Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

He intended, at first, to read for his final semester: biographies of Romantic poets for his undergraduate thesis. Instead he bought fabulist novels and books of myths and fables. More real than life. The passages the staff read aloud shared a disconnectedness, a lonesomeness, characters lost in changing worlds. Maybe because they, the staff, faced such misunderstandings in Prague. Once, on the Bridge of Legions, a man in a patched coat had taken an apple from Tee’s hand before Tee could eat it, pulled a switchblade from the coat, and sliced the fruit open to a star pattern, nodding gravely. “Good luck,” the man said, “Asian.” Tee didn’t know if the man was wishing him luck or calling his race lucky. Unlike the others, though, Tee trusted Prague’s strangeness. Ynez was the only one at the Globe like him. She had planned to travel through Europe, but had changed her plans after a single walk through Old Town, a giant metronome ticking on the hill above. She told Tee that the star was lucky. Soon he was coming in an hour early so their schedules overlapped.

Once the paintings of Tee were finished, Pavel’s friend Rockefeller helped look for an art dealer who could arrange an exhibit in New York. The revenue would go to a new café the friends had decided to open in the fall. Tee didn’t know what to say about the paintings of him traveling the opposite route he had come. His desire to keep being painted, like his job, was mostly a desire not to disappear. He continued to visit the house in Malešice. Sometimes Pavel squinted at Tee in the doorway, as if trying to recall what he had seen on New Year’s. But he didn’t offer another thank-you painting or mention that Tee could or should stop coming. Each morning on the tram, Tee would jot down things to say, wanting to contribute without art. They would sit around the kitchen table as if in a café. Occasionally Pavel would drift into the bedroom to paint, and Tee, alone with Katka, would try to deny the floating sensation: as if they were two boats tied to the same dock.

The afternoon that Pavel announced Rockefeller had found an American dealer, Katka clunked her empty teacup on its saucer and said she missed the old distribution, hanging the paintings in public, inspiring people to action. She had to disagree, once again, that a gallery in New York was a better venue than Prague. The cup rattled the saucer — somehow she was still holding it delicately. Then she muttered something indelicate in Czech. Pavel stormed into the bedroom. It was the first time Tee had seen them fight.

Dishes littered the table: the aftermath of fresh bread, gulaš soup, tea, merciless appetites. On the dishes were paintings Pavel’s father had done: portraits of the family in the 1970s, his only personal pieces. “Cimrman invented the airplane cabin but had to wait for someone to invent an airplane,” Katka said to Tee. She tore off a piece of bread but didn’t eat it. “Pavel has forgotten the Czech sensibility. Yours are his first political paintings since Communism, and the best.”

“They aren’t mine.” Tee imagined Andy Warhol at the table.

Katka drifted to the window. The fringe of her skirt brushed his side. “The model is the painting’s ex-lover,” she said. “The artist is its current one.” Some admission gathered behind her eyes, but quickly disappeared.

As she touched the glass, Tee remembered: wrong women. But he reached toward her waist.

“What are you doing?” she said sharply.

They heard something crash in the other room. His uncle’s plane, twisted, in flames.

After a moment Katka said, “I love him,” as if to answer a question Tee hadn’t asked.

Later that evening, in the Globe, Tee ran his finger along a row of book spines as Ynez organized the shelf beside his counter. He took down a book and read. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. He knew desire was just around the corner. What kept it hidden — setting? time? Ynez shifted her hips toward him. He couldn’t talk in the Globe about what it felt like to be painted, to be seen. He never mentioned Pavel and Katka to Ynez. Around her, his container got all mixed up. He told her about his father’s “business trips”; his aunt, at the funeral, glancing over her bony shoulder as if waiting to be accused. He asked Ynez what it might mean if someone said he was holding a door open for himself, and then closed it. She was quiet for a while. Finally she said, “Sometimes our passion is so strong that it makes a fool of us.” Her Castilian lisp (she had grown up in Spain before studying sociology at Cornell) made him lean in to catch every word. She evened the books on the shelf until she was inches from his face. Why did he want to stay here, he asked himself again, in Prague? Heat breathed from her skin. She was probably an expert on passion, her parted lips and long lashes. He imagined pulling her into the stacks, a corner of books no one ever looked for. “Your Anne Carson has written plenty about that.” Slowly she pivoted and rested her slim white arms on the desk. “Though, I don’t know, I’m not saying we don’t make the choice of who to love for ourselves.”

“We don’t make the choice for ourselves,” Tee repeated. He clasped his hands behind his back. “In Boston I dated older women who must have reminded me of my aunt.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Ynez said after a moment. “You don’t have to prove yourself.”

He wasn’t trying to prove himself, though. He suppressed a strong urge to share a story about his childhood: a night he had spent alone in the woods, because he was six and had thought he could find his birth mother there. “You know what I want more than anything else?” he said. “I want to be old, and to rock on the porch with my wife. To look back and have everything figured out.”

“You want to skip your youth?” she lisped.

He took a pen from his shirt pocket and drew on a bookmark. “At the time you make a decision, you have no idea how it will turn out. Life would be so much easier if you knew what you could do with it.”

Ynez reached for the pen and tucked it above her ear. On the bookmark, a baby lay at a man’s feet. She frowned. “You mean like holding the door for yourself?”

He swept the bookmark away from her. He felt stung, like he had slapped a little kid and she had caught him, like she had seen him go too far.

He made an effort, and rested his fingertips on her wrist. He could feel her pulse quicken. “I may have to go back for a few days. My mom is set on divorce. She keeps e-mailing me that she means it.”

“Don’t worry,” Ynez said. “Your job will still be here when you get back.”

Once Ynez had left, Tee touched the books she had touched, his fingers still with the warmth of her wrist. In the story he’d wanted to tell her, he had run away from home with a photo of his birth mother.

His parents lived in a renovated farmhouse outside of Boston, the yard bordering a forest where lost dogs were often found. When he was a boy, those woods had seemed to him a fairy world where anything was possible. The winter he turned six, he had a sharp feeling, like an earache, and while his parents fought over his father’s latest indiscretion, he pocketed the sole photograph of his birth mother and snuck into the snow-glistened trees.

The black-and-white Polaroid was the one thing Tee had from Korea, proof he was hers. He’d already memorized her face against his own (her softer angles, her darker skin). He’d memorized the smell, plastic with the slightest trace of coffee — maybe his father had spilled on it. On the back of the photo, his father had written the three syllables she’d said before she died, Kang Seul Peum. In the woods Tee chanted these syllables like a spell. He made a circle of snowballs around him. He wondered if, as his father had guessed, she had tried to name him. For a while, under the snow-bent trees, Tee enjoyed the anticipation. He imagined his mother appearing in a blue flame, like in a cartoon he had seen. But once the sun set, the universe shifted. His fingers froze, and the snow blew and melted against his cheeks like tears. He recalled the Medusa from his father’s book of myths, able to turn a boy to stone. All night he waited for some monster to find him, and in the morning, as he made his way to a neighbor’s house in the half-light, cold and sick and wet, the photo had lost its protection.