CHAPTER 2 – You didn't see me – Sep 16, 10:20 AM – Viktor

I arrived at school five minutes early and immediately regretted it.

A person should arrive late. Not by much. Just enough so there's no time to look around.

The ground floor hallway. Fluorescent light that is never white or yellow, more like some sickly grey intermediate stage. The smell of deodorant, wet shoes, and vending machine coffee that tastes like punishment for people who don't have their own lives. A group of students by the bulletin board that no one has updated since last year.

STUDY ADVISING — OFFICE HOURS.
Tuesdays from four.

Right. On Tuesdays from four everyone has practice, so that bulletin board is only hanging there so the school can claim help exists.

I stood in the hallway and slowly took my backpack off my shoulders.

I felt like crap.

Not visibly. Outwardly, everything's fine. Take off the backpack. Sling it casually over one shoulder. Walk over to the locker. Open it. Inside is a printout of the schedule I've already seen three times online, information about the methodology exam sometime in November, and a flyer for sports supplements, as if what I was missing was protein with a discount code.

I folded it into quarters and shoved it into my backpack.

Everything's fine.

Only in my nose I could still smell smoke.

The smell of the place. Leather, perfume, alcohol, warm air, cigarette smoke soaked into the upholstery. A porn theater has its own scent. It was stuck in my nose like a tenant who hasn't paid rent for a month and went and bought a dog.

I headed to the classroom.

Sports Management Methodology is a course where I usually exist as a present absence. I sit there, I'm registered, I have attendance, my body works, my head is somewhere else. Sometimes in a porn cinema. Sometimes in a pool. Sometimes nowhere, which is the best option.

Today it wasn't working.

Today I couldn't even switch off.

I sat in the third row from the window. My usual spot. Not in the back, where people who have given up on pretending sit, nor in the front, where those who believe that the teacher's physical proximity will earn them points on the exam sit. The middle. Visible enough for attendance, invisible enough for life.

Kratochvíl was leading it.

A grey-haired man who speaks in equations. Not mathematical ones. Rhetorical ones. Subject, predicate, object. Everything fits together, nothing leaks out. He never gets excited, never speeds up. The ideal voice if you need to survive ninety minutes and take nothing away.

Normally it suited me.

Today it pissed me off.

I needed something to get me out of my head. And Kratochvíl's market segmentation didn't get me out of my head. Market segmentation won't even get me off a tram, let alone out of the smoking room.

I reached into the side pocket of my backpack for a pen.

Tom Záhorský stood in the doorway.

No. Not now.

I closed my eyes.

A stupid idea. Behind closed eyes, the image was sharper. I opened them immediately. The blackboard. Kratochvíl. The female classmate next to me was leafing through her notes. The window. Gray sky. Visual competition. At least something.

Yet Tom was there all the same.

Tom's expression. That one second.

The first impulse was: don't judge me.

Then it hit me that I didn't even know what exactly he had seen.

He saw the smoking room. He saw smoke, a red light, me, a guy, a situation from which everyone pieces together exactly what they want to. He didn't see anything specific. Or did he? Did he see enough? Did he see too much? Did he see absolutely everything?

That was what was eating at me. Not knowing is sometimes worse than knowing.

Kratochvíl said something about product differentiation.

I wrote in the notebook:

differentiation

Underneath that I wrote:

what he saw

I looked at those two words.

Then I crossed them out. Once, twice, three times, until it became a black hole.

At a quarter past nine, my phone vibrated.

I pulled it out from under the desk.

Sršeň.

I called this morning. Where are you.

No question mark. Hornet doesn't write question marks. Hornet writes sentences that look like a question, but have an order inside them.

I wrote:

At school.

Read in twenty seconds.

I need to know when you're coming.
I have nothing to pay you this month. I spoke with Oli.

I stared at that line.

She spoke with Oli. That could mean anything. Money. Rent. My shifts at the video rental shop. His outbursts. My alleged irresponsibility. Or Oli said something no one else told him, because Oli has this gift: sucking information out of thin air and then acting like he heard it from a reliable source.

I wrote:

Ok.

Sent.

I shoved my phone into my pocket and stared ahead at Kratochvíl's shoulders.

Hornet. Oli. Money.

Daylight.

School. Timetable. Attendance. A mother who, when she doesn't know where I am, acts as though I don't exist quite right. A brother who generates gravity even from the other end of the apartment. And in the evening, the video rental shop when I'm on shift, or home, or some other version of the same.

And at night, the porn cinema.

That system worked for almost a year. Day and night. Two separate worlds. Two languages. Two bodies.

But Tom Záhorský crossed the line.

He arrived where he shouldn't have been.

And now it wasn't sealing properly.

The break was ten minutes long.

I went to the restroom on the second floor, the one with the window facing the courtyard. In summer it stinks, in winter there's a draft, in September it's still bearable.

I locked myself in the stall.

I pulled out my phone.

Grindr.

Viktor's rule number one: delete. After every single night. After every longer interaction. After every contact that threatens to become a relationship, a memory, or something that could one day turn against me. Delete. Swipe. Delete everything. As if one were wiping a slate clean.

I opened the app.

A profile nearby popped up at the top.

340 meters.

I stopped breathing.

Torso. Faceless. BlondJock.

Three hundred and forty meters.

FTVS. Or nearby. Or someone on the street. Or anybody. Sure. BlondJock could be fifty different blondes within a three-hundred-meter radius.

But he wasn't.

It was Tom.

Or it wasn't.

But he was.

I closed Grindr.

I opened Tom's contact.

Chat empty. No message. No conversation. Just the name at the top and the last seen in my head: Sept 14, video rental store. Back before the smoking area. Back before the door. Back before his face became a problem.

I stood over the keyboard.

What to write to him.

You didn't see shit.

No. I did.

Forget about it.

No. He won't forget. Neither will I.

You shouldn't have gone there.

True, but weak.

What were you doing there.

This was the closest thing to the truth.

What were you doing there, Tom? Did you go to take a look? Did you follow me? Did you happen to go there? Nobody goes to a porn theater by accident. Everyone knows that. Only some people can lie to themselves that they were just passing by so convincingly that you'd almost want to applaud them.

Or maybe I'm the one lying to myself.

That he just happened to be passing by.

That he was just taking a night walk, paid for admission, got a stamp, walked past the bar, went downstairs, and by sheer coincidence ended up in the smoking room doorway at the exact moment I was there.

Sure.

I wrote:

Right.

Deleted.

I wrote:

Hey.

Deleted.

I wrote:

I need to ask.

I deleted it as fast as if that sentence could bite me.

I typed a dash.

I deleted the dash too.

I closed the chat.

I came out of the stall.

By the sink stood some kid from a lower grade, rinsing his eyes. He looked at me. I looked at him. I washed my hands, wiped them on my T-shirt because the paper towels had run out, and went outside.

The second lecture was analytics. Different classroom, same fluorescent hopelessness.

I sat down by the window.

Outside the window was a courtyard. A few trees, a bench, a trash can. A gray day that couldn't decide whether to rain or just make threats.

I let the lecture drift past me.

For the first time since morning, I allowed myself to think about the smoking room on purpose. I just let it play, like a movie.

The smoking room in the porn theater is no luxury. Sofas, small tables, ashtrays, smoke, walls soaked with words that no one was supposed to say out loud. And the painting. For some reason, someone painted a nearly fairytale forest in there. Trees, light between the branches, almost an illustration from a children's book. Until you noticed that someone under a tree in that forest was screwing someone else. In a room where fairy tales definitely do not end well.

I like that smoking room.

Yeah. Ridiculous. Pathetic. But I do.

It's one of the few places where I don't have to perform for a while. I don't have to be a good student, a good son, a good brother, a good guy from the pool, whatever. I sit there with a cigarette or a raspberry soda and for a while I'm just a body in smoke.

And Tom took that away from me.

He came in with that look of his and suddenly that smoking room wasn't mine anymore. Now whenever I picture it, he's standing in the doorway. He bites into that image like mold into a wall. And I'm little Viktorek again, the one someone is watching and who ought to be explaining things.

I can't forgive him for that.

Except behind that anger was something else.

And that was worse.

Why did it hit me so hard that it was him looking?

If anyone else had shown up there, I would have taken it as an unpleasant incident. Someone knows me from another world. Fine. So what. Wipe the tracks. Change the route. Turn the page.

Only it was Tom.

And I can't wipe him away.

Tom Záhorský. Blond athlete. Synchronized diving. Second-hand blazer. A tie that never fits him quite as well as he thinks. Blue eyes. The walk of a guy who wants to look like he knows where he's going, even when he doesn't know shit.

A completely different type from the men I normally go for.

Normally I'm attracted to men who are bigger, older, more tired, less polished. Truck drivers. Bolt drivers. Guys who don't comment. Guys who expect nothing the next day.

Tom was the opposite.

And yet.

At the same time, I watched him at the pool, in the drying room, at the buffet, across the hallway, from the stairs, from the tram, from the stop.

Four months.

For four months I knew when he went to training. Whether he walked through the camp or the park. What he ordered at the buffet. How he sat when he was thinking — slightly leaning forward, elbows on his knees, as if he wanted to push off, but didn't yet know where.

I watched him.

And then he came to me.

While working on analytics about demand elasticity in sports marketing, this hit me so clearly that a chill ran down my spine.

I had been watching him.

He came to me.

Jsme si kvit, Tome.

Only I wasn't looking him in the face. I played it through corners, through glass, through coincidence, through the fact that I just happened to be walking by. Never directly. Never in the doorway. Never with that expression on my face.

He did.

He was standing there. And he was looking right at me. And you could tell he hadn't planned it. That he'd caught himself at the exact same moment I had.

That's worse than having a plan.

Lunch break.

I bought a sandwich from the vending machine. A cheesy plastic-wrapped disaster that tastes the same in every school, every hospital, and probably in hell too.

I went outside.

There were a few benches outside the building. I sat on the end one under a tree that wasn't dropping autumn yet, just occasionally letting go of a leaf as a spare.

I didn't feel like eating.

I wrapped the sandwich back up.

I pulled out my phone.

Grindr. BlondJock. 280 meters.

I closed the app.

I sat and looked out at the street.

280 meters.

Tom was somewhere 280 meters away from me. He could have been walking down the sidewalk. He could have been sitting in the snack bar. He could have been in the showers, the drying room, at practice. He could have been pretending it was a normal day, as if nothing had happened.

Maybe he really was.

Maybe Tom Záhorský was completely normal at that moment and I was just being a dramatic bitch.

Except no.

The body knows. The body knows when another body is carrying a weight. And Tom was carrying one. I saw it in the doorway of the smoking area. Before the shock. Before the shame. Before anything else. That look, as if someone had hit him with what he saw, and at the same time he understood that the blow hadn't come from the outside.

Vulnerability.

Pure, filthily indefensible vulnerability.

And then he left.

If I were a different person — calmer, less corrupted by the fact that intimate things out in the world get turned into weapons — I would have gone after him. Or I would have written to him. Or I at least would have said: look, so now we've witnessed something of each other's that no one was supposed to see.

But I am who I am.

So I let him walk out into the rain.

And now I'm sitting on a bench with a cheese disaster in my hand and 280 meters away from me there exists a person with whom I don't have a single message.

In the afternoon there was a communication seminar. A small room, eight students, discussion.

I sat down by the window.

To my right, Síma. Blonde. Síma is a name, blonde is a function. She looked at me once. Twice. The third time, longer.

"You look tired," she said quietly.

"I slept badly."

"Mmm." She went back to her laptop. Then: "I saw you on Thursday night. By Karlák."

Something in my body stiffened.

"Mmm," I said.

"I was going to a client meeting."

"Nice."

„You looked different than at school.“

I left it as it was.

I didn't dwell on it any further. Or I told myself I wasn't dwelling on it. Which is just another way of dwelling on it while better dressed.

The seminar continued. Crisis communication. How to respond when negative information spreads about an organization. How to control the narrative.

I was sitting by the window, wondering how one controls the narrative.

The answer: you don't.

You just pretend you're holding the steering wheel while the car has been coasting downhill for ages.

At four, I was outside.

The sunset was cutting short. Prague had a gray-orange color, that kind of tired shade that isn't trying to be pretty and by that is almost pretty.

I walked to the tram.

School behind me. Metro, tram, home, Sršeň, Oli, the kitchen, and money in front of me.

Tom in my head.

That was the truth I'd been trying to avoid all day. Not the porn theater. The porn theater was the backdrop. Tom was coming back. His expression. His silence. His departure.

I was in that state where you know what you feel, but you refuse to give it a name because a name is a commitment.

Three people were waiting at the stop. A man with a stroller, a female student with headphones, an elderly woman with two bags.

I pulled out my phone.

I opened Tom's contact.

Finger hovering over the text box.

You saw me.

Deleted.

So what.

I left it there. Two words. Empty and precise at the same time. So what. Now what. What do you want. And what about me.

I deleted that too.

The tram arrived.

I sat down by the window. The city rolled by behind the glass. Houses, intersections, a piece of the Vltava.

I opened Grindr.

I deleted four conversations. Routine. Swipe. Delete. Done. I swiped past the fifth one and stopped.

Alex. Or that's how he introduced himself. Around forty, a warehouse worker, came to Prague every other week. We met twice. No big story. Just two encounters, one silence, a body, presence, no promises.

He wrote last:

Next time in November.

I didn't answer.

I deleted him.

Seven deleted conversations. Twenty-two deleted users. A ritual. Not cleanliness. The illusion of control. As if deleting things could also remove what stayed on the skin from the inside.

A river flowed outside the window.

I thought of Tony.

Tony invited me to SAPA. For a tattoo. Just to take a look, he said. You don't have to get anything.

Tony says it without heaviness. Without a strategy. Just like that, because he wants me to come. With Tony, I don't immediately have to explain why I was where I was at night. I don't have to be a better version of myself. I don't even have to try very hard.

With Tony, I don't have to be as much as I am for others.

Tony never came to the smoking room of the porn cinema.

Outside the window stood the Dancing House. Crooked pillars, two figures in the facade, architecture that moves even when it stands still. I live nearby, on Gorazdova. I know that house by heart. Morning, evening, rain, sun, everything.

The Dancing House. Gorazdova. The dance hall across the street. The Vltava around the corner.

I stood up.

My stop wasn't yet. But I got off.

I don't know why.

I walked along the embankment.

The Vltava was grey, almost calm. On the other bank, the windows of Smíchov were glowing. Down by the water a few boats, a couple with a dog, otherwise almost nobody.

Hornet wanted to know when I'd be back. I'll be back. In an hour. In two. Hornet will be in the kitchen or by the table and will say she talked to Oli about money. I'll be standing in the hallway and it'll be clear to me that the right answer doesn't exist. So I'll say something vague and go to my room.

Scenario.

Domov.

I pulled out my phone and opened Tony's contact.

Tony: How's school? Exams?

He sent it at two.

I wrote:

It's going. I'm existing lightly.

Two minutes later:

Good. SAPA next week? I'm telling Filip we'll come.

I looked at it.

Then I wrote:

Yeah.

One word. For Tony, agreement. For me: there is someone with whom I don't have to explain the night.

Tony replied with a thumbs-up.

Ordinary. Right.

I shoved my phone into my pocket and kept walking.

By Palacký Bridge, I stopped.

From here, the other bank was visible. Smíchov. Vltavská.

Tom lives on Vltavská.

I knew that because once he returned a movie late and, when paying the fine, dropped the address as an excuse. Vltavská. Opposite the Indian restaurant. RanGoli.

I looked across the river at the lights.

Tom was somewhere over there. In a flat with a sick mother, with medicine, with Dlážděnka, with soup, with that jacket of his and his effort to be someone who knows what he's doing.

I was right here. Nineteen years old, sports management, the Hornet's son, Oli's brother, video store part-timer, the smoking room kid, a guy who spent the whole day writing twenty messages and didn't send a single one.

Two people on two banks.

One of us stood in the doorway of the smoking room at night.

The wind from the river blew my hair into my forehead.

I texted Tom:

Right.

I deleted it.

Suddenly it hit me that a message is the wrong medium. A message is for things that can be said in two sentences and the other person replies in one line. This isn't something for a message.

Only there is no other medium.

Tom wasn't in front of me. Tom was on the other bank, two hundred and eighty or three hundred and forty or a thousand meters away from me, and I was standing on the bridge looking at the water.

The Vltava was flowing.

A cyclist rode past. Then another.

I put the phone down.

Tom's look in the doorway.

Shock. And then the other thing. The thing I hadn't wanted to name all day.

Tom had been a witness. Not to the smoking room. Not to the porn theater. Not to that guy. Me. That Viktor, who exists in the smoking room for a moment without explanation.

And that had been crushing me all day.

The fear that he'd seen too much. The fear that he'd seen need. And need is an ugly thing when it doesn't have a safe address.

I opened my phone.

I texted Tom:

You were there.

Three words. Without a question mark. Without reproach. Without a plea.

Finger hovering over send.

I deleted it.

He closed the app.

I turned away from the river and walked home.

Gorazdova. Corner house, dark facade, balcony frames, bell, key, stairs.

On the fourth floor, I stopped.

Light behind the door.

Silence.

Then Oli's voice. Loud, semi-rough, talking on the phone or into the air or into the wall, you never know with Oli.

I unlocked.

Hallway. Kitchen smell. Onion, garlic, meat. Hornet was cooking.

She stood by the stove. She looked up.

„Viktorek.“

“Bye.”

“I called.”

„I was at school.“

“Aren't you allowed to use your phone at school?”

I put my bag by the shoe rack.

“I was at a seminar.”

Hornet went back to the pan. Hair tied back, sweatpants, t-shirt, precise movements. No wasted motion. She never wastes a movement. Or a sentence.

“I spoke with Oli,” she said.

“I heard.”

“He says you won't be paying rent if you only work two afternoons a week.”

“I work three.”

„Two or three, that's not enough.“

I picked up the glass from the counter and took a drink.

Outside the window, the Dance Hall. The neon wasn't lit yet, just hanging there, green and waiting. Hornet never commented on it. She never said anything about the Dance Hall as a Dance Hall. She just closed the curtain. That was the whole commentary.

„I'll tell you what I'm planning to do about it once I know something,“ I said.

„You say that every month.“

„Well, it's true every month.“

Silence.

Sršeň was stirring.

Oli walked down the hallway, saw me, and stopped in the doorway.

Oli is a physical commentary on the situation. He just has to stand in the doorway and the air thickens.

„Where have you been?“

Same tone as Hornet. Without a question mark.

„At school.“

„Hmm.“ He leaned against the doorframe. „I heard you were out last night.“

„I went for a walk.“

„At night.“

„There are fewer people at night.“

„If you mean outside, then yeah.“ He smiled. Not nicely. „If you mean in general, it depends on where you go.“

Hornet stopped stirring.

These moments. Oli throws a word like a stone into the water and waits to see how far the ripples will go. Never anything direct. Never anything you could grab onto and say: this was an attack. Just ripples.

"Oli," said Hornet softly.

„Co? Jen říkám.“

„Dej ty věci.“

Oli left after a while.

Sršeň turned to me.

„Dinner's in an hour.“

I nodded. Picked up my bag and went to my room.

Room.

Bed, desk, a window facing Gorazdova. Down below the street, cars, pedestrians, raindrops on the glass from the morning rain.

I sat down on the bed.

I pulled out my phone.

I opened Tom's contact.

An empty chat. Just his name at the top.

I wrote:

You didn't see me.

Then I looked at it.

Rubbish.

I did.

I deleted it.

I wrote:

It was different than you think.

Deleted.

I wrote:

What were you doing there.

I let it sit for a while.

Co jsi tam dělal, Tome.

The question I cared about the most. The question I was most afraid of. Because if I sent it and he answered, I would already be in a different situation. And I spent the whole day doing everything I could not to enter a different situation.

A witness is worse than a lover.

A lover leaves. A lover is erased. A lover has a function, a time, a body, an end. A witness stays in your head. And precisely that was eating me alive all day.

Tom was a witness of me.

I was a witness of him.

I deleted the sentence.

He locked the screen.

Down on the street outside, the Dance Hall lit up. A green neon sign flickered, jerked, then steadied. Blurred by the rain on the wet glass.

I picked up the phone one more time.

I wrote:

Right.

Last attempt.

I deleted that one too.

I shoved the phone under the pillow and lay down on my back.

Outside the window, Gorazdova Street. The Dance Hall. Prague. The Vltava around the corner. On the other bank Smíchov, Vltavská Street, the RanGoli Indian restaurant, the building I once went to see just to know where she lived. The fourth step from the top creaks there. I know it. Of course I know it. I'm normal.

Tom somewhere out there.

Tom's look in the doorway of the smoking room.

We were both witnesses.

The question is what we're going to do about it.

Or more precisely: whether we'll do anything about it at all.

So far I've written about twenty messages and deleted all of them.

Tom might have too. Or not. Maybe he's sitting on the other bank and doing nothing. Maybe he has his phone face down and thinks that controls the world. Maybe he just can't admit to himself that he's writing in his head the same way I am.

That image hit me harder than anything else that day.

Deleted sentences.

On both banks of the Vltava.

Maybe that's how it should be. Maybe it's not time for sentences yet.

Or maybe deleted sentences are the only form of communication we have right now.

I turned on my side.

The dance hall was glowing.

I closed my eyes.