Chapter 20 Tomáš
Scatter morning sounds like wheels on marble.
The lobby at eight is a freight yard. Twenty-three men’s worth of bags, kit cases, medal boxes. One framed FEEDBACK form, which Novotny is transporting by hand.
“Kapitáne.” He presents it like a diplomatic credential. “I’m requesting an exemption. The appendix doesn’t fly cargo.”
“The appendix is a piece of paper in a frame, Novotny.”
“The appendix is a founding document. You signed it.”
“I graded it.”
“You graded it EXCEEDS. That’s a signature with extra steps.” He tucks it under his arm. “Reunion goulash in October. My mother’s recipe. Attendance is mandatory.”
“Nobody agreed to the goulash.”
“The goulash,” he says, backing through the revolving door, “is a concept. Concepts don’t need agreement.”
I run the manifest out of habit. Fifteen flights, one taxi. Everyone accounted for, everyone fed, everyone hugged or scheduled for hugging. The machine’s last morning, and it runs on time. I built it. I’m still the captain until the last wheel leaves the curb.
“Captain.” Horak, backpack on both shoulders like a schoolboy. “I wanted to say. This summer. What you did for me.”
“You kept nine crosses in a semifinal. You did that.”
“You told me to let the gloves work.”
“And you let them. That’s the whole division of labor.” I put my hand on the back of his neck, because that’s where my hands go. He grins like it’s another medal. “Eat real food this autumn. I’ll be checking the chat.”
“There’s still a chat?”
“There’s always a chat,” Polá?ek says, rolling past with two cases. “The chat has never once been closed.”
“The chat is a concept,” ?íma says, from across the lobby, not looking up from his phone. “Concepts don’t close.”
“See,” Polá?ek tells Horak, “he understands. Ten years and I finally have a witness.” He stops in front of me and puts out his hand. “Kapitáne. My wife has a list. It has categories. I’m needed at home.”
“Go. Kiss the twins.”
“The twins have requested the horn for Christmas.”
“The horn is not available. The horn has a career.”
Horak goes, taller than June. Polá?ek goes, to his list with categories. One at a time, the summer walks out through revolving doors. I stand in the middle of it with my clipboard heart doing what it does. Counting.
Through the glass, on the training-ground steps across the service road, Damián sits with Ková?.
Two coffees. One of them is on the step by Ková?’s foot.
I can’t hear a word and I don’t need to.
Damián is doing his quiet thing, the one he’s always done.
Ková? is staring at the middle distance.
Whatever’s moving over there is theirs. I let it be theirs.
Damián finds me last, the way we both planned without planning.
His bags are small. Eleven boxes come Thursday, but this morning it’s one duffel and one carry-on. Twenty years of federation life, travel-sized. A taxi idling twenty minutes east of everything.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“Twenty years.” He looks around the lobby like it’s a stadium. “I keep waiting for it to feel like an ending. It just feels like an away trip where nobody gave me the itinerary.”
“I’ll send you an itinerary. Monthly. With the dumplings.”
“The crate.” He grins. “Tobík built a shelf for it already. He labeled it. TOMá? SUPPLY LINE.”
“Good. It’ll be a reliable service.”
“I know. It’s yours.” The grin softens. “Listen. The programs are in the locker. I told the federation you have access. Twenty years of Czech league, alphabetical, because I knew you’d want them alphabetical.”
“I want them chronological.”
“Then you’ll have a project.”
Here’s where I do the thing I’ve been coming toward all summer.
“Damián. Look after my brother.” He starts to answer and I hold up a hand, because this one gets finished.
“Not a request. A transfer of title. I held that job since he was twelve. I did it well and sometimes I did it terribly, and it’s yours now.
Both of you knew it before I did. I’m making it official. That’s all. Paperwork.”
Damián looks at me for a long second. Twenty years of my deliveries in his face.
“He looks after me, mostly,” he says. “You should know that. The couch, the bakery, the tutor. I signed for a new life and he’d already furnished it.”
“He’s a Hájek. We furnish.”
“You’re all insane and I’m keeping him.” He puts out his hand and I take it. Then neither of us pretends the handshake is enough. The hug is long and hard and says the twenty years.
And standing there, with my best friend’s medal digging into my collarbone, the sour thing I’ve been carrying since a fence in the second week finally gives up its name. Because I can afford the name now.
Envy. That’s all it ever was. Damián said one true thing out loud and got a whole life for it.
A couch, a bakery, a boy who labels shelves.
I stood at fences all summer wanting what he’d paid for.
And now the ledger’s even. I said mine at a pool and it cost me two days of my life.
Then a man amended a record in front of sixty thousand people.
Last night I fell asleep mid-word with the lights off and nobody leaving.
The envy dissolves the second it’s named.
There’s nothing left to envy. I have mine.
“Text me when you land,” Damián says, picking up the duffel. “Wait. I don’t land. I forgot I don’t land.” He laughs, delighted with himself, a man whose whole itinerary is a taxi. “Text me anyway.”
“Every month. With tracking numbers.”
“Tomá?.” He stops in the door, half in, half out, the way he’s exited every room I’ve ever shared with him. “It was the best twenty years anyone ever spent being the second-most organized man in a federation.”
“Second.”
“I let you have it. That was the gift.” And he goes through the doors and doesn’t look back, because he’s Damián. The last I see of him this summer is an arm out the taxi window, backward, waving, like a man who knows exactly what’s behind him and where it lives.
Mami’s dispatch takes place at nine, curbside. It requires two federation staff and a luggage decision.
“The horn travels in the cabin,” she says.
“Mami. It’s a horn.”
“It’s a national instrument. It has a medal.” She’s sewn a ribbon on it. She has actually sewn a bronze ribbon on the horn. “Tobík, tell your brother.”
“The horn flies cabin,” Tobík says, deadpan, wheeling her cases. “I’ve already paid the seat fee. Window. It likes to watch the wing.”
“You paid a seat fee for a horn.”
“I paid a seat fee for a NATIONAL INSTRUMENT,” he says. “With a MEDAL. Keep up, Tomá?.”
“And customs? When they ask what it is?”
“It’s a horn with a medal. Customs will understand. Customs are people. People love a decorated horn.”
They’re flying home today. Tobík comes back to Atlanta in a week to finish the flat.
He hugs me goodbye, all commitment, no technique, then holds on one extra second, my little brother.
He says, quiet, into my shoulder, “You look lighter. Whatever the carrying was.” He pulls back, crumbs from somewhere on his collar even now.
“Say it badly sometime. Whenever. It counts.”
“Fly safe. Mind the horn.”
“The horn minds ME.”
Mami takes my face in both hands, the full ceremony, and studies me the way she’s studied me since before I could talk.
“You’re working on something still,” she says.
“I’ll tell you when it’s true, Mami.”
“Mm.” She pats my cheek once, decided. “It’s getting truer. A mother sees. Kitchen’s warm from Thursday.”
“Mami. The flags fit in the tote?”
“The flags,” she says, already moving, “have never once not fit.” And she’s gone into the terminal with both of them sticking out of her tote, conducting the porters. The horn goes home to Brno with a medal it earned.
The airport at eleven is the last of us. Ková?’s flight and ours leave within the hour, different directions. The three of us stand at the mouth of the security lanes doing the thing men do when the summer’s over. Nothing, slowly.
“Well,” Ková? says.
“Well,” I say.
?íma doesn’t say well. ?íma puts down his bag and hugs Ková?, both arms, the full wingspan, no bit anywhere in the building.
I watch my hollow friend take it the way you take medicine you didn’t ask for and needed.
It goes on a while. Neither of them says anything at all.
Whatever ?íma’s carrying about Ková?, he doesn’t say it.
Whatever Ková?’s carrying, wherever it’s flying, he doesn’t say either.
Two of the best readers in the federation, electing silence, in an airport, on purpose.
“September,” Ková? says, when they let go. “Qualifiers.”
“September,” ?íma says. “Bring the eggs verdict. The committee reconvenes.”
“The eggs know,” Ková? says, and almost smiles. He shoulders his bag and walks to his gate and doesn’t look back either. Something about the set of his shoulders is different than a week ago. I don’t have the file on it. For once in my life I let a man carry his own luggage.
And then it’s us.
Gate B7, Atlanta to Vienna, connection to Brno.
Two seats, booked separately, weeks ago, out of habit.
We sit next to each other at the gate because the seats next to each other were free.
Nobody looks twice, because there’s nothing to look at.
Two men from Brno flying home to Brno. Teammates.
Everyone knows them. The most public secret transport in aviation history.
“Window or aisle,” he says, not looking up from his phone.
“You know my seat.”
“14C. I’ve known your seat for ten years.” He scrolls. “I checked us in. We’re 14C and 14D.”
“The system allowed that?”
“The system,” he says, “has always allowed it. That was never the problem.”
I look at him. He looks at the departures board, deadpan, broadcasting to an audience of one.
The laugh comes up out of me from somewhere that’s been locked all summer.
The invisibility. Five years it was the prison, the thing that made us possible and impossible in the same breath.
This morning it’s a private joke at gate B7.
Nobody can see us because there was never anything to see.
There still isn’t. There’s just two men from Brno, going home, together.
The word together doing quiet work in that sentence that no camera on this earth could develop.
“I made a list on the plane out,” he says. “In June. Things to fix about your travel habits.”
“You made a list about me.”
“Item one. He checks the departures board every four minutes. The board has not changed. The board will announce changes.”
“The board misses things.”
“The board is an international aviation system, Tomá?.”
“The board,” I say, “is a concept.”
He puts the phone down. That’s how I know I got him. Ten years of material and the scoreboard still matters.
“Item two,” he says. “He packs snacks for a nine-hour flight like the airline has never heard of food.”
“The airline food is a rumor with a tray.”
“Item three.” He picks the phone back up, scrolling nothing. “He falls asleep before the safety demonstration and wakes up angry that he missed the snacks.”
“And item four?”
“There’s no item four.” A pause, timed, broadcast-grade. “I stopped writing the list. I decided I’d rather just have the seat next to it for the rest of my life.”
There it is. In an airport, at gate B7, in the flattest voice in the federation. Nobody around us even looks up. The most explicit thing said in public all summer, and it’s invisible, because it was engineered to be. He goes back to his phone. My chest does something I don’t file.
“You get the aisle,” I say. “I get the armrest.”
“You get the armrest,” he agrees. “It’s in the terms.”
They call the flight. We board like professionals.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, with him asleep in 14D with his mouth open, undocumented, unphotographed, mine, I do the summer’s final ledger. Because I’m still me, and ledgers are how I love things.
Lost a semifinal. Won a bronze. Lost a partnership, eleven boxes to Atlanta, and gained a supply line. Lost the fiction, two days in a beige corridor I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Kept the thing that counts. Kept it, said it, signed it. 14D, present tense, snoring gently at thirty-eight thousand feet.
The summer files itself. I close the ledger.
Home next.
?