Page 36 of Offside

lights out at eleven. that includes the chat

Polášek

the chat has never once been closed

Šíma

the chat is a concept, Polášek. concepts don’t close

Hájek

tonight the concept sleeps

The hotel goes down early, floor by floor, a building holding its breath. Damián sleeps the disciplined pre-match sleep, out in four minutes, a career of practice. I stand at the window with the room dark behind me and run the countdown I no longer pretend I’m not running.

Tomorrow, the semifinal. Ninety minutes. Then one final match and a flight home. The corridor empties, and the film room closes for the season, and whatever we are becomes whatever we were. The schedule is coming at the speed schedules come, one sunrise at a time, absolutely certain, and against it I have deployed a curfew and a punctuation policy.

An official on his way up at eleven to enforce an early checkout, gone by twelve, his own clause, in his own code. The hardest whistle of my career, and I wrote it myself.

?

Chapter 12: Tomáš

Eve of a semifinal and the hotel hums like a parked bus.

I do the rounds, because the rounds are mine. Floor by floor, door by door, twenty-two players stacked in a tower, all of them pretending to sleep earlier than any of them will.

Horak opens before I finish knocking.

“I was asleep,” he says, fully dressed.

“You were not.”

“I was nearly asleep.”

“Lie down with the lights off. That’s the whole technique. Your body knows the rest.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It kept nine crosses today. It knows things. Trust the employee.”

“What if they score early?”

“Then we’re losing early, and we have the whole match to fix it. You want the plan for going behind? Sleep. That’s the plan. Everything else is tomorrow’s job.”

“Captain,” he says, as I turn.

“Mm.”

“Thanks for the rounds.”

“It’s the job.”

He laughs, and behind the laugh he’s twenty and playing a World Cup semifinal tomorrow, so I stay another minute in the doorway and talk about nothing, the bus time, breakfast, until the shoulders come down a centimeter. Then bed, lights, door.

Novotný’s room sounds like a podcast about itself. I knock once. The sound stops. “Sleeping,” he calls.

“Sleep quieter.”