Chapter 15 Šíma
His bed, second morning running. His arm is dead weight across me, his breathing long and wrecked and even, grief finally asleep in a body that ran eleven kilometers yesterday and won't get to the World Cup anyway.
Exhibit one, in a case I haven’t opened yet: I stayed, and I slept, and nothing in me tried to leave.
The gray light comes through the curtain seam and puts a line across his face. I lie there in violation of every statute I have ever drafted and watch him sleep, the way you’re not supposed to watch anything you plan to keep at arm’s length.
I love him. There it is. The whole file in three words.
One sentence. That’s what it gets. One sentence, said once, in the dark of my own head where no court sits.
There’s older paper under it, while the court is open. Bisexual. Correct on the intake form, correct now, never once read at volume. That part was never the dispute. It was never the wanting I couldn’t afford. Only the losing.
Then the terror comes in like water under a door.
Cold. Fast. Certain. The sentence has been living here for five years and I just said it where I could hear it, and things you say out loud are things that can be taken from you.
Ask Ková?. Ask the half-sentence that landed on my spine last night like a verdict.
This is the only thing this summer I’m not losing.
He said it out loud. It has a name now, whether or not anybody spells it. Named things end. I have five years of case law and a corridor full of evidence, and every exhibit says the same thing.
I reach for the rulebook the way a man reaches for a rail.
Protocol. I ease out from under his arm and he doesn’t wake. I dress silent. At the door I stop, because I told him I’d be here at breakfast, and the room where he’s sleeping is not where breakfast is.
I keep my promises by the letter when I can no longer afford the spirit.
I’m at the table at seven. Present. As promised. In the room, at breakfast, technically.
The camp is gutted. You can hear it in the cutlery. Men eating quietly around a hole where a final used to be.
“?íma.” Novotny sits down across from me. His plate is half what it was all tournament. “Tell me something. Anything. The bus, the eggs, the fan. I don’t care. It’s too quiet in my head.”
“Bronze in two days.”
“That’s it? That’s what I get?”
“That’s the fixture.”
He looks at me like I’ve handed him a stone. Polá?ek fills the gap, because Polá?ek has been reading rooms as long as I have.
“The federation emailed. Bronze logistics. Novotny, your family’s tickets moved sections.”
“Moved where?”
“Closer to the horn.”
“There’s a horn again?” Horak, hopeful, from down the table. “It’s coming back?”
“It never left,” Polá?ek says. “It was observing a silence.”
“The bronze is a real medal,” Horak says, to the table, testing it. “My mother says it’s the friendly medal.”
“Your mother is a hard woman,” Novotny says.
“She emailed the federation about the referee.”
“So did Novotny,” Polá?ek says.
“I filed FEEDBACK. There’s a form. I used the form.”
“You attached photos.”
“Annotated photos. I’m a professional.”
They keep it going, the three of them, a rally without me in it, and I sit inside my own minimum viable output and eat what’s in front of me.
Which is a plate. Which was at my seat when I sat down, eggs, toast, two bananas, because a man walked into this gutted room ten minutes after losing the biggest match of his life’s sleep and his hands still ran their schedule.
He’s at the far end now, gray, upright, captaining the wreckage. Refilling Horak’s juice. Answering the physio. I don’t engage. He doesn’t engage. Two professionals, ten meters, one plate.
“You’re not doing the report,” Horak says to me, careful, like he’s asking about an injury. “There’s always a report.”
The room doesn’t stop, but it leans. Men not looking at me, but listening.
“Item one.” My voice comes out on time and in tune, which is the whole trick, that’s all the broadcast has ever been. “The eggs win today. Nobody contest them.”
It gets a laugh. Small, real, grateful. One bit, with blood all through it, and nobody checks the blood, because nobody has ever once checked. Horak goes back to his juice looking less nineteen. Minimum viable output, delivered.
The rest of the day I run cold.
Pool at ten. The physio talks at me for twenty minutes while she works my calf.
“My mother says that referee needed glasses in 2019 already. My brother-in-law has the offside from the buildup frozen on his television like a shrine. And I say we were an inch from extra time. An inch, ?íma. You put that ball through a keyhole in the eightieth and nobody will remember it, and that’s football, and football should be ashamed of itself. ”
“It happens.”
She moves to the ankle, waiting for more from me. Which I usually give. When I give her nothing else, she says, “Fine. I’ll talk for both of us. My sister wants to know if the team is eating.”
I give her four words total across twenty minutes and she doesn’t notice, because she’s kind and she’s talking for both of us on purpose.
“You’re allowed to be sad,” she says, at the end, patting my ankle. “Even you.”
“Noted.”
Coach passes me in the corridor. Stops. Looks at me the way he looks at film.
“Bronze,” he says. “I need the room lighter. You’re the lever.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” Even coach talks at me in paragraphs today.
At lunch, Novotny reads his federation feedback aloud to the table. It has sections.
“Point four. The fourth official’s coordination with the linesman on the buildup, see attached, figures one through three.”
“Withdraw the appendix,” Polá?ek says.
“The appendix is load-bearing.”
“You’ve cited your own tweet.”
“I’ve cited a WITNESS.”
The table argues the appendix for ten minutes, gratefully, loudly, a squad breathing into a paper bag, and I eat my lunch inside the noise and contribute nothing, and nobody needs me to, which is either the system working or the system failing and I no longer know the difference.
Damián finds me in our room at four, folding what’s already folded.
“So we lost,” he says, to my back. “And the sun came up anyway. I checked. I was surprised too.” He drops onto his bed.
“Tobík called for an hour. He says, and I’m quoting, tell your roommate the blog rates his semifinal an eight point five and the blog does not inflate.
" He looks over at me, gauging my reaction. "He thought it would help.”
“It helps.”
“He also says Mami is cooking for Saturday like it’s a wedding. Two kitchens now. She’s annexed the neighbor’s.” He watches me fold. “And you’ve said nine words since breakfast. Eleven now. I counted, because counting is catching, apparently, living with you.”
“Long season.”
“Thirteen.” He lets it sit. Then, gently, the way he does everything now: “You did this after Kyiv too. Went underwater for two days. Came up with a bit about border control and nobody ever knew where you’d been.
” He’s quiet a second. “Whenever you surface, I’m around. That’s all. No appointment needed.”
My own method. Aimed back at me, secondhand, through a man who doesn’t know he’s holding it. The room is full of people leaving doors open and I’m over here reviewing hinges.
“Thanks, Dami.”
“Fifteen,” he says, satisfied. “Also the blog wants to know if you’re running your airport hug circuit on Sunday. He’s budgeting his goodbyes. He was very serious about it.”
“Tell the blog yes.”
“Nineteen words. A rally.” He lets me be.