Page 54 of Offside

“Look at me,” I say. The only demand I have left. “And hold it.”

He looks at me. He holds it. He doesn’t blink and he doesn’t soften it and he doesn’t repeat it, because the record doesn’t stutter. The pool light swims on him. His knuckles stay white on the rail the whole time, both hands, like a man keeping something from going over a cliff, and I log the knuckles and donothing with them, because the data and the testimony disagree, and in my whole life I have never once ranked data above a man’s plain word.

“The road ends Sunday,” he says. “Roads do. It was a good road. Don’t stand at the end of it inventing a destination.”

I stand still. I said I’d stand still, and I stand still. The announcement register runs out of announcements. What’s left in my chest is one question, wearing the only shape I have left.

“Face value,” I say. “That’s what I do with words. Everyone’s always known that about me. So once, plainly, and then I’ll take it and go. Is that the truth?”

One second.

One more.

“That’s the truth,” he says.

And I take it. Because he has never lied to me. Not once. Not in five years of nights or ten years of rooms. A man who has never lied to you has earned the face value of a lifetime. That’s the mercy of me, and the whole mechanism of him, and neither of us can help it.

“Okay,” I say.

The word comes out of the drawer where I keep the register I hate. The short one. The clipped one. The one Tobík calls not-sulking, because he’s too kind to call it what it is. It comes out flat and final, and it locks every door behind it on its way.

“Bronze Saturday,” I say. “Bus at nine. Recovery at eleven. I’ll post the times.”

“Tomáš.”

“The times will be in the chat.”

I go. I don’t roar. There’s no roar in the building. The roar would mean there’s an argument to have, and there’s no argument. The man answered plainly and I took it. That’s the whole transaction. Five years, liquidated at face value, in ninety seconds by the deep end.

The door swings behind me. The corridor is beige and endless. Somewhere above me is a room with extra water on the desk that nobody ordered tonight, and nobody’s going to drink.

In my room, the boots are by the bed where I left them this morning, lined up true, the museum of order, the most famous boots in a story where I sleep through everything. I look at them a long time. Then I put them in the wardrobe, out of the display, because the exhibit is closed.

In the lift down to nowhere and back, because the body wanted movement, I un-set the second alarm. The one that was for nothing anyway. The one I’ve kept for five years at the wrong time on purpose, in case a night ran long and a man needed waking at five forty.

The times go in the chat at eleven.

bus at nine. recovery at eleven. bronze list tomorrow

Twenty-two read receipts inside a minute. One of them is his. The channel that carried five years of everything carries schedules now, which is what I always said it carried.

There’s nothing to be early for now.

The doors close on my own face in the steel, and the man in there takes it at face value too.

Both of us ride up alone.

?

Chapter 17: Šíma

Iwon. I want that noted before anything else tonight, because the record loves a result.

I stood at a rail in blue pool light and the man I love asked me for everything, plainly, in his own voice, with his whole chest, and I defended the position I have held for five years without conceding a meter. Flawless execution. Clean sheet. I walked off the deck with the arrangement dead and the secret safe and the plan intact, and if this is winning, then I have deeply misunderstood the concept my entire career.

The room is empty. Damián’s at the rented kitchen across town, where Mami is cooking for Saturday in two kitchens and the family is loud and alive and he belongs to it.

The lobby at ten is half a squad that can’t sleep, so I work the shift, because the breaker of the best thing in his own life still has a job.