“You’re losing time,” says Rafael in our earpieces. He gives us the precise numbers, the time checks. He plots the trend. He tells us the kind of level at which we need to work. He is sinking into a sea of static. As sometimes happens, the radio is not working well. His voice is shrouded increasingly by fuzz, until what he says becomes indistinguishable. I look around and see that my colleagues have removed their earpieces, which now hang from their collars, swinging in the high wind.
* *
I returned from that last autumn race and that basement conversation with Rafael on Liz’s second day of maternity leave. B was due to arrive in four weeks, and she had left the lab with reluctance. She was settling uneasily into those days of waiting, walking the house slowly, sore and heavy-footed.
I meant to recount Rafael’s persuasions straightaway, but instead I was overwhelmed by the emptiness of the time, the sudden stillness after my season, after Liz’s work, before all that was to come. We slept late in the mornings. They were exquisite autumn days, dry and warm, presided over by a steady yellow sun. We were close and quiet. She had given up coffee, but I drank so many cups. She read more seriously than she had for many years. She considered playing the bassoon. “It will do something terrible to the baby in the womb,” I joked. It was a strange time of waiting, and I came to think the fineness of those days to be a form of improbable balance: a suspension bridge, a chemical molecule, an archway in a church. I didn’t want to bring anything else in. What Rafael was asking of me churned in my mind, but I held it off, tried to lose myself in the vividness of the period, the acute sense of time moving past. But then treatments began coming in the mail: packages of vials and glass bottles addressed to “Timothy Dalton” that needed to be explained.
In the baby room, I recounted the conversation I’d had with Rafael. Liz and I were assembling a bedside table. She sat and I stood. I talked as she worked. “In short,” I said, “I’m being asked whether I don’t want a little chemical assistance.”
She winced. “Spare the euphemism,” she said.
I waited for more. She screwed a leg into place with a small hex key.
“What do you think?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Is it dangerous?”
“In what sense?”
“In any.”
“It’s undetectable,” I said. “They do these things in hospitals. The transfusions. Hormone supplements.”
“Yes,” she said, “but all sorts of drugs are used in hospitals. It depends on the context.”
“There is a doctor involved. He has many years of experience.”
“And there’s no way you can do without?”
“It’s hard to progress otherwise,” I said. “Do you remember the oxygen tent?” I had taken the tent down in late spring.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“This is five or ten times more effective than the tent.” Rafael would have pushed here, asked whether sleeping in an artificially altered environment was qualitatively different from an injection of a few hormones, but I waited.
She had paused her work on the table. She closed her eyes, rolled her neck back. It crunched. She looked back at me. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“If you won’t get banned or killed—that much we owe to the baby—then I guess that’s okay.”
“You’re sure?” I said.
“Give me some credit,” she said. She picked the table up again. Set to work on the second leg. “Did you not imagine that I’d considered this a possibility?”
I had expected her to be angry, but suddenly I was the one who felt wronged. She had accepted in moments something I had wrestled with for days. “I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Of course not.”
“Have you not thought that I might hold out?”
“You’re committed,” she said. “You’re serious.”
“But this is not the main measure of seriousness.”
“Sure,” she said. She spoke with exasperated disbelief. “But you’re not going to give up your career because of it, are you?”
“No,” I said. Yet I felt defensive, wounded that she hadn’t considered the possibility of my choosing otherwise. Had she been waiting for this moment? Did she take it as evidence of my professional progression?
“I’ve worried about the idea a lot,” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “That’s why I’m agreeing. Assuming you’ve thought it through. Trusting you.”
“It’s not simple,” I said.
She nodded in agreement. “The others are doing it, right? If every X does Y and you are an X . . .” She sat back, a hand on her stomach. “Let me understand. Don’t put a face on for me.”
* *
Eventually, the spires of the town in which we are to finish appear, like catches in the stitching between the sky and the flat horizon. We speed through the outskirts, around roundabouts, into the final, cordoned section of the course. Briefly I replace my earpiece but find it still to be transmitting only hissing. We hear the public-address system at the finish broadcasting a commentary. The commentator is counting down the time we have lost, a count which only concludes as we cross the line. “Ooh, ooh, ooh,” he says in sympathy.
As we find our way back through the crowds to the bus, however, something strange happens. People congratulate us. “You must be pleased,” says a rider from a competing squad, a Dutchman I hardly know. I look at Fabrice. He shakes his head.
Miguel, a former colleague of ours, now riding for another team, wheels through the crowd toward his own team bus. He stands on one pedal of his bicycle, scuffing himself along with the other foot. He sees us, smiles. “Nice,” he says.
Craning my neck to look around the finish, I see Johan, surrounded by a crush of journalists and cameras, sitting on a stool.
“I think Johan won the stage,” I say to Fabrice.
Fabrice looks at me and laughs mirthlessly.
* *
We have to wait on the bus for Johan to finish with his podium duties and interviews. Rafael for once is confused as to how to react. He is apoplectic, of course, regarding those of us charged with protecting Fabrice, yet at the same time he must consider the great coup of Johan’s stage win. Johan, we have learned, jumped from Sebastian’s wheel and infiltrated the sprint preparations of another team, hung behind their man, waited, and then took off at the last minute, passing the rider just before the line. By Johan’s account, this passing was simply the result of his superior power. Others have suggested his opponent was slowed by a near collision with another rider. The sponsors are happy anyway. Johan has collected prize money. Television replays show slow-motion footage of him crossing the line, sitting up on his bike, arms raised above his head, his mouth agape.
There is a myth, born somewhere in the pelotons of the past, that air-conditioning after a hot stage is likely to cause riders respiratory difficulties. Rafael is nothing if not heedful of the traditions of racing, and so we sit on a sweltering bus waiting for Johan.
When he finally gets onto the bus, Johan raises the stage winner’s bouquet above his head. He looks at us, challenging us to share his success. We call our congratulations through the heavy air. Fabrice raises his voice to say good work. Rafael comes up the bus steps behind Johan. The driver starts the engine and we begin the journey back to our hotel.
As the bus lurches through the tight city streets around the finish line, Johan walks slowly down the aisle, deciding where to sit. There is a seat free next to me and he studies me for a second before taking it. He gives a sigh of pleasure. He flaps his bouquet idly. “I told you I would win,” he says.
“It was yesterday’s stage you said you’d win,” I say, but he ignores me. I point to the bouquet. “Aren’t you supposed to throw that into the crowd?” I say.
“That’s at a wedding,” says Johan. “It’s called a winner’s bouquet. It’s for the winner.” He thinks a little more. “There’s no class in
throwing away what you’ve just been given.” He picks at the flowers. “Also—who knows?—someone in the crowd might have had allergies.” He looks at me. “I wanted it,” he says finally, as if I’ve persisted in questioning him. “I’ve always wanted to win a stage.” He lapses back into a tired silence.
I know what he means. We own so little for our efforts. In those flowers are represented many sacrifices: hours of training sessions, dietary restrictions, nights of staying home, even Johan’s acceptance of unregulated pharmaceutical assistance. It is nice to hold on to something. It is a guarantee against the threats too. There are journalists who will talk down his achievements, testers with their needles and mass spectrometers. To hold an object in his hand, a thing they will never demand back, is a reassurance.
As we pull onto the motorway, Johan becomes alert again. “Who’s going to have a glass of champagne with me tonight?” he says loudly. Rafael, three rows ahead, rises from his seat and looks back. “You and I can have some champagne, Johan. The rest of these idiots get a squirt of lemon in their water.”
Later Rafael arrives with the leather pouch and the small scissors. He presses the wing sticker into Johan’s palm. Johan closes his fingers tightly around it.
Chapter 5
It is the most beautiful evening, as if the weather is seeking to prove the pettiness of our displeasure. The wind has blown itself out, the air is warm, the colors of the landscape sharp. We are in the same kind of hotel as usual: a functionalist box with a large car park in front. The mechanics are set up on a small space of asphalt between the bus and the hotel. The team bikes are arrayed on a long rack. A radio plays techno, the thrust of the music lost in the open air.
I walk out and fetch my bike. I have had my massage and still feel the warmth of the Butcher’s hands in my back. I retrieve a workstand for the bike, clamp it into place. The two mechanics acknowledge me silently.
Of course, I do not need to do my own work: the mechanics will do what is needed, and the bike is running well besides. But I like to occupy my hands. I’ve been running over the question of how we let Fabrice get dropped, and I seek some escape from it.
I flick through the gears of the bike, spinning its pedals with a hand. I test the rear brake. The parts hiss and click to my satisfaction. I undo the quick-release levers on the rear wheel then, and lift it out of the frame. I wrench off the rear cassette, then grease the freewheel mechanism. I take a cloth and carefully rub at each sprocket of the cassette.
The first thing I loved about cycling was the machine. I saved to upgrade from my child’s mountain bike to a proper road bike. I spent months researching that first purchase, and then when I had it, I attended obsessively to maintaining and upgrading it. I loved the efficiency of the model I bought—all that had been shorn from it—and I worked to make it even lighter. I got a slimmer saddle, thinner handlebar tape, special latex tubes. I took a drill and drilled small holes in the aluminum of the rims. There was always something more one could be doing, other reductions to be made. This sense of progression, the feeling that even the tiniest changes could build toward something, was not one I had encountered elsewhere. I took it into my training when I started in earnest, losing myself not just in the riding but in the planning of it, in the joy of paying such meticulous attention.
My ringtone sounds from my pocket. I put down my cloth and wheel. I pinch my phone in my palm, trying to avoid grasping it with my oily fingers.
“Hello,” says Liz.
“Hi,” I say. I walk to the other side of the bus. I have been waiting to talk to her without knowing it: cued by habit, yet dulled by the stupidity that tiredness brings on.
“That was tough,” she says. “I was sorry to watch it. You should have moved Fabrice to the front of the pack before the break happened.”
“Don’t I know it,” I say. “You are in agreement with Rafael, though more composed.”
“Yes?” she says. She laughs. “I’m getting ready. I’m getting ready to come and see you.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m pleased. I’m excited.” I’m too tired to summon the necessary life in my voice to underline the truth of this.
“I’ll pack tomorrow,” she says. “And then the day after we go at four thirty in the morning. I’ve done the calculations. That is the latest we can go.”
“That’s tough.”
“Do you want anything? Do you want some white socks?”
“I’m good for socks.”
She sighs. “It’s going to be a nightmare: traveling with a baby and then all of that.”
“It’s going to be tough,” I say. I scratch my arm, leave a stripe of grease against it. “I wish I could be there to help.”
She gives a weary laugh. “If you were traveling with us,” she says, “who would we be going to see?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps we’d be taking a holiday.”
“Like normal people,” she says.
I laugh. “Yes. Like normal people.”
* *
Fabrice raps on my hotel door after dinner. I have been lying on the bed, snoozing. He inclines his head. “We have a team meeting,” he says. He puts an ironic stress on the words.
We walk down the corridor together. “I’m sorry we let you down today,” I say.
He frowns. I see the recollection of the stage play over his face. He shakes his head in disagreement. “I need to be in charge,” he says. “I need to be in control on the road.”
We enter Rafael’s room. Rafael is there, the Butcher, Tsutomo. The Butcher is seated, digging around in an open holdall placed on his lap. Rafael meanwhile examines the room suspiciously. He peers out the window through the closed curtains, as if expecting to find a face pressed up against it. He looks under the bed.
“Where’s Marc?” says Rafael. “Where’s our team doctor?”
“Don’t worry,” says the Butcher. “He is well out of the way. He’s downstairs in the lounge, playing Ping-Pong with Sebastian.”
“Ideal,” Rafael says.
Fabrice sits on the bed. The Butcher indicates that Tsutomo and I should take places next to our team leader. The Butcher digs around in the holdall and brings out syringes and a clinking cooler bag of vials. He kneels in front of Fabrice and kneads at Fabrice’s arm. He locates a vein on his inner biceps, above his tan line: a place that will be hidden by his racing jersey. He fills the syringe from the vial, inserts it carefully into the vein, briefly pulls back the plunger to check for the swirl of red that indicates he has hit the bloodstream, then steadily pushes in the contents of the syringe. Rafael and the Butcher call this microdosing and seem to enjoy all the connotations of this name: the sense of convenience and finely wrought intelligence. The Butcher gives Fabrice a cotton pad to hold to the needle mark. The Butcher sets about Tsutomo and then me.
“All done,” says Rafael. “All gone.”
We are just getting hormones for now. In seventy-two hours, on the coming rest day, we will be reinjected with a half liter of blood taken earlier in the year. It was harvested at the height of our training, all those lush red cells, healthy and ready to carry oxygen. Our own blood is now dilute, diminished by all the trauma of racing. It will be refreshed.
* *
Before a preseason race, I found myself waiting in a motel. There were lamps with mustard-colored shades, an old TV/VCR, an airbrushed painting of a woodland cottage at dusk. A doctor knocked on my room door. “I’ve come for your blood,” he said, mock-Dracula.
We were in a roadside bonk motel, in one of four rooms rented for two hours. Rafael had hired prostitutes—four of them—to offer some ostensible reason for our short visit. They sat with Rafael in an adjacent room, flicking through magazines, waiting to be dismissed once the medical man had done his stuff. “I vant to suck your blard!” said the doctor, growing into the role.
I let him into the room and sat on the bed. I was the last of our group to be seen.
“You’re going to feel a little prick,” sa
id the doctor, kneeling on the floor, seeking something in his leather doctor’s bag. He wore a shiny gray suit but his glasses were old-fashioned and large. He was bald and he wrinkled his long forehead as he searched for the necessary items. He was a comforting classic of his type: the backdoor dope doctor, a man with some deficiencies to kick against. There was the sharp pain of the needle and the long ache of the drawing of blood. He tapped the filling bag. “Got to get this on ice.”
“How do you freeze it?” I said.
“On the move,” said the doctor.
“You’ve got a portable freezer?” I said.
“The whole deal,” he said.
When the bag was full, he took the needle from my arm. He dropped it into his plastic box of sharps. He fished around in his bag and took out a paper hat and blue-striped apron.
“Why are you getting dressed now?” I said.
“My cover,” said the doctor. He pointed out the window to the rainy, windblown parking lot. Between the cars stood an ice cream van. A plastic anthropomorphized ice cream cone, with arms, legs, and bulging eyes was suspended on a pole above the van, ready, I supposed, to rotate with the movement of the vehicle. It regarded the hotel maniacally.
“It’s got freezers,” said the doctor. “It plays music. It’s got everything.”
“Great,” I said.
“Do you want a lolly?” he said.
* *
The week before B was born, I waited at home with Liz. It was October, an unseasonal warm snap just before the clocks changed. I had been scheduled to attend a team meeting on the continent, but Liz was due. I stayed with her, happily neglected my training schedule. B was five days late. We had prepared, and now we just anticipated B’s arrival. We were close in those days. It was a pleasure to close ourselves off from the world so completely. I recalled our meeting, in that airport years before, and the way that both of us had been able to find each other in the midst of a delay, in time we hadn’t accounted for. When Liz’s labor started, I drove her to the hospital. The labor was long but without complication. Then he was with us.
We Begin Our Ascent Page 7