Page 57 of Offside

You cannot leave a door open for a thing you built the whole building around. There is exactly one move that has ever moved a truth like mine, and I watched Tomáš Hájek make it at a pool rail, out loud, badly, magnificently, while I stood there and called it arithmetic.

You have to push it out. Yourself. Through the front of your own face, with your name on it.

Kovár finishes his tea. He stands, collects nothing, asks nothing, and at the door he stops, and looks at me for one second, maybe a second and a half, which from him is a filibuster.

“Different quiet,” he says.

My own line. Handed back across three weeks and a hallway, no charge, no follow-up, a mirror wearing a hoodie.

“Night, Šíma.”

Six sentences, start to finish. He learns nothing, because I said nothing. He leaves knowing what he arrived knowing, which isthe shape of a bad night, and behind him the room is louder than it was when it had a broadcast in it.

I don’t sleep. At one in the morning, Damián comes back fed and warm and drops into bed with a sentence about Mami’s two kitchens, and is gone in four minutes, and I lie in the dark next to that breathing and take inventory of the building I built.

At two I get up and stand at the minibar.

There’s a drink for this. Every table I’ve ever run knows there’s a drink for this. The one that goes with the worst nights. The one the broadcast pours when the crowd’s gone home. I look at the little bottles in the little light, and I find I don’t want the drink. I want the thing the drink is for. The performance. The seat at my own table. The voice that holds the room so the room never asks.

There’s no room here. There’s a dark window and a sleeping roommate, and no performance on this earth is going to hold any of that.

I close the minibar. The echo goes in the file where he’d put it, softly, no lecture.

At three, Brno calls.

My grandmother, who has risen at five in the morning her whole life and never once considered that a reason not to telephone, and whose opening line, always, is a ruling.

“You lost the semifinal,” she says. “The neighbors watched at my house. Buriánek wept. A grown man.”

“It’s a hard week for the nation, babi.”

“The nation will live. I’m calling about my grandson.” Tea sounds. She’s at the kitchen table, the oilcloth one, the whole map of my childhood in one audio cue. “You did the funny voice for the cameras after. I saw it. Very good. Very professional.”

“It’s my job, babi.”

“Mm. Nobody does the funny voice for you. That’s the trouble with that job.”

The oilcloth. The tea. An ocean of cable, and a woman who has asked me nothing directly since 2009, which is how she has always known everything.

“There’s a bronze on Saturday,” I say.

“There is. The neighbors are bringing chairs to my house. Buriánek is bringing his own chair. He doesn’t trust mine since the wedding.” A sip. “Now. I’m an old woman, so I’ll say one thing, and then we’ll discuss the steak.”

“Babi.”

“One thing. You’re letting something go cold. I don’t know what it is. I don’t need to know, don’t tell me, I’m hanging up before you try. But I’ve fed you since you were this big, and I know how you eat. You take the plate and you make everyone laugh and you let your own food go cold, every time, your whole life. Whatever it is.” The tea again, unhurried, geological, the source of every method in this family. “Eat it warm. That’s all. Now. The steak.”

We discuss the steak.

“Novák has a new boy at the counter,” she says. “He gave me the wrong cut on Thursday. I educated him.”

“How long did the education take?”

“He’ll be a fine butcher one day.”

“Did you make him cry?”

“Men don’t cry at butcher counters. He reflected. Now. The wedding. Buriánek’s daughter is having FISH. At a wedding. In this town.”