Page 68 of Offside

“I paid a seat fee for a NATIONAL INSTRUMENT,” he says. “With a MEDAL. Keep up, Tomáš.”

“And customs? When they ask what it is?”

“It’s a horn with a medal. Customs will understand. Customs are people. People love a decorated horn.”

They’re flying home today. Tobík comes back to Atlanta in a week to finish the flat. He hugs me goodbye, all commitment, no technique, then holds on one extra second, my little brother. He says, quiet, into my shoulder, “You look lighter. Whatever the carrying was.” He pulls back, crumbs from somewhere on his collar even now. “Say it badly sometime. Whenever. It counts.”

“Fly safe. Mind the horn.”

“The horn minds ME.”

Mami takes my face in both hands, the full ceremony, and studies me the way she’s studied me since before I could talk.

“You’re working on something still,” she says.

“I’ll tell you when it’s true, Mami.”

“Mm.” She pats my cheek once, decided. “It’s getting truer. A mother sees. Kitchen’s warm from Thursday.”

“Mami. The flags fit in the tote?”

“The flags,” she says, already moving, “have never once not fit.” And she’s gone into the terminal with both of them sticking out of her tote, conducting the porters. The horn goes home to Brno with a medal it earned.

The airport at eleven is the last of us. Kovár’s flight and ours leave within the hour, different directions. The three of us stand at the mouth of the security lanes doing the thing men do when the summer’s over. Nothing, slowly.

“Well,” Kovár says.

“Well,” I say.

Šíma doesn’t say well. Šíma puts down his bag and hugs Kovár, both arms, the full wingspan, no bit anywhere in the building. I watch my hollow friend take it the way you take medicine you didn’t ask for and needed. It goes on a while. Neither of them says anything at all. Whatever Šíma’s carrying about Kovár, he doesn’t say it. Whatever Kovár’s carrying, wherever it’s flying, he doesn’t say either. Two of the best readers in the federation, electing silence, in an airport, on purpose.

“September,” Kovár says, when they let go. “Qualifiers.”

“September,” Šíma says. “Bring the eggs verdict. The committee reconvenes.”

“The eggs know,” Kovár says, and almost smiles. He shoulders his bag and walks to his gate and doesn’t look back either. Something about the set of his shoulders is different than a week ago. I don’t have the file on it. For once in my life I let a man carry his own luggage.

And then it’s us.

Gate B7, Atlanta to Vienna, connection to Brno. Two seats, booked separately, weeks ago, out of habit. We sit next to each other at the gate because the seats next to each other were free. Nobody looks twice, because there’s nothing to look at. Two men from Brno flying home to Brno. Teammates. Everyone knows them. The most public secret transport in aviation history.

“Window or aisle,” he says, not looking up from his phone.

“You know my seat.”

“14C. I’ve known your seat for ten years.” He scrolls. “I checked us in. We’re 14C and 14D.”

“The system allowed that?”

“The system,” he says, “has always allowed it. That was never the problem.”

I look at him. He looks at the departures board, deadpan, broadcasting to an audience of one. The laugh comes up out of me from somewhere that’s been locked all summer. The invisibility. Five years it was the prison, the thing that made us possible and impossible in the same breath. This morning it’s a private joke at gate B7. Nobody can see us because there was never anything to see. There still isn’t. There’s just two men from Brno, going home, together. The word together doing quiet work in that sentence that no camera on this earth could develop.

“I made a list on the plane out,” he says. “In June. Things to fix about your travel habits.”

“You made a list about me.”

“Item one. He checks the departures board every four minutes. The board has not changed. The board will announce changes.”