Page 13 of Offside

“Their four,” he says, looking over at me. Quieter, because his volume does the thing it does when rooms empty. “If he steps early on you and misses, that’s a goal at this level. Maybe the whole match.”

“Then I’ll put it where he isn’t.”

“You will. You’ve been putting it where people aren’t since I met you.” He looks back at the screen. “One more time, wide angle.”

We watch it again from the wide angle. Then once more, and I’m the one holding the remote.

Eleven extra minutes. I know because the room’s clock is the aggressive kind. Eleven minutes of two men and a keeper’s bad habit, and nothing happened, because nothing was ever going to happen. This is a video room at a training facility with a fire-evacuation map on the wall.

Nothing for the manifest. Corners ran long. That’s it. I kill the projector, we walk out, he peels toward the physio like always, and I stand in the corridor for a second with the remote still inmy hand, holding a remote in an empty corridor like a man who forgot what it’s for.

Dinner is the family thing, my mother’s rented kitchen, and I sit between my brother and my best friend and it’s loud and it’s good and I’d testify to both under oath.

“Tell the security story,” Damián says.

“So the man at the gate reads my lanyard,” Tobík says, already standing up for it, “and he looks at me, and he looks at the lanyard, and he says, official WHAT, and I look him dead in the eye and I say: morale. And then proceeds to ask me questions about when I visit the Beltline and the dog Biscuit I have photos of on Instagram.”

The table goes up. My mother puts another dish down and squeezes the back of my neck on the way past, which is where I put my hand on other people, which is a thing I’m not thinking about tonight.

“Do the airport,” Tobík says. “Do Tomáš in 2019.”

Damián stands. Squares his shoulders. Stares into the middle distance like a man reading a departures board that has personally betrayed him.

“The gate has moved,” he announces, to the salt. “Gates don’t move. Somebody moved the gate.”

“I was right,” I say. “They had moved the gate.”

“You made an announcement,” Damián says. “To the airport.”

“It was important civic information.”

“You held up the boarding group like a union rep.”

“They thanked me.”

“One woman thanked you,” Damián says. “She was also Czech. It’s a national condition.”

The two of them are off again, building on each other, no gaps. The baker has agreed to hold Friday rye, there’s a second bookshelf under discussion. They have a calendar. They saidone true thing out loud during the tournament and got a whole calendar for it.

“You’re quiet,” Damián says, under the noise, just to me.

“I’m eating.”

“Mm.” He tops up my water and lets it be, which is us. It has always been us.

My mother watches me watch them. So I eat, because eating is the approved activity for a man whose face needs somewhere to be.

It’s the Atlanta grievance. I keep telling myself this and check the label twice on the walk back to the hotel. Best friend leaving. Brother settled. Both good news.

The label is fine.

But something doesn’t fit tonight, and I’m a man who knows when a kit bag doesn’t zip.

Because the sting at the fence wasn’t the leaving. The sting was the laughing. The out-loud, fence-height, lanyard-wearing laughing. The entire unhidden weight of what they get to be in daylight, and me on the training side of the fence with a whistle, wanting.

Wanting what? Fill in the blank, Hájek. It’s one blank line on the manifest.

I don’t fill in the blank. I walk into the lobby, and the lift takes eight floors to give me back my routine.