The Hundred-Year Flood (16 page)

The doctor picked at his stethoscope.

“Tonight—let me see her tonight.”

“You will see her tonight,” the doctor said, and left.

Tee leaned his elbows on the polished counter. Why had his resolve weakened? The nurse behind the desk touched his arm. She gestured for him to move. Heat flashed back up his body into his neck and face, but not like anger, more like embarrassment. He dropped his arms at his sides. The nurse smiled, understanding or pitying him.

“Okay?” the second nurse asked, her glare, too, disappearing.

Tee brushed his hot cheek. They seemed to wait for him to say something. He turned back toward the waiting room. The nurse who’d offered her help earlier hurried up the corridor, but he shook his head, wishing to be alone.

“Nobody is coming?”

“Which room is she in?” he said. “I need to see my wife.”

“She not your wife,” the nurse said with an accusing smile. “I am checking her papers.” He knew what had happened. Meaning to help, she had found Katka’s emergency contact. “You are not her
miláček
,” the nurse said. “I know that name of her
miláček
.”

“I’m her husband,” Tee said.

“That painter will here soon,” she said. “Who are you?”

He needed her to hear him out—he needed someone to give way. He stepped forward, trying again to assert himself, and she shrank back in sudden fear.

“You know nothing about me,” Tee said quietly. “Where do you get the right to say who I am?”

The nurse couldn’t make him go since Katka wanted him to stay. Maybe the staff anticipated a good fight. Everyone’s eyes seemed to follow him as if they’d bet for or against him. In the waiting room, he took a pen from the side table and weighed his options: he wasn’t leaving, and he wasn’t letting Pavel take her back. He could only acknowledge that he had hurt her, and hurt Pavel, and yet press on. Later, after Katka healed, they would flee together.

The television showed a barge sinking before it could hit a bridge, and policemen cheering. A plane crashed in Tee’s mind.

Sunset was only a few hours off. Tee watched the shadows outside—doctors smoking with their patients—like the creeping fingers of the flood. He remembered how Katka had snapped the last candles, as he pressed the tip of the pen against the table, bending the barrel.

Finally Pavel arrived—with Rockefeller. The smaller and the larger man talked at the desk, presumably about Katka’s health. What was their deal? Forgive and forget? Rockefeller stood to the side of the artist and after a while, went out to smoke, ignoring Tee. When Pavel scraped his casts across the counter, no one stopped him. They knew who he was. Either they recognized him or the nurse had told them.

They would tell Pavel exactly what Katka’s status was. A nurse pointed toward the waiting room and Pavel tensed and looked over his shoulder. Tee tried to keep his face blank. A corner of his stomach clenched, a muscle he hadn’t known he had.

As Pavel entered the waiting room, it went quiet. Heads turned, not to the artist, but to Tee. One of the nurses crossed his arms. Tee plucked at the lip of his jeans pocket, but did not lower his eyes. He imagined how he must look, still in his flood-stained clothes. He’d been exhausted the night before, and in the morning, they’d rushed to the hospital before he could shower. He probably still smelled like the river.

“You hurt her,” he said.

Pavel reddened. “She walking out okay. No flood, no sickness. You did that.”

“I didn’t know.”

Pavel started forward, rubbed his casts together. “I telling nurses you are hurt her.” A child shouted from down the hall.

“That isn’t true,” Tee said loudly. He tried to remember that he was taller than Pavel. “She told them I was her husband. She doesn’t want you here.”

Tee remembered the intensity that seemed to draw the artist’s outer reaches in toward a central point, as Pavel’s jaw clenched. There was a strange sense of déjà vu. The room breathed all at once, sucking in air.

“You say your father hurting people,” Pavel muttered. “Who is hurting people really? You should watching out.” His casts stiffened at his sides, and he stomped out to smoke.

Tee shook. He straightened his back, suddenly aware of his posture. At least it had been quick. He wanted to cry, but he wouldn’t let Pavel hurt him. And then Rockefeller walked in—of course. Tee dared the two of them to do something. Blood rushed to his defense, to his head, his fists. He held on to his anger and righteousness.

“You didn’t leaving Karlín,” Rockefeller said. “Even after warning?”

“Sure,” Tee said, “it’s my fault. He hates me, I guess. But Katka doesn’t.” Like at the desk, though, his certainty left him. “What did they say? Is she going to be all right?”

Rockefeller shook his head.

The nurses craned to see the Asian against the giant Czech. “Forget her,” Rockefeller said. Then he pinned Tee’s arms, for a moment, before letting go with a grunt. Tee’s biceps tingled. The strength in those fingers. “You are only kid.”

White light shone off the walls and there was the cutting scent of bleach. Tee bit back tears. Rockefeller ran his hand through his bird-nest hair. Neither of them budged—until the doctor came in and said Katka was asking for Tee.

III

Katka’s doctor shuffled from side to side and said that the operation had at first seemed successful, but in fact the bacteria had already spread. He’d cut away as much infected tissue as possible. Now her organs had become a problem. Her liver and kidneys were shutting down. He continued in medical terms that hung in the air uninterpreted once he left. Tee wondered if the poor bedside manner was busyness or Katka’s translation.

He stood on one side of her bed, Pavel on the other, Rockefeller in the corner behind the artist.

The wound was open to the air, since the gauze would have stuck to it. The debridement had sliced her calf down to a thin layer of muscle around her fibula. Her knee above looked like the head on a stick doll. She said the doctors didn’t think cutting off her leg would help. The bacteria were in her bloodstream and her body couldn’t handle the stress of an amputation. The bacteria ate away a lattice of flesh all the way up to her thigh, exposing muscle wrinkled like cauliflower. Pavel covered his mouth. Tee choked. Sweat beaded on Katka’s face with each breath.

Tee wanted her to explain. She’d only had a scratch, a tiny cut closed with six stitches. He’d rushed her to the hospital twice where the doctors should have easily healed her.

Pavel wiped a tear with his shoulder. Behind him, Rockefeller shifted in place as if to warm up for a sport. It was a small room, but at least she had it to herself. She sat up slowly.

“I will explain everything,” she said in English. “It is not your fault, Tee.”

She switched to Czech, though Pavel said he could understand. As she talked, Pavel’s eyes became thin lines. Tee imagined what she said. She didn’t love Pavel, she’d made her choice with a clear mind. She would be fine. He should leave. She and Tee were going to tend a garden, buy a pet, far away.

But as she went on, her blue eyes clouding with a half-visible gray, Tee imagined she was telling Pavel she regretted leaving him. She’d made a mistake.

Tee should have learned more Czech. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. Her sharp cheekbones were sharper, the skin caved in. Her hands inched up her stomach. When her nails clicked together, he felt for the second time that day a sense of déjà vu. Her brown hair flowed neatly off the back of the pillow—she’d been able to think of this detail, to remember how she looked.

She exhaled a long breath, and at the end of it, she said, “Yes. I am going to be okay. But if I am not, I do not want any of you hating each other.”

Tee could feel Pavel concentrating on translation.

“Do something for me,” she said as electrical sounds echoed somewhere.

She shut her eyes for a moment. The smell of her leg burned in Tee’s nose, itched his throat. She gestured Tee closer. Pavel turned and grunted from his chest. When Tee’s ear was above her mouth, she whispered: “I want you to have that life.”

“Which life?” he asked. He wished she would bite him. He lowered his ear.

“It is time to pretend.”

Pavel clinked his casts on the metal rail. “I love you,” he said in English, maybe so Tee would understand as well, so Tee would feel jealous, which he did, at how natural the interruption seemed. Husband to wife. Rockefeller stepped around the bed. One big hand fell on Tee’s shoulder. Tee shrugged it off.

“Come,” she said then. “All of you.” As if they were her three children.

“Stop acting like you’re eighty and have cancer,” Tee said.

He held her hand. She brought his palm to Pavel’s fingertips, which stuck out of the cast. The cold rough plaster. Holding them together with one hand, she reached her other for Rockefeller. Pavel grimaced. Tee heard a faint swallowing sound. Katka’s shivers traveled into her wet hands. The room was silent and bright, too bright, and Pavel pulled his cast away and pounded the call button.

A nurse entered and waved them out. Tee wished he could have hit that button for Katka. She needed to rest and prepare for another surgery.

Rockefeller squeezed her hand and exited. Tee wanted to kiss her good-bye. He glanced down at her white, dying leg, so dull and detached from her red mouth, her blue eyes, her brown hair flowing off the back of the pillow. Pavel glared, his hair a snarl of lighter brown, waiting to be the last inside. Tee bent over her—but she shook her head.

He stopped inches from her face. He smelled the acrid wound. He didn’t want to give Pavel a private good-bye. The nurse pressed his back, her hand disembodied, like it had come out of thin air. Katka smiled, a new wrinkle in the corner of her left eye.

“He can stay, Tee,” she said. “They let family stay.”

IV

Rockefeller said he had something Tee needed to see, so Tee agreed to stop at The Heavenly Café on the way to the house in Malešice. Tee couldn’t think straight, his thoughts on Pavel alone with Katka, on her ruined leg.

The mall was about to close. They climbed the dead escalator to the second floor, and Rockefeller took a key from a cord around his neck and opened the café. It was clear why Tee was there. A mural covered the back wall, painted by Pavel’s casts.

At first Tee couldn’t tell what caused the pressure in the back of his head. The casts had made thick bands of yellow and blue and green. Wide black borders outlined everything like comic-book characters. The curves of Katka’s body had become the curves of rushing water. Pavel had painted the flood. The debris in the water looked like the debris of the café. A swimmer rested in the bottom-left corner, emitting rays like an underwater sun. It seemed innocent enough, but Tee’s container slowly filled.

Rockefeller said nothing. Tee kept staring until the swimmer, or the urgency with which Rockefeller had led him there, or the timing—after leaving Katka in the hospital—struck him with terrifying clarity. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s me, isn’t it? Pavel painted me at the bottom of the flood.”

Rockefeller moved around beside the mural. He was still taller than the painted body in the corner. Tee’s body.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Rockefeller said the artist had asked him to make this happen. He played with his lapel. “If I am hurting you,” he said, “then Pavel will forgive me.”

The resignation in those eyes was like two immovable rocks. “You would do it?” Tee said. He backed away. “What now? Should I call the police? The embassy?”

“So now you leave from Prague.” Rockefeller crossed over the slabs of concrete. His corduroy jacket clung too tightly to his wide shoulders, as if it was concealing wings. Here
,
Tee thought, in The Heavenly Café, was the Angel of Death
.
He wished to make a joke.

“She’s dying soon,” Rockefeller whispered when he was even with Tee. “You cannot staying here.”

Tee planted his leg. “She’s not dying.” He remembered his father’s call in September, to say that his uncle had died, the buzz of finality. Tee didn’t feel that now. He forced himself to memorize the mural, and he remembered his palms: an early death or a coma. In his apartment, Katka had taken one look at the molten pewter, and cried. “How could you say that?”

“You have to go before she goes,” Rockefeller said.

They went to Pavel and Katka’s house to sleep, unable to return to Karlín. Tee took the bed. He wanted Rockefeller to know he wasn’t running away. Rockefeller said nothing. He’d been silent since the café. When Tee stripped down for a shower, he saw that his father had called again, sometime since the hospital. He hadn’t felt the vibration.

He stepped into the shower Pavel and Katka had used for a dozen years, at times surely together. As the clean water washed off the smell and grime of the flood, he imagined them in the hospital. Pavel glowing that she had rejected Tee’s kiss, Katka’s palm clammy on his bicep. Maybe Pavel expected Tee, at that very moment, to be drowning. To his wife, Pavel apologized. He had never purposefully hurt her, though that didn’t make it any better. He would suck the poison from her leg if he could. She was sorry, too. She said Tee had caused the infection. Tee hadn’t listened.

Pavel and Katka would fall into their old rhythm: painting, posing. She could say,
your art
,
your art
; and he would say,
Jára Cimrman will always be our hero
; and they would share that secret laugh.

When Tee was dressed in the clothes from his plastic bags, he found himself standing beside the back of the giant canvas. He turned it around. Katka’s yellow ripples. That painting seemed the opposite of the mural in the café: her bright immortality, his dark drowning. Then he remembered the other painting Pavel had done. He searched the room, and then the closet, but he couldn’t find it. In the closet, he looked through the door ready for the ghost. If it was ever there. A wind shook the curtains, and he noticed one window was cracked.

When Tee went to bed, Rockefeller was still pacing the living room. Tee set his phone alarm for five
A.M.
and lay awake to the heavy footsteps.

In the end Pavel’s friendship had been worth more to Rockefeller than money, and Tee didn’t want to bribe anyone ever again. If Katka died, Rockefeller would attack Tee—that was the deal? And when Katka recovered? What then?

Tee wondered if his uncle, or his mother, had ever plotted revenge. Maybe his uncle had planned to crash his plane with his father in it. Maybe his mother had planned to run away and start a new family. He imagined his mother tracing a finger over his father’s nose, late at night, then over her adopted son’s. The same shape. On another night, she compared the noses with a ruler. She snipped locks of their hairs. But no, she said she didn’t have proof.

His father must have met his birth mother on one of the two initial visits, before he took the job. He was walking absentmindedly, comparing Korea to a film about Korea that he had watched before he left, when a skinny woman broke away from her friends. She wanted to practice her English, or she was curious about foreigners. Her tongue flicked to the three dots at the corner of her mouth, and he invited her to the hotel he was going to work for. He handed her a business card, making up his mind in that instant.

Tee felt the need to call his father, picturing that obsessive gaze, those hangdog cheeks. He weighed his cell in his hand. Rockefeller was still moving around on the other side of the wall. His father’s number glowed in the dark room. They hadn’t spoken since Tee’s trip back to Boston, since his father’s trip to California. The thought crossed Tee’s mind, though he pushed it away, that his father could offer advice. How to be with a married woman, how to stave off the backlash, emotional and physical. Or at least how to accept it. Tee thumbed the call button.

As if his thumb had reached out, the screen flashed. He listened to the ring. He felt his throat closing, a fist for an Adam’s apple. When he hung up, he could breathe again.

In Tee’s dreams, Pavel and Rockefeller pushed his face into the fissure in Katka’s leg. He could smell the sewage in her cut, the festering bacteria; he could see the disease chomping after her cells. Slowly they tipped up his feet, and he slid inside. He tried to swim away through her blood, but the mouths of the disease followed him, biting at his heels. Finally he realized he was asleep, and he tore himself out of the dream, though the feeling that he was inside her remained. In his daze, he could make out a tall figure beside the bed. The moon was trapped behind rain clouds, and the room was almost black. Then he knew who it was. He didn’t know if Rockefeller could see him, too, see that he was awake. The giant body seemed like only a collection of shadows. Neither of them breathed. Then Tee whispered, “Rock?” and the shadows slowly receded.