We lie cowering. We wait. Someone puts a hand on my back. We hear the television helicopter hovering above us. We hear those riders lucky enough to evade us zipping past. There can be no more, surely. There is a momentary stillness before we all try to stand.
Our standing is a trauma in itself. We are covered with each other’s bodies and bikes. We push bikes off us and onto other people. We bump into each other and tread on still-prone riders as we climb upright. The pain too, begins to register. I feel the rawness of my upper right leg and an intense pain in my pelvis. I find my bike. Fabrice stands crouched as if trying to keep his weight off one leg. His left knee is cut deeply, blood flowing in lines around the kneecap. Tsutomo’s arms are grazed and the shoulder of his team jersey ripped into tatters. We’re each standing though, unlike others behind us. We have to make it to the finish, we know. We do not linger. Treatment, assessment of our injuries, can wait. The adrenaline of the accident can be used in our progress to the finish. This has happened before and will again. We remount our bikes unsteadily and begin to pedal. Our bikes click and complain, their gears having been knocked out of adjustment by our falls, but we are up and rolling. Around us, other riders struggle to do the same. A zombie peloton of cyclists, lacerated and bleeding, reforms for the last two kilometers.
At the line, Marc is a man transformed. We are battered and cut up and neither we nor Rafael can deny his help any longer. He awaits us at the bus. He bends his tall frame over and looks at each of us in turn. He puts on new latex gloves for these inspections and sheds them at the end. They pile at his feet like a glossary of sign language terms. He presses at our injuries. He asks questions. He talks to us with an off-handedness that his usual meekness would not permit. Marc makes calculations of urgency and risk. He attends to Fabrice first of all, and when he has done so, prompts our team leader to sit in a canvas chair, an ice pack pressed onto his shoulder.
My thigh hurts acutely. I see people looking at the point where my shorts have been ripped open. The strands of lycra curl away from the wound like a burnt outer layer of skin. Tsutomo stands silently next to me. The Butcher regards us. “I’ve got some job tonight,” he says.
Johan comes past. “You look like shit,” he says. He is changed into a tracksuit already. “Seventeenth,” he says, answering my look. He shakes his head. “But at least I missed your shit show.”
“That’s a consolation,” I say.
“Your man looks bad.” He points to Fabrice, slumped in his seat. “You might not be working as domestiques tomorrow. You might have no one to assist.”
“It’s a bit early to be saying that.”
“It’s not all bad. They could let you off the leash.” He reaches to pat me on the shoulder. “It’s the mountains. Get in a break, get some camera time, try for a stage win.”
“I’m here for Fabrice,” I say.
“I’m just saying,” says Johan. He moves off, back into the crowd.
Rafael emerges from the bus as I approach it. His hair is wet. The shoulders of his jacket are dark with rainwater. He looks at me and says, “And you a father?”
I nod.
He says, “You call that taking care?”
The crash didn’t originate with me. I was hit by another rider and he, probably, by another before that. The TV stations will surely analyze the footage, seeking to find a culprit. Short of a truly egregious mistake on anyone’s part though, we riders are as happy not knowing, remaining as superstitious as fishermen and attributing the crash to fate, to something in the wind.
I shrug. “They took my front wheel down. You’ve been in the peloton. You know how it goes.”
“Just because somebody’s been a chef,” he says, “it doesn’t mean they like spit in their soup.”
“It was random,” I say.
“You could have moved him forward earlier,” he says. He stalks off toward Marc.
* *
The bus is overwarm even in this rainy weather, the windows fogged. I take a seat next to Tsutomo. The pain in my leg sears. I try to visualize it, to imagine it as a red shape slowly turning a cool blue. “Shit day,” says Tsutomo. Rafael returns to the bus to speak to the Butcher, who sits just in front of us. Marc and the race doctors want Fabrice taken to the hospital to be x -rayed and CAT-scanned. Rafael is suspicious, convinced of neither the severity of the injury nor the notion that the hospital can do more good than he and the Butcher.
The atmosphere quietly intensifies. Around us other team buses depart. We are creatures of routine and we feel instinctively that we should be elsewhere. It is time for massages, for our return to the dim rooms of the hotel. The vehicle’s engine is running to power the lights: a stultifying rhythm which promises progression but never builds.
My phone rings. It is Liz. “Hi,” I say.
“You’re alive?” she says. “That looked nasty.”
“I’m okay,” I say. “Torn up. Living, though.”
“We watched all the replays on the TV.”
“You know what happened better than I do.”
“Perhaps,” she says. “A rider went too wide around the corner ahead of you, hit a barrier.”
“There you go,” I say. “Rafael says we should have been farther ahead in the group, that we should have missed the crash.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t,” she says. “We watched it again and again: the skid, the collisions, the ruck of you all going down. I watched it so often I’m surprised I don’t have grazes myself.”
* *
Eventually Rafael accedes. He directs the bus driver to return the rest of us to the hotel. As he is about to descend from the bus, he turns to Tsutomo and me. “You boys might as well come too,” he says.
We walk toward the team car, past technicians dismantling the finish area scaffolding and rolling up the kilometers of wires required for broadcasting. A man deflates a giant yellow kangaroo—a promotion for an Australian energy drink—by stamping against its collapsing hide. What air is left in the inflatable causes the kangaroo’s head to rise with each stamp, its large cartoonish eyes seeming to seek witnesses to this assault.
Fabrice is already seated in the back of the car, looking pale. “You okay?” I say. Tsutomo and I slide onto the rear seats next to him.
He holds out his hand, palm down, and flutters it. “Sore,” he says. “You?”
I look at my own legs: the road grease, torn skin, and ripped lycra. Blood has run down my shins in thin lines, mixing with the dirt.
“Sore,” I say.
Tsutomo nods in agreement. “Sore,” he says, closing the circle.
* *
In the hospital Tsutomo and I are taken into different rooms and checked over. The doctor who examines me is a tall, slim woman. She tucks a graying strand of hair behind her ear as she talks. “A cyclist?” she says to me.
“Yes,” I say. I look down at my leg, above which her gloved fingers hesitate. “A dangerous sport,” I say.
“Tell me about it,” she says.
“Do you cycle?”
“No,” she says. “My son does.”
“Seriously?” I say.
“He’s ten,” she says. “He’s always falling off.”
She scrubs at the cuts with cotton wool soaked in iodine, staining the skin around them. She closes up lacerations with stick-on butterfly stitches. “Let’s check for major damage,” she says. She has me lie back on the treatment table and moves my leg back and forth in a motion that reminds me of somebody removing a drumstick from a cooked chicken. “Does this hurt?” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
She nods and moves onto the next leg. She asks again whether it hurts and I reply again that it does. “I don’t think anything’s broken,” she says.
“I told you it hurt,” I say.
“But you were not vehement,” she says.
I leave the doctor’s room and wait in a hallway with Tsutomo. We
sit on a plastic bench. Farther down the corridor a janitor mops slowly, moving away from us, backward, erasing his own footprints. Tsutomo fidgets, jogging his knees and clicking his fingers. He too has had his cuts cleaned and been pronounced only bruised. “I don’t like hospitals,” he says. He shuts his eyes.
Rafael comes out of a consulting room and sees us. “Idiots,” he says.
“Us?” says Tsutomo, opening his eyes again.
“No,” says Rafael. “The doctors. They’re encouraging Fabrice to abandon the race.”
The Butcher appears behind Rafael. “To consider abandoning,” he says.
“Why?” I say.
Rafael karate chops at his own shoulder in demonstration. “Fractured collarbone,” he says.
“We can probably stabilize it,” says the Butcher. “Then it’s just an issue of pain management.”
“We think they’ve underestimated him,” says Rafael.
“And us,” says the Butcher.
We are silent for a while. Rafael scuffs his shoe against the linoleum floor. “What about you boys?” he says.
“Soft tissue,” says Tsutomo.
“My hip hurts like hell,” I say. “The doctor wouldn’t consider anything beyond bruising.”
“Really?” says Rafael.
“She was quick and dismissive.”
“Is that so?” says Rafael, interested. “She did not take her time?”
“No.”
Rafael turns to the Butcher. “We should have directed Fabrice to that doctor. She sounds like less of a busybody.”
The Butcher nods.
A doctor comes out of the room and indicates that Rafael should follow him down the corridor in order to talk discreetly. “He’s a professional,” I hear Rafael say.
“There’s a lot of bureaucracy these days,” says the Butcher to Tsutomo and me.
“They sound worried,” I say.
“They’re doctors,” says the Butcher. “That’s their job, just like mechanics find problems with cars. We just need to manage his injury for a day or two, keep him out of trouble, let him ride it off.”
“You can ride off a fractured collarbone?” says Tsutomo.
“We’ll strap it,” says the Butcher. “Keep it still. We’ll give him some tablets.”
The doctor strides past us, back into the consulting room. Rafael wanders over. “Progress,” he says. “They’re letting us take him back to the hotel. I’ve told them we’ll likely withdraw him.”
“You will?” says Tsutomo.
“No,” says Rafael. “But these people worry. They deal with ordinary people, mostly old people. They do not know what you riders can”—he searches for the word—“tolerate.”
The doctor returns, followed by Fabrice. Fabrice wears a hospital tunic and has his arm strapped across his chest. He has on disposable paper slippers. His frail shuffle alarms me more than anything. I wonder whether it is pain or his sedation that causes him to move so deliberately. He smiles at Tsutomo and me, then shakes his head as if to say, What can you do?
“Over to us,” says Rafael.
The doctor nods slowly, gravely. He is a neat man, his peppery hair styled with precision. He waits with his hands behind his back. “He’s not going to sleep well tonight,” he says.
Rafael wags a finger proudly. “This is yet another area in which he is unusual. He is very good at resting. Also, we are very good at facilitating our riders’ sleep.” He points to Fabrice. “This man has a special pillow probably worth more than your TV.”
“This isn’t a problem solved with feathers,” says the doctor.
Rafael rubs his hands together. “Time to go,” he says. He looks at the doctor. “You can get back to your patients.” The doctor exhales and walks away, crossing the newly cleaned floor, taking a single weary glance back from the doorway of a consulting room before disappearing. Rafael moves to stand in front of Fabrice. “I know this is silly,” he says, “but if you could look strong, that would help. There might be journalists or fans around. We don’t want news spreading. We don’t want your competitors sensing weakness.”
Fabrice nods.
“How about we cover the arm?” says the Butcher. He takes off his team fleece and helps Fabrice into it, zipping the strapped arm inside the garment. It hangs in baggy folds around Fabrice’s torso, disguising the bulge of his elbow.
“What about this?” says Rafael, taking hold of the empty right sleeve.
There is a box of tissues on a small Formica table beside the bench on which Tsutomo and I sit. The Butcher pulls a succession of tissues from the box, balling them loosely and stuffing them into the sleeve. He pushes the end of the sleeve into the pocket of the hospital pajamas Fabrice wears. This false arm looks spindly and unconvincing. Fabrice is a cyclist though, whose real arms are as useless as a snowman’s. We all agree that the effect is good enough.
Chapter 10
I room with Fabrice again. When I come back from my massage, he lies in bed, the covers tucked up to his chin. He stares at the ceiling. His face is bloodless, that of a shop mannequin. He acknowledges me with the smallest movement of his head. I leave the room. His pain is more extensive than mine, something beneath which he has submerged himself, while the discomfort of my hip makes me itchy, restless. I have an urge to walk a little, to tease at the sensation, to break Rafael’s rules. The corridor is quiet, lined with pictures of trees. There is an arboreal theme: a green and brown carpet, the walls painted dark red.
I walk and find my way down to the hotel business center. It’s a windowless room, a square of desks running around the walls, six computers spaced between them, a large printer in the corner. Sebastian is the only person in the room. He looks up at me when I enter. He sits at a monitor, a long figure, a Modigliani, leaned back in his chair, his long right arm extended, stroking the mouse. He looks different in this situation. There is a grace to him, I think, when he is not contorted over a bicycle. He missed the crash, riding up ahead with Johan. “What are you doing?” I say.
He shrugs. “Not much. Financial news. I am learning about economics.”
“Yes?” I say.
“This career doesn’t go on forever, you know.”
“I know.”
“The Dow is up,” he says. He turns back to his screen.
I sit at a computer. Its screen is dark. I do not turn it on but instead fiddle with the office chair, pushing the lever to lower the chair with a whoosh of air. Another guest comes through the door. He looks at the two of us. He wears a crumpled cotton suit and has a press card on a lanyard around his neck. “Are you riders?” he says.
“What?” I say.
“Cyclists?”
“We’re businessmen,” I say.
“Is it true that your team leader is retiring tomorrow?” he says.
“We do business,” says Sebastian. “We just happen to be very skinny.”
“The Dow is up,” I say.
“It’s a good day for us,” says Sebastian.
The journalist shakes his head and leaves. I look back at the dark monitor.
A few minutes later, Rafael enters the room. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says. He looks at Sebastian. “What are you doing?” he says.
“The FTSE is up,” Sebastian says. “The DAX is down.”
“Go away,” says Rafael.
Sebastian stands and walks out of the room.
Rafael waits until the door of the room has swung shut. He sucks on his aniseed drop, swallows. He passes a hand through his hair. “I have some things to discuss,” he says.
“Yes?”
“Not for the first time, things are fucked.”
“I noticed,” I say. “Will Fabrice be okay to race?”
Rafael flaps a hand. “Yes, yes,” he says. “We just have to manage things correctly.”
“Yes?”
“It is, as they say, hairline. Also, we can compensate in other areas. You can help us.”
“I’m doing my best.”
<
br /> “Yes, yes,” says Rafael. “In other areas too.” He takes the chair at the computer next to me. He rotates to face me.
“What?” I shift in my chair and feel as I do a shock of pain from my hip.
He notes my expression, gives it time to pass. “We need more stuff,” he says. “The situation has changed. The situation is not as we predicted.”
“You’re shifting,” I say. “You said no blood, but she got blood.”
“Yes.”
“And now this?”
“It’s not much,” he says. “One extra treatment.”
“No,” I say.
Rafael shakes his head. His face is too close. I would give anything to punch it, but even now I am mindful of the consequences. He scratches his chin. His nail scrits against his slight stubble. The odd thing is that I believe he is aware of what I am thinking: both my desire to hit him and my inability to do so.
“Your wife makes a little trip, meets someone, sees a little more of the country,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Why us? Why not the others?” It is like a dream, I think, speaking with Rafael, the kind of dream in which one cannot move as one wishes, in which one is trapped in the wrong kind of body.
“You can do it,” he says. “You’re proven. It went well before.”
“The one time,” I say. “The one time because it was essential.”
“Exactly,” he says. “You are flexible. You can adapt to conditions. And now things are critical. We are unable to be losing Fabrice, to be dropping out of competition in the general classification. Fabrice is in the top ten. Perhaps he can even hold this position. Maybe I am wishful. I believe he is a little magic.” He sighs. “Our sponsorship situation is precarious; our world ranking is not a certain thing. We have three days of mountain stages coming up. I cannot tolerate a rider who does not do his best to prevent negative consequences.”
We Begin Our Ascent Page 15