Page 8 of Offside

Šíma

minutes concluded. pool at ten. hydrate like professionals and comb your hair, the cameras found us this morning and they are not giving us back

Chapter 3: Šíma

Damián wakes up laughing at his phone, which is a new development in this roommate study.

“Tobík says the neighbors complained about the noise from last night after we won,” he says. “The building manager left a note. He’s framing the note.”

“Of course he’s framing the note. He’s a Hájek. They document.”

I say it from my bed, face down, in yesterday’s clothes, which is where the record will show I woke up. The clothes are part of the system. A man who comes home late from a diner sleeps in his clothes. It’s method acting, except the method is my life.

Damián puts the phone down and looks at me for exactly one second longer than the look requires.

“How was the diner?”

“There was a ceiling fan,” I say, into the pillow. “You’ll hear about it at breakfast. I’m not doing two shows.”

He laughs and goes to shower, easy and loose. A man with nothing hiding in his pockets. He kept a part of himself hidden for years. Now he wakes up laughing. There’s a drawer forevidence like this that proves the wrong case. It’s getting full. I keep it shut with my foot.

Recovery day. The schedule is on the group chat: recovery pool at ten, food at twelve, films of other teams’ quarterfinals at four.

Breakfast is the squad at three tables pretending to be one table. I arrive to a request already on the floor.

“The diner,” Novotný says. “Šíma. The diner.”

“I’m eating.”

“You’re never eating. You’re narrating with food nearby.”

“Fine.” I put down the fork. “Item one. Diner on Peachtree. There’s a ceiling fan with a personality problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Two speeds. Wedding and interrogation.”

“Which was it on?” Novotný has both elbows on the table now.

“It changed. Every time the server lied, the fan went to interrogation. I tested this for two hours. By the end I was asking the questions and the fan was handling the pressure.”

“You deposed a server,” Polášek says.

“The fan deposed him. I took minutes. There’s a custody situation involving the day shift that I’m not at liberty to discuss.”

Novotný puts his head on the table. The physio has stopped chewing. The story ends and nobody asks for the address. Years of stories and not one request for an address.

“Was the fan there when you arrived?” Tomáš says, from down the table, not looking up from his eggs. “Or did it hear you were coming?”

“The fan and I arrived at an understanding.”

“You said that about the parrot.”

“The parrot and I arrived at a settlement. Different place, different process.”

The table laughs. This is the double act. Ten years of it, seamless, no rehearsal required. He feeds me the straight lineand I hit it. What the squad sees is two best friends doing the bit they always do. What the record sees is the man who invented the ceiling fan at one in the morning asking the fan questions in public.

If you want to hide a wire, run it through the wall everyone already looks at.