I ordered pasta and when it came finished only half of it. “Is that all you’re having?” said Davina. She herself was dismembering langoustines with great fluency.
I explained how important it was to come into the tour with no excess weight, half-starved, in fact. “You do this for sport?” she said. She laughed. She cracked a shell, tugged out white flesh. “It’s insane.”
“I know,” I said.
“It’s the doing,” said Liz, “that is important.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Dr. Johnson wrote about seeing a man riding three horses at a circus,” said Liz. “He said it was important not because of what the man was doing but because it increased our sense of human capabilities.”
“That’s good,” said Davina. “I like that.” She looked at me. “You’re pushing our idea of what a man can do.”
I understood, I suppose. I might use the anecdote one day. The sport I am engaged in is a game, but there is a level at which it surpasses that, at which the dedication, the logic and attention applied make it vivid, real, and meaningful. To cross the finish line first in one of those old storied races is not merely to have pedaled but to have played a part in a piece of theater, to have enacted a struggle, a narrative, from which conclusions about character and the tendencies of our age can be drawn. Liz’s and my professions are similar in this way. We have small, specific goals, yet there is some implicit romance here: an unspoken claim that a deeper appreciation of life emerges from our focus, from our resolve to apprehend infinity not by cowering in submission to all that lies beyond us, but through meticulous reexamination of single things.
* *
For once, I am not rooming with Tsutomo, but with Fabrice. Usually Fabrice, as team leader, is entitled to his own room. Stage races normally have their casualties, and I suspect, though he hasn’t mentioned as much, that Rafael has booked fewer rooms from this point in the race onward, expecting somebody to have gone home by now. Instead we have all hung on, suffering and giving mixed performances: something less desirable in Rafael’s mind than crashing or burning out in a more single-minded pursuit of victory. Fabrice has been pushed into sharing.
As I pause at the door of my room, I can hear Fabrice clipping his toenails. He clips his toenails each night. To clip a day’s growth seems impossible, so I suppose that he cuts ever further toward the cuticle. It’s one of his many ceremonies of preparation. He likes the idea that he need not carry the crescents he cuts up the next day’s climbs. I’ve asked him why he doesn’t shave his head for the same reason, and he has told me that he has considered the idea and decided that the psychological drawbacks of coming to resemble his father would counteract any weight savings.
When I enter, he sits on the middle of his bed, contorted, given totally to his task, as content as a mystic at prayer.
I sit on my own bed. I watch him grasp a toe and position it for the scissors. There is a pressure upon him that I do not always bear in mind. Those of us around him—Rafael and the team—are not just sources of assistance but symbols of expectation. He pulls off a tiny crescent of nail. He lays it on a piece of open tissue on the bed. His big toe is vivid red, like the head of a newborn. He works on it with a nail file. “The rest day tomorrow,” he says without looking up.
“It’s great,” I say.
“I have a good feeling about it,” he says. “I’m going to rest like a champion.”
Chapter 8
I am jolted out of sleep. There is someone in our room, standing between the beds. “Fabrice,” he hisses. I recognize Rafael’s voice. I sit up. Rafael nods at me in the half dark.
“What?” says Fabrice. He lifts his head from the pillow.
“You have to get up,” says Rafael. He looks at me. “You too, Solomon.” His voice is different so early: fragile and husky. “The dope man is coming in twenty minutes,” he says.
Fabrice sits fully up now. “We’re good?” he says.
Sometimes, if we are surprised just after a treatment, we may be forced to drink glass after glass of water so that traces of what we have taken are flushed through our systems. “You’re as clean as the pope’s pajamas,” says Rafael.
He leaves the room. We climb from our mattresses and pull on tracksuits. Fabrice looks at his watch and then at me. “Ten minutes,” he says. I nod. We return to the warmth of our respective beds. “The rest day,” Fabrice says. He exhales heavily. “It’s the rest day and they give us a six a.m. drug test.”
In ten minutes’ time I hear voices outside the room. Rafael is out there, and the Butcher. A phone rings briefly, then is silenced. There are footsteps down the hall. “Rafa,” says a voice I do not recognize, that I take to be the tester. “How are you?”
“Henri,” says Rafael. “I am working very hard. You know how it is.”
“Yes, of course. You are very industrious. Your riders are ready, do you think?”
“Who knows?” says Rafael. There is something in his tone I know: a need to play, a compulsion to press his advantages for the sake of doing so. “They have just woken up. I think they might need to get themselves ready. I think they might need to drink a little before they can pee.”
“By the rules, they should be giving their samples now,” says the tester.
“Of course,” says Rafael. “But they are in a stressful situation. We should wait for a little time.”
“Hydration is very important, Rafa.” The tester speaks primly, in jest. “Dehydration will impair your boys’ performances. I would have thought you knew this.”
“I do not know everything,” says Rafael.
“This I cannot believe,” says the tester. Both men laugh.
Rafael comes into the room alone. “Drink,” he says.
“I thought we didn’t need to,” says Fabrice.
“No,” says Rafael. “But we cannot give away everything so easily. We need to keep these men flexible.” He goes out again.
The door to our room is opened five minutes later. We sit up in our beds. The tester is of average height, middle-aged, with brown hair and a side parting. To him, I think, already up and around this morning, the room must be stuffy, close, sour with sleep. He places his bag on a chest of drawers which sits between Fabrice’s bed and my own. “I am sorry to wake you up, gentlemen,” he says. Rafael and the Butcher stand in the doorway, watching. The tester squats between our beds, looks each of us in the eye. It is disquieting, his sudden closeness. He rummages in his bag. “Blood, then urine,” he says. He takes out a syringe. “Who’s first?”
When the tester has gone, we stay in our beds. I snooze. I am used to being up for breakfast already. My arm aches where the blood has been taken. At nine, I get a text from Liz. “Off the ferry,” she says. “Driving. In the car of the tired and the tearful.” I lie for a while, but I cannot sleep now. I get up, wearily, feeling my aches and pains. I shuffle around in the bathroom, waking up.
* *
At the breakfast table, the others are taciturn. It is as if the rest day, this reprieve from riding, is too good, as if it might disappear with our explicit acknowledgment of it. Everyone eats slowly. Near the end of the meal, Rafael comes over to where Fabrice and I sit.
“Did you get back to sleep?” he says. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I have a plan for you two.”
“Yes?” says Fabrice. He chews a mouthful of banana. He takes a sip of coffee.
“An easy ride.”
“Yes?” says Fabrice. It is obvious that we will ride today. It is said that our legs—half-sentient things, apparently—need to be reminded that they still need to cycle, that the race is ongoing.
“Yes,” says Rafael. “With a guest.”
We meet in the lobby of the hotel in the early afternoon. We will do the ride, I tell myself. We will eat again. Liz and B will arrive in town.
Sebastian stands in front of a rack of leaflets. He looks at brochures: for wine tours, for a cheese museum, for a water park, for a castle, for a crocodile sanctuar
y. “So much to do,” he says.
“You want to go to a crocodile zoo?” says Rafael, arriving behind him. “Now things make sense.”
“How is being a cyclist incompatible with going to a crocodile sanctuary?” says Sebastian.
“Would champions go to a crocodile zoo?” says Rafael. “Would your father?”
“My father is a boring and intolerant man,” says Sebastian.
Rafael grunts, turns. “Are you ready?” he says, looking at Fabrice and me. We nod. “Good,” he says. “Our guest is coming.”
“Who?” says Fabrice.
Rafael points to the logo on Fabrice’s jersey. “An executive of your sponsor. An important man.”
“Nuggets?” says Fabrice.
“Nuggets.”
“Can we ask him why we have brown shorts?” says Fabrice.
“No,” says Rafael. “Brown is clean and natural, they tell me. It is about reminding the consumer that their chicken nuggets come fresh from the farm.”
“My sweaty brown shorts?” says Fabrice.
“Brown is the color of environmental sustainability,” says Rafael. “They have had certain image problems in the past year. Did you see that documentary about the chicken factory? The bootleg Bulgarian antibiotics? It’s a wonder that all they’re asking is that you wear brown shorts.”
* *
The Nugget Man arrives in our team cycling kit, shoes and all. He has gray hair, lively eyes, and pristinely white teeth. “Comrades,” he says, bearing these teeth in a smile.
Rafael greets him with an embrace, then guides the man to stand in front of us.
“Your riding companions need no introduction,” says Rafael, “just as you need not be introduced to them.”
“We’re grateful for your sponsorship,” I say. Fabrice nods slowly in agreement.
“I’m glad,” says the Nugget Man. He is about fifty. He looks us up and down. “You’ve had some tough days.” He grimaces and the tendons in his neck briefly reanimate the sagging skin around his Adam’s apple. “Are you fellas well?”
“Yes,” says Fabrice.
“I respect your dedication,” says the Nugget Man.
“Anything to sell some nuggets,” says Fabrice. Rafael gives him a reproving glance, though the Nugget Man is unflustered.
“I don’t like to think of us as selling nuggets,” says the Nugget Man. “Really, I like to say, we sell family mealtimes. Do you have children?”
Fabrice jabs a thumb in my direction.
“Isn’t it hard to get them to sit down at the table?” he says.
“Mine’s not even one yet,” I say. “Sitting at the table is all he can do.”
“We make baby food,” says the Nugget Man. “I’ll send you some baby food.”
“Thank you,” says Rafael.
The Nugget Man breathes deeply, changes tack. “We are a family company,” he says warmly. “You play a role in that. Your dedication, your diligence—”
“Yes,” says Fabrice.
“—you show us how to behave, how to get things done.”
“I think of us more as a warning,” says Fabrice.
“How so?” says the Nugget Man.
“I have not been to a party in five years,” says Fabrice. “I am not a normal man.”
“But you know it,” says the Nugget Man. He is imperturbable. “That is important.”
“Are you ready to take a ride?” Rafael says to the Nugget Man. “Don’t go too fast for them.”
The Nugget Man laughs.
“Seriously,” says Rafael, looking at us but speaking for the benefit of the Nugget Man. “This guy is a proper cyclist. He could have been a pro, I think.”
“Not quite a pro,” says the Nugget Man. In his engagement with this claim I feel faintly embarrassed on his behalf.
Rafael leads the way out of the lounge, through tall glass doors, into the car park where the Butcher waits with three bicycles: Fabrice’s, my own, and another matching model in team colors.
“Your bike!” says Rafael to the Nugget Man. “I hope it fits.”
We pedal out onto the road. The Butcher follows us in the team car. Fabrice’s open mood of last night is gone. I suspect he is annoyed by the Nugget Man’s presence on this ride. Fabrice is accommodating until something encroaches upon his core concerns. Now he pedals sullenly, inside himself. He sits still on the saddle, his face set. The Nugget Man and I ride in front of him. The Nugget Man looks back at Fabrice occasionally. Fabrice’s uncharacteristically dark mood works in his favor: he is the champion and a certain strangeness is expected from him. “He’s so focused,” the Nugget Man says.
* *
Liz asked me about Fabrice’s romantic life after she had come to see us race in the spring. It seemed odd to her that I knew so little. He has had girlfriends since I’ve known him, but never for long, never apparently seriously. I have not met any of them. He has not confided to me a single thing about these relationships. “Is he repressing something?” Liz said. I told her that I didn’t think so. My hypothesis is that he simply doesn’t have the energy to give himself to loving. He is more of a fundamentalist than I, and he preserves all he can for racing. I think of my first months of knowing Liz, which felt so consuming to me. She exceeded human scale in my mind. I’d leave the house to cycle and trick myself into thinking I’d seen her passing in a car, or in the midst of a crowded shopping street, as I rolled along. The rides in those days were a torment. The possibility of her was everywhere. Her face seemed to dissolve in my memory as I thought of it, broken down by these misrecognitions. I began to fear I wouldn’t know her if I were to see her, that I would pass right by her. Fabrice is not a man for that kind of stress, that disorder, that lack of control.
* *
Fabrice, the Nugget Man, and I roll into the car park. The Butcher takes our bikes and shoos us toward the dining hall.
The Nugget Man eats as we do, looking around him all the while, smiling like a boy at his own birthday party. No one talks. At the end of the meal, Rafael comes over to me, swinging a set of car keys around a bony finger. “Liz has just got in,” he says. “Would it not be nice to go and see your wife?” He hands me a tracksuit. There is not time, it seems, to run up to my room. I put the tracksuit on over my riding kit. I take off my cycling shoes and my socks. I walk to the car barefoot.
We drive a short way around roundabouts, past supermarkets and DIY megastores. We pull into the car park of another hotel. “Here we are,” says Rafael.
We walk across the hot asphalt toward the hotel reception. I like the sensation against my bare soles: something deeply felt, near to pain. Every now and then I tread on a bit of gravel and this gnarls my posture for a second. Rafael catches my expression at one such moment. “At least look glad,” he says. “You being happy to see your family is our cover.”
“I am glad,” I say.
In the lobby Rafael asks for a surname that is not my wife’s, not my own. He is directed to the third floor.
The hallway upstairs is quiet, lit only by the windows at each end. The carpet is worn and sticky. Rafael counts off the rooms. “This is the one,” he says. He knocks and immediately after the knock I hear the sound of B’s excited gurgle. Liz opens the door holding B. She looks well, despite the long drive. Her hair is mussed. She has a small mole on the right side of her nose, near the tear duct. It gives her glance a minor asymmetry, which I like. In those days when I worried that I would not recognize her, I clung to the memory of that mole.
I embrace her and B. Their scents mix: her skin, his, baby powder, deodorant, a tang of sweat.
Rafael steps back to find a view by which to frame our meeting. “Pretend I’m not here,” he says. He waits awhile. “Behind every great man, as they say.”
“Are you okay?” Liz says. “You look tired.”
I nod. “Don’t I know it,” I say.
“He’s a soldier,” says Rafael. “Knock him down and he asks if it’s all you’ve got.”
&nb
sp; “I’m glad to hear that,” Liz says.
“I take care of my boys,” says Rafael, “like they’re my own God-be-damned family.”
“We just got in,” she says. “Do you want to hold him?” She hands me B. He is heavy, or I am tired, or both. I am gladdened by this surprise, though, and by his robustness, the way he shifts so much. There is a roving curiosity in him, a litheness antithetical to the self-possession of the tired, wary men I have been spending my time around.
“Look at that,” says Rafael. “That’s what it’s really all about. That’s why we do it all, isn’t it?”
B looks up at me happily. His head is inclined upward. A filament of spit drips from the edge of his mouth. His fat hands clasp at my jacket.
“Wow,” says Rafael. “What a sight. It warms the heart and all of those things. If only we could stay all day. I think, though, you have something for us, no? A little gift, shall we say, from a friend of ours?”
Liz turns and walks to the back of the room. We follow her. B’s romper suits are spread around on top of a dresser, Liz’s clothes folded and piled next to them. She unplugs a blocky machine by the window. She wraps its power cord around it and hefts it into a roller suitcase, which she zips up and drags over to Rafael.
“What’s the machine?” I say.
“Portable freezer,” says Liz.
“It plugs into the little cigarette thing in the car,” says Rafael. “Amazing, no?” He looks at Liz. “You kept it on always?”
“Of course,” she says. “I can follow instructions.”
“You can,” says Rafael. “This is true. But you’d be surprised how many can’t.”
They both laugh and yet I am outside of this joke, suddenly angry.
The freezer is needed only for blood transfusions. The blood is mixed with various chemicals so that the cells within it do not simply burst on being frozen. I think of the little freezer chugging away in the car for Liz’s whole drive down here.
“You said it was just hormones,” I say to Rafael. “You said you wouldn’t ask her to carry blood.” I shift my grip on B, who is surprised for a moment, though he doesn’t cry.
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