I don’t look back at him. I’ve gotten very good at not looking back at him.
Davide finds me in the tunnel with his arm around my neck, saying nothing, which is the correct thing. Behind us, the Czech noise goes on. The advancing noise. The sound of a team going where I’m not going.
“You want the truth or you want quiet?” he says, finally, at the dressing room door.
“Quiet. For tonight, give me quiet.”
“Quiet it is.” He squeezes my neck once and lets go. “But not the guilty kind. You didn’t lose this. Eleven of them beat eleven of us by a corner and a header. You beat him ninety times.”
“It doesn’t go in the record like that.”
“The record’s wrong. I was there. Tomorrow you get the rest of the truth whether you want it or not. That’s the friendship. Read the small print.”
Ricci sits down beside me in the dressing room and doesn’t say the thing, which I appreciate, and then says a smaller thing instead.
“You were unstoppable today. For the record. He just happened to be the one man alive who could play you.”
“I know.”
“That’s worse, isn’t it? Knowing.”
“It’s the whole tournament in one sentence, Ricci. And, yes. It’s worse.”
I take my boots off slowly. I don’t want to. Taking them off means it’s over. It means the tournament is a thing that happened and ended, and I go back to a borrowed apartment that still smells like the last dinner I cooked for the man who just knocked me out of the World Cup with his positioning and then told me, hand in mine, that I was the best on the pitch.
The joy was real. I want that on the record, too. Right up until the whistle the joy was real and it was mine, and nothing that happened after can make it not have happened. That is the part they cannot take. I ran at a man who knows me completely and I made him work for ninety minutes.
It was the best football of my life. I lost, and the man I lost to is the man I love, and tonight all three of those are true at exactly the same time. I sit in a concrete room with one boot on and let them be true, because that is the price of a day like this, and I have always paid my prices in full.
Chapter 16: Marek
We win, and I feel nothing where the winning should be.
The dressing room is a flood. Šíma is on a table. Novotný has lost his shirt and possibly his mind. Damián pours something over Tomáš, and the noise is the specific noise of men who just reached a World Cup semifinal. I’m in the middle of it, doing all the correct things, hugging and grinning and saying the word semifinal like it tastes of anything at all.
It tastes of a handshake an hour ago.You have always been so good at walking away. Go win your semifinal.
I won it. And the man who told me to win it is across the city right now with his tournament in a bin. I did that, with my positioning and my reading and years of studying the way his hips lie. I put him out. I used two years of loving him to end the biggest thing in his professional life. Then I shook his hand and told him the truth quietly, so it would cost me nothing. He heard it anyway. He named it. He walked away.
“You’re doing the thing,” Damián says, appearing at my shoulder with a water bottle when we are back at the lobby bar inthe hotel. He has the face of a man who’s been watching me not celebrate. “The gym face. At the party of your life.”
“I’m happy.”
“You look like the man who lost tonight, not the man who won.”
“We won, Damián. I was there.”
“I know where your body was. I’m asking where you are.” He waits. “You’re somewhere else and you have been all night.”
“I’m going to go see him.”
Damián doesn’t ask who. He looks at me for a long second, the way he does.
“Then go see him as the version that stays,” he says. “Not the version that visits. If you go as the visitor, Marek, do us both a favor and don’t go.”
“I have the words this time.”
“Words aren’t the thing. You’ve always had words. Go be the thing.”
