[Brackets]

by Sloan, David

  Nera walked by to inspect the picks. As she paused over his, Cole held his breath, looking sideways at her to take in the olive skin, the athletic build, and the certain knowledge that she could break his arm if he ever tried to make an unwelcomed move. One of these days, he let himself think. And why not? I’m a good guy, there’s no reason why we couldn’t… He was awakened by a sound that was part giggle, part scoff, part snort as Nera turned away from his bracket.

  “Seriously Cole?” she asked, not even looking at him. “UCLA over Boston College? Sorry, but, wow.” Cole went back to his desk with the enigmatic sensation of becoming defensive about something that, five minutes ago, he hadn’t cared about at all.

  As noon passed, Cole noticed that Tom began to slow down in his movements. He had headphones on. He seemed to be making notes on a legal pad, but he only used the pen in his hand occasionally. Every once in a while he would adjust the volume or click on something, but otherwise he seemed to just sit tensely, eyes distant. When two o’clock approached, he began to whisper something that sounded like an urgent whimper. It looked like he wanted to jump out of his chair and was using all of his strength just to maintain the image of calm diligence. At one point, Cole distinctly heard Tom whisper, “Just shoot the ball!” Looking around the room, Cole noticed several others, including Nera, with headphones on and identically distracted looks.

  At two o’clock sharp, Anne Marie popped out of her office and summoned everyone to the conference table, instructing them to bring what they had been working on for the afternoon. Cole printed off some documents and stretched his back as he left his desk, checking on Tom with a curious glance. Tom was standing, headphones still in, looking like there was just one more thing to listen to. When Anne Marie called over again, he ripped off the headphones in frustration, hastily reached into a drawer for a file, and huffed into the conference room. Cole followed.

  Just as Tom described, Anne Marie very nicely asked to have short reports of their day’s productivity. Cole was able to show that he had done exactly the same amount of work that he always did. Others gave similar reports.

  When they got to Tom, he opened the folder and removed a set of documents, each filled out very neatly. His report was the longest, and the volume of work was superhuman.

  “Tom, this is very impressive,” Anne Marie glowed. “We should do this every day, huh? Am I right? OK, we’ll see everyone again at 4:00.” The praise drew annoyed, sarcastic glares from everyone else, but Tom perked up and bowed his head in fake modesty. Cole wondered how much time Tom spent to do an extra day’s work in advance. He had to admire the foresight that he had never seen his coworker apply to any other workday.

  During the next two hours, as his coworkers sank back into faux productivity, Cole felt a mild case of afternoon grogginess set in. He did the normal work, answering the normal phone calls and entering the normal data. He paid a few minutes of attention to the radio station’s normal three o’clock news updates. The Thai ambassador was visiting somewhere, the inconclusive hunt for the Wall Street arsonist was ongoing, the American poultry industry was spooked by recent recalls. The reporter on the arsonist story was Anne Marie’s sister, Deborah Cheney, whose local morning TV show occasionally featured Anne Marie as an industry expert in the housing market. When the radio began rattling off the scores of the first games of the tournament, Tom could apparently hear them through his headphones, and they made him growl. A client came in to ask for information on mortgage rates, and Cole took some pleasure in sending him to Tom right away.

  As four o’clock neared, Tom, who had dispensed with the client very efficiently, ripped off his headphones in sudden disgust. He pounded his desk softly, grunted as if he’d been kicked from somewhere under his chair, and then composed himself as he turned toward the bulletin board full of brackets. He held two markers in his hand: a thin red one and a bright yellow hi-lighter. One by one, beginning with his own, he began to make marks. As a judge both exacting and merciless, he colored each bracket by crossing out or highlighting a team, leaving each sheet with a splash of golden approval and bloody punishment. When he finished Nera’s, he made eye contact with her and chuckled maniacally, holding up three fingers. She nodded her capitulation. She already knew her score.

  Then Tom arrived at Cole’s bracket. Team by team, Tom marked with the highlighter. After a pause, he dropped the red marker on his desk.

  “Holy cow,” he said to himself audibly.

  Anne Marie came out and called everyone to the table. There wasn’t much time, she prodded, and they needed to get this over with. Tom looked at Cole with a narrow-eyed expression that Cole couldn’t interpret. Then he quickly reached into his desk, grabbed a second folder, and went to the conference table.

  After they had issued their reports, Anne Marie drum-rolled on the table with her fingers. “So, Tom, who is today’s lucky winner?”

  Tom didn’t answer for a moment. It looked like he was debating something internally, and losing. “Cole, by a lot. Five for five,” he finally said. There was weak applause around the table.

  “Hey, Cole! On the first try! Congratulations!” Anne Marie cheered. “You can feel free to call it a day. For the rest of you, let’s finish the day strong, OK!”

  Tom fell in beside him as they went back to their seats. “I cannot believe how lucky you are,” he grumbled. “You even had West Virginia over Boise. I had Boise in the Sweet Sixteen. I didn’t even come close.”

  “Did you come in second?” Cole asked encouragingly. Tom drooped his head in shame.

  “No. Linda did.”

  “Sorry, man,” Cole apologized, but he wasn’t really sorry. Going home early was going home early. Cole shut down his computer as Tom put his hands in his pockets in resigned disappointment. Grabbing his coat, Cole looked over at Nera, who was inspecting his bracket on the wall. She looked back at him, impressed, and gave him a smile.

  To Cole, for whom every day was intensely, relentlessly normal, having a small change was nice. It was brief, it meant nothing, but it was nice. He took one more glance at Nera and walked nimbly out of the office. Too late, he realized that he had not yet put on his coat. An arctic blast punched him square in the face, and his thoughts about the day returned to the single-minded meditation of cold people whose only wish is to be warm.

  [East Division: Second Round]

  [Monday, March 25]

  On Monday morning, Cole came in with a plan.

  Part one of that plan involved the acquisition of tickets. The annual Hartford Indie Rock Fest (HAIR Fest to those in the know) was happening that weekend at the Dodge Center. The general seating tickets had been available for months, but there was a special promotion for tickets close to the stage, available only to a few lucky online buyers at exactly noon that day. Tickets would be gone by 12:02. The promotion included dream seats and backstage passes. His plan was to finish all lingering work by 11:50 and then focus his attention on logging in at just the right moment to ensure success. He had set his cell phone clock, his computer, and the office clock on the wall to the exact time shown on the countdown clock on the website. He had practiced logging on for a good hour the night before to get the timing right. He was going to get these tickets.

  Part two of his plan was to catch Nera early that afternoon and casually mention that he had just lucked into two amazing tickets for a concert and one was available.

  That morning, he completed his routine in good time. By 8:15, when his boss came through the door, he had already gotten a strong, productive jump on his chore list.

  “Hi, Cole, getting nippy out there, right?” she jingled.

  “It sure is,” he chimed back automatically. Her feet tapped as his fingers typed.

  His coworkers all entered in sequence, Linda changing the radio station, and began the week with their individual, distinctive Monday sighs.

  All, except for Tom.

  Tom rushed in, barely said hello, dumped his jacket in his chair, and stood directly
in front of the bulletin board of brackets. He took out a red pen, which he hovered over one sheet of paper without ever touching it.

  “Cole,” he said after a momentous pause, “you are my hero forever.”

  To this unexpected promotion in Tom’s eyes, Cole responded casually, “What’s up?”

  “What’s up?!” Tom cried. He pulled the unblemished bracket from the board and slammed it down on Cole’s desk. “What’s up is that you are still perfect after the first two rounds. That means that out of 48 games that are friggin’ impossible to predict, you got the winner right 48 out of 48 times. Nobody does that. Ever.” Tom rubbed his forehead as he pondered it anew, then shoved Cole’s bracket onto the keyboard in front of him. “How did you do it?”

  Cole looked down at the paper, then back up at the comically exasperated face of Tom. “I dunno. Just lucky. Don’t people get this right all the time? Maybe sometimes?”

  “Lucky!” Tom scoffed in agony. “I’ve been filling out brackets since I was nine years old. I’ve never personally met anyone that got every game of the first two rounds right. I don’t think that I’ve ever even heard of that. People get the Final Four right, but the first 48 games?! Do you know what the odds of that are?”

  “No.”

  “Well, me neither, but it’s almost impossible.”

  A lull in the conversation, as Tom waited in vain for signs of a budding two-way dialogue. When none came, Tom leaned in and spoke secretively.

  “Can you just tell me if you saw any of this in a dream? Just between us.”

  Cole backed off a bit. “Dude, you were there when I filled it out. It took me like a minute and I wasn’t even really paying attention. Listen Tom, I kind of need to get some things done before lunch, sooo...”

  “OK, OK, go ahead. Good luck is wasted on people like you.”

  Tom went back to the bulletin board and rearranged all the brackets so that they fanned out in a circle around Cole’s, as if paying homage. The attention of every incoming coworker was drawn to it, and each was granted a personal tour in which Tom explained the significance and impossibility of each perfect pick. Nera got the longest tour, and she paid the most attention.

  Once she had inspected it for herself, she stepped over to Cole. “I’m amazed. Truly amazed. How did you know Oral Roberts would beat Georgetown? 15-2 upsets are pretty rare.”

  Cole thought quickly… and arrived nowhere. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I honestly have no explanation.”

  “I have to tell you, Cole,” she said with mild but playful disapproval, “your lack of basketball knowledge is totally unacceptable. No one with a perfect bracket should know so little. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, because I’m cool like this. I’ll buy you lunch today, and I’ll catch you up on the last hundred years. Sound good?”

  Cole’s smile almost vanished in complete shock. “Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Totally. Awesome. Yes.”

  “OK then. Come get me when you’re ready.”

  Now! Let’s go right now! Cole thought as he watched her return to her desk. He realized that part two of the day’s plan had just fallen into place. Now to come up with the exact words he would use to spontaneously bring up the topic of backstage passes.

  The morning proceeded uneventfully until 11:15, when Anne Marie emerged from her office with a single sheet of paper. She clicked over to the center of the office and called everyone’s attention.

  “OK, everyone, please, I need to get a quick group consensus,” she announced. She held up the piece of paper. “A contact of mine—do you all know Herb?—needs to offload some office property in New Haven. He has six good lots at bargain prices, but for a variety of reasons we can only get one. I know that this isn’t our standard operating procedure, but I have to call him back by noon. So you’re all analysts for now.”

  Everyone looked around at each other. They all knew that she wasn’t asking whether or not they should do it at all, so no one demurred. Anne Marie read the list of square footages and locations for the six office buildings, re-read it, and asked for a vote by show of hands. Two promising candidates remained: a larger site in a business park, and a smaller site in downtown New Haven. To Cole, they sounded exactly equal, so he just picked the one that Nera picked. Not that anyone really cared what the receptionist thought anyway.

  A second round of voting found the employees split in a tie. The older ones, including Tom, chose the one closer to downtown, because it would be easier to fill. The younger people, including Nera, voted for the larger building because the profit would be potentially greater. Anne Marie sighed as the clock ticked to 11:32.

  “OK people, we have to move on this now. How are we going to decide? Somebody make me a case.” Linda, who very much valued her own opinion, spoke about the need to make rational judgments in the current economy and warned about acquiring properties that couldn’t be unloaded quickly. It was a solid case, and Anne Marie seemed to agree.

  “Anyone want to make the case for the business park office?” she asked. No one spoke up immediately. It was 11:38.

  “We should ask Cole,” Tom said. “He’s the one on the hot streak.”

  Cole slunk down in his chair.

  “What hot streak?”

  We do not have to bring this up right now, thought Cole. And seriously, who cares?

  “He has a perfect bracket through two rounds. 48 for 48. The man is a decision-making machine. Maybe we should be riding his luck.”

  All eyes remained on Cole. This was not good.

  “Wow. So, what do you think, Cole?” Anne Marie asked expectantly.

  He put his hands in his lap and thought. He had to argue for an opinion when he had no business having any opinions. If they listened to him and it was the wrong choice, Anne Marie might blame him. His only impulse was to stick with Nera somehow. He wished that he knew what she was thinking so he could think it too.

  “Any day now, Cole,” Anne Marie prodded.

  He took a deep breath. “I just think, I’m, I think that long term, we want value, right? And this is a big offer, and you should seize the big offers because they don’t always come around. Like, you want to be smart, I mean you don’t want to do anything stupid or anything. I think we have to look for what’s in the best interest here. I mean, for everyone, right?”

  He could hear his words echoing in the silent room, and they were as moronic as he felt.

  “So… which one did you say?” Anne Marie was losing patience.

  Another deep breath. “Office park. I say office park.”

  “Fine,” said Anne Marie. “Another vote. All in favor of going with Linda for the downtown office?” Most of the staff raised their hands, including a reluctant Nera, who cast an apologetic glance at Cole.

  “Office park?” asked Anne Marie. It was a mere formality, though. Only Cole raised his hand. After a second, Tom did, too.

  “Downtown it is,” she announced. “Thanks everyone. I think this is a good plan. I will personally have a Cheney Real Estate sign on the property by one o’clock today.” With that, she clicked back to her office.

  When she was gone, Cole leaned in and whispered harshly to Tom. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey,” Tom chuckled, “I didn’t know you were going to bomb like that. You get nervous in front of people, huh?”

  “No, it’s… forget it,” he said, and he returned to his desk. Tom was right, he didn’t like standing out in groups. It made him feel like his entire brain was blushing. But with a glance of the clock, he knew that he had to get over it quickly. There were a few extra things that he had to finish for Anne Marie. It was 11:46.

  Just before 11:50, he turned around to check on Nera. In eleven minutes, he’d have the tickets and they’d be heading out to lunch. But she was bent over, talking softly on the phone, and she didn’t look happy. Hanging up abruptly, she walked over to Anne Marie’s office and shut the door. When she returned to her desk, she began wrapping her scarf around her neck.

/>   Nera was halfway out the door when she turned back, looking regretful but distracted. It was 11:57. “Oh, Cole, I almost forgot. I can’t do lunch today. Some other time, maybe?”

  Cole felt his self-esteem crumbling to dust inside, but didn’t show it. “Oh, yeah, that’s fine. I understand. I actually have a lot I could do anyway, so. Yeah, maybe later.”

  “Thanks. It’s just that I have this family thing. I thought it could wait until I went up to their house this weekend, but it looks like they need me this afternoon, too.” She turned back to the door.

  No! he thought, and grasped for just one more thing to say. “Hey Nera?”

  “Yeah?” she stopped.

  “I’m sorry that I wasn’t more helpful on the office park thing…”

  “Oh, no,” she brushed his comment off. “It doesn’t matter. They were right about the downtown space, it’ll be better. Forget it. I have to go.” And she was gone.

  When Cole scored the tickets at 12:01, he did so joylessly.

  The day moved on. Anne Marie left at lunch to personally take over the New Haven property. Nera didn’t come back. Easy listening from the 1990’s put Cole in a near comatose state.

  When the three o’clock newscast began, nobody paid much attention until Linda jumped up and told everyone to be quiet. The announcer was reporting a building on fire. It was in New Haven, and the location sounded very familiar.

  Tom logged on to the live video feed of the broadcast, and several people gathered around his desk. There was Deborah Cheney, the spitting image of her sister, speaking urgently across the street from a fire truck while people were being evacuated behind her. Tom turned up the volume.