Page 74 of Offside

“I know the blue thing.” He hangs the towel like he lives here. Minus paperwork, he does. “Šíma. Look at that.”

“At what?”

“Two chairs.”

We look at the table. Two chairs. Two plates. A bottle, one glass working and one standing sentry. And tomorrow at eight, a table in our own city with a real name on it.

“Monday,” I say, “we buy the good ones.”

?

Epilogue: Šíma

October in Brno smells like wet leaves and other people’s fireplaces. The restaurant is loud in the way I like, which is loud enough that nobody’s listening.

We have a table by the wall. We have it because we always have it now. The staff have stopped asking. This is what five years of counterintelligence has come to. A standing arrangement. The visible kind.

“The svícková,” Tomáš tells the waiter, “and he’ll have the same, and he’ll claim he wasn’t going to order it.”

“I was going to order it.”

“He was going to order the trout and steal mine. We’ve run the experiment.”

“Once. We ran it once.”

“Twice, with controls.” He hands both menus back. “The svícková twice. Extra dumplings on the second one. He’s too thin. I have it from a committee.”

The waiter goes. He’s maybe twenty, and he has no idea, and I love that about him. I love that about this whole room. Forty tables of Thursday people, eating, arguing about the league, oneof them wearing my club’s scarf. Not one of them looking at us, because there’s nothing to look at. Two footballers having dinner. It’s nothing. It’s dinner. It’s October. It’s every week now.

“Tobík texted,” Tomáš says. “The crate cleared customs. Third one. He says Damián cried at the tracking number again.”

“He didn’t cry.”

“He cried. There’s documentation. Tobík photographed him holding the packing slip like a telegram from the front.” He pours water for both of us. Housekeeping, unconscious. “Also the shelf broke.”

“The shelf.”

“The supply line shelf. Too many dumplings. It came off the wall on Tuesday, and Damián apparently stood in the kitchen saying not the shelf, like a man in a disaster film.”

“Structural failure. In an Atlanta kitchen.”

“A load-bearing shelf of Czech starch. Tobík’s rebuilding it with brackets. He’s labeling the brackets.”

“What do the brackets say?”

“INFRASTRUCTURE.”

And that does it. That’s the one that gets him. His own punchline, it always is. Tomáš Hájek goes backward into the laugh the way he does maybe four times a year. Headfirst, eyes shut, shoulders up. The laugh that doesn’t perform because it can’t. It’s too busy happening. The candle throws it upward and the wall holds it there.

My phone is in my hand before I know my hand had a plan.

I take the photo.

I look at it while he’s still coming down. Tomáš, mid-laugh, eyes shut, a plate of bread and the good dark tablecloth in front of him, the wall behind. It’s the best photograph ever taken by anyone. I say that as a professional appraiser of my own work. I’m not in the frame. And here’s the thing I notice, standing inthe middle of my own life like a man who’s just felt the weather change.

I’m not in the frame because I’m holding the phone.

That’s all. That’s the whole reason. Five years of engineering my own absence. Cropping myself out of my best material. A career of standing just left of every picture. And tonight the explanation is one sentence long and weighs nothing. Somebody had to take it. I was closest.