Chapter 8 Marek
The hotel eggs have stopped being interesting.
I stand at the buffet with the tongs and wait for the old curiosity to show up.
The what-happened-to-you instinct. The case I’ve been building for two weeks.
Nothing comes. They’re just eggs. Last night I ate pasta cooked specifically for me at a table with my name on it, and it has ruined me for evidence.
“You’re not doing the face,” ?íma says, sitting down across from me.
“There’s no face.”
“That’s what I said. Two weeks of the face, and today, nothing.” He peels his banana and watches me over it. “You’re also very talkative this morning. You said good morning to the physio. In Spanish.”
“I’m expanding.”
“Mm. It’s a good costume. The collar’s wrong.”
I text Damián after breakfast.
Can you meet?
Three words, and sending them costs more than the walk will. I’ve known Damián over ten years and I have never once asked to meet him anywhere. Meetings happen to us, in buses and camps and tunnels. His reply lands in four seconds, which means he clocked the shape of it immediately.
Meet me in the lobby in twenty minutes. I’m buying.
He’s already at the corner table when I get there, two cups ordered. He watches me sit down the way he watches film, without hurry.
“So,” he says.
“How’s Tobík?”
“You wanted to meet for coffee on a match day to ask about Tobík.” His eyes not letting me get away with anything.
“The call,” I say while I swirl my coffee in its cup. “The other night, you said the right contract feels like standing in a lit room.”
He smiles at his own cup. “You were at the dinner. You heard the speech.”
“I heard the speech. I want the part you didn’t say at the table.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he gives it to me, because Damián has never once made a man ask twice for something that matters.
“The part I didn’t say is that I almost signed the wrong thing.
Because the other one had certainty, and this one had a question mark the size of a country, and a man I’d spent three years watching from the wrong side of a phone screen.
You know what got the pen moving?” He turns the cup again.
“I did the math on the walls. What they cost me. Not money. Years, Ková?. Whole years of standing in rooms with people who loved me and handing them the basic version of myself.”
“Years,” I say.
“Years.” He says it plainly, the way you hand a man a tool. “You’re good at math.” The basic version of himself. That is the phrase that finds the bruise. Not lying, exactly. Not even silence. A version small enough that nobody who loved him had to update the file.
Here it is. The high board, the water below, a man who walked this exact road sitting across from me with two coffees he paid for in four seconds. The sentence is right there. It has a subject, a verb, a city in it.
“How did you…” Three words. The rest of it is carrying the whole cargo, and it stands on the board with its toes curled over the edge, and then it climbs back down the ladder.
“The federation set my press slot for two this afternoon. They’ll ask about marking him.
They ask all the time even though we have to win first tonight. ”
Damián looks at me for a long moment. Then he just nods, easy as anything, and lets the water close over the whole thing like it was never standing there.
“You know what I did, the three years before I finally said it out loud?” he says, conversational, standing, putting money under the cup.
“I invented reasons to stand next to it. I watched his life through a phone screen every day and never once hit follow. Told myself I was staying informed. Three years of staying informed.” He shrugs.
“So. If a man ever wanted to develop a coffee hobby, I can be here. No agenda. The chairs don’t ask questions. ”
“I might develop a coffee hobby.”
“I’ll tell the chairs.”
He pauses next to me. “One more thing, since you didn’t ask. The morning after I finally told the first person I was gay, I played the best half of football of my career. Make of that whatever you want. It’s not advice. It’s a statistic I enjoy.”
“Same time next crisis,” I say.
“I’ll pencil it in. And eat something. Sentences keep, Ková?. Whenever you find the end of that one, it’ll still be true.”
I go back to the room before we head to the stadium.
The room lets my mind wander, and it shows me the table again.
Not the food. The setting of it. Two plates put down without a pause, two glasses, the bread in the middle, his hands moving through the whole arrangement.
No man sets a table for two like that on the first try.
That was ten thousand repetitions. That was a man who went on laying the second place with nobody coming and doing it anyway, and I know the exact form of that motion, because two nights ago my own hand held a shoe and would not put it on.
I did that to him. Not left him. I unplugged him like an appliance and told myself the silence was the humane setting. I do the thing I’ve been circling since the stairwell and scroll all the way down the thread.
At the bottom, the last exchange before his dinner invite, preserved like a fly in amber.
The market has favas Saturday. Come early, they go by nine.
And under it, my last words to a man I drove eleven thousand kilometers toward across two seasons.
Early training Monday. Next week maybe.
Next week maybe. That’s the tombstone. Not even a lie with effort in it. A man offered me favas, and I gave him a scheduling estimate and vanished off the face of his particular earth. He kept the number anyway. He opened the door anyway. Twice now.
I read the favas message until the words go strange. He never sent another one after it. More discipline than me. Or more pride. In him, the two might be the same.
The phone goes face down. The ceiling gets my full attention.
I want the table. There’s the sentence, finished, private, free of charge. Not the window. Not the deniable versions I’ve been calling sustainable.
I want the table, and the man at it, dark hair loose from whatever he has been cooking, blue eyes on me across bread and plates and all the evidence of a life I did not earn.
I want the noon and the sun and the witnesses.
I want to be a man who eats favas in a market at eight in the morning next to a winger everybody is watching, and I have no idea how to become him, and every known route runs through a wall I have spent years leaning on to keep the building up.
I don’t know yet that wanting the witnesses is not the same thing as surviving them.
I only know the sentence has moved from impossible to imaginable, and the body is poor at telling the difference.
Except Damián took his walls out and his building is standing, and now he sits in coffee shops handing out tools like it’s nothing. Years. You’re good at math.
I’m very good at math. That’s the problem.
I can count exactly what the walls have cost, now that somebody made me look.
The number is rude and still climbing. The only man who can stop the count is four blocks east of here, in a bed I left two nights ago at a speed I was only pretending was still mine.
Novotny comes back loud with the corridor’s whole news cycle.
Somebody argued with somebody else. The yogurt situation has reached the coaching staff.
There’s a rumor coach smiled at a meal, so far unconfirmed.
I let it wash the room in ordinary noise while I lie there being two men at once.
The one in the costume with the wrong collar. The one under it, awake, counting.
The afternoon comes with the noise of the Mexico match, players gearing up for a win they want, and bracing against a loss that could arrive instead.
Before kickoff, the coach keeps the talk short, because the week already said everything.
“If their striker gets bored,” he says, and finds me at the back. “Ková?.”
“Keep him busy and he keeps himself offside.”
“You heard the man. Babysit.”
We win. One to nothing, tight enough that coaches call it professional because coaches enjoy lying with structure.
Mexico pushes late, sending everything forward, and the last half hour turns into headers, clearances, and men arriving half a step too late.
Their winger tried me four times in the first half and stopped trying, which is the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week.
Their striker got bored twice, and both times Polá?ek was already standing where the boredom led.
Babysitting. Occasionally, a knife fight.
In the mixed zone, I say we’re taking it one match at a time, which is the “fine” of football sentences. Then a journalist asks what changes if the opponent after is Italy.
“Nothing. We prepare the same. Football is eleven problems and you solve the nearest one first.”
“And Valenti? You’ve faced him a lot in Serie A.”
“I know his hips.”
It’s out before the sentence clears with anyone. The room laughs, because football people can only hear football. I let it be football. It was not football.
“So you can stop him,” the journalist says, happy with himself.
“Nobody stops him. You delay him. Professionally. For ninety minutes.”
That one they write down. I sign a boy’s shirt on the way out and my handwriting looks like somebody else did it.
The dressing room is a minor riot. Tomá? has his shirt off and is conducting something with a rolled sock. Novotny is filming a message for his nephew that is so far mostly Novotny.
Coach comes through with his glasses on his head. “Recovery at ten. Anyone limping tomorrow had better be limping from today.”
“The winger stopped trying after half-time,” Polá?ek says to me, pulling tape off his ankle. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing. I was just always there.”
“That’s horror-film material.”
“Thank you.”
On the bus, Tomá? is loud and happy and eating someone else’s crisps. “Quarterfinal,” he keeps saying, like the word needs exercising. “Who do you want, Ková?? Italy?”
“I want whoever loses their shape in the last twenty minutes.”
“Italy doesn’t.”
“No,” I say. “Italy doesn’t.”
“Scared?”
“Italy is eleven problems.”
“And the winger? Which problem is he?”
“The nearest one,” I say. “Whenever he’s near.”
“If it’s Italy, I’m not swapping shirts,” he announces. “National duty.”
“You swapped two in the group stage.”
“That was friendship duty. This is a quarterfinal.” He grins and moves down the bus with the crisps, spreading the word quarterfinal to people who were at the same match he was.
I look out the window at the city, and I do not sleep, on a bus, after a win, for the first time in the recorded history of me.
?íma, across the aisle, notices that too. He doesn’t say anything. He puts it wherever he puts things.
Later that night, lying in bed, my phone lights up with the other score. Italy finished their job and the group chat is already arguing about the referee.
Wednesday, it’s Italy. It was always going to be Italy.
I close my eyes and the drawer stands open in the dark, and for the first time since a stairwell months and months ago, I’m afraid of what’s there.
On Wednesday I mark him in front of everybody. After that, the count comes due.
I turn onto my side and face the wall and do the thing I’m famous for. Eventually, even tonight, I sleep. The last thing I hear is Novotny conceding a point to Roman.