Chapter 4 Tomáš
Breakfast inventory, day two after Italy. One coach reading a printout like it owes him money. Novotny with six pieces of bacon and a defense prepared.
I build a plate on my way in. Eggs, toast, two bananas. I set it at the empty spot next to Polá?ek, where ?íma sits when he comes down, because he comes down late and the kitchen closes the hot line at nine.
Then I make my own.
I’ve done it in that order for years. It’s not a thing. It’s timing. Somebody in this squad has to arrive on time on behalf of the people who don’t.
“Captain.” Novotny points his fork at me. “Settle something. If I score in the semifinal, is the celebration the archer or the lawnmower.”
“Neither. You’ll be too tired to celebrate, because you’ll have tracked your runner all match. That’s the celebration.”
?íma arrives at nine minutes to nine and sits down in front of the plate like room service is a constitutional right.
“Item one,” he says, to no one in particular. “The weather. It is good, and it has been noted.”
“Eat,” I say. I check him off the roster and move to the schedule, which today has a guest on it.
Tobík’s lanyard says OFFICIAL and my brother wears it like a medal, which is correct, because the federation doesn’t give lanyards to just anyone. It gives them to anyone who asks Damián.
He hugs me hello at the training-ground gate. He still hugs the way he did at twelve. All commitment, no technique.
“You look terrible,” he says, delighted. “Semifinals suit you.”
“You look like a man with a lanyard.”
“I’m OFFICIAL. It’s laminated. Mami wants it for the shelf after, so don’t let anyone touch it.”
The session runs sharp. Four days to the semifinal and the legs know it, the boss saying nothing, which from the boss is a parade. Tobík stands where guests stand, and heckles like family.
“Dami,” he calls, during the passing pattern. “Your first touch is going. I’m telling the internet.”
“You are the internet.”
“My feed has standards. My feed wants trophies.”
Damián laughs mid-drill and has to reset his feet. Two touches later he puts a header down onto my instep from thirty meters like it was posted first class. Ten years of that. Ten more years of that for him across an ocean now.
Between drills they keep going, fence and pitch, no gap in the machine.
“The bakery does rye on Fridays only,” Tobík calls. “I checked.”
“He negotiated with a baker,” Damián tells me, jogging past.
“Somebody had to,” Tobík says. “You’d have just been sad about bread quietly for a year. Right, Tomá??”
“I’ve lived it. Ostrava, 2014. He didn’t speak for a day.”
“It was bad bread,” Damián says, with dignity.
There’s a bit between them already. There’s an internet and a bakery and laughing. It runs on its own fuel, no maintenance needed.
My brother was hurt in my house, on my watch, by a rule I wrote, and now he’s laughing at a fence with the man who loves him, and everything about that sentence is good news.
Something turns in my chest anyway. Small, like a key.
I tell myself it’s the Atlanta thing. When this ends, that laugh lives here permanently and I train an ocean away from it. That’s the whole manifest. Cargo with a departure date, a route being retired. I sign it and call the next drill, because the next drill is what there is.
Lunch at the facility. Tobík sits with the squad and is immediately better at it than half the squad.
“Show me the save,” he says to Horak. “The legs one.”
Horak does it with cutlery. Fork dives left, spoon stays home, the water glass is Valenti and the water glass doesn’t score.
“Again.”
He does it again. The table is in pieces.
“It was more of a reflex,” Horak says, modest, and does it a third time anyway. My brother could run a room without even realizing it.
Damián watches him the way you watch a package you ordered.
“MLS defenders,” Novotny says to Damián, through bacon he saved from breakfast, don’t ask me how. “Rate them.”
“I haven’t even practiced with the team yet, Novotny. But from film, faster than you’d think. Younger than you’d think.”
“They’ll love you here,” I say. “Nobody tracks back. You’ll look quick again.”
It comes out one degree off. I hear the degree the second it leaves. There’s a version of that line I’ve played at him on buses, in tunnels, and it lands like a towel snap. This version said enjoy the retirement league.
The table doesn’t catch it. Novotny is already relitigating a play from the quarterfinals. Damián catches it though. He knows the weight of every ball I’ve ever played him, and he takes this one down without a word and sets his water bottle between us like a small flag.
“I’ll look quick,” he says, easy. “You’ll look old in Prague. We’ll send each other film.”
“Deal,” I say, too fast.
Then I spend ten minutes being aggressively helpful. I bring him a coffee he didn’t ask for. I confirm tonight’s dinner plan twice.
“He takes the green shake,” I tell the nutritionist, ahead of the queue. “Double protein.”
“He can order,” she says.
“Let him,” Damián says. “It’s faster. He’s been ordering for as long as I can remember.”
He lets me. Letting me is the worst part. It means he’s read the whole situation, priced it, and decided to be kind about it.
Put out at one of my best friends for getting a life. There’s a word for what was in the line at lunch and I’m not doing the word today. It’s the Atlanta grievance. That’s the name I’m choosing to give it.
We watch film that afternoon. Semifinal opposition, set pieces, their keeper’s habits. I run the remote today. It’s my remote the way the schedule is my schedule.
“Their line steps early,” I say, and run it back. “Watch the four. Early every time. That’s a channel.”
“Third clip confirms it,” ?íma says. “Also their keeper hates his near post.”
“Corners after training tomorrow. I want six bodies.”
The room empties the way rooms empty, in twos and threes, Novotny negotiating dinner options all the way out the door. Then it’s the last two of us, which happens, which is normal. Two midfielders and a screen.
Protocol here isn’t written down, because nothing about us is written down, but I could recite it. Business concludes, business disperses. Room, road, breakfast, pitch. We don’t loiter in small rooms. Small rooms with two of us in them are the whole category the rules exist to manage.
?íma runs the near-post clip again. I stay.
I stay for the corners. It needs a second look, and if I’m delivering six tomorrow I want the picture in my legs, not in a notebook. The chair has a purpose. I’m staying for the purpose.
“Their four,” he says, looking over at me. Quieter, because his volume does the thing it does when rooms empty. “If he steps early on you and misses, that’s a goal at this level. Maybe the whole match.”
“Then I’ll put it where he isn’t.”
“You will. You’ve been putting it where people aren’t since I met you.” He looks back at the screen. “One more time, wide angle.”
We watch it again from the wide angle. Then once more, and I’m the one holding the remote.
Eleven extra minutes. I know because the room’s clock is the aggressive kind. Eleven minutes of two men and a keeper’s bad habit, and nothing happened, because nothing was ever going to happen. This is a video room at a training facility with a fire-evacuation map on the wall.
Nothing for the manifest. Corners ran long. That’s it. I kill the projector, we walk out, he peels toward the physio like always, and I stand in the corridor for a second with the remote still in my hand, holding a remote in an empty corridor like a man who forgot what it’s for.
Dinner is the family thing, my mother’s rented kitchen, and I sit between my brother and my best friend and it’s loud and it’s good and I’d testify to both under oath.
“Tell the security story,” Damián says.
“So the man at the gate reads my lanyard,” Tobík says, already standing up for it, “and he looks at me, and he looks at the lanyard, and he says, official WHAT, and I look him dead in the eye and I say: morale. And then proceeds to ask me questions about when I visit the Beltline and the dog Biscuit I have photos of on Instagram.”
The table goes up. My mother puts another dish down and squeezes the back of my neck on the way past, which is where I put my hand on other people, which is a thing I’m not thinking about tonight.
“Do the airport,” Tobík says. “Do Tomá? in 2019.”
Damián stands. Squares his shoulders. Stares into the middle distance like a man reading a departures board that has personally betrayed him.
“The gate has moved,” he announces, to the salt. “Gates don’t move. Somebody moved the gate.”
“I was right,” I say. “They had moved the gate.”
“You made an announcement,” Damián says. “To the airport.”
“It was important civic information.”
“You held up the boarding group like a union rep.”
“They thanked me.”
“One woman thanked you,” Damián says. “She was also Czech. It’s a national condition.”
The two of them are off again, building on each other, no gaps. The baker has agreed to hold Friday rye, there’s a second bookshelf under discussion. They have a calendar. They said one true thing out loud during the tournament and got a whole calendar for it.
“You’re quiet,” Damián says, under the noise, just to me.
“I’m eating.”
“Mm.” He tops up my water and lets it be, which is us. It has always been us.
My mother watches me watch them. So I eat, because eating is the approved activity for a man whose face needs somewhere to be.
It’s the Atlanta grievance. I keep telling myself this and check the label twice on the walk back to the hotel. Best friend leaving. Brother settled. Both good news.
The label is fine.
But something doesn’t fit tonight, and I’m a man who knows when a kit bag doesn’t zip.
Because the sting at the fence wasn’t the leaving. The sting was the laughing. The out-loud, fence-height, lanyard-wearing laughing. The entire unhidden weight of what they get to be in daylight, and me on the training side of the fence with a whistle, wanting.
Wanting what? Fill in the blank, Hájek. It’s one blank line on the manifest.
I don’t fill in the blank. I walk into the lobby, and the lift takes eight floors to give me back my routine.
I set two alarms. Corners tomorrow. Six bodies, first delivery to the near post.
?