Page 71 of Offside

I open the apartment door. Tomáš Hájek is standing in my stairwell in Brno with four grocery bags.

Let the record show the location. Not a hotel. Not a corridor with carpet chosen by an algorithm. My stairwell. My city. The one rule that outlived all the other rules. Never at home. I wrote it first and defended it longest, and here it stands in the doorway with its coat on, watching itself get retired.

“You’re here,” I say.

“I’m here.” He holds up the bags. “You have nothing in your kitchen. I checked your kitchen on Thursday. It has salt and a lightbulb.”

“The lightbulb is for emergencies.”

“Move,” he says.

He walks into my flat like a man with a delivery route, and the rule takes its coat off and dies quietly in the stairwell. I stand inmy own doorway and watch the best thing that ever happened to me look for my counter space.

Here’s what my brain does, because five years of training doesn’t disperse like fog. It drafts the cover story. Instantly. Reflexively. Fully formatted. He’s here to review semifinal film. The federation asked for a debrief. There’s a coaching course, we’re both enrolled, carpooling is fiscally responsible. Three options, load-bearing, deniable, drafted between the buzzer and the door. I stand in my kitchen doorway holding all three like tickets to a demolished theater.

Nobody’s asking. Nobody’s ever asking again.

I throw the whole draft away. The last one. I’d like to say it went with dignity, but the truth is it just went, the way scaffolding goes when the building can stand.

“You’re doing the thing,” Tomáš says, unpacking eggs. “The face. The one where you’re writing.”

“I was drafting the cover story. Force of habit.”

“Which one did you land on?”

“Film review. Debrief. Coaching course. In that order.”

“Coaching course.” He nods, judicious. “That’s the strongest. Plausible, boring, no follow-up questions.”

“That’s why it went in the bin last. Sentiment.”

“Throw it away.”

“Already did. You watched me.”

“I watched your face do a eulogy.” He puts the eggs in my empty refrigerator, where they look like the first settlers of a large and hopeful country. “Where are your pans?”

“I have a pan.”

“A pan.” He opens the cabinet. He looks at my one pan the way he looked at Belgian set pieces. “Šíma. You’ve lived here six years.”

“I’ve SLEPT here six years. I live in hotels. You know this. You’ve audited it.”

He stops, half into my cabinet, and looks back at me, and something goes over his face like weather. Because yes. That’s the whole file in one sentence. Six years of salt and a lightbulb, because the road had the plates and the towels and the arrangement, and home was the place I kept the boots.

“Well,” he says, voice level, captain’s volume for an audience of one. “We’re fixing it. Starting with lunch. Sit down.”

There is exactly one chair at my kitchen table.

We both look at it. The chair achieves a significance no chair has ever wanted.

“One chair,” he says.

“I eat standing. Like a horse.”

“Six YEARS.”

“Nobody ever sat there but me. It seemed efficient.”