Chapter 12 Tomáš
Eve of a semifinal and the hotel hums like a parked bus.
I do the rounds, because the rounds are mine. Floor by floor, door by door, twenty-two players stacked in a tower, all of them pretending to sleep earlier than any of them will.
Horak opens before I finish knocking.
“I was asleep,” he says, fully dressed.
“You were not.”
“I was nearly asleep.”
“Lie down with the lights off. That’s the whole technique. Your body knows the rest.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It kept nine crosses today. It knows things. Trust the employee.”
“What if they score early?”
“Then we’re losing early, and we have the whole match to fix it. You want the plan for going behind? Sleep. That’s the plan. Everything else is tomorrow’s job.”
“Captain,” he says, as I turn.
“Mm.”
“Thanks for the rounds.”
“It’s the job.”
He laughs, and behind the laugh he’s twenty and playing a World Cup semifinal tomorrow, so I stay another minute in the doorway and talk about nothing, the bus time, breakfast, until the shoulders come down a centimeter. Then bed, lights, door.
Novotny’s room sounds like a podcast about itself. I knock once. The sound stops. “Sleeping,” he calls.
“Sleep quieter.”
“It’s the tactics one,” he calls back, wounded. “It’s ABOUT tomorrow. It’s practically homework.”
“Volume, Novotny.”
“Volume is how I retain.”
“Retain quieter.”
Polá?ek opens his door already talking. “I’m asleep.”
“You’re standing up.”
“I sleep standing. Ask my wife.”
“Lights at eleven.”
“They’re off in spirit,” he says, and shuts the door on his own light.
He didn’t need checking. I check because the rounds are the rounds. Damián’s door I pass without knocking. He’s been asleep since ten past, the four-minute discipline in his nervous system. ?íma will be lying in the dark listening to the calmest breathing in the federation.
Mami texts at ten fifteen.
We are praying and I cooked for after. Win or lose, there is food. Sleep, Tomá?ku.
Sleep, Mami. Keep the horn warm.
She sends back a horn, the Czechia flag, and a dumpling, in that order, which is the whole of my mother in three small pictures.
Ková?’s light is on under the door. I raise my hand and I don’t knock. His match prep is his own country and always has been, and lately the borders are up. I file the light and move on.
Coach is in the corridor holding tea, looking at the parking garage next door like it owes him something.
“All down?” he says.
“All down.”
“You?”
“Going now.”
He nods at the garage. Nobody assigned him the shift. Nobody assigned me mine either.
Eleven o’clock. I’m back in my room.
Film, said the schedule. Gone by twelve, said the schedule, in his coldest grammar, and I said noted, and I’ve hated the word noted for nine hours now.
He comes in with the laptop under his arm like a chaperone. Sets it on the desk. Opens it. Their keeper’s near post fills the screen, the freelancing, footage we’ve both known by heart for days.
We watch it. We actually watch it. Two men on the eve of the biggest match of their lives, sitting a correct meter apart, watching a Bulgarian goalkeeper mismanage his post, at eleven at night, in a locked room, with the whole ocean of the thing pressing between us.
“Their keeper resets slow after a save. If corner one forces one, take corner two fast. Don’t let the ref settle,” he says.
“I never let the ref settle.”
“You gave a referee a lecture in the group stage.”
“It was important civic information.”
The corner of his mouth raises slightly. He kills it and runs the clip again.
“Water?” I ask.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re always fine.”
“It’s a skill.”
“Their two takes the short restart when their four’s asleep,” I say. “If we press it, I’m in behind.”
“You’ll be offside.”
“I’m never offside.”
“You’re offside four times a season. I keep the tally.”
“Onside four hundred.”
“The tally keeps both columns,” he says, and for a second it’s almost us, the real register, and then he checks the clock and it isn’t.
The clips run. The commentary runs. The meter of air between us runs the whole time at a temperature the laptop can’t explain, and neither of us puts a hand across it, because the schedule said what it said and the schedule is being obeyed.
“You could stay till twelve exactly,” I say, at eleven fifty. Not a question. Questions got me the cold grammar.
“Twelve is the wall, not the target.”
“Noted,” I say, and hear my own voice do to that word what his texts have been doing to it all day.
He looks at me for one second. A second and a half. Then he closes the laptop, and stands, and for four steps toward my door he is a man leaving a tactical meeting, clean, professional, regulation to the core.
At the door it goes wrong.
He turns to say goodnight, and I’m closer than the meter. I don’t know when that happened, and my hand is up and at the back of his neck before any department of me gets a vote. Palm to the nape. Thumb below the ear. The gesture that got loose last night and has been circling the building since.
He doesn’t pull back. Two seconds, my hand on his neck, his forehead tipping half a degree toward mine, a doorway, a wedge of corridor light across us, and the door, which I was holding with my other hand, drifting open wider than any protocol on earth allows.
And down the corridor, someone opening their door. A teammate. Or maybe not a teammate. It doesn’t matter though.
Everything stops being motion and becomes photograph.
I don’t take my hand off ?íma’s neck fast. Fast is a confession. I take it off the way you take a hand off a teammate, a beat, a squeeze that could be congratulations for a tactical meeting, and ?íma is already turning through the door at conversational speed, unhurried, professionally bored.
“Corner one, near post,” he says, at full corridor volume, walking. “Even cleared, it pays. Sleep, captain.”
“Sleep,” I say, in the same currency, two men closing a meeting, nothing in the corridor but tactics and ice.
He goes down the corridor the way he goes everywhere, like a man narrating his own highlights, past Ková?, a nod. “Ková?. Ice machine on our floor not working?”
“No. Said out of order.”
Sima nods at that and continues walking down the hallway. Ková? nods back. The bucket is in his hands. The machine has already stopped rattling.
How long has the machine been stopped. That’s the whole question of my life now, compressed.
The machine rattles for thirty seconds. He’s standing there with a full bucket and still feet.
Thirty seconds of ice plus however long a man stands after, at the exact end of the exact corridor, with a clean line of sight to a doorway and a wedge of light and a hand on a neck.
Or he walked up while the door was drifting. Or he was looking at the bucket. Or the angle ate the details, the light was behind us and this means nothing.
Then he looks at me for a moment. His face does nothing.
“Night, captain,” he says.
“Night, Marek.”
He goes. Not fast, not slow. The lift opens and takes him. The corridor is just a corridor again, and I’m standing in my doorway with my heart going like a race horse, and the photograph develops and develops and never resolves.
Inside, door locked, I sit on the end of the bed and wait to feel the relief.
It doesn’t come.
I check for it the way you check a hamstring, probing, expecting the flood of it, we got away with it, nothing seen or nothing understood, the wall held. The relief isn’t there. In its place there’s something with a completely different shape.
Loss.
For a brief moment in that doorway, the thing decided itself.
The corridor was going to do what five years of my silence couldn’t, and there was a version of tomorrow where it was simply known, done, out, no ask required, no bravery bill to pay, and some traitor department of me stood in the light with my hand on his neck and wanted it.
Wanted to be caught. Wanted the deciding taken out of my hands, the way I have never once in my life wanted anything taken out of my hands.
The audit is still where I left it. It means everything. Say nothing, change nothing, guard it harder.
Guard it harder. But I wanted the wall to fall on us. Both true. File that.
The phone starts at twelve fifteen. Two texts, four minutes apart. The code with its collar up.
no film until after. schedule’s full
good near post today. nothing before the match
Doubled protocols, in dressing-room-readable code. No film means no rooms, and no rooms means the routes are burned, the stairs most of all. Nothing before the match means don’t even think about it, and it’s signed with a corner compliment the way you’d bandage a thing you just cut.
I type we play tomorrow, that’s all this week is, and delete it fast, because it’s a lie, and we don’t lie on this channel. We just say less.
I send one word.
noted
And I hate it. I hate obeying it. I hate that he’s right to send it, that the corridor was my fault, my hand, my door drifting.
I hate that the man builds walls the way I build schedules, instantly, competently, in love with neither.
I lie on top of the covers in my kit like a junior and hate all of it at a fully professional level.
Sleep doesn’t come. One o’clock comes instead.
Here’s what I know at one o’clock on the eve of a World Cup semifinal. Tomorrow, ninety minutes will decide years of some things and nothing about the one specific thing. The corridor is burned. The wall got reinforced at twelve fifteen by its original architects.
But eve of match is eve of match. Older than the washbag, older than film. I’m dressed before the clause finishes making its case.
I take the burned stairs. Two men who play tomorrow don’t sit in separate rooms. That’s roster management. My heart is doing the pressed-horn thing again and I let it, because at least a horn is honest.
His floor. His door. Damián asleep behind it. I raise my hand to knock soft, once, captain’s business, eve of match, the oldest excuse the arrangement owns, both of us pretending that’s what it is, and I already know he’ll answer.
The door opens before my knuckles land.
He’s dressed. Washbag under his arm.
“Eve of match,” he says.
“Eve of match,” I say.
Neither of us calls it what it is. Neither of us mentions the washbag, or the protocols, or the architects breaking their own walls.
We turn for the burned stairs together, and the hotel hums, and tomorrow is already leaning on the door of tonight, and nobody is pretending anything at all.
?