“It is not a revolution,” she murmured. She stepped into the room to her husband.
Tee slapped his hand against the wall, and his fingertips rang with pain.
In the corner of his eye, something moved. He remembered the calf the night before. He was about to follow what he had seen when a doctor walked up.
Tee asked about the artist’s condition. The doctor pointed to his wrists. “Broke. Need surgery. How you know Pavel Picasso?”
“Will he paint again?” Tee asked.
“This injury”—the doctor tapped his head—“may be mental impact. Physical he will be okay. We fix him.”
“Mental impact?”
“Mental,” the doctor repeated.
Tee thanked him. Then he walked out through the white halls into the rain.
After the attack, Tee and Rockefeller were no longer welcome at the house in Malešice. Tee blamed himself: he had wanted them all to get drunk. He tried to visit, twice, but no one would let him inside. A policeman showed up at Tee’s apartment to question him. Tee asked what the chances were of catching the attackers. “How you say it?” the policeman said. “Zero.” Tee imagined American faces bearing down on the artist. More and more, he found himself across the hall or at the Globe. Rockefeller brooded, hunched into the collars of sports jackets. Tee asked about the flying horse on the bar sign in Vyšehrad: Šemik, Rockefeller said, that broke its leg jumping over a wall to save its master’s life. Tee went by the Globe even when he wasn’t on schedule. Ynez joked that he had gone back to Boston to fall more in love with Prague. “It’s not like you have to know what you’re running away from,” she teased, “to run away.” Ever since that night of drinking, he had kept his relationship with her to the Globe. As if stepping outside would be more bad luck. He bought a book on the maidens’ army, on the betrayals that led the sexes to war. He wrote myths in the margins of myths. In his, a version of him dammed up the Vltava, a boulder a day, rearranging the map of Prague. A version of him stomped on the hill Blaník to rouse its army of dead. A version of him broke into the Orloj and hung on the enormous gears until everything, everyone, slowed.
Ynez read over his shoulder. “Are you supposed to be Czech in these stories?” She chewed her pen. “Are those our books?”
“If I’m trying to run away from myself,” he said, “can’t you just let me?”
“Now who do you think I am?”
He slipped her pen cap into his pocket. When he didn’t answer her, she said, “Where do pigs park? A porking lot.”
He laughed and clutched at his chest.
“It’s not that funny,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. Finally she said, “What are you afraid of? Is this about your birth mother, your birth father?”
Tee raised a single eyebrow — his father’s gesture, which Tee had copied, at first, because it made him look like a pirate. “What am I afraid of?” He told her how Pavel had stared at him that night, unblinking, before shattering the mug. He had stepped in front of her, Ynez, for fear not of Rockefeller but of Pavel. Ynez seemed confused why he should be afraid of the artist.
Tee remembered what Katka had said about lies. She had rubbed her nose and said, “This means you are telling the truth.” Then she’d rubbed his. “Your nose is too soft,” she’d said. “Do all Asians have soft noses?”
Pavel kept to his bed through most of May. The Globe filled with gossip. Rumor reported a successful surgery: two screws in each wrist, under twin casts. Tee imagined Pavel pulling up the blanket with his teeth, shivering like an addict. His fingers itching for a brush, his lips sucking for a cigarette. Each time Tee called the house in Malešice, Katka waited just long enough to know it was him before hanging up. Tee bought all the books he’d written in in the Globe and hid them under his bed.
The few expats the artist did allow over, Rockefeller invited to his apartment. He hosted dinner party after dinner party. The art dealer’s daughter, Vanessa, said the bedroom studio was a mess of clothes, dishes. She’d seen an easel, in one corner, kicked in half. Pavel wouldn’t let Katka touch it. Vanessa said she had lit cigarettes and placed them in his mouth; he’d nearly bitten her. She had gotten the feeling he wanted to. “Jára Cimrman lit his cigarettes with lightning,” Tee said. No one mentioned the specifics of the attack.
In the Globe the staff sometimes went quiet when they saw Tee coming. Once, he overheard a woman with a book on Pavel’s art say she was buying it because the artist was going crazy. Someone she knew in the Czech art world had gone by the house in Malešice, and Pavel had shouted for a full hour about certain young artists borrowing culture from the Americans, as if he blamed her friend and was about to stab him through the heart with a paintbrush. The cashier glanced in Tee’s direction. But Tee knew Pavel couldn’t lift a brush; that must have been embellishment. After the woman left, the cashier asked if Tee was okay, as if he was the one to be pitied, not Pavel. Ynez crept closer to hear his answer. Tee said the book the woman had bought was a good one.
One afternoon, while Tee killed time in an Internet café before work, he found an e-mail from his father. A link to a blog, of all things. Finally in Hollywood, his father wrote. Apologies to my wife. Must get this film made or die trying. Heck, it’s my best attempt to forgive myself.
A couple of days later: Had lunch with a film guy. I drew him a picture of my brother’s crash. If only he knew everything I knew, he’d back this movie in a second. Why doesn’t anyone see things as I see them? If you’re out there, pray for me.
Tee wondered if his father meant him, or maybe his uncle.
Finally Tee set a date with Ynez at the Cuban-Irish bar in New Town, O’Che’s, where they stood no chance of running into Katka or Pavel or Rockefeller. They sat under the arched ceiling in the back, beside a stained-glass window of Che Guevara. Ynez asked what had taken so long; couldn’t he tell she was waiting for him? He remembered his aunt and uncle babysitting once while his parents saw a movie. Half-asleep, he’d heard his aunt enter the master bedroom. Drawers squeaked open. Then his uncle’s footsteps came upstairs, and the room quieted. Tee had tiptoed across the hall and heard the bed squeak. What had his aunt found that she’d tried to erase through sex?
In the bar, Tee noticed the noise of other Americans, the bravado. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, scratching the lip of the table. “You’re right, I should have noticed.”
Ynez said, “You’re starting this date with ‘It’s not you, it’s me’?”
He ordered shots of absinthe. Just be a tourist, he thought. Someone who can take things or leave them. Ynez modeled how to wet the sugar and light the spoon on fire, waiting out the flame before stirring sweet into the bitter licorice liquor.
The bar blurred at the edges. “Why did you choose this place?” she asked. “It’s awful.”
Outside, as they walked toward the night tram, he pulled her into him. She stumbled against his chest. A tenor sax whined over Wenceslas Square. It rained.
“For someone with a fear of abandonment,” she said when he covered her with his body. Then she stopped, one heel catching against the cobblestone.
“Is that what I have?” he asked, his heart pounding.
In her bedroom he pressed his face between her breasts, breathing her in. He would not be his father, not drive people away and pretend he was the one who’d left. He didn’t have anything to deny or atone for. But he kept premeditating his kisses. Beside her ear, under her chin, in the hollow of her throat.