* *
Rafael mentions the disqualification in his morning speech. “I’m shocked,” he says, as the bus huffs and sighs through traffic toward its parking space. “Truly. I have always had respect for that team. I always thought that they were professionals. But to fail a test in such a way? That is a real shame. It has not just harmed them, but all of us. We are all hurt by association. I have already had a call from our sponsors.” He tuts in an exaggerated manner.
At the start line the journalists are more agitated than usual. Fabrice and Rafael are immediately cornered by television crews.
I follow Fabrice. He gives a rueful smile. I watch him from behind the camera. “So,” he says, “I am out in the wind and the rain, riding myself into the ground, while I find that this guy prefers to just take a trip to the pharmacy. It leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.”
It is only later that I find Rafael sitting on a bench near the perimeter of the starting paddock. He holds a small cup of espresso, sniffs at it. “I’m worried about our plan,” I say, “given recent developments.”
Rafael looks up at me. He drinks the espresso. His nose twitches. He slides along the bench and indicates that I should take a place next to him. He waits for me.
“We can’t do it now,” I say.
“What?”
“The plan.”
“You think I have not made these calculations?” says Rafael. “The bankers’ situation is a decoy, if anything. The heat is on them. They have been very foolish. I do not like to say this, but they let this happen to them. Nobody wanted this to happen. They have been very sloppy.” He taps his empty espresso cup on the cast iron arm of the bench. “The plan was good before. The plan is good now.”
“It doesn’t feel good.”
“What is most dangerous about descending?” Rafael says. He studies my expression. “Braking suddenly. Chickening out. Hesitation.”
* *
I walk back to the bus. I watch Fabrice. He slips his team tracksuit off slowly, every movement cautious, his expression vacant. When he has stripped to his riding kit though, he steps onto the trainer and begins cycling as smoothly as he ever has. He does not wince or work his way into his pedaling. He simply starts. That is Fabrice, I think. He can draw lines in his experience, choose to leave behind disappointments and discomforts. Where I would feel fate pressing heavily upon me, he can, with an act of will, decide things will be well.
I am called to warm up. I strip off my tracksuit. I start riding on the trainer next to Fabrice. He turns to me. “Two parachutists leave a plane,” he says. “One thousand meters above the ground, one of them asks if maybe they should open their chutes. ‘No,’ says the other, ‘wait.’ At six hundred meters, the first man asks the same thing. ‘Wait,’ he’s told again. At two hundred meters the answer’s still ‘Wait.’ At fifty meters it’s the same.”
“Right,” I say.
“Finally, at ten meters from the ground, the first man says, ‘Surely we should open our chutes?’ ”
Fabrice stops pedaling. The flywheel of the trainer fizzes. “ ‘Why?’ says the second man. ‘We’ve been doing fine so far.’ ”
* *
I find a chair and sit for a few minutes trying to compose myself. People move past me, mounting their bikes, grabbing energy gels, water bottles, or good luck tokens before they leave for the line. I will do this race, I think, and then I will return home with Liz and my son. I think of the house, of that back room of mine, of the summer only half done.
My phone rings. It is Liz. I hear the sound of a car in the background. “I’m going there,” she says. “I have a missed call from you. Things are okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “I suppose.”
Perhaps I want her to pick up on my reluctance, but she does not. She is focused, and maybe this is for the best. “Did you call me for any reason?” she says.
I pause. “Not particularly,” I say. I could tell her, I think. I could say. But why?
“You’ll do well,” she says. “I’ll do well.”
The Butcher arrives holding a plastic tray. We put our personal items into the tray, which is then placed securely onto the bus for the duration of the race. He looks at me and shakes it. The objects in it rattle together. A photo of a young child, smiling on a sunny beach, shifts amidst watches and jewelry. I say good-bye to Liz and drop my phone into the tray. “Good luck,” says the Butcher.
Before we head toward the line, Rafael puts his arm around Fabrice, who stands on his bicycle. He whispers something into Fabrice’s ear. He looks at me and Sebastian. “Hard to believe,” he says, “but I envy you boys.”
* *
Despite concern for Fabrice’s health, there is an anticipation among our team at the start. We are into the last set of mountain stages, those that will decide the race at large. There are only so many of these days in a career, and today I have the sense that others are ruminating on this fact. We are nostalgic in real time. I see Tsutomo looking at the assembled fans as we wait to set off from the line. There is a slight smile on his face, and I think I have some idea of what preoccupies him. To get to this place, we have needed to have such focus upon our sport, and yet even a long career will be just a fraction of any ordinary lifespan. I am not blind to the absurdity of this job, to the inessentiality of all this carnival. And yet in the years after this, whatever I choose to do, I will be lucky to win a tiny part of the acclaim I enjoy now, to experience even a small portion of the excitement that I feel coursing around this gang of skinny men of which I am a part.
Since I first held B in my arms, I have wondered what I will be to him. I will be done with this career by the time he is grown. I can visualize him in fifteen years, say, as a slight boy with a mop of Liz’s hair and that same acute expression of his, and yet I cannot put myself into the picture.
Perhaps the fact is just that this point will be approached step by step, that I will not change suddenly but remake myself in increments. That is, after all, how I have lived with B so far.
In those first months in which Liz returned to work, when I would train early in the morning and then care for B for the rest of day, we would often ride the train into the city. I would carry him in a pack on my front. I learned to move differently with him, warned by the looks of strangers when I rushed too quickly through a crowd or jumped onto a train just before the closing of the doors. I took him to churches, not because I am religious, but because they were calming places, because his wide eyes seemed to predispose him to appreciating monumental structures.
I took him, for instance, to the church of Saint Stephen Walbrook. We cut through the lunchtime crowds on Cannon Street and then up a smaller alley, to the doorway into the church. We went up the steps and then into the great space inside that was disarmingly empty. There was just a single elderly woman standing in a waxed jacket and gazing up into the dome. She looked at us and I carried B forward as I lifted him a little in his harness so he could truly see. The quantity of light that Wren’s design could draw from the gray London sky astounded me. The shapes of the arches and details of the dome above appeared as if they’d grown from bone. I considered what effort it must have taken men working with their hands, what attention they must have exerted. The old woman made that kind of face people make for babies, and B gawped, happy in that moment. Then she looked back at the dome and then back at me, in a manner that seemed to ask, Aren’t we lucky to be here, now, just the three of us? I looked back silently in agreement, filled with that renewing pleasure bought on by a place so apart from its surroundings, a wonder found so close to home.
* *
The start of the race is announced over the PA system. We riders shift into a position to begin, pedals at ten o’clock, calves flinching. Then the horn sounds, and we set off. We climb away from the start line bunched together. Television motorbikes ride in front of us, pulling ahead and then dropping back with coughs of their exhausts. The helicopter has peeled off to put us in context against the
sprawl of the town we have just left.
The pace settles. At first we talk about Eric. The bankers ride in a group at the rear of the pack, conferring among themselves, monitored with interest by the rest of us (though not necessarily without sympathy).
We descend for a time, and on the first bend the whisper of applied brakes arises, as coordinated as any orchestra. I ride next to Fabrice. I ask how he is. He nods at me, looks forward, his face empty.
As we begin to make our way up a valley though, people pull alongside Fabrice and offer him their anxiety dreams. He plays his part. He is deliberate. What I see as discomfort, other riders regard as calculation. A rider from an Eastern European team asks about a dream in which he wished to go out cycling but couldn’t find any shorts. “Inadequate reasons conceal unconfessed motives,” says Fabrice. Another rider wants to know about a dream in which he was trapped in a thick snowstorm walking endlessly toward a light that moved as he approached. Fabrice thinks. “You want to lead your team,” he suggests. One of the bankers even arrives and describes a dream where he prepared an elaborate dinner for himself. “This is an innocent dream,” says Fabrice. He spits high into the wind above the peloton.
When I am able to talk discreetly with Fabrice, I counsel him to preserve his energy, to not give too much of himself away with all this speculation. He tells me that he is in control, however. He says that holding court as he is doing can only serve to communicate his confidence to his rivals.
The stage has four high passes and a mountaintop finish. As we begin our ascent of the day’s second climb, one of the other team leaders, a climbing specialist, sprints away from the group. Fabrice, needing to preserve his proximity to the leaders, is compelled to join the chasing group. Over the radio, Rafael tells me to go with Fabrice. Tsutomo also makes the break with us, moving away from all those riders behind who are set on grinding up these mountains, merely enduring the stage.
“Enjoy it, boys,” Rafael says.
* *
On the inclines we are silent. Our lungs need ever more air and our legs fill with heaviness. The crowds shout us rabidly up the hills. On the busiest parts of the climbs, hands extend from the side to pat our backs, to push us a little, or merely to make contact. Our small group of chasing riders works together efficiently. Each rider is guarded now. When I do talk to Fabrice or Tsutomo, I sense our companions taking note.
Fabrice eats pills: painkillers, anti-inflammatories. He is dosed heavily. He pedals in leaden circles. His eyes show little. I myself have taken pills provided by the Butcher, though fewer than Fabrice. My skin still feels ragged. I can still sense where my bandages rub against me.
“How do you feel?” I say to Fabrice.
“I feel almost nothing,” he says.
“You’re a perfect cyclist,” I say.
“Maybe,” he says, “but a certain amount of pain in a race is important, like scratching an itch.”
“When they wear off,” I say, “you’ll get your pain.”
“I know,” he says, “but that is not the right way. I like to accumulate it.”
* *
We all know the young man out ahead of us. He’s a media darling: short and skinny with slow, gentle eyes. He has a propensity for ill-fated breaks from the peloton, which is one of the elements of his appeal. He likes karaoke and has attracted publicity with this predilection. It is only in front of the microphone and in the mountains that his facade of gentleness is broken. He seems to believe he is better suited to the hills than anyone else, and though we know that he has previously overestimated himself, the rest of us are wary of the day he will achieve what he has set out to do.
At a flat section, I pull back to the team car to collect water. The window buzzes down. Rafael begins the slow charade of passing bottles. I stop pedaling and my freewheel mechanism hums. “How is it going?” Rafael says. The Butcher is driving. Rafael waits.
“Okay,” I say. I put a bottle into the pocket of my jersey, take hold of another.
“We’ve been running calculations,” says Rafael. “You’re going to make the catch in the next hour. Present conditions persisting. At the pace he’s going it’s impossible.”
“Physiologically impossible,” the Butcher adds with satisfaction.
We climb up another bare mountainside. Ski lifts loom on the horizon. The fans around the road here have slept in tents and caravans and then waited all day. They wear baseball caps thrown out by the parade of sponsors’ vehicles. They ring cowbells.
The sun is intense. I take a bottle of water proffered by a fan and pour it over my head. Fabrice chews on his lip. Ahead of us, the television motorbikes sound their horns to clear fans from the road.
We catch the stage leader just before the summit of the climb.
When he turns to see us on the road behind him, he slows to let our group catch him. However, he does not let us leave him. He sits and pedals smoothly, staying in the midst of our group. He is wearing no gloves and a chunky golden ring on his little finger. Fabrice nods at him, and the man nods back cordially with an expression far more relaxed than his time out ahead should allow. Fabrice looks at me, a pantomimed surprise in his expression.
We freewheel down into the valley, through villages. People stand pressed to the side of the tarmac, against the walls of their houses, to accommodate our velocity. Dogs bark from gardens.
We do not pay much attention to anything but the wobbles of our front wheels beneath us. We think about cornering as smoothly as possible. We think about the positions of other riders behind and ahead of us, seeking to prevent our paths from conflicting.
The road flattens. Other teams push up the pace. I ride with Fabrice. His jaw is set. His legs move steadily. I note the slightest tension in the way he holds his handlebars. The fingers of his healthy left hand grip the bar tape firmly. His nails are tiny ellipses on nubby fingers, emerging from fingerless gloves and pressed until red against the grips. I see the way he places the heel of his right palm on the bars, not gripping around them. There are shouts ahead, warnings conveyed with waved hands. Fabrice swerves around a pothole. A pain squirms through his posture as he does this. It is so subtle that I do not think anyone else sees it. “Good?” I say.
“Good,” he says.
The agricultural machinists move to the head of our small group: four of them. Three of them take turns on the front. The fourth man, their leader, sits just behind in their slipstream. They are pushing toward the base of the penultimate ascent, trying to tire the rest of us before we are even climbing in earnest. “An offensive move,” says Rafael over the airwaves. “Endure it.”
The road begins to steepen. The crowd is denser and louder. The machinists still work, infernally rotating. Logically, of course, they will have to crack before the finish. Struggling to stay with them, however, witnessing their coordination, I feel this is impossible. Fabrice rides behind me. We move at around thirty kilometers per hour, but I think, most of all, of my location in relation to his: his front wheel rolling along the road, moving in tiny increments toward and away from my own rear wheel.
Ahead of us, one of the machinists reaches his limits. He pulls off from the group, drops a gear, and sits back on his saddle as we pull past him. I am pushing through my lactate threshold, toward oxygen debt. “Red,” says Rafael through the radio. “You’re going red.”
I hold on. I do not look at Fabrice. I feel him behind me. He is following, hanging on himself.
The pace rises again. The group of three machinists splits. Two more drop from the front. Only their leader stays at the head of the pack, just behind new pacemakers from other teams. Looking back at the men dropping off, my eyes move onto Fabrice. He is pallid. He sits lopsided on his saddle. He reaches into a pocket, pushes something between his lips. “Good?” I mouth. He just nods. The road straightens. I can see it stretching ahead of me, then far away twisting into a steep corner. I stand on the pedals, change a gear, then shift again. I sit. I stand. For the immediate future, th
ese small changes put off my collapse. They will not for long, however. I have no idea how much Fabrice feels.
The space between the rear wheel of the rider ahead and my own front tire increases by a couple of centimeters. I look to my right to see Fabrice standing on his pedals and moving past me. He knows before I do. I feel bile rising in my esophagus. I am done. I cannot hang on. Other riders pass me: the leaders, the climbers, only a few domestiques. The back of the group approaches. Gaps between riders increase: centimeters, then meters. The last of the group struggle to keep pace. They dangle from the mass of riders, flutter fitfully in its wake. Then I am passed by the last rider of the group. He will also be dropped, but for an instant he too stands in one final, futile effort; he straightens his back, rocks on the handlebars. Then, tiring, he slows, pushing his pelvis forward, locking his arms, seeking some position in which to rest his muscles. I am behind him now by twenty meters. I will not win this distance back, even against him. “Keep it up, Fabrice,” says Rafael over the radio.
I ride alone. I am passed by other riders. Eventually I settle with a small group who ride determinedly toward the finish. I stay with them up the last climb. Through my earpiece, I hear Rafael all the while encouraging Fabrice. Without injury, this might have been a day for Fabrice to make gains, but I can hear in the way Rafael talks that he is now expecting something else: only that Fabrice does not let his rivals get any further away. “Close this out,” he says. “Do not let the fucks fuck with you.”
At the last some riders attempt to break from the leading group. They go, one at a time: bursting, being caught, bursting again. I surmise all this from the cries of Rafael through my earpiece. Fabrice is left grinding on. “A little more,” says Rafael. “Just a little more.” I hear the roar of the crowd at the finish up above me as the leading riders fight for victory in the stage. Fabrice loses only twenty seconds. I still have a couple of kilometers to pedal to the line. I keep making my way up amidst others who have been dropped. I pass fans on the last corner before the finish, who hold a large sign that reads “Drug takers go to hell.” I am riding with one of the bankers, and these fans jeer him in response to all the business of the morning. They cheer loudly for those riders coming behind us though. Their voices are hoarse from all the shouting they did as the leaders passed them, from their thrilled reaction to all those improbable final surges.
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