Page 61 of Offside

“Mami.” The line comes up out of me from wherever true things wait. “I’m working on something. I’ll tell you when it’s true.”

“Something or someone?”

“Mami.”

“I withdraw it. I withdraw it completely.”

She looks at me for exactly one second. My mother, who has been watching me organize the world since I could talk. Whatever she sees, she puts it away somewhere gentle, and doesn’t open it.

“Good,” she says. “Work fast. The kitchen’s warm.” And she’s gone in a swirl of two flags, dispatched to Tobík and the grandfather and the last plane of her tournament, conducting the concourse.

The team room party that night is loud and healing.

The squad toasts Damián for eleven minutes. Novotný goes last.

“Twenty years,” he says, glass up, uncharacteristically level. “Two flags. The best left foot this country ever produced, and he’s giving it to AMERICA.”

“On loan,” Damián says. “The foot stays Czech.”

“SPEECH.”

Damián stands. He looks around the room a long time, my best friend, and does it his way. Plain.

“Twenty years. One regret, and I’m not saying which match. Thank you for letting me be from here.” He lifts his glass.“Fifteen flights tomorrow. One taxi. Doors open in Atlanta, all of you, forever. That’s the whole speech.”

The room detonates. He cries the way honest men cry, all at once, done, grinning. I post nothing in the chat, because the chat is in the room.

Bucharest gets told at midnight. Full director’s cut.

“The sequel,” Novotný demands, before it even starts. “Tonight. The swan.”

“In development,” Šíma rules, from the table. “The swan has representation now. These things take time.” I deliver my line from twelve meters, on cue, one last time.

“I slept through it. I saw a man at breakfast with cake he couldn’t explain.”

And Šíma, on the table, holds my eyes across the whole room, inside the biggest laugh of the night, and doesn’t smile, and I understand we are the only two people at this party attending a different party.

At one I leave the noise. The lift. The corridor.

I don’t have a plan. I had one thing like a plan this week, and it died at a pool. What I have is a fork I’ve apparently owned for five years. A medal. Eleven kilometers in my legs. A sentence from my mother about warm kitchens.

I stand in front of his door. Damián’s door too, alibi built in, except there’s no alibi tonight and no excuse either. Eve of nothing. I raise my hand to knock.

The door opens before my knuckles land.

He’s dressed. No washbag. Behind him the room is dark and Damián is not in it, because Damián is still downstairs being toasted, and Šíma looks like a man who has been standing at that door for a while, deciding, and finished deciding at the exact moment I arrived.

“I was coming to find you,” he says.

“You found me.”

He steps back and holds the door, which in five years he has never once done, because doors that open themselves shut themselves, and this one he holds.

“Come in, Tomáš. I owe the record a correction. The long version.”

?

Chapter 19: Šíma