We Begin Our Ascent Page 2

Fabrice is concentrating. Discussions of dreams ceased long ago. Tsutomo and I ride ahead of him, pushing hard, seeking to keep up with two teams, one sponsored by a northern European banking group, the other by a French manufacturer of farm machinery, who are raising the pace. People break from the lines of spectators at the roadside and run beside us. They bellow, wave their hands wildly. A fat man wearing lederhosen and a cowboy hat jogs at a speed one would not expect his build to allow, shouting into Fabrice’s ear.

  Pedals creak on their spindles. Some riders stand, some sit and spin, their bodies rocking in the saddle. Fingers dig into handlebar tape. “You’re into the red zone, Tsutomo,” says Rafael over the radio. The red zone means that Tsutomo’s pulse is high, that he is exerting himself in a way that cannot be maintained. There is so much data taken from us that it must be returned simplified into a color-coded system. From the car, Rafael has access to our pulse rates, our speed, and the power we push through our pedals. Tsutomo slows and drops behind me and Fabrice in order to recover. I look back and realize that we have broken from the majority of riders. They are strung out behind us, down the switchbacks of the mountain, their progress assessable by flashes of their brightly colored kits and the activity in the crowd as they pass.

  I am nauseous. We have to summit this hill, descend, and then summit another before the day’s finish. There are forty kilometers to go. I try to give myself to my pace, convince myself of its inevitability. The bankers and the agricultural machinists have lost riders too. Our group is now forty or so riders strong. I think of my feet making circles. I try to imagine these circles as being independent of me, mechanical and necessary.

  Two kilometers from the top of the climb, Tsutomo passes me and settles in front. He seems to have energy back but his pacing is erratic. He surges and slows a little. I see his forearms quiver with the effort.

  “Very good, boys,” says Rafael into our earpieces. “Let’s keep this.”

  I stand on my pedals and glance back at the other riders, at the road falling away behind us. To my rear, Fabrice just holds his head down. He offers no hint of his condition. We crest the peak in the same group of forty. We begin to descend. As we start to freewheel, we do the zips of our cycling jerseys right up. The road dips away and we crouch into our bicycles. Having been unable to separate from each other, riders now work together, stringing out into a line. The wind rushing past chills us. Our sweat-soaked kits quickly become clammy. The air tears through the insubstantial lycra to our skin. There are few fans on this side of the mountain. The action is too fast to really appreciate. The only sounds are the wind and the buzz of our wheels against asphalt. If things are going right in a race, there is little pure fear. Instead, the experience is vivid, consuming. Fear is not quite fear if it does not have time to settle, but an energy, a strange quality of attention. My real anxiety comes to me in the evening, when I reflect upon past descents and anticipate new ones.

  On the lower slopes of the mountain we enter a village. Shouts and clicks of gears echo off the walls of houses. Out of the village, the road levels. The riders bunch together into a group, two riders wide and twenty deep. We take turns to ride on the front, pushing into a crosswind. The detente which has prevailed during the descent will soon be broken. We anticipate the last climb: the thing that will decide the stage, determine the day’s beneficiaries and victims.

  Through our earpieces, Rafael reads out our pace, the distance to the finish line. Tsutomo and I need not make it to the finish with this group, many of whom are team leaders, favorites to win the Tour. We must simply pace Fabrice for as long as we can bear, then we may slow and grind toward the end with the stragglers.

  In the flat of the bottom of the valley, hay is being harvested. The air is filled with the rich, peppery smell of cut grass stalks. People stand on the edge of ditches, between the fields and the road, calmer than the crowds on the hillside. They hold up signs or simply applaud.

  Gradually, the road tilts into a climb. As a group, we keep pushing, though we know the pace to be unsustainable for all but a handful of us. At times like this I feel it is hardly worth breathing. Something is escaping from me and all my sucking in of air will not return it. My vision closes to encompass just the space in front. Now that we are back on an upslope the crowds are all around us, a blur of replica kits and banners and sunburnt skin. “Concentrate,” says Rafael in my earpiece. “Ten kilometers left.” Tsutomo is behind me and I can feel him faltering. I hear the click of Fabrice’s gear shifter. Fabrice moves past Tsutomo and settles at my rear wheel. We ride a few moments longer and when I look back I see Tsutomo off the back of the group, suddenly just a man cycling up a steep hill alone.

  As we go on, other riders begin to drop. Soon there are few more than thirty of us. Someone in the crowd sprays us with water. Spectators are forever proffering water. One may pour it over one’s head, but it should not be drunk. It has been decided that the crowd could contain any number of psychopaths with any variety of designs on our insides. The water could be poisoned, unsanitary, tainted with substances that would interest the dope testers. “You are accountable,” Rafael likes to say, menacingly, “for what goes into your bodies.”

  One of the members of the banking team stands on his pedals and attempts to stamp away from the group. The rest of us are alert, however. The group lurches, and draws itself around him.

  The life has gone out of my legs. The pace is a machinery greater than any one of us. I feel I am being dragged into it, like a Victorian unfortunate caught in a factory apparatus.

  Heroes, here, are made in ten-second increments. I tell myself, Ten seconds more, and then when those ten seconds have elapsed, I tell myself the same thing again. If you can put off your collapse long enough, there is no reason you can’t take everything. However, in the moment, it all feels as rigged as a game at the fair. These increments just get longer.

  Then I just drop. Fabrice gives me a nod as I seem to slide backward down the hill. I wait for that slower pace to calm me. I wait for my legs to return. They do not. No pace is slow enough. I pedal in hollow, aching strokes toward the line.

  * *

  The finish plays out over the radio. Rafael’s exhortations go from encouraging to disappointed and then to slightly threatening, the tone ever detectable through the static. One of the leaders kicks ahead in the final few kilometers, and Fabrice can do nothing to stay with the man. He loses time.

  As I approach the line later, Rafael addresses me through my earpiece. “One more kilometer,” he says, “you lazy piece of shit.”

  I just keep pedaling. Everybody is passing me. Who knows how many have passed me. Soon, perhaps, a clown on a tiny bicycle will come squeaking up the hill.

  Tsutomo, even, is gaining on me. We need just to cross the line, however. Fabrice is the racer; we are his assistants. The fans don’t concede or even seem to know this. They are still hollering, urging us on, trying to hook into some submerged sense of pride. The last kilometer is cordoned off. They lean forward and beat high notes on the bars of the metal barricades. They seek some residue of spectacle, some desire, some fight in our eyes. They don’t get it.

  * *

  The leading riders, those who haven’t been packed off to massages, podiums, or interviews, roll back down the course warming down, spinning their legs idly. That’s how we recover from cycling: more cycling. I keep my head down and continue to pedal. I pedal and I live in my little increments, endure these blocks of time, and eventually I am across the line.

  At the finish, we fight through crowds and trail back to the bus. We reassemble easily because there are no commitments for our riders, no prizes to collect. Fabrice does a couple of interviews. He is curt, visibly disappointed. In previous days he has been doing well, staying with the major contenders in the race, building what Rafael calls a foundation. Today the television people get none of the sunniness, the sly pleasure and jokes that they have become inclined to expect from him.

  People push food int
o my hands: protein bars, rice cakes, recovery shakes. Our bus is parked on the backstreets of the alpine town. Here the barriers and cordons which separate us from the crowds are largely absent. We are protected by the banality of our routines. We take off cycling clothes. We flannel our faces. Mechanics spin the cranks of our bicycles, spraying oil and adjusting bolts. We wait for the bus to move. An elderly couple watch us from a balcony coolly, the man smoking, the woman holding a small, yapping dog as if it were a child.

  I eat a protein bar. The next day begins the moment we finish the last, we are told. So much of our success is built not on what happens on the race course, but on what happens before we start. “There is no fuel,” Rafael says, “like the thought that you have done something in preparation that the other guy has not.” He has never needed to sell any of us on this notion. We came into this team having marked ourselves out from so many other aspirants. We each knew what separated us from all those riders who fell away into amateurism. In our early careers, we all outpaced our competitors with the confidence that we had woken earlier than they had, that we had tuned our bikes more comprehensively, that we had trained whatever the weather, that we had been out riding on Christmas morning. Rafael’s dictum has two aspects: positive and negative. We seek to do what other racers do not, and we do not neglect to copy gains our competitors make.

  As I walk to the steps of the bus, I see Shinichi. He moves around the tour with some efficiency. Presence at both the start and finish is impressive. He sits on the pavement of the small street, his own bicycle resting beside him. He still wears his team kit and nods at me as I go over.

  “A bad race,” he says, shaking his head.

  “I suppose,” I say, “a little disappointing.”

  “Tsutomo was very tired,” he says.

  “We’re all very tired,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, “everyone is very tired. Very tired is no excuse.”

  I shrug in reply.

  On the bus, we pass around a little bottle with an eyedropper lid. Two drops on your tongue: that is the formula. It’s a tiny dose of testosterone, enough to aid one’s recovery, so small as to be undetectable by the drug testers. It is very important to feel that there is something within oneself doing good, fighting the insurgency that one’s muscles and joints mount in the evening. “The ancient Greeks used to use testosterone,” Rafael said to me once. “They used to eat ram’s testicles before a race.” He was overjoyed by this tidbit, wherever he had heard it. There is clearly some great justification in finding the roots of an action, any action, in antiquity. Perhaps I could have told him that the ancient Greeks used to own slaves and bugger children; maybe that would have been the smart reply. However, on tour we have no need for smart replies. I took Rafael’s comment on board, and now when I use the dropper I think about the lineage of the act.

  We pass the bottle covertly. Though it is our own team bus, there is a need to contain these activities. A couple of the new riders on the team are, as I was until nine months ago, yet to be ushered into the program. Though they might have made certain assumptions in light of their teammates’ abilities, there is no need to offer them such evidence without good reason. The bus driver, for all we know, thinks us the most principled athletes to have walked the earth. Rafael has even taken care to keep our team doctor in the dark. Marc is only recently graduated from medical school. He has taken a pay cut to do what he says is a unique and fascinating job. He is a lanky, awkward guy in a perpetual quandary, it seems, about how to hold his body. He is balding in way that is painful to witness. His role is confined to the treatment of grazes and saddle rash. More illicit activities are performed by other members of the team staff and by doctors hired from outside the team. The era in which teams doped and were found out en masse has passed. Rafael has taken care to hire a doctor who can be shut out: “a useful buffer of ignorance.”

  The bus moves into the center of town. The vehicle swims in the glass front of an office block.

  When I turn on my phone, I have a text message from my wife. “We watched the finish,” it says. “We saw you. Good. Black socks and white shoes though?”

  At first Liz’s friends called me “The Cyclist.” “What kind of adult,” she reported one of them saying, “worries about how fast he can ride his bike?” Liz found this funny, and it was, though perhaps a little close to my own anxieties. She has always been an advocate of my career among her friends, however. She has learned to talk about the tactics, communicate the nuances of the sport. “You’re missing out,” she tells friends who watch football or tennis or nothing at all. I am grateful for the advocacy, though also aware that, among her friends, it has caused me to be solely defined by my profession. I have read that when Minoans first encountered mounted horsemen, they came up with the myth of centaurs to explain what they had seen. To Liz’s friends, I think, I am at least half bicycle.

  I sit next to Fabrice. He huddles against the window, the corner of his forehead resting on the glass. He watches the town stutter past us. “No one is getting a wing today,” he says.

  “No,” I say. Wings are an invention of Rafael’s. Performances in which members of our team do their jobs beyond all possible reproach are awarded little stickers of wings. We attach them to our bicycle frames, like kills marked on fighter planes. There is debate about the symbolism. Some on the team suggest that a wing means we ascend like birds; others argue that it is to do with our sponsor, a manufacturer of poultry products. We covet them, anyway. Rafael, more than anyone, knows what we should be doing. A reward from him is never given without good reason. No one, so far, on this tour, has acquired a wing. We are all eager to be the first to do so. Fabrice has four for the season, Tsutomo two. I, so far, have none.

  Fabrice closes his eyes. He lets his head roll against the window with the movement of the coach. He is not sleeping. “Tomorrow,” he says. “Tomorrow will be as smooth as cream.”

  Chapter 2

  At the hotel I move slowly, conscious of my need to recover, cued by the rush of racing to enjoy the stillness of the dim hallways. I make my way to the small room I share with Tsutomo. A dirty kit lies on the floor, two energy bars beside it, as if remnants of a very exclusive rapture. He has been and departed already. He is having his massage elsewhere in the hotel. The room is quiet. The curtains are closed already. I sit on the bed. My phone connects. “Hello,” says Liz. We talk for a while, go over the same things said earlier. I hear B in the background. His voice rises and falls in response to the activity of someone else, of his grandma.

  * *

  I met Liz by chance. I do not like to think about that, because to do so invites the consideration of alternatives, draws me into visualizations of different lives. My training and inclination make me a believer in necessity and causation. I need to be convinced of the efficacy of preparation, of the sure reward of my conditioning. If I were to truly attend to luck—to how easily a puncture or the crash of a rider in front might ruin a race, or how much my successes rely on the misfortunes of others—then I would struggle to prepare, to get myself out on the bike on winter mornings.

  We were both flying back to London, making connections in Barcelona. It was a Sunday evening flight, and it was delayed at the last minute because there was a problem with the fluid that they were using to clean the plane. In compensation, the airline issued passengers meal tickets to be redeemed in any of the airport food outlets. We both joined the end of the line to receive these. I sensed Liz’s prettiness beside me, some force outside my field of vision. She was tall. She had straight brown hair, hooded eyes that gave her glance a steadiness. I remember that she was dressed smartly, in a jacket and black jeans. I noticed this because though I wear team tracksuits often, I still try to dress up to fly. I have always felt the need to reject the clothes people wear in airports, the denial implied by such outfits: the elasticated sweatpants, the soft shoes, the neck pillows they wear hung in place as they pace the concourse, as if any sense of the speed and dist
ance of a flight is only something to be blocked out.

  Liz looked at the fifteen-euro voucher when it was handed to her. “I can spend it on wine?” she said.

  The flight attendant didn’t look up. “You can spend it on what you want,” she said, “but alcohol is very expensive in this airport.”

  “Yes?”

  “Believe me.”

  Liz looked at me as I received my own voucher. “You want to go halves on a bottle of red?” she said.

  We ate in a counter-service pizzeria, in a seating area roped off from the echoing belly of the concourse. We had a bottle of wine, two plastic cups, and a small pizza on a paper plate. The sun was setting and the glassy corridors were full of soft light. Mr. Torres Pereira was missing his flight at gate twenty-seven. The announcement of that fact came again and again over the speakers. From the table, we could see out to the runway, to planes taxiing, made insectile by the expanses of glass and steel and tarmac around them. I was coming back from a training camp, she from a conference. We were unlike the others, I realized, because we were both glad of the delay. I felt this myself, and I sensed Liz’s concordance. She had green eyes, and a funny way of holding her finger just beneath her chin as she talked. We were both busy people with hectic schedules, and suddenly here was a gap in our days for which neither of us had accounted. Perhaps we each knew, from the pleasure we were taking in this break, that there was no one waiting for the other at home. I asked her about her work, and she told me about her PhD: the zebra fish, the gene expression and breeding and lost-function experiments. “So what’s the aim?” I said.

  “To get my PhD,” she said.

  “The general aim?” I said.

  She sighed. “You find the purpose of a gene in a fish.”

  “Suppose you do,” I said. “And then?”

  “Anything,” she said. She kneaded the edge of her eyebrow with her fingers, looked at me. She wanted me to make the rest up for myself, and I recognized that desire. She had ambitions that she was reluctant to say out loud, and I knew this: the sense that you sought an objective rare enough that it felt too stark, almost childish, to simply say it.