The Patterns — Matt Leibel

We all watched in respectful (if uninspired) silence as Brauck, the Austrian, began his pre-serve ritual. He bent his towering frame over slightly and bounced the ball exactly three times. He lifted himself back up and used his thin, pale-white left arm (made to appear even longer than it already was by the racquet he held, more an extension of his arm, a part of the appendage itself) to wipe the generous irruptions of sweat from his brow. He bent over once again, and returned to bouncing the ball. He bounced it precisely seven times before grasping and lifting it high into the air with his supple fingertips, following the fuzzy yellow trail of its arc with his eyes and, when the ball reached its apex, swatting it as though it were a pest with his Technifibre racquet, strung at a decidedly neurotic tension of 64 pounds, and smashing the ball into the center of the net at a digitally recorded speed of 193 kilometers per hour. Brauck languidly returned to the start: the bounces, the clearing of the sweat rivulets, the swat at the ball. This time, more of a safe, brushing motion (strings acting like a comb, almost grooming the ball) and spun the second serve in, comfortably clearing the net and landing the ball safely (if unintimidatingly) in the far corner of the opponent’s service box, where it took a relatively high but true bounce, leaving Saurez, the Spaniard, with a makeable backhand return. And so the point commenced, as we looked on with what was then only mild interest, some of us more concerned with getting a glimpse of the local celebrities in attendance, with the wild roars, suggestive as they were of dramatic shifts of momentum, on the larger, Stadium court adjacent to our smaller, more intimate Clubhouse venue, with the oppressive glare of the sun that graced or plagued (depending on your point of view) our tiny village year round.

***

We consider ourselves a kind and patient people, unassuming and for the most part, unglamorous. We make our livings as farmers and fishers, as doctors and teachers and factory workers (a major auto manufacturer recently opened a production facility in our city: they have become the title sponsor of the Tournament). We pride ourselves on a collective evenness of temperament. We have few nightclubs but we enjoy our music: we’re not by nature promiscuous in our thought processes, but we’re certainly not puritanical either. Things happen somewhat slowly here: we are a few steps behind the pace of the modern world, though we can see the just-splashed footprints of that world hovering tantalizingly in front of us. 

So you can understand how this tournament, with its international cast, its big names, its television coverage and world media frenzy might be for us an anomaly, a singular indulgence. The frenzied itinerary of the professional tennis tour reads like an exotic travelogue, with stops in any number of cosmopolitan metropoli around the globe: Copenhagen, Rome, Johannesburg, Paris, Dubai, Mallorca, Santiago, Casablanca, Stockholm, Montreal, Tokyo, Kiev. Compared with such locales, we are but a weigh station, a footnote, a pragmatic transition, for fans and players on their way to bigger and better things. For us, each year, the Tournament is an excitement (though we are sometimes too embarrassed to fully show our enthusiasm) that dwarves all but the most momentous occurrences (marriages, births, deaths, juicy rumors) within the usual flow of our somewhat sheltered lives.

***

Suarez, the Spaniard, rolled over the backhand with all the fluid smoothness of a breaking wave, sending the ball deep into the middle of Brauck’s court where it took a bounce that, as in the bounce of a shampoo model’s hair, could only be described as “healthy.” Brauck, in that awkwardly stiff and gangly way of his, moved his feet (some of us estimated his shoe size at twenty, while others thought such estimates romantic hyperbole engendered only by the excitement of the Tournament) in retreat, striking the ball from beyond the white stripe of the baseline, striking a fierce forehand, a firm, flat rocketing retort that sent the speedy Suarez scrambling into the corner for a desperate defensive chip, a slice underspin return that landed short, and we were all sure that Brauck, all brawn and power, would have little trouble putting Suarez away with the next shot. 

***

If it seems odd, already, to the outsider, the meticulousness of our crowd, the intricacy of our observation, the closeness and intensity with which we watched the match, if all this seems a bit overboard, to us it seems second nature. Tournament or no tournament, we are a people inclined by habit and temperament toward detailed contemplation of the ordinarily overlooked. In particular, we are adept at following the most minute and seemingly random of movements: the flight path of an arbitrarily orbiting honeybee, the puzzle-piece contours of a jagged storm cloud, the rootlike spread of sidewalk cracks, to name just a few. These things, what some of us call nature’s geometry and others simply call The Patterns, fascinate us to no end. Of course, we would be loath to let these things interrupt us, our work, our routines, our relationships. The tournament is one of those rare, pure occasions where we can feel free to revel in The Patterns in depth. Some in attendance in the crowd trace (literally, trace, on paper) the voyage of the ball, from side to side, from racquet to racquet, throughout the course of the point, throughout the match. They are searching for Meaning, trying to see what God sees: a plan. Sometimes these ontological courtside sketchers think they’ve found one: more often they realize all they’ve drawn are a series of mysteries, in the form of zigzags, crosses, and overlapping arcs. Patterns no less fascinating but no less ineluctable than say, the veins of a sausage or a man’s fingerprints. 

***

Brauck hovered over the sitting duck, the short return, ready to pounce. The German eyed the ball with disdain, as though its perky yellow fuzziness were a thing that deserved to be punished. And punish it he would, with a huge, herky-jerky forehand (Brauck’s swing emphasized the mechanical, in its backswing and follow-through more than any kind of natural, flowing grace) that might have ended the point against a player of normal agility, but Suarez was not such a player. The supernaturally fit and quick Spaniard took small, determined steps (he ran with the force of his heart more than merely his limbs) and lunged at the ball, flinging a lob reply skyward with a wild, whipping motion. The ball soared, just this side of the stratosphere, and finally plummeted, a suicidal bird, barely grazing the back of the baseline stripe on Brauck’s side of the court. From far back, almost leaning up against the fir-leaf green boundary wall emblazoned with the title sponsor’s name and logo, Brauck was forced to hit a looping, neutral shot, and the point was now on even footing, as if begun again from scratch.

***

As the point progressed, gaining momentum, a tension began to build among those of us in the crowd. We were, we felt, being forced to choose sides. And we realized, as we made our choices, that these choices had a weight to them, a heft. Who we chose to root for would brand us, in ways we might not even consciously realize for a long time. It might ultimately give us insights, welcome or unwelcome, into ourselves. It might have even shown us what we really wanted, deep down. Our choice would tell us something revelatory, it would show us what we thought we lacked. Those of us who chose to root for Brauck were seeking order, or, to put it more kindly and aptly, clarity. The carefully modulated ball bounces, the unmistakable textbook precision, the clean-cut, tucked-shirt exactitude. It made some of us think of things we may have wanted cleaned: our messy kitchens, our favorite wine-stained dress shirts, our consciences. We admired Brauck’s blocky mass and treelike height: we wanted to grow taller, physically and psychically, to tower over our ground-floor lives. We wanted control, like in Brauck’s measured swings, control even over things we were never meant to have control over: perhaps even control over our own mortality. That is what Brauck grew to mean for his admirers, as the point progressed. Whereas Suarez filled the needs among others of us for danger, for unpredictability, for a kind of “damn the torpedoes” wildness; part of the thrill of watching the point from Suarez’s end was the knowledge that at any minute one of his swooping swings might smack the metal edge of his racquet and catapult the ball right out of the stadium. At the same time, Suarez sated his fans’ vicarious desire for a kind of mobile grace. It was a deft dance he did, and we wanted to follow in his nimble footsteps. We admired the fluidity of his strokes, and of his long black hair and tightly muscled calves as they pranced animalistically across the court. We wanted that form of Flow, that intangible yet satisfying sense of being “on a roll,” being “in a groove,” to infuse our own lives, to flush out the stasis and propel us forward towards a hyper-productive, anything-is-possible sort of bliss. Again, perhaps you can justifiably accuse us of atomizing these players’ impacts upon us, of taking the psychological upshots of our chosen allegiances too far, but remember, we are very thorough. We see patterns in everything.

***

Time constraints, with which we are uncomfortable, as a group (we revel in time, we enjoy as much as possible taking our time), are an unfortunate but necessary part of tennis journalism. Here, only certain highlights of the point can be suggested. The point itself was far too complex to lend itself to easy synopsis. In some ways, it might be like summarizing the unsummarizable, a symphony for instance, or an opera. Only with far more dramatic shifts, changes of momentum, than in even the most emotionally thunderous fever-dreams of Mozart, Handel, Mahler, Debussy, etc. Brauck’s heavy forehands backed Suarez into a corner repeatedly. Suarez looping replies bought him time, time and time again. At one stage, Brauck went doggedly and repeatedly to the backhand chip, scraping under the ball like some upside-down violinist slyly sliding under strings with bow, taking pace away from Suarez, only to have Suarez return the favor with a few skillfully skidding underspin shots of his own. Both players had moments of near-exhaustion, as well as moments of boredom. There were times when the lack of variety within the point, the droning sense of sameness, shot after shot, concerned the players enough (as if they could sense they were losing the crowd, as if the air had come out of the dramatic balloon) to nearly cause, at various points for each of them, a careless and fatal error. These near misses, inevitably, would send the crowd into shy quick whispery gasps of nervousness, followed by insistent hisses pleading for silence, and these would reinvigorate the players once more. 

***

Morning, when the point commenced, slipped nonchalantly into midday, and the excited hum that began to pervade the crowd inside and (as news began to spread) outside the Clubhouse court seemed the very definition of “collective murmur.” We grew hungry; the heat was sapping our energy. Some of us went to the concession lines, keeping one eye on the match as we waited for our hot dogs, our pretzels, our thirst-quelling fountain drinks, all the while measuring our desire for sustenance—our howling, hollow stomachs—against the disastrous possibility that we could miss the shot that ends it, the stinging swing or wild whiff that brings the point to a climax, or anti-climactic conclusion. Yet it seemed to us a remote possibility, still, at that juncture, when in our minds the point has not even reached its peak, its crescendo, its zenith (we searched in vain for the right vocabulary, the right metaphors, even as we unceremoniously slurped the last of the melting ice from our sodas). And it wasn’t until later, much later, that it occurred to us, retroactively: the players, who had been involved in the point for as long as we’d been watching it, they too must have been hungry, thirsty most of all, unable as they were to take a break from the point to replenish their systems with the refreshing splash of spring water or the energizing kick of the gaudily-colored sports drinks which we, in all our blissfully beige blandness, were so skeptical of. What impelled them, in their increasingly dehydrated state, to continue to move with what struck us as ever-increasing nimble swiftness and to swing with such unwavering and impassioned strength was a mystery that, for all of our meticulous contemplation, we hadn’t even considered. 

***

The sun, at its apex grilled the players, as sweat ran down Brauck’s forehead like water on windshield, and flew fanlike from Suarez’s flowing bangs. It was as if God had become impatient above, and was tossing down heat to try to melt the warriors into submission. We fanned ourselves with the programs some of us had scribbled the point’s trajectories onto, and we poured drinks over heads and lapped up the runoff as it trickled down in droplets through our hair. The representative of the major automobile manufacturer and title sponsor of the event shielded himself from the blaze of the sun’s rays by lifting above his head the giant novelty check to be given as grand prize money to the eventual winner. The first signs of restlessness began to reverberate through the crowd. A pretty woman, popular in our community, known to have reduced to jelly more than a few of our finest men, began herself to reduce, to slump down in her seat, her eyes flickering in and out of attentiveness. It seemed that everyone had a moment of doubt, watching her. There was a collective narcoleptic swoop, thousands of eyes closing almost simultaneously—but just as quickly opening wide, as Suarez was forced to lunge one-handed for a backhand, compromising his natural two-handed stroke out of dire necessity, and striking the ball back into play with a heaving grunt that jolted us back to life and alerted us to the tremendous effort still being exerted by both competitors, which itself, in turn, shamed us out of our own languor, made us realize that the least we could do was reward their dogged play with our own, continued, rapt attention.

***

In the twilight, the other courts deserted. We couldn’t think about the ultimate winners and losers. It was all about the rally. We knew this. We could look around and see it in each other’s faces. We had invested so much already. There were questions we could dare not voice. We couldn’t think about the after. We only followed the ball. It spun, it hopped, it danced. Each time it was struck, the sound it made as almost a mini, more demure version of the players’ continuing grunts. This was something we noticed fairly late in the game, it was something that was left to us after we had exhausted most of our other perceptions. And even as we reached the point where our collective unconscious might have had an inkling, there were no conscious thoughts of the point’s end. There were no thoughts of the evening’s plans, no thoughts of obligations, of families, of kids, of kisses. We had become a part of the point; the point had become a part of us. We were being tossed from side to side, smacked and whacked, bounced and bashed, sliced and diced. We were part of the Patterns. 

***

A group gasp, muted slightly by our lingering sense of decorum. Brauck, in what was either a character lapse or a determined, strategic attempt to break character with all the vehemence of a malcontented typecast actor seeking artistic growth, made the final decision to charge, or more accurately, to bulldoze his way, towards the net. His approach shot pinned Suarez once again, this time deep in the forehand corner, but the feisty Spaniard had the shot lined up; his footwork, as always, was pure and true. It was as if he were swinging right through us; it was as if the sweet spot of his strings were whacking our very beating hearts across the net. The wild, curving crosscourt shot was a good one, but Brauck was a tall man with deceptive and even superhuman reach. He poured his whole body into a lunge, but it wasn’t enough, and we were reduced, for the first and last time in the point’s life cycle, to the disarming simplicity of only two possible outcomes: the ball would land inside or outside the line, determining the winner. We were forced to contemplate a conclusion now, a death to the point, and at this thought our minds went as blank as the scoreboard above us, which, in those final, crucial seconds, lost power, and the grandstand lights went out, and we sat in the dreamy dark, strangely unperturbed, perhaps oddly content, listening for the sound of the final bounce of ball against concrete. 

***

Now there is no more slowness, only stillness, and it suits us. The players, locked in their swings, captured in poses of pure motion, their Herculean efforts crystallized, frozen in time. The ball itself: skinned and fuzz-drained, battered near to death. We sit transfixed, observing it, the weave of its gray grooves, caught in midair. Just as we sat for hours watching, with our heads shifting back and forth, its spins and bounces, its crosscourt dances, we now focus on its hovering staticness, the tiny planet of eternal suspense that it has become. We know full well that at any time, time itself may force its hand, may impel its own resumption, that Newtonian physics may superimpose itself upon our town, our oasis of content contemplation, that there will have to be a winner and a loser, champions crowned, purses divided. We know that we cannot forever atomize the beauty of a single moment. But for now we are riveted, unable to look away, unable to conceive of being anywhere else. The baseline official, still standing, arms clasped behind his back, staring straight at the sideline. His mind is lucid, clear and fresh, his eagle eyes unwavering, ready to make the call. 

***

Matt Leibel’s short-form writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Carolina Quarterly, Redivider, DIAGRAM, Wigleaf, and Best Small Fictions 2020. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and works as a copywriter in San Francisco.