Page 2 of Offside

“Story,” Novotný says. “The Bucharest one.”

“No.”

“It’s a semifinal night.”

“Bucharest is a seated story. Look at this room. Nobody has been seated since the group stage.” I put my drink down. “You’ll get the parrot.”

“We have had the parrot,” Polášek says.

“You have had the short parrot. There is a director’s cut.”

So I give them the parrot. “Vilnius. Preseason. A bar with genuine character, and character in this case means a parrot with a criminal record. Banned from two other bars before we ever met. I conducted interviews. That parrot knew one word ofCzech, and it deployed that word at the worst available moment, every time, without fail. A specialist. That bird understood timing better than most wingers I have played with.”

“The police part,” Novotný says. He is already going. “Say the part where it said it to the police.”

“It said it to the police.”

Novotný folds over the back of a chair like the parrot said it to him personally. Horak wants to know what the word was. Polášek tells him he is too young, and Polášek is younger than Horak.

Every word of that story is true. That is the trick of it. A man who comes back at two in the morning with a story about a parrot was at a bar with a parrot. Where else would he have been. Nobody checks. Nobody has checked for years. The stories are load-bearing. I built the system myself, out of being exactly this annoying, and it has never once failed an inspection, because there have never been any inspections. That is the system working.

Damián finds me at the bar with a beer he isn’t drinking fast.

“You know what’s insane,” he says. Not a question. “When this ends, I don’t fly anywhere. Everyone packs, and I take a taxi twenty minutes east.”

“You chose employment in a swamp. I respect it. I don’t understand but I respect it.”

“The club sent a shirt with my name on the back,” he says. “I hung it in the hotel closet. A closet, Šíma. In a hotel. Like it lives here too.”

“You could put it in a drawer like a normal person.”

“It doesn’t go in a drawer.” He says it simply, the way you state an offside. “It hangs.” He laughs at himself and turns the bottle a half-turn on the bar.

“Two more matches,” he says. “If it goes perfectly. Two. Then this team scatters, and everybody I have eaten breakfast with for a month is a flight.”

“You’ve done camp math before. Camps always end.”

“I know.” He looks down the bar at nothing in particular. “I’m the one staying, and it still feels like leaving. Explain that.”

“I don’t do feelings after midnight. Confessions like this aren’t good after midnight for anyone involved.”

He huffs and lets it go. He always lets it go. I have never decided whether that is mercy or surrender, and I have never wanted the finding.

But the math stays on the bar where he left it, and the math is simple. The run will end and the camp will break. Everything in a camp is temporary by design. The rooms are temporary. The routines are temporary. The thing I do not name even in my own head is temporary, on purpose, by rule. The rules have an author. The author is doing fine. Ask anyone.

Across the room, Damián has migrated. Now he is at Kovár’s shoulder, holding out a bottle of water like a question. Kovár has his second face on, the one that does all the right things one second late. Eleven minutes after the water bottle, he is gone from his own victory party, and nobody sees it. I see it.

Tomáš lands next to me around one with a bottle of water in each hand. He gives one to Novotný without being asked, without even looking, the way a man deals cards. His voice has gone to gravel from a whole evening of the word.

“Semifinal,” he says to me. Quieter. Like it’s classified.

“I’ve heard.”

“Semifinal, Šíma.”

“You’ve said it forty times.”

“It keeps being true.”