We Begin Our Ascent

by Joe Mungo Reed

  “We won’t do it,” I say.

  “We’d microdose,” he says. “A twelve-hour glow time. You’ve been tested just two days ago. The risks are negligible. These things are for recovery, to give Fabrice a little assistance in this tough time.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “You’ve had your moments on this tour. You’ve surprised me. Don’t think I didn’t see that spell out front you took. You’re on form. You could be someone important in this race. It would be a shame to see you fall away for a lack of preparation.”

  “I don’t want my wife involved,” I say.

  “I am no expert on love,” says Rafael, “but it seems you are very often talking for Liz. She has her own motivations. She knows her own capabilities.”

  “She is being dragged into this stuff.”

  “She told me you would react like this.”

  I wince again. Rafael notices. He lets it pass. “You talked to her?” I say.

  “Just now,” he says. He smiles. “Your son has been—what did she say?—grouchy today. She is at the loose end. She is a clever woman. She needs stimulation.”

  “I need to talk to her,” I say. I stand from the computer chair with difficulty.

  “Exactly,” says Rafael. “That is what I would suggest.”

  * *

  I climb upstairs into the lobby, pass by the polish and the tile and the glass, the hard public voices ringing around the space. The pain in my hip stabs. I feel my grazes abraded by the bandage. I walk out of the sliding doors into the early evening and pace the asphalt of the hotel car park, waiting for my phone to connect. The sun is still up, the air warm, the sky clear of cloud.

  “You spoke to Rafael and didn’t tell me?” I say.

  I have gone too quickly and she takes a beat to register my anger, to reply. “He said he was going to talk to you after the call,” she says. Her voice has a gummy, tired quality. “The man has momentum.”

  “He’s full of shit.”

  “But I know that,” she says. “Do you not think I know that?” She sighs. “I did well last time. We got paid. You’re in his good books. We’re here.”

  “This new thing is so sudden,” I say. I walk past lines of parked cars. I brush my hand against the body of a black BMW, warmed by the sun, the temperature of a living thing.

  “He’s explained the plan. It’s not even blood. I can manage it,” she says.

  “But you don’t have to.”

  “If I pass, he uses one of his own men. The man I met at the motorway stop, who gave me the freezer, had the worst comb-over. He was picking wax out of his ear as he talked to me. I could just see a policeman taking interest in that kind of man.”

  “Maybe he will just give up,” I say.

  “But I think he’s right that the team needs to finish strongly,” says Liz. “Your world ranking is dodgy. The sponsors will not be happy. The team finances are not exactly balanced.”

  On the other side of the car park, a van reverses, bleating out a warning as it does so. I wait for the sound to cease. “How do you know all this?” I say.

  “I talk to people,” she says. “I work this stuff out. I am interested. They need the finishing bonuses to pay you all. They need to get Fabrice across the line. This is a decision that affects the whole team: Sebastian, Tsutomo, the funny little guy with the beard. This isn’t such a simple decision.”

  “You don’t need to be concerned by all that,” I say.

  “Why not?” she says.

  “This is Rafael’s business.”

  “And so yours, and so mine.”

  “But we don’t have to be involved in it.”

  “I’m here,” she says. “Just know that. I am eager to help you.”

  I wait a second. Though the day’s rain has dried off the car park, the smell of damp earth comes from the flowerbeds that surround the asphalt.

  “He called you?” I say.

  “Yes,” she said. “He called and tried to exercise charm.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I listened.”

  “You believed him?”

  “I am not unaware that he can be manipulative.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m coming to see you,” she says. “Let’s talk about this face-to-face.”

  * *

  When I return to the room, Fabrice is still in bed. He sits up, propped up with pillows. His arm is in its sling. He watches me enter the room. “Okay?” I say.

  He widens his eyes in silent laconic response.

  I think of his shuffling toward the team car in the hospital car park earlier in the day. “It hurts?” I say.

  “It’s bearable,” he says. “The Butcher is coming.”

  I change into clothes that do not bear the team name or logo. I pull a pair of jeans over my wounded legs with some difficulty. I look at Fabrice sitting in bed. He looks dazed. He feels my eyes upon him. He flinches back into alertness. Perhaps Rafael is right, and Fabrice will be able to hold on until the end of the race.

  Yet that scant possibility is not what Fabrice has trained so long for. I think of dull days lived not for their own sake but for the light that will be cast back upon them by success, of rituals, exercises, and personal strictures justified only by victory. Success or failure can bleed through time, making periods of our lives good or bad after the fact. The past year has run away from him in a moment, and I see this fact on his face, in his uncommon stillness, in his hollow gaze.

  “I’m going out,” I say.

  He nods stiffly. “Yes,” he says.

  I close the door quietly behind me. I ride down to the hotel lobby in the elevator. I stand outside the hotel and wait for the family car to loom out of the dusk.

  * *

  We park on a shuttered shopping street. We seek a bar instead of the hotel café, for reasons of privacy, and subtlety and distance. The first bar we try is too busy. Patrons and staff turn their interested faces as we enter. The bar on from that is also crowded. The Tour is felt here, inescapable, a frisson to a Tuesday night. We carry B in his car seat. We walk toward the old town center, down narrower, cobbled streets; past the town museum, town hall, and church. Here the restaurants seek tourists. A man standing outside a bistro, smoking a cigarillo, waves. “Come in,” he says. “It’s a good place.”

  Liz shifts her grip on B’s seat. “We’re not eating,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “It’s a good place. It’s perfect.”

  He is improbably correct. The bistro is empty. I watch Liz, try to gain a sense of her mood, take a cue from her. The radio is playing loudly: eighties hits, ballads, drive-time, Yamaha synths. “I make it quieter?” says the waiter.

  “Please no,” says Liz.

  He looks puzzled by her vehemence. She wears a summer dress and a red woolen cardigan. She wears a dark lipstick I would not have expected her to put on. We both order glasses of wine which we will not drink. She reaches across the table, holds my arm, and rolls up my sleeve to where my elbow is grazed. She is precise in her movements, yet gentle. She studies the broken skin silently. “Does it hurt?” she says.

  “A little,” I say.

  “You have been strong,” she says. “You’ve looked good this tour.”

  “Did Rafael tell you that?”

  “This is me,” she says, quietly. She begins to roll down my sleeve again, taking it slowly, being careful to not drag my clothing across the graze. “This is me talking to you. I’m doing it for you. Maybe for myself, a little, but no one else.”

  She lets go of my arm, sits back. The music thumps on. The waiter moves toward our table. He looks at our untouched drinks. “It’s okay?”

  “It’s okay,” says Liz. The waiter leaves. “You’re not having much luck on this tour,” she says.

  “No,” I say.

  “I could pick something else up for you.” She winks.

  “What?”

  “A shipment of horseshoes? Four-leaf clovers?”

&nbs
p; Her expression hangs suspended. I laugh. She does too then. I laugh more than the joke could possibly justify. I am giving up something, letting go. I feel tired by this laughing. B beats a chubby hand against the side of his baby seat. The waiter regards us with satisfaction from across the room.

  I have worried about Liz being beguiled by Rafael, by his claustrophobic certainty, but perhaps his power over others is as much a projection of mine as anything. For her he may be just another silly man, obsessed with this small strange sport. She is too sharp, I think, too tuned to the absurdity of this world.

  * *

  B sleeps in his seat in the rear of the car when we drive back. I think of the pleasure of journeys in childhood, when I would arrive somewhere late at night, snoozing in the back, barely waking to murmurs and streetlights and my mother’s hands, redolent of cigarettes, lifting me from my seat. Liz stops and drops me at the hotel. There is no moon. We say good-bye in whispers. The car drives quietly back into the night.

  I pass through the lobby of the hotel. The restaurant area is empty but for the Butcher. He sits at a table with a coffee, surrounded by papers. Around him, the hotel staff are already cleaning up, spraying disinfectant onto tables, counting out pieces of cutlery for breakfast. A waiter turns off a bank of ceiling lights, and now only the Butcher’s table and the two next to it are lit. He sees me. “You want to see the profiles?” he says. There are papers in front of him: printouts of highways, photographs of roads, elevation maps. He is studying the terrain of the coming stages.

  “Why not?” I say.

  He passes me a couple of the elevation profiles and a map. The route is marked in red on the map: a line squiggled through the mountains, calligraphy in a script I do not know.

  “A hard couple of days,” says the Butcher, “coming up.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I scan the elevation profiles as a musician might a score, looking for patterns, difficulties, places where I might excel. The climbs are mostly steep, staccato, not the longer, more gradual ascents on which I tend to do well. I feel them in my stomach. I consider the climbs, the point at which they will begin to feel unbearable. I think of the creak of cranks, the whisper of a tire rolling over a patch of gravel. I wonder how I will feel tomorrow. My consciousness roams around my body.

  “Are you ready?” says the Butcher, as if he can hear my thoughts. I nod impulsively, but following that comes the sense that this assent is true. I am not beyond cracking under pressure, but also, just occasionally, I have found myself racing without doubt, pushing unencumbered to my limit. I feel that that will be the case in these coming days. It is so simple, after all. It is just a question of riding as fast as I can, of closing down concerns. I imagine standing up on the pedals and beginning to move away from other riders, pushing into the hill and hurting those who try to follow me. For a moment, the image seems more vivid than this dark café, the grumble of the commercial dishwasher in the kitchen, the car lights raking the windows.

  I am not like Fabrice. I do not love it all. That is not me, and I have come to know it. I am another type of person. I like results, and I am good at deferring gratification. I am good at waiting, at directing my energies. This is my temperament, and it has forged me as surely as all of Fabrice’s zest and energy have made him. I know that minutes I do not enjoy can be built toward moments that I do. That is all. My career has been built incrementally, through schedules and planning, by faith in my preparation.

  I hand the Butcher back his maps, leave him sitting in the empty restaurant with half a cup of cold coffee. I walk out the front door of the hotel, into the night—the chirp of crickets in foliage, the night wind, the sound of a car horn—and call Liz. “You should do it,” I say.

  “You want me to?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “I do.”

  Chapter 11

  In the morning I listen to Fabrice in the bathroom. I hear him cough and retch. Normally I would not be so attentive to these noises. We each make a rough job of putting ourselves together each day. Today, though, I am eager for signs of Fabrice’s health. He comes out of the bathroom shirtless. His shoulder is strapped with blue medical tape; he has grazes around his elbow. He holds his arm against the bottom of his sternum. He smiles at me, and I sense the effort behind this smile.

  “Did you dream?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “I dreamt.”

  He goes over to his open suitcase and stands, studying the kit folded within it.

  “You’re riding today?” I say. I know the answer to my question, but I want to hear him affirm it.

  He smiles ruefully. “It’s the mountains,” he says. “Today was always going to be painful.”

  I think of something he said when I was riding my first race for the team. It was an early-season event and I was struggling. I was blowing off the back of the group, and then, unprecedentedly, Fabrice appeared next to me. I complained about not having the necessary fuel in my legs, about not being ready for the day. He listened. “Consider only how you feel, not why,” he said. He stood on his pedals and accelerated toward the head of the race.

  I hunkered into my bike and tried to really pin down the nature of my discomfort and weakness, and, as I imagine he had suspected, I found that I could not. There was just the race, the road, and those ahead of me. There was nothing to prevent me from staying with those men, only the worry that I would not be able to do so. I retreated from the bleating of my own consciousness. I hung on, made it to the finish with the main group. The technique has not always worked for me, but it did then.

  Now Fabrice sits on the edge of his bed in his boxer shorts. He looks at the wall ahead of him. “I’m going to breakfast,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. He does not shift his stare.

  * *

  The breakfast room is at the rear of the hotel. Outside, a man on a large lawn mower is trimming the grass. He steers with the heel of his hand on the wheel, swinging the mower around with a fierce fluency at the end of each run. The lightest flotsam of cut grass is cast over the gravel paths.

  I arrive earlier than the other riders. A waiter carries a tray of pasta from the kitchen. He looks at the pasta and then back up at me, as if I am the sole cause of such a culinary-temporal abomination.

  As the waiter moves away, I approach the buffet table and smell in his retreat a faint odor of cigarettes mixing with the scents of banana and cut oranges, and in this a memory of my parents: the morning, the old hanging lamp over the kitchen table, my mother washing dishes, my father talking loudly as he hurried to leave the house.

  I mix muesli, fruit, milk, yogurt, pasta, and scrambled eggs in a large bowl and take a solitary seat at the table.

  When I have been eating for a couple of minutes, Fabrice walks stiffly into the room. He gives a brief smile. He pulls out the chair opposite me. He sits himself down gingerly. “Have you heard about Eric?” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “Slovenian Eric,” he says, “who rides for the bankers.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “They say,” he says, “that he has been taking performance-enhancing drugs.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The news channels, the journalists, the race stewards.” The news animates him. He leans forward, despite himself; a wince betrays his shoulder injury, his momentary forgetting of it.

  “How do you know?”

  “Rafael called me when I was leaving the room. You had gone.” He points to the jumble in my bowl. “You were mixing this up.”

  The waiter returns to place a coffeepot on the table.

  “It’s shocking and saddening,” says Fabrice.

  The waiter leaves again.

  “Are you worried?” I say.

  “I am shocked. The bankers are diligent.” He has an energy he didn’t have up in the room. The intrigue, the game of it, has given him something.

  “Do you know the substance?” I say. “Do you know how they got him?”

 
Fabrice exhales. “That is not for us to worry about.” I hear the ding of the arriving elevator. The doors of the breakfast room open and a number of the team enter at once. The Butcher and Rafael are conversing together. Rafael looks up, feeling our gazes upon him, and winks.

  * *

  On the way back to my room I see Marc. “Have you heard?” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “About the guy taking drugs.”

  “Sorry?” I say. Marc is the kind of man that even I can lie to.

  “A guy on the German team was caught taking drugs,” says Marc. He reaches a hand up and fingers the thinning island of hair at the front of his head. “I don’t think he is necessarily the only one.”

  “Really?” I say.

  He leans toward me. “Trust me. I have my suspicions.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see,” I say. He touches the bandage he wrapped around my forearm the previous day. “It needs to be changed?” I say.

  “No.” He keeps his eyes on it. “It’s good.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “A pleasure to be of assistance,” he says.

  When I return to my room, Fabrice is elsewhere. The news is playing at a low volume on the hotel television. There is a picture of Eric, then footage of the Germans riding together in the race. I put my personal things, my clothes and vitamins, into my bag. I have time to really consider the news then. Across town, in another hotel, another man is packing up, his career possibly at its end. His name will be struck through on starting rosters, removed from the classification. The dope men have come for him, and then Liz, today, will do what she has promised Rafael. I pick up my phone and call her. It runs to voice mail though, and I end the call.

  I go to the bathroom, and when I return, the news has moved on. The price of milk is at an unprecedented low. It is unclear whether the minister for the interior will resign after having been caught offering government contracts for personal gain. I try to find comfort in the quickness with which the world can swallow our misdeeds.