The Hundred-Year Flood Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD

  Tee is in Prague. He is running away from memory. He is running toward myth. He is searching. In Prague, Tee meets an artist and the artist’s wife. Before long, the three are drawn into a fateful series of events as Prague is laid bare by a flood that only comes every hundred years. This beautiful debut novel by Matthew Salesses is much like that flood—epic and devastating and full of natural majesty.

  —Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

  A filmic, fast-moving, disjunctive ride, The Hundred-Year Flood rollicks through an exquisitely constructed plot to arrive at a surprising destination. Matthew Salesses writes taut, intelligent, lyrical sentences. He is definitely a writer to watch, and The Hundred-Year Flood is the novel to read right this moment.

  —Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

  The Hundred-Year Flood spins the gorgeous and devastating tale of Tee’s quest to find his place in the world amidst the richly haunted landscape of Prague. This is a phenomenally engrossing novel, cast in prose that is at once searing and poetic, and Matthew Salesses is a once in a lifetime talent.

  —Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and Find Me

  The Hundred-Year Flood is a beautiful, transporting novel that lays bare the heartbreak and loss of the world while never forgetting its magic. A dreamlike exploration of how the myths and stories we tell—and those that we choose to keep to ourselves—forge our identities, this book will swallow you whole.

  —James Scott, author of The Kept

  How artfully Matthew Salesses transports his reader between Prague and the States, past and present. I fell under the spell of his lovely novel as thoroughly as his protagonist, Tee, falls under the spell of Prague and, in particular, of one of its inhabitants. The Hundred-Year Flood is a vivid, cunning, compelling narrative about inheritance and forgiveness. A wonderful debut.

  —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  In this spellbinding novel, Matthew Salesses artfully weaves an intricate tapestry, shifting effortlessly between time, place, and identity while exploring all three subjects in the process. He succeeds in transporting the reader to a ghost Prague—a timeless, kaleidoscopic city layered with wonder and devastating sorrow.

  —Kenneth Calhoun, author of Black Moon

  Matthew Salesses’s elegant debut is at once both minimalist and expansive, atmospheric yet grounded in vivid, astonishing details. The Hundred-Year Flood captures life distilled to its purest, most potent form. I’ll be thinking about this story for many years to come.

  —Kirstin Chen, author of Soy Sauce for Beginners

  The Hundred-Year Flood is a beautifully wrought novel about a young man who goes on a quest for self-discovery and finds himself in a city of legends, demons, and saints. Here, Tee struggles to reconcile his desire to belong with his desire to be free—his desire to be someone with his desire to be no one at all. This book is a deep, wonderful, and incredibly complex investigation into the necessary and fertile tension between resistance and submission, attraction and repulsion, and the need to create versus the need to annihilate. Poetic and dreamlike, aching with loss, and filled with the strange and enduring power of myth, The Hundred-Year Flood builds and builds until everything—the characters, their histories, their relationships and animosities, and even the city in which they live, are borne up, taken over, and forever changed by the inevitable and unpredictable tide of fate. This is an exquisite, unforgettable book about the extraordinary demands of identity and the transformative power of art and love.

  —Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

  The Hundred-Year Flood yanks you off your feet, whipping you along on a brilliantly crafted adventure. You can’t fight the current and you don’t want to, either. Matthew Salesses is a new force of nature.

  —Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Matthew Salesses

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477829547 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1477829547 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781477828373 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1477828370 (paperback)

  eISBN: 9781477878378

  Cover design by Patrick Barry

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959624

  For my wife

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1 MYTHS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  CHAPTER 2 GHOSTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  CHAPTER 3 THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: PAVEL AND ROCKEFELLER

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  CHAPTER 4 THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: TEE AND KATKA

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  CHAPTER 5 MEMORIES OF WATER

  I

  II

  CHAPTER 6 THE POSSIBILITY OF SAINTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  CHAPTER 7 HOMECOMINGS

  I

  II

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  We do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us—the fact of not knowing what is happening to us.

  —José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis

  Later you look back and see one thing foretold by another. But when you’re young, those are secrets; everything you know is secret from yourself.

  —Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams

  CHAPTER 1

  MYTHS

  I

  Before his father came and flew him back to Massachusetts General Hospital in September of 2002, these are the things Tee learned in Prague:

  If someone sneezes while you’re talking, what you’re saying is true.

  If your nose is soft, you’re lying.

  If you cut an apple in half and see a star, it’s good luck. If not, it’s bad.

  If you step in shit, it’s good luck.

  If you pour molten lead into water, you can tell the future from the form it makes.

  If your hand itches, you’ll get into a fight.

  If your nose itches, you’ll get beaten up.

  If you pour something and it overflows, someone
you know will get pregnant.

  If you lift your feet for someone to sweep under them, you’ll never marry.

  “To cry at the wrong grave” means “to bark up the wrong tree.”

  Often the legends of Prague have to do with selling one’s soul to the devil.

  Half of Prague will be destroyed by fire, half by water.

  When the Czech Republic is in its most desperate hour of need, a sleeping army under the hill Blaník will awaken and defeat its enemies.

  Tee wrote this list during his first week in the hospital. He woke on a wet pillow, and he scrambled over the railing of his bed and fell to the floor. He pinched his nose shut. Water rushed over him, thick and brown. But he could breathe. He stood and rested the back of his hand on his pillow—he had cried in his sleep again. He smoothed down his dry hospital gown and went to the window. The river outside was the Charles, in Boston, not the Vltava, in Prague. He pressed a sheet of paper against the glass, blocking the view, and wrote until the words blurred. When a doctor knocked at the door, Tee touched the bandage around his head and told himself there was no flood, he was in Boston.

  The doctor switched on the X-ray board, and they stared at the back of Tee’s skull. Where Tee had been hit, the nerves had fused together in shock, and the skin had knotted and died until a surgeon had to cut it off. Tee knew who had attacked him, probably—a Czech with an American name, Rockefeller, someone Tee had called friend. Tee couldn’t remember what exactly had happened. The impact had caused some rare brain damage. He couldn’t tell dates or remember song lyrics.

  “Are you listening?” the doctor asked.

  Tee stood on one leg and the doctor tested his balance. The solidity of the floor shifted like weather. For the second time that day, Tee was back in Prague. He was running, naked, under the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The wind slapping his chest. People pushed and sang and embraced. Then the back of a glowing leg slipped through the crowd . . .

  A woman walked out of Tee’s hospital room. But no one had been inside except the doctor and Tee. Tee started forward, and his balance gave out. The doctor held him up, linking arms, and called for a nurse. The doctor said Tee had to want to recover. Tee had seen that leg—that calf—before. Where?

  Later that month, Tee would transfer to a rehabilitation center, meant to reorient him to the world he’d never understood. He would stumble down the halls, searching for a ghost. He took to stopping other patients and prompting them with abstract nouns. They had to get used to every kind of bewilderment. “Love,” he would say, hands trembling, and someone willing might answer, “What goes up comes down” or “If you give a mouse a cookie.” “Regret,” he would say, and someone might answer, “A wish for a perfect life” or “Aging.” “Hate,” he would say, and some would remember why they were there.

  II

  The day Tee decided to go to Prague, his girlfriend pulled him aside at a birthday party in Boston. The talk had turned to 9/11. “Stop acting so tragic,” his girlfriend said in his ear. “For God’s sake, others are suffering worse. Your uncle only killed himself. He didn’t die in the towers.” That was when Tee knew he couldn’t stay in America. He downed his IPA and said, “Only?” Everyone was talking about death, but he had to keep quiet. He was filling a container inside of him. Into it, he put the things he couldn’t say—about the seduction of forgetting. When his container was full, he would dump himself out in one dramatic move. A case in point: by the end of that week, he had broken up with his girlfriend and requested a leave of absence.

  On the tram back to Boston College from the birthday party, Tee remembered a word his uncle used to like, posturing. Why had that come to him now? His friends were not posturing; was he? As a child he had thought of the word as a topographical feature. His uncle, the pilot, collected maps. There was one map his uncle liked best—a map of the wars in Eastern Europe. His uncle had called Prague a city of survivors, an older, less-posturing Paris. Tee used to point out Prague on globes before he knew what posturing meant, when he simply liked the sound of the word. He’d forgotten that. He could hear his uncle flattening the r, describing spires from above, the glow of roofs. He could feel his uncle toss him into the air, that first flight.

  He chose Prague for its resistance. A city where, for thousands of years, private lives had withstood the oppression of empires. Both world wars, countless invasions. In the weeks before he left, Tee imagined hiding from the Secret Police, giving up his home to save his ideals. That was what he had to do: resist, move on, leave the familiar behind. It would be his first trip on his own, as he’d gone to college three miles from where he grew up. His first trip not counting his adoption. Prague might be the perfect place, after all: a city that valued anonymity, the desire to be no one and someone at once.

  Tee arrived in Prague in late December 2001 and met the artist and the artist’s wife at the turn of the New Year. It snowed that Eve, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. After a late lunch, Tee took the metro to the ruins of the original castle, Vyšehrad. He carried a bottle of beer in each pocket. He had paid twelve dollars for a monthly transit pass, a dollar per Pilsner Urquell. Water cost slightly more than beer, a fact he noted in his e-mails home. He didn’t miss his friends, though—he wanted to be alone, free of expectations. He stepped out of the metro station and into the wind at the top of the hill. A hundred feet down the path, the walls stretched along either side, keeping out a long-gone foe. At the far end, the Vltava ran below, a dozen feet lower than it would reach in August.

  Tee bent his head to an arrow slit, shrinking the world into a guardable space. He imagined an army advancing, simply for something in their sparse world to take. Or maybe to take something back. He imagined a little piece of himself, held captive. He had been in Prague for five snowy days. The sun never came out. He wondered again if he should have gone elsewhere for his semester off. He’d enrolled in a certification course to teach English as a foreign language, but he was already skipping. What if the Czech kids saw his Korean half and had to know where he came from? Anywhere he went he was the only Asian in Prague.

  The wind blew at his back. At the far end of the castle grounds, behind the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul where the devil had lost a legendary bet for a soul, Tee stood for a while in a famous cemetery. He watched a boy return to the same statue over and over, a thin, winged girl that couldn’t have meant anything to him. Tee stepped back to give the boy room, or to wonder unobserved. After the boy’s father led him away, Tee touched the wings. They were scaly, almost reptilian. He imagined the boy lifting those wings onto his own back. Making a myth of himself. Later Tee would learn about Queen Libuše, who sent out a white horse from Vyšehrad to look for a king and found a man stooping under a doorframe that would eventually become Kafka’s castle. After that king died, a maidens’ army would fight the men for control of Prague. Beside the cemetery was a prayer maze where children knelt in the center and wished. Tee felt cold with history. He poked a finger in the snow and outlined a man and a woman, a baby slipping out of their arms.

  He climbed up and sat on the wall under the flat-bottomed clouds. Below, ancient armies had piled up dead, forever at the edge of what they wanted.

  Then Tee was back at his uncle’s wake. His uncle, burned up from crashing his solo plane in a wheat field in New York, had been cremated and kept in a teal urn. Tee’s aunt shrieked with guilt, pressed her forehead to the ceramic. His father buried his face in his shirt. They could no longer hide their affair. The two of them had driven the plane down as effectively as had his uncle’s hands. Yet the affair was many years old. Why had his uncle given up at last?

  A piece of brick scratched free under Tee’s nails and tumbled toward the water.

  He wandered down the hill, through an arch in the wall. A flash of color in the dark: a picture of fireworks and, underneath, in English, NEW YEAR EVE. In a day, Tee reminded himself, it would be 2002. Other
announcements lay scattered on the cobblestone, all in Czech. He wondered why this single English flyer was left on the wall. The type of everyday strangeness that thrived in Prague. He folded the flyer into his pocket.

  When he reached the city center, it was dark but not late. Winter curtained Prague at four in the afternoon—so cold sometimes it was like the city was searching out the gaps in his clothing. Though other times he would stumble upon a hidden garden, as if pumped through the arteries of a secret heart.

  In his pocket, his fingers found a tiny piece of scaled wing. At some point he had started taking “souvenirs” from the places he went, coasters he doodled on, a loose chunk of brick, severed buttons. He remembered lying in bed after the birthday party in Boston, a candle in his hand, wondering why he had taken it—the number 2. Later, on his first day at the artist’s house, he would steal a pewter Golem, just bigger than a Monopoly piece.

  He needed coffee. He needed to believe his exhaustion was only jet lag, though he had woken on the cold floor that morning, as his father would do sometimes. He had slept late despite the rooster that crowed periodically, a rooster in a city in winter. He heard its pecking in his head—shush, shush, shush—its beak slicing vainly through the snow.

  In a café down a side street, he let the caffeine wind his spring. He wondered how to make a start: apply at the Prague Post (the local English newspaper); work at an English bookstore; commit to teaching, after all; write a novel; become a tea connoisseur? As if one of those tasks would open a door. It wasn’t about work. After his uncle’s air limo business sold, Tee’s share of the inheritance (a token for a son-like nephew) would be nearly three hundred thousand dollars.

  By ten, he had finished his third cup. He trembled as he signed the check. In the dark, on the cobblestone, he didn’t know which way to turn. He smelled smoke, heard a siren somewhere. His heart raced. After an hour he stumbled upon the familiar glass doors of his hotel, as if by coincidence. No one waited inside. He remembered skimming over Boston in the cockpit of his uncle’s water plane, so completely separate from the city below. In the glass doors stood his reflection. The container inside of him filling. Finally he made his way through the web of streets to a beer stall near Old Town Square. As he waited for his Budvar, he heard the explosions, at last. He followed a woman a little older than he. When they reached the crowd, he saw the fireworks. Not high up in the air, but shot horizontally down streets, just overhead. He pushed through the mob under the Orloj astronomical clock, under the streaks that burst into sparks and ash. Inside his coat pocket, his fist tightened on the scaly feather. A stranger slapped his back. The Orloj rang in the New Year with its famous dance of figurines. People sprayed champagne, shook hands, passed bottles, sang Czech folk songs, pulled him into crisscrossing arms. He drank anything he got his hands on. A liquor that tasted like Christmas, which he would later know as Becherovka. A jam jar of homemade slivovice. The champagne wet his clothes, stuck to his skin, and suddenly he wanted everything off. He felt dizzy with the idea of starting out clean of his past, like a baby. Dumping his container for good.