Chapter 20 Damián
?íma is taping his left boot.
Left before right. He says it’s not superstition. He says it’s science. I’ve watched him do this before every match since we were kids and the science has never been explained, and I’ve stopped asking because ?íma’s explanations are longer than the matches.
“Vě?.” He looks up from the tape. “You look calm. You look suspiciously calm. Like a man who’s done something.”
“I’ve done nothing.”
“That’s what people who’ve done things say.”
Ková? is eating a banana across the locker room. His third. ?íma tracked the first two from behind his boot tape with the focus of a man monitoring a security threat.
“Ková?, put the banana down.”
“I’m fueling.”
“You’re fueling for the wrong sport. This is football. We run. You’re eating like you’re about to hibernate.”
“Bananas are potassium. Potassium prevents cramps.”
“Your calves are going to cramp from the weight of three bananas sitting in your stomach.”
Novotny is standing at the tactics board with Polá?ek, arguing about defensive shape.
They’ve been arguing about defensive shape since the bus.
The locker room is loud with the usual pre-match rhythm, the click of boots on tile, the physio moving through with tape and ice and the voice he uses when he’s checking ankles.
I sit at my locker and pull my shirt on.
The number four. The shirt has my name on it and the shirt doesn’t know anything has changed.
Tomá? is at his locker across the room. His phone has been in his hand since breakfast. He’s been reading, texting, and every time I look over he puts the screen down with a timing that suggests the screen was meant to be put down.
He’s not avoiding me. He’s quieter than he was two weeks ago, a new kind of quiet I can’t quite read.
I assumed it was the conversation from still sitting between us.
Tomá? processing. Tomá? deciding what to do with the thing I told him was nothing but a poor decision.
Novotny has the captain’s armband tonight. I’m not wearing it. I haven’t worn it this tournament and for the first time in my career the absence of it doesn’t feel like a thing I lost. It feels like a thing I set down.
I think about Tobík. Not as a wound. Not as the man I texted last week with words I’d take back if taking things back were how life worked.
Tobík is in this stadium. Tomá? said Marchetti and Thompson are with him.
The Czech scarf is probably around his neck because the Czech scarf is always around his neck at these matches and the consistency of that does something to my chest I don’t have time for right now.
Eight days since the text. Four days since I called Peter and told him I wasn’t extending with the club in Germany. Three days since Peter started talking to Atlanta United. This morning, the finalization. The announcement scheduled for sometime in the next day.
I let the thought sit. I have a match to play and then I will tell the team.
“Vě?.” Tomá?‘s voice from across the room. “How’s the hamstring?”
“Fine. Tight from yesterday but fine.”
“Stretch it again before warmup.”
“I stretched it twice.”
“Stretch it three times. You’re twenty-seven. Your body doesn’t forgive the way it used to.”
“My body forgives plenty.”
“Your body is lying to you. Bodies do that after twenty-five. Ask Ková?.”
Ková?, mid-banana: “Don’t bring me into this. My body and I have an arrangement.”
“Your arrangement involves too much fruit,” ?íma says. “I’m genuinely concerned.”
The whistle for warmup sounds through the corridor. I stand. The boots feel right. The pitch is waiting outside this tunnel, seventy thousand people and the July heat that Georgia hasn’t surrendered even at eight in the evening. Knockout round. Czechia versus Mexico for a place in the quarterfinal.
I follow the team into the corridor, and the roar builds the way it builds, a low vibration in the concrete that becomes sound when the tunnel opens to the pitch.
The air hits first. Stadium-thick. The HVAC lost the fight with July hours ago and the heat has settled into the steel roof and the seats and the grass and everything underneath. My hair is already sticking to my neck.
The pitch opens in front of us and I see the green and the white lines and the goal nets and the stadium seats climbing toward the roof, and I think: this is the city I’m moving to.
This stadium. This pitch. This grass that’s softer and thicker than German grass.
The next time I play here I’ll be wearing red and black instead of red, white, and blue.
Warmup. Dynamic stretches, the circle expanding and contracting.
I move through the sequence without thinking.
Tomá? sends crosses in from the right, and I meet each one at the top of the jump, and the contact at the forehead is clean, and for twenty minutes my chest has nothing in it except air and effort and the sound of a ball landing where I aimed it.
I scan section 126 once during the stretch. Brief. Three seconds.
Tobík is there. The Czech scarf around his neck.
Black t-shirt. He’s sitting between Marchetti and Thompson.
He came. He came to a Czech knockout match in his country’s colors eight days after I broke things off via text.
The scarf is information. I don’t know what it means.
I register it and turn back to the pitch.
The first fifteen minutes are possession chess.
Mexico holds the ball in their half, probing, looking for the gap.
In the twenty-third minute I win an aerial duel.
The jump is timed right and my forehead meets the ball and redirects it to Tomá?.
I land and the pitch makes sense the way the pitch always makes sense.
I love this. The ball in the air and my body underneath it and the timing that comes from years of the same drill, the same jump, the same contact point, and none of it is the program right now. This is the thing I chose before anyone told me I had to choose it.
In the thirty-eighth minute Mexico finds a gap on the counter.
Their striker beats our left-back and puts a cross in low.
I slide. My foot meets the ball a half-second before their forward’s does, and the ball ricochets wide.
I get up. My knee has grass stain on it and the left-back is looking at me with the face of a kid who just got beaten.
I put my hand on the back of his neck. “You’re fine. That’s gone. Next one.”
He nods. We reset.
In the fifty-sixth minute, corner kick. Ours. Tomá? takes it. He sends the ball in high, curling toward the near post, and I’m already moving before it leaves his boot because I’ve been reading Tomá?‘s corners for a decade and the body knows before the mind catches up.
I time the jump. The defender beside me jumps late. The ball meets my forehead at the highest point and I send it down and across and the net moves and the sound that comes out of seventy thousand people is the sound that separates football from every other thing in my life.
I land. ?íma reaches me first, arms around my waist, screaming words I can’t hear over the noise. Tomá? is three steps behind him.
I turn toward section 126. Three seconds. I lift a finger to my temple. A small gesture. The kind nobody in the stadium reads because the stadium is too loud and the gesture is not for the stadium.
The last thirty-four minutes are the best football I’ve played in years.
Mexico pushes. They send everything forward.
I win headers, clear crosses, read the striker’s hips before the striker knows which direction his own body is going.
Tomá? and I communicate in the half-sentences of a decade of playing together.
Single words and hand signals, and the partnership holds.
In the seventy-ninth minute I step in front of a shot heading for the top corner and take it on the chest and the impact runs through my ribs and I don’t care because the ball is ours again and the pitch is the one place where everything I do makes sense.
The whistle goes. Czechia 1, Mexico 0. We are going to the quarterfinals.
Tomá? finds me first. The embrace is brief, his forehead against my shoulder, his hand on the back of my neck. The old gesture, returned.
He pulls back and looks at me and his face is doing the new quiet thing, the thing I haven’t been able to read for two days, and I think: he knows more than I thought he knew. The thought arrives without panic.
We walk toward the tunnel. The handshakes with the Mexican players, the cameras, the press. I glance at section 126. Tobík’s seat is empty. He’s moved. He’s somewhere in the tunnel area I hope, coming down the way he came down after that first match
The team walks into the tunnel and the air is the same air from two weeks ago.
Stadium-thick. Georgia heat trapped under the steel roof, July refusing to let anything go.
My hair is damp. The flush is still on my skin.
Two weeks ago in this same tunnel I watched Tobík arrive in a Czech scarf and I told myself I was fine about it.
The locker room. I get to my locker. The phone in my bag is vibrating.
Atlanta United’s official account. A signing announcement. My name. A photo of me in the Czech kit from the federation database. The caption confirming the transfer.
Below the United notification is a text from Peter. “It’s live. Sorry, I tried to push it to tomorrow.”
I look up. Tomá? is across the locker room. His phone is in his hand. He’s watching me. He nods once. The nod says: I knew. The nod says: I’ve known for longer than you think.
?íma is the loudest. “ATLANTA. ATLANTA, Vě?. YOUR CONTRACT EXPIRED AND YOU SIGNED IN AMERICA AND YOU DIDN’T TELL US?”
“I’ll explain. I have to do something first.”
“What could you possibly have to do first?”
“Something.”
I grab a fresh shirt. I change faster than I’ve changed after any match in my career. ?íma is still talking. Ková? has stopped eating. Novotny and Polá?ek are staring at me with the face of men who have just learned a thing they didn’t know about a man they’ve known for a decade.
I leave the locker room.
The corridor toward the post-match area is the same corridor from two weeks ago. Tobík is there. Standing with Marchetti and Thompson. Marchetti has his phone out, showing them the screen. They’re all looking at it.
Tobík looks up. His eyes find me across twelve feet of tunnel. Three weeks of Atlanta. Eight days of silence. One text I’d unsend if unsending were how life worked. The tunnel is loud with post-match noise and the tunnel is also the quietest place I’ve ever stood.
Marchetti looks between us. Reads the room faster than his hockey reflexes would suggest. “We are going to step over there.” He pulls Thompson sideways.
I walk the last few feet between us. “Tobík.”
“Damián.”
The silence sits. His face is controlled. Not flat. Controlled. He’s had eight days to prepare for any version of seeing me and he’s not letting his face go first.
I open my mouth. The sentence I planned doesn’t come out whole.
“I signed with Atlanta. Atlanta United. It was finalized this morning. The announcement just went out. I...”
The sentence stops. The fragments are all I have.
“I...I want this. I want to be here. I want...” I can hear my own voice losing the fluency I’ve had my whole life in three different languages.
“Tobík. I’m sorry about the text. I shouldn’t have sent it.
I want to be here. With you. I want this city.
I want to wake up here. I want to walk on your Beltline.
I want...” The fragments are getting smaller.
“I don’t have all the words for it. I’m not asking you to forgive the text.
I’m telling you I’m here. And I want you. ”
I stop. I’ve run out of pieces to give him.
Tobík’s face changes. Not all at once. In stages. The controlled mouth softening. The eyes going somewhere I haven’t seen them go since the night three years ago when I leaned in and pulled back and called it a weird night for three years afterward.
He takes one step forward. His hand comes up. It lands on arm. His thumb rubbing against my skin. His palm is warm and his fingers are steady and I can feel his hand the way I feel a ball at the top of a jump, which is to say in my whole body.
“You signed with Atlanta.” His voice is soft.
“I signed with Atlanta.”
“When does it start?”
“As soon as the tournament’s over. I need to go back to Germany briefly and then I move here.”
“Okay.” The smallest word. Doing everything. “And the text…” he says.
“The text was wrong. It came from a version of me that doesn’t get to make decisions anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Damián.” He pauses. “I’m going to take some time to figure out what to do with the text. I’m not telling you no right now. I’m telling you the text happened and I need to understand what to do with it.”
I look down the tunnel. Tomá? is standing at the far end, outside the locker room door. He’s watching us. He does the smallest possible nod. Then he turns and walks back inside.
I look at Tobík. His hand is still on my arm. I bring my hand up and cover his. I hold it there.
“I love you. I’ve loved you for three years and I didn’t know it until I had to choose.”
“I know.”
“You knew?”
“I know now.” The corner of his mouth moves. Not a grin yet. Close.
“Can I see you tonight?”
“Yes. Come to my apartment. After you’ve done the things you need to do. The post-match press. The team. ?íma yelling at you for two hours. Come when you can.”
He drops his hand. He steps back. Not away. Back, giving me the space to be seen by my team.
Marchetti, from twenty feet down the corridor: “Hájek? We good?”
“We are good.” Tobík’s English, careful and measured, every word given its weight. “Give me a minute.”
He turns back to me. The grin breaks through, small and real. Czech again. “Go finish your night. There’s going to be a press scrum. There’s going to be Tomá? needing to talk. Come to my apartment when you can.”
“Tobík? Thank you for being here.”
He nods then turns and walks toward Marchetti and Thompson. He doesn’t look back.
I stand in the tunnel. The team is behind me.
The press is ahead. I’m going to live here.
As soon as the tournament ends, I’m going to wake up in this city.
I’m going to walk the Beltline that Tobík walks every morning.
I’m going to learn what other tacos Maria makes and whether Bagel sits on my foot too.
I walk back toward the locker room. ?íma is going to have questions. Tomá? is going to need to talk. The press is going to want quotes about the signing and the match and the header and the quarterfinal. The next several hours are going to be loud and full and mine.
Then I have a place to be tonight. I have a place to be when the summer ends.