Chapter 11 Šíma
Iwake at seven in a bed that isn’t mine, in a room that was never supposed to hold me this late, and the first thing I see is a water bottle on the nightstand that I didn’t put there.
He’s gone. Trainers missing, the schedule on the mirror hanging there like a witness. In a silent room and me in the middle of it, unconscious for six unauthorized hours in the one location the rules exist to keep me out of after dawn.
The water bottle has been placed at hand height. I drink it, because I’m a professional.
I slept here.
I slept. Here.
I said things in the dark that belong in no file I keep. Then I slept like the dead in the captain’s bed on a training night. The last thing I remember is his hand in my hair and my own voice saying Bucharest.
Getting off a captain’s floor at seven is a different sport from getting out at five.
There are staff. There are trolleys. There’s a physio who runs at dawn, and a coach who reads printouts in the breakfast room.
I do it clean, service stairs, one pause at the landing window like a man admiring Atlanta, yesterday’s shirt worn like a decision instead of an accident.
Nobody sees me. That’s not the point. The point is that for six hours the system ran on luck. Luck is not a system. And somewhere out on a road is the man who chose to leave me sleeping instead of waking me, which is either mercy or theft, and I can’t figure out which.
So the day runs on enforcement rules. Somebody has to be the official. The official has been compromised, which is exactly why the whistle gets louder.
At breakfast, the plate is at my seat. Eggs, toast, two bananas. The captain is at the far end talking recovery windows with the physio, back from his run, showered, composed, a man conducting a normal day with a semifinal in it.
“Sleep well?” Polá?ek asks, because I’m late and look it.
“Like the dead.”
“You look like the dead.”
“The dead have excellent structure.”
Training. Semifinal minus one. You can hear the undercurrent of nerves running throughout the team.
Novotny snaps at Polá?ek. Actually snaps. Then the apologies start.
“I’m sorry.”
“Noted,” Polá?ek says.
“I’ll put it in the chat. With a graphic.”
“Please don’t.” Polá?ek rolls his eyes.
“It’s already rendering.”
“Render it smaller,” Tomá? calls from the next grid, without looking over.
Horak drops two crosses he’d catch in his sleep and stares at his gloves like they’ve been bought off.
“The gloves are fine,” I tell him, passing. “The gloves have done this before. Let the gloves work.”
“Let the gloves work,” he repeats, and catches the next nine, and then keeps catching things the rest of the morning. Balls. Cones. A wasp.
Ková? is the steadiest man on the pitch and the emptiest. Everything at match tempo, first in every line, flawless, hollow, a perfect training session with nobody home in it.
Between drills I catch him staring at the fence line, at nothing, at the specific nothing men stare at when the nothing has a name. Then he’s back. On time. Correct.
Damián trains like a man photographing everything with his skin. Last full session before a semifinal, and he keeps grinning at things that aren’t funny. The grass. The bibs. Me.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. Counting.”
“Counting what?”
“Everything,” he says, happy and unashamed, and jogs backwards to his line like a man making deposits.
Before the session, the boot ritual. Left before right, always, since my senior debut.
“Left,” the kit man says, holding out the roll. He’s not asking.
“Left,” I say.
Thirty seconds. Left boot. Right boot. Done. Function, not ceremony. Nobody watches, nobody has ever watched, because it looks like nothing, and it is nothing, and today I need the nothing to hold still while I get taped into a man who can run.
No football to report. The football is tomorrow. Today is a team trying to walk normally next to the very big thing.
The apology graphic hits the chat at noon.
Novotny
[image] formal apology, notarized, with crest
Polá?ek
this is worse than the offense
Novotny
the crest stays
Hájek
training film at four. delete the crest.
The text lands at twelve fifteen.
?íma. Film at mine tonight?
I stand in the corridor outside the video room and read it seven times. I count the reads, because counting is the last honest instrument I own.
It’s not the words. Film at mine is the rule, the routine. It’s the mark at the end. Five years of imperatives from a man who announces everything. Film at mine, fifteen minutes, bus at nine. And tonight, for the first time in the historical record, the sentence turns up at the end and asks.
A question mark. One character. One degree of warm, from a man who either doesn’t know he turned the dial or couldn’t stop himself, and I stand in a corridor reading a punctuation mark like a ransom note, seven times, which is exactly the behavior the rules were built to prevent.
The rules. Somebody has to enforce them. Look what happens when nobody does. A peephole. Eleven minutes in a video room. A hand on a neck. A man asleep at seven in enemy territory with a question mark sitting on his chest.
I type the reply.
noted. eve of match. early one, gone by twelve
I read that seven times too. It’s perfect.
Regulation grammar, curfew logic, professional, and cold as a January pitch, and I know exactly what it is because I built it to be that.
Earlier checkout, stipulated in code. A wall repaired at the exact spot where the man who lives behind it has been tapping.
Send.
Forty seconds later. No marks on it at all.
noted
The wire between us goes formal again. I stand in the corridor having successfully defended a system I would burn down tomorrow if either of us ever said so out loud. The officiating in my head is very loud now. Statute and subsection. Because the alternative to loud is listening.
“Anything good?” Damián says, passing.
“Logistics,” I say.
“Your favorite.”
“Somebody has to love the timetable,” I say.
I put the phone away with the wire still formal in it.
Media day for a semifinal means the big room, and the federation sends coach and one player, and the player is me, because early on, somebody discovered I make journalists write down jokes instead of problems.
Coach takes four questions and spends eleven words on them. Then me.
“How is the squad handling the pressure?”
“We don’t handle it. We gave it a bib number. It trains with us now. Decent first touch.” The room laughs. First deflection is a success.
“Damián Mare? is coming to the states to play for the Atlanta United. You’ve noted he’s one of your best friends. A word?”
“Several. We have shared hotel rooms at these tournaments many times. He snores in two languages, and tomorrow I’d still pick him first. Next question.”
And then, from the third row, the one that earns its lanyard.
“You and the captain have played together more than a decade. Describe the partnership.”
The room waits. The feed goes very quiet, the way a stadium does between the whistle and the kick.
“He runs, I talk,” I say. “It’s won us a lot of restaurants.”
Laughter, clips, everyone eats, next question. The broadcast doesn’t miss. On the way out I price the answer and find it accurate, complete, and missing everything, which makes it the best work I’ve done all tournament.
The physio tapes my ankle at three.
“Hip flexor?”
“Cooperating. It signed a statement.”
“The rest of you?”
“Match fit.”
“Sleeping?”
“Like the dead,” I say.
“Mm,” she says, and moves on, because it’s the eve of a semifinal and everything in this building is match fit.
Dinner is eve-of-match dinner, carbohydrates and ritual, the squad performing the version of normal for each other.
“If we win, I’m buying the horn a drink,” Novotny says.
“The horn doesn’t drink,” Polá?ek says.
“After tomorrow it does.”
“And if we lose?”
Nobody answers that. Novotny throws a roll at him, which is the correct answer, and the table moves on.
“What time do we leave tomorrow?” Horak asks, for the third time today.
“Four fifteen,” Tomá? says, no edge on it, a man who would answer a fourth time and a fifth. “Bus won’t go without you. Eat.”
The nutritionist confiscates the dessert tray on schedule. “It’s fuel, not decoration.”
“Decoration won us the group round,” Tomá? says, and eats the confiscated pudding anyway, captain’s privilege, and the table laughs the eve-of-match laugh, short and grateful.
After dinner, coach stands up for his eve-of-match meeting. It lasts forty seconds and twenty words.
The chat gets its curfew at ten.
Hájek
lights out at eleven. that includes the chat
Polá?ek
the chat has never once been closed
?íma
the chat is a concept, Polá?ek. concepts don’t close
Hájek
tonight the concept sleeps
The hotel goes down early, floor by floor, a building holding its breath. Damián sleeps the disciplined pre-match sleep, out in four minutes, a career of practice. I stand at the window with the room dark behind me and run the countdown I no longer pretend I’m not running.
Tomorrow, the semifinal. Ninety minutes.
Then one final match and a flight home. The corridor empties, and the film room closes for the season, and whatever we are becomes whatever we were.
The schedule is coming at the speed schedules come, one sunrise at a time, absolutely certain, and against it I have deployed a curfew and a punctuation policy.
An official on his way up at eleven to enforce an early checkout, gone by twelve, his own clause, in his own code. The hardest whistle of my career, and I wrote it myself.
?