Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

Tee didn’t know what to make of this brag. Rockefeller was clearly tricking himself. His parents had been high-level Communists who fled the country after the Revolution. They must have known that Communism would end. They had given Rockefeller his name by special permission.

Rockefeller ordered another round. Tee doodled the Czech flag on a napkin, then slipped the napkin into his wallet, as if it would work away there, writing over his Americanness.

In the Globe, Rockefeller’s head hung forward and he held the lapel of his sports jacket closed. He led Tee away from the stacks to a table by the main entrance — the Globe was in a century-old building with bronze banisters and a vaulted ceiling in the front section. Rockefeller ordered them beers and pulled from his bag a hand-drawn blueprint of his and Pavel’s future café. “Advising me,” he said, that same Shakespearean heft to his accent, as if aping the artist. “I want that everyone will come. Americans will come, then everyone.”

His eyes never wavered from Tee’s, two round bulges above his caved cheeks and square chin: a face that seemed composed more of a theme than of genetic traits. Sometimes Tee liked feeling swept along in the current of Rockefeller’s self-assurance. Yet the relentless eye contact, those cabbage shoulders, the way Rockefeller rattled the blueprint in Tee’s face and asked for money, unsettled him. Tee regretted mentioning his inheritance as proof he could pay his rent.

“I told you I’m not an investor,” he said. “My uncle died just six months ago.”

“You’ll changing mind. Here, look at this. I’m putting space for talking here. Real talking needs this shape of room. And Pavel’s paintings. Here, on wall, Picasso.”

There was beer on Rockefeller’s breath, and he could go on about Pavel Picasso for hours if drunk. Tee had to change the subject. But he said, “Paintings of Katka? I’ve seen them in the museums. Are they all of her?”

Rockefeller touched thumb to forefinger. “I’m putting them together.”

“A perfect couple?” Tee asked.

Tee couldn’t picture this giant match-making. Rockefeller smoothed his lapel and asked how anyone could be perfect. Then, as if he had just thought of it, he said, “Why Prague? Why not you going to Korea?”

Tee had heard this question from the bookstore staff, from Pavel. He sketched spire after spire on his coaster, under an empty sky. In Korea there was nothing for him that wasn’t already buried deep underground. “Stop drawing,” Rockefeller said, covering the pen with his hand.

“Pavel and Katka aren’t perfect?” Tee asked again.

“ Proč? ” Rockefeller said. “Why, you wanting her?”

Tee was relieved he’d already reddened from the alcohol. His Asian blush.

Rockefeller pulled his hand away and studied the blueprint, laughing. But after a sip of beer, he fell silent. Tee’s breaths quickened. For some reason he couldn’t look up. He scooped the drawing into his lap. The café seemed to grow louder, busier. Then a woman walked in — the daughter of Pavel’s art dealer, a New Yorker full of the indifference of skyscrapers — and glanced around until she found them. She adjusted her skirt and waved. Rockefeller crumpled the blueprint in one bearish paw.

“What’s Vanessa doing here?” Tee asked.

The paper lay crippled on the table as Vanessa strode toward them. “I need that money,” Rockefeller whispered, “please.”

That same evening, Tee sat on the edge of his bed, in the dark, as Rockefeller knocked at his door. Tee recalled how Rockefeller’s fingers, on the café table, curled into fat fists. On the bed lay the blueprint, the creases smoothed flat. Tee had taken it. He shivered, aware of how stupid it was to be hiding, and from what? He would run into Rockefeller the next day, or the next.

When the knocking stopped, Tee waited for fifteen minutes, and then he called Ynez and got out of the building. Ynez said she had wanted him to call for a while, but wasn’t he going to America soon? They talked and talked, until it was clear he was not returning to his apartment.

On the last day of March, Tee would again meet the artist and the artist’s wife in Old Town Square. He was walking back to Karlín, not watching where he was going, when a colorful wing dropped on his shoulder. The Thai Massage parrot grinned and repeated that Tee was Thai. It was so sudden that Tee slipped and caught his hand on the cobblestone. His container filled. He wished to accept this strangeness, but for some reason he could not. At that moment, someone shouted in Czech and the parrot flapped off, fearing the tall woman — it was Katka. Like on New Year’s, she had appeared when Tee needed someone. She helped him up, and his pulse sprang to her touch. Pavel walked out of a nearby shop. She squeezed Tee’s hand. They were running errands, shopping for Pavel’s café. He and Rockefeller were going to choose a location the next morning. Tee said casually that he could keep Katka company while Pavel was out. Pavel stomped his cigarette, closed his hands in his armpits, and said they could have a “see you alligator” party.

That night, Katka appeared in Tee’s dreams again and again, until he could see her flaws. The hint of cruelty in her stare. One side of her body slightly longer than the other. In one dream she was Korean. She led him up to a rooftop. From the roof Tee could see Boston, his ex-girlfriend mouthing, “Wrong woman.” His nose itched, and he scratched until it fell off in his palm. Upon descending the staircase, he and Katka were inside his apartment in Karlín. He switched on the lights; she switched them off. When he tried to speak, the words exited his lips, like tiny scraps of paper, and entered hers. He woke aching with desire.

In the morning, he rode the tram to Malešice. The entire winter, his painted selves had hopped out of their canvases and into his sleep as if to offer other lives, or as ghosts of lives he’d already lived somewhere else. He wondered which of those canvases Katka would say was most like him. He trusted her instinctively.

In the first, he shone with faith beside the Orloj as he left his feet.

In the second, a black bird clawed his shoulder, its feathers shiny and metallic. He lit its tail like a rocket, waiting for it to explode.

In the third, he stood at a mirror. The canvas was long and wide. In the mirror was Old Town, his reflection half-naked in the night streets, and in the corner, a door.

In the fourth, Pavel had exaggerated Tee. As tall and skinny as a skyscraper, as brown as a wet sand castle. But his eyes were not his. They were blue.

From the tram stop, Tee walked down to Pavel and Katka’s yard, past the gnarled maple tree she loved, and knocked at the kitchen door. She opened it, aproned. The scent of gulaš and cabbage trailed her like a loyal pet. Her stare flashed past him at first, then focused on his face. She pursed her lips in an incomprehensible whistle. On an impulse, he shook her hand, and she smiled at his awkwardness. She had bladelike cheekbones, sharp enough to halt a trespasser in his tracks.

They sat at the kitchen table, out of habit, and ate slowly. He asked about the paintings, and she said the first was the best. After he’d praised her cooking a third time, she said, “I want to know something about you that no one else knows.”

He wasn’t sure what to tell her, and then he was talking about his father’s affair. “You want to know why I left Boston? My uncle committed suicide. Afterward I searched my dad’s office. I needed some sign of who he really was. He was always filming things. I pulled these boxes down from the top of his closet, and inside were old textbooks, geology books he probably knew by heart. It was a strange place for them. I got this hunch, and when I emptied the last box, in the very bottom was a reel of film older than I am.” He waited for her to comment on the suicide or his age, but she ignored both.