Page 58 of Offside

“A scandal.”

“I said so at the shop, and the shop agreed. There will be steak at my table on Saturday, win or lose, and if you win, there will also be dumplings, so consider your motivation settled.”

“And if we lose?”

“Then you come home in September and eat it like a man who played a World Cup, and the town will be proud, and Buriánekwill weep either way. He’s become a weeper.” A pause, one beat, the exact length of a hand on a cheek. “Play well, chlapce. Both halves.”

She rings off the way she always rings off, mid-warmth, no goodbye, a woman getting off a tram.

She learned no facts. She asked no questions. And the file adds her exhibit to Kovár’s and hands me the finding I have been outrunning since a rail in blue light. Here it is, then. The correction, filed against my own record, in my own dialect, because there’s no other official left in the building.

Finding. The arithmetic was rigged at source. Half of Tomáš forever. Five years I ran that number like conservative accounting, the safe line, the disciplined position. Review shows the number was invented. There was never a half on offer. There was a whole man, standing in rooms, leaving doors open, moving his boots, setting plates. Asking with a question mark. Asking at a rail. Asking.

I booked half of him and called the theft prudence. Half forever was the lie that let me keep the books balanced while I embezzled a life.

There is no half. There never was. There is all of him, said out loud, with my name on it, pushed through the front of my own face. Or there is the flight home alone, and a clean record, and a funny voice, and a plate going cold in every room I ever run for the rest of my career.

That’s the whole ledger. Two lines.

The method doesn’t work on me. Not Kovár’s chair, not babi’s oilcloth, not Damián’s seat at a walnut table. It has to be pushed, by me, once, in daylight, for myself, which is the one direction I have never once pushed in my entire documented life.

So push.

Day 8 arrives gray through the window. Bronze tomorrow. The camp wakes and needs its report, and it gets its report, because the broadcast is load-bearing to the end.

At breakfast, the plate is not at my seat.

First morning of the whole tournament with no plate. Twenty-one men notice nothing. The system’s author reads the message in the medium, loud and clear, at regulation volume.

“Bus at nine,” the captain tells the room. Even. Gray. Flawless. “Training at ten. Bronze eleven at noon.”

“Are you in it?” Horak asks him, because he asks everything now.

“I’m in it. So are you. Eat.”

Nothing in any of it for me. Nothing against me. Nothing at all. The frightening register, aimed by omission, and I sit in the middle of it and eat eggs I got myself, and take the punishment the way it’s sent, quietly, in full.

But the record now shows a correction, timestamped, irrevocable, and a man scheduled to make the single costliest transmission of his career.

After the bronze. Win it first. He deserves the medal without my noise in it.

Then push.

?

Chapter 18: Tomáš

The bus to a bronze match is quiet in a different key than the bus to a semifinal.

Nobody’s afraid. That’s the difference. There’s nothing left to be afraid of. What’s on the bus instead is twenty-three men deciding, privately, one at a time, whether the match nobody dreams about is going to matter.

“It matters,” Novotný says, halfway there, to nobody. Deciding out loud, because he does everything out loud. “It’s a World Cup medal. My kids will hold it.”

“You don’t have kids,” Polášek says.

“My FUTURE kids.”

“It matters,” Horak says, quietly, jaw set, and the bus hums agreement, and that’s the vote carried.