Page 50 of Offside

Chapter 15: Šíma

His bed, second morning running. His arm is dead weight across me, his breathing long and wrecked and even, grief finally asleep in a body that ran eleven kilometers yesterday and won't get to the World Cup anyway.

Exhibit one, in a case I haven’t opened yet: I stayed, and I slept, and nothing in me tried to leave.

The gray light comes through the curtain seam and puts a line across his face. I lie there in violation of every statute I have ever drafted and watch him sleep, the way you’re not supposed to watch anything you plan to keep at arm’s length.

I love him. There it is. The whole file in three words.

One sentence. That’s what it gets. One sentence, said once, in the dark of my own head where no court sits.

There’s older paper under it, while the court is open. Bisexual. Correct on the intake form, correct now, never once read at volume. That part was never the dispute. It was never the wanting I couldn’t afford. Only the losing.

Then the terror comes in like water under a door. Cold. Fast. Certain. The sentence has been living here for five years and Ijust said it where I could hear it, and things you say out loud are things that can be taken from you. Ask Kovár. Ask the half-sentence that landed on my spine last night like a verdict.

This is the only thing this summer I’m not losing.

He said it out loud. It has a name now, whether or not anybody spells it. Named things end. I have five years of case law and a corridor full of evidence, and every exhibit says the same thing.

I reach for the rulebook the way a man reaches for a rail.

Protocol. I ease out from under his arm and he doesn’t wake. I dress silent. At the door I stop, because I told him I’d be here at breakfast, and the room where he’s sleeping is not where breakfast is.

I keep my promises by the letter when I can no longer afford the spirit.

I’m at the table at seven. Present. As promised. In the room, at breakfast, technically.

The camp is gutted. You can hear it in the cutlery. Men eating quietly around a hole where a final used to be.

“Šíma.” Novotný sits down across from me. His plate is half what it was all tournament. “Tell me something. Anything. The bus, the eggs, the fan. I don’t care. It’s too quiet in my head.”

“Bronze in two days.”

“That’s it? That’s what I get?”

“That’s the fixture.”

He looks at me like I’ve handed him a stone. Polášek fills the gap, because Polášek has been reading rooms as long as I have.

“The federation emailed. Bronze logistics. Novotný, your family’s tickets moved sections.”

“Moved where?”

“Closer to the horn.”

“There’s a horn again?” Horak, hopeful, from down the table. “It’s coming back?”

“It never left,” Polášek says. “It was observing a silence.”

“The bronze is a real medal,” Horak says, to the table, testing it. “My mother says it’s the friendly medal.”

“Your mother is a hard woman,” Novotný says.

“She emailed the federation about the referee.”

“So did Novotný,” Polášek says.

“I filed FEEDBACK. There’s a form. I used the form.”