Also by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  The Portrait of a Mirror

  Medium Rare

  Copyright © 2025 by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: November 2025

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Melville House UK

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781685892470

  Ebook ISBN 9781685892487

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2025948173

  Book designed by Beste M. Doğan, adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Easy Access System Europe, Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia. gpsr.requests@easproject.com

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  CONTENTS

  Also by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  “First Four”

  Part 1: Prime Time

  Round 1

  Round 2

  Sweet Sixteen

  Elite Eight

  Final Four

  National Championship

  Part 2: Postgame Show

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  Swan Song

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Michael J. McDuffie

  who is…a Duke fan

  But tragedy blossomed forth and won great acclaim, becoming a wondrous entertainment for the ears and eyes of the men of that age, and, by the mythological character of its plots, and the vicissitudes which its characters undergo, it effected a deception wherein, as Gorgias remarks, “he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.” For he who deceives is more honest, because he has done what he promised to do; and he who is deceived is wiser, because the mind which is not insensible to fine perceptions is easily enthralled by the delights of language.

  —Plutarch, “On the Fame of the Athenians”

  and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  —W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

  “FIRST FOUR”

  I see Phil. And when I now see Phil? I see a man with a ball. Not just any ball: a basketball. But any man. You might even call him every man—though I do want to be fair to him. The everyman figure is a composite of specific ones, and fairness and truth close enough acquaintances a dispassionate observer would almost certainly call them friends. When I say I see a man, I mean I see a human being: singular like any other. Nothing more—but also nothing less. Something ordinary and something amazing. A world and a grain of sand.

  * * *

  The odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket are so infinitesimal statisticians disagree just how infinitesimal they are. Disregarding the “First Four” play-in games—because honestly, who doesn’t—proponents of treating every game as a fair coin flip will tell you one in nine quintillion, two hundred twenty-three quadrillion, three hundred seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight hundred fifty-four million, seven hundred seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight. This was, indeed, the estimate favored by Phil Fayeton himself, not just for its magnitude but also its precision; for its neat, edgy literalness—the way it accounted for every possible eventuality, from our alma mater’s landmark loss the previous season to their poetic redemption in 2019.

  The best sixty-four college basketball programs in the country score invitations to “the big dance” each year; it takes sixty-three single-elimination games to crown a tournament champion. That’s two to the sixty-third power, mathematically speaking, Phil would explain, rattling off each digit with memorial pride. After his first few public appearances, he googled a series of analogies to help contextualize a number of that size, as if to improve its marketability—almost like he was lobbying for it. Pick a single grain of sand from anywhere in the world, he’d say, and you’d be twenty-three percent more likely to find it again at random than to fill out a perfect March Madness bracket. He relayed such anecdotes with a specious kind of authority in his voice; Phil unironically trusted the internet in that natural, unexamined way it is easy to trust generally helpful things.

  The main problem with the coin-flip method is that it’s not remotely accurate, bracketologically. It assumes the probability of winning games is fifty-fifty when seeding is asymmetric by design. If you always choose the higher-seeded team, you’ll correctly predict not 50 percent, but something closer to 75 percent of the games. And that’s only on average. Certain individual contests carry far more lopsided odds. Yes, in 2018, UMBC famously beat the University of Virginia in Cinderella style, but only after the top seeds had prevailed the previous 135 consecutive times. There is a lexically subtle but hard-and-fast mathematical difference between uncertainty and randomness. The winner of a basketball game is always uncertain, but random only sometimes. Sometimes it just has the appearance of randomness, because the factors and influences driving the outcome are too multivariate and complex—even for generational minds like Jim Nantz and Sir Charles Barkley.

  * * *

  —

  More legitimate stochastic estimates on the odds of a perfect bracket are still intimidatingly, incomprehensibly huge. The most optimistic computer models quote one in two billionish, and then only in certain years, like 2019. Had Phil latched on to this ratio instead, he might still have offset it dramatically. As Georgetown University Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Lucas Hadley explained to Sunny Sanders in a courtside pregame segment early in the second round, his legs crossed at the thigh in that almost yogic manner so often exhibited by stylish men wearing slim suit pants:

  —All else being equal, when the championship buzzer sounds, you’re less likely to fill out a perfect bracket than to be one of the five winning players on the court.

  Phil never connected his own penchant for waxing analogic back to Lucas Hadley. And yet, he remembered this segment well. It had aired back when Sunny’s 4K hotness still had that unidirectional, abstract quality of telegenic women on television, and any national intrigue surrounding Phil took the form of a broader statistic. There were thirteen verified perfect brackets at the time—few enough, certainly, for Phil’s inclusion to be a novelty within his own circle of personal acquaintance, but still too many for any of the networks to start thinking “personal interest story” on the individual bracketologists. No, the bright, hungry spotlight of fleeting sports-media attention landed instead that night on the flexing avian ankles and (frankly, in Phil’s opinion, offensively tight) wool gabardine suit pants of a Georgetown statistician. Georgetown hadn’t even made the tournament, Phil later complained. They’d given floor seats at the DaedaDome (formerly CapitalOne Arena, formerly formerly Verizon Center) to a math professor, while Phil himself watched from the obscurity of his townhouse living room, just across the river in Arlington, VA.

  Their television at the time was a fifty-inch flatscreen, suspended below a synthetically weathered home decor sign reading “Love Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” which Phil’s wife, Raleigh, bought after spotting it on HGTV. Dear Raleigh; it was the type of object that, within a certain context (soaring ceilings, marble countertops; i.e., on HGTV) looked glibly high-end, but veered maudlin in an architecturally unremarkable suburban living room. The piece was outrageously expensive for what it was, and Raleigh had lobbied hard for it, squealing when the package arrived. As soon as Phil hung it up, though, there was a twinge of disappointment on her face. Like she’d expected it to alter the fundamental physics of the place and was baffled when there still wasn’t any crown molding or a decorative barn door.

  —Do you want to return it? Phil asked hopefully.

  —No, of course not!

  Like Phil, Raleigh was from the South. The Deep South. She had been bred to subsume her heart’s desires in amiability.

  —It’s okay if you want to return it, babe.

  —But I don’t! I love it!

  So complete and exalting was Raleigh’s devotion to the god of politeness I wonder she herself didn’t find it heretical. And yet, if this devotion was one of her greater weaknesses, she possessed the rare corresponding strength to mold her own mind, shaping and polishing her thoughts until the polite mirrored the true. She’d never admit to her disappointment, but it also wouldn’t eat at her—not the way it would have many women; not the way it would have me. Privately, subtly, Raleigh would manage to reframe the narrative, imbuing the synthetically weathered sign with hope and appreciation in a manner that somehow recalled neither cloying Pollyanna nor the Goopy “gratitude” of late capitalism. It was a useful temperament in a
nurse: this staid, deliberate brand of positivity. And being a nurse—as Raleigh was, in emergency medicine at George Washington University Hospital—was likewise helpful in recategorizing the disappointments in other spheres of one’s life, such as the discordant aesthetics of one’s living room.

  Phil didn’t press her further, probably figuring that keeping the thing at least meant he wouldn’t have to take it down, wrestle with the box, drive to the UPS Store, and patch the marred drywall. He wouldn’t have argued with the message, per se. It wasn’t like it said “Happy Wife, Happy Life” or something. Not apologizing was a sentiment Phil could get behind.

  * * *

  —

  —So I take it you don’t see anyone banking the billion-dollar prize, then? Sunny Sanders said to Lucas Hadley on the television.

  The professor smiled wryly; flexed his dangling ankle again—Jesus, thought Phil, was he flirting with her?—but Sunny continued before Lucas could answer:

  —For our viewers who aren’t already aware, Arun Patil, the CEO of Daedalus Industries, has pledged to give a billion dollars to anyone who fills out a perfect bracket this year.

  —Alas, it’s all but certainly a contest without a winner, said Lucas. Or, rather, a contest Patil himself is foretold to win. I mean, look at all the free advertising we’re giving hi—

  —Phil? What do you want to do for din—

  —Shhh! Phil hushed his wife.

  Raleigh looked at him, incredulous, but said nothing. She was thirty-four weeks pregnant; the question of dinner was not an insignificant one.

  —I mean—just hang on a second, please, Phil amended.

  —When you say “all but certainly,” though, Sunny beamed, her tone beginning its upward modulation toward the segment’s inevitable, rosy wrap—that means it is still technically possible, right? For someone to win the money? You can’t say for certain.

  —Statistics is never having to say you’re certain, said Lucas.

  Sunny laughed, giving his shoulder a chummy squeeze.

  —Well, there you have it, folks! she said, turning to the camera. Hope springs eternal, right? Now, back to—

  * * *

  —

  Me.

  Yes, I—the seer. Your narrator. Surely you want to know more of me, even if the story is Phil’s?

  The salient facts of my life are these: I always tell the truth; I am never believed. Please remember this should it ever seem surprising for a woman of my narrative gifts to so exert them on Phil Fayeton, on basketball. Remember the polarities of magnets and how they attract; that sight is not an anecdote, but the origin of envy. If I see more than the average person—and I do—remember incredible gifts nearly always carry some hidden price, deep in the belly. That I yearn for credibility—not as much as “the average person,” but more. Remember fiction is where the incredible finds credibility. Glory, even. For incredible fiction is not a falsehood: It is the visionary recourse of truth.

  And so to fiction I turned, its pull not professional, but human. Perhaps a mad strategy, without any modern credentials—“so competitive, the literary world”—but we all go a little mad sometimes, soothsayers more often still. Remember that “sometimes” is a word of such fraught probabilities. Never is this truer than in the month of March, as it was for Phil. O Phil! My subject, my foil, my rival, my friend. I see you. And when I see you, with all my incredible gifts? Sometimes the Madness of March extends to me, too.

  PART 1: PRIME TIME

  ROUND 1

  VIRGINIA (1) VS. GARDINER-WEBB (16)

  On Thursday, March 21, 2019, Phil Fayeton drove his large automobile east, his morning ardor fresh upon him. Even outside of March, the best twenty-five minutes of his day were nearly always these, alone in his Audi SUV, with his yacht rock and a stainless-steel tumbler of premium coffee. It was in the liminal space between his home and Capitol Hill, on the roads he very (very) indirectly helped to build, that Phil was able to forge some brief connection between the idea and the reality of himself. This rare, gratifying union had the superficial overlay of millennial self-actualization but fundamentally boiled down to an older archetype of American maleness, the one pioneered by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, which invariably anoints the car as the essence of freedom, and freedom as the exemption from personal responsibility. It is an archetype that runs uncomfortably close to the radioactive brand of “Great” the president was always trying to Make Happen Again. Phil hadn’t voted for him, of course—though he couldn’t quite bring himself to vote for Hillary either, and had written in Mitt Romney instead.

  When you work in politics—which Phil did, as an in-house lobbyist for the American Association of Stone, Sand, and Shale—for whom you cast your ballot is not merely a personal, but also a business decision. Phil had graduated the year before me, in 2006, into a Republican Congress under Bush the Second, and doubling down on the party he’d been raised to favor not only pleased his white, working-class father back in New Orleans, but was also professionally expedient. He fashioned himself a “moderate” one, though, a Reagan Republican, clear to distinguish his greater liberalism on social issues, and in particular those for which Democratic values seemed to be disproportionately favored by sexually liberated post-collegiate women.

  Phil’s first two years in Washington had been good to him, with the caveat that both Senators whose offices he’d worked to forge ties with as an aide to the Senate Appropriations Committee retired in 2008, one losing his seat to a Democrat. Having been on the Hill just long enough to have established the sort of clear partisan alignment it is tough to walk back, Phil experienced a sudden decline in his prospects that persisted through much of the Obama administration, with brief glimmers of hope on the campaign trails of Romney and Jeb Bush. It was when the 2016 Bush push dissolved that Phil reconciled himself to mid-level AASSS lobbying—and to marrying Raleigh, after years of on-again, off-again posturing. This was the same year my twins were born, and following my return from parental leave, I started finding myself in the odd elevator with him.

  For example: that Thursday morning, at the Democratic National Committee, when his stainless-steel tumbler forced the doors to reopen. Will van der Wende was with me.

  —Hey man, Phil said to him, then to me, in pointed greeting, my name. Cassandra.

  —Hey, Will pseudo-acknowledged Phil without looking away from me, all but refusing small talk in so momentum-less a return.

  A feature of the Hill, seen elsewhere but perhaps not quite so violently, is that the precise social hierarchy is not just evident to everyone in the room, it is inherent to it—to the room. The status gradations within our bicameral system are so fine as to operate practically at the individual level, an ever-evolving stack-rack of influence largely tied to one’s office and reflected in its physical space. The building, the level, the layout, the view; these things are elaborately metered and codified conveyers of status and clout. If New York is ruled by the invisible hand, Washington is so by a highly visible one. Its sheer visibility acts as a narrowing mechanism in behavioral governance, the strictures of its spaces and roles enforcing social mores that stiffen and shift predictably depending on who’s present—and even within the same group as it moves from building to building, from office to office, from room to room.

  All of these froms are hardly an afterthought; it is with good reason we say the halls of Congress are hallowed. And if the halls are hallowed, the elevators are sacrosanct. Members—that is senators, representatives, the capital-B Bosses of the American legislature—often have their own, invite-only elevator cars, the privilege of riding in which might well supersede a personal office visit for one crucial reason: It is easier to be seen. Appearance, in Washington, is just reality before it’s brushed its teeth, a procedural gap that’s easily remedied.

  We were in one of the regular elevators that day, me and Phil and Will, but that hardly mitigated the jockeying. As the chief of staff to freshman Representative Maria Muñoz (D-CA-43), Will sat a couple of rungs above Phil—but just a couple, the distance not so great as to block free-flowing conversation, in which Phil would attempt obsequence without seeming obsequious, and Will superiority without seeming to act superior.