We Begin Our Ascent

by Joe Mungo Reed

  I come around a switchback and there, improbably, is the banker who just dropped me. I approach him gradually, wondering whether he is slowing or I am accelerating.

  He looks back, grimaces. I am on him, then. I pass him. I ride ahead.

  I take a sip from my bottle. The sugar of the drink catches in my throat. I cough and spit.

  Rafael’s voice prickles through the team radio. “Okay,” he says, “down, down, down.” He addresses Fabrice, who is already over the peak and beginning to descend toward the finish. “No gaps,” says Rafael. “Keep it tight.”

  It’s a surprise, somehow, to be reminded that the race continues with such intensity ahead of us.

  “Hey,” says the banker again. He clicks up a gear and overtakes me. “Keep a pace,” he says. “Wake up.”

  Chapter 13

  We head toward the peak, over which the others have already gone. A couple of riders pass us. The fans, as usual, think us dispirited. They offer the standard affirmations of our ability, entreaties to push onward.

  As I stand to force myself over the last meters of the climb, the radio channel opens. “Crash,” says Rafael. “Crash on the descent.” I look to the banker, who seems to be getting the same notification in his own earpiece. He nods. He slows a little. Then we are passing under the inflatable arch that marks the summit, tipping over into the descent.

  The banker settles onto the drops of his handlebars, covering the brake levers with his forefingers. I do the same, tucking into his slipstream. He looks back at me. There is no need for us to go too quickly. We are no longer playing a competitive role in the stage, after all.

  The banker swings around a left switchback and then a right. We do one bend and then another, and I find myself seduced by the action, loosening. Riding as just two of us, I need not worry about cutting off others behind me, nor being caught up in the crashes of those just ahead. Riding becomes a work of geometry.

  The route drops into trees and begins to twist more sharply. We leave the dome of the peak and nose down into forest. The road coils. Just occasionally a view opens out and we can see into the yawn of the valley to our right. It is car-commercial scenery. Spectators, where they observe this section at all, stand in ones and twos on the inside of turns. They cannot really see us, so quickly do we pass, and the inessentiality of this descending to the spectacle of the sport makes it feel truer, cleaner.

  The banker rides ahead. Just occasionally he looks back to check that I still follow him. My bike moves under me, shaken by minor mechanical asymmetries, jogged by cracks in the road.

  Despite ourselves, we are speeding up. We take a sharp right hairpin and I wonder, in that moment, at the improbable hold of my tires to the tarmac. Finding a rhythm, we both rise out of that turn and immediately set ourselves for the next leftward switchback. In shifting the lean of the bike from one side to another there is a moment of lightness, a brief levitation. Then we are tucked down into the corner, traveling around it, coming out to a view of the valley below.

  It is as the road opens up ahead of us that we see the lights: red and flashing up the road, initially hard to locate, the flickering seeming like afterimages or the play of the sun between trees. As we approach, we see the race referee’s car pulled over, its lights going, motorbikes stopped, cameramen and journalists standing in the road. There are four team cars parked on the verge. My own team’s is there, the bankers’, a couple of others. I cannot pick out Rafael and the Butcher amidst the group. The helicopter is overhead, thumping a nervous pulse onto the scene. The banker and I slow to avoid all this. I can make nothing out of the hubbub arising from the men busy at the outside of the corner. Past the activity, fans are already walking up the hill to see what is going on, uninterested in myself or the banker.

  We carry on rolling, because we don’t know what else to do. We take another corner, and another after that, not flowing as we were before but maneuvering our way around, our engagement with the descent no longer instinctual. Then the banker slows further. He looks back at me, expecting something. I stare ahead, trying to shake off his glance and what it could entail. After an eternity, my own radio channel opens, carrying the news that the banker must have received already. “We’re at the crash site,” says Rafael. “Fabrice has gone off the edge of the road.”

  I pull on my brakes. The banker nods to me as he continues away. He’s in no hurry but has no reason to stop. The bike comes to a halt, and I stand. I look back up the hill. Off the road, I think.

  I feel shaky. I wonder whether what has been said can be true. There is a moment of dislocation from my surroundings. I look at my hands gripping the bars. I open one hand and turn it over, surprised, momentarily, to see my body respond to my will. The palm of my glove is grubby; my fingers are grease stained. On the back of my sense of shock arrives a rush, a desire to act. I am able to, I think. I have a seasick notion with it that perhaps I have waited for a moment like this. An old man walks up the hill from where he has been watching the race. He looks at me intently. I turn my bike until it faces back up the incline. Something is asked of me, I think. I step on my pedals and begin to ride up the hill.

  * *

  I pedal the wrong way. The support cars of other teams pass now. Other riders, behind me in the race and now coming down past me, do not pay me any notice. They are closing in their focus, trying to ignore those events they do not have the time to interpret, as I was until so recently. Perhaps they do not even see me.

  I am driven by a nervous energy. The fans I pass do not know how to acknowledge me. Some nod, some of them quietly applaud.

  The helicopter hovers near the crash site, and I can measure my progress up the hill by the intensification of the sound of the rotors.

  I think of Fabrice and imagine him, for some reason, lying on the road.

  All of us, I think, have our images of the crash: the one we fear will take us down permanently. For me, these revolve as nightmares. For other temperaments, I think, there is some theater about this scenario, some redeeming glamour. Though most would deny it, we have all found ourselves in darkened rooms, late at night, pawing at laptops, seeking coverage of the worst accidents: lifeless bodies laid out on the road, blood leaking from a head wound and spread by the last motion of the prone rider, like the mark of a large paintbrush dragged lazily. “The head is where the blood is,” the Butcher once told me, when he patched a weeping graze I had acquired on my temple. While I ride back up, I find myself plugging Fabrice into my own imagining. Hence the road, I suppose, and the doctors surrounding him, one of them pumping vainly at his chest. In my vision Rafael is there leaning in, trying, perhaps for the last time, to exert his influence on the endurance of his rider.

  As I approach I see, of course, that this is not the case. There is no Fabrice, just other people standing, looking over the side of the roadway.

  The Butcher busies himself retrieving something from the back of the car. I lay my bike down and walk over to the group at the edge of the road.

  The sight stops my breath. It is a cliff edge. I can see the far bank of the river a long way below, a little scrub and rock above that. For a couple of meters beneath our feet there is steep, rock-studded grass, then the terrain drops right away, utterly invisible from where we stand.

  “He went over here?” I say.

  A man in overalls, a mechanic or an ambulance man, nods.

  Then I hear Rafael’s voice, addressing someone else. “You do not know,” he says. “You do not yet know.”

  Two men study the terrain right at the edge of the road. They kneel on the tarmac, look at where the dirt falls away.

  “Excuse me,” says Rafael, to no one in particular. “Does anyone have a fucking idea what they are doing?”

  Radios crackle—not our own team radios but the bulky black things carried by emergency workers and the race organizers. Stewards stand near the vehicles speaking tersely into these devices. I sense that their activities offer an answer in the affirmative to Rafael�
��s question.

  I hear the whirr of freewheeling bicycles, the application of brakes, and the multilingual warnings of a large group of cyclists approaching an obstacle. I look up to see a bunch of about thirty riders. I imagine being in the wilderness and being passed by a body of fleet-moving creatures. Having adjusted their course past us, the riders do not give our group any further attention. When one is descending, hazards are beyond concern once one is upon them. A good descender thinks not of where they are but where they will be in three seconds’ time.

  Amidst the spectators is a stout man in a short-sleeved checked shirt. He glances around with curiosity. He has a gray mustache. His hair is an artificial shade of black. He catches my eye. “Right over there,” he says. “I saw him go right over.”

  “What?” I say.

  “I was watching from there,” he says. He points across the road, to the inside of the corner. “He came down in a group. He took the corner a little wide. He tried to brake, I think.” I examine the man, as if that will give me a clue of how to take what he is saying. He shrugs. “It was a terrible thing to watch,” he says, though I do not think from the way he says this that he regrets having witnessed it.

  “Mother of God!” says Rafael. “Am I going to have to climb down the cliff myself?”

  He stands next to me, among the men clustered around the edge. We are doing nothing. We stand where we do merely because it has some place in the story of what has happened. The coordination of the event—the rescue? the recovery?—is happening elsewhere. “Does anyone understand the urgency?” Rafael says. The pitch of the television helicopter above us changes and I see it peeling off, away from the mountains. I wonder whether this is a bad omen. “He’s down there,” says Rafael.

  A man wearing a polo shirt embroidered with the logo of the Tour organizers turns to Rafael. “You have to understand,” he says, “it’s a long fall.”

  “Don’t think I don’t,” says Rafael. “Don’t you misunderstand, either. It takes a lot to kill a man these days.” I am surprised that he can say the word “kill,” that he can speak already of what I can barely think. He looks around him, picks out and focuses upon me. “He is a man who can surprise you,” he says.

  The sound of rotors returns. We look up to see a different aircraft, a red mountain-rescue helicopter. With this sight there is a change in the body language of those around us. Their helplessness in the face of the catastrophe is validated. There is nothing they can do but watch. They stiffen their postures, no longer shrinking in their impotence, ceasing to will their own invisibility. The helicopter hovers over the gorge. The rotors pummel the air. This close, I feel their movement in my stomach. The tufts of grass around the lip of the cliff are blown back toward us. Dust is thrown up. We shield our faces. Through fingers, we see a man emerge from the helicopter, hanging from a rope. We watch him descend ahead of us and then down out of view.

  When the man has been deposited in the gorge, the rope is dragged back up into the helicopter. Another man descends, and after that, a red lozenge-shaped stretcher is lowered.

  We at the top of the cliff wait. The men at the end of the rope already know things that it will take minutes or hours, perhaps days, for the rest of us to find out, that may, in fact, remain unspoken forever. Does Fabrice lie crumpled over rocks, in the bushes? Could his fall have been broken by foliage? By a plunge into deep water?

  I walk over to the car and to the Butcher. He nods, acknowledging me. We stand silently together. “It’s hard to watch,” he says after some time. He cannot keep still. He touches his face, his neck, his chest.

  I am still standing next to the Butcher when the sound of the helicopter changes in tone. We watch the paramedics winched back up, steadying the stretcher hanging next to them. This sight, I suppose, confirms nothing but Fabrice’s continued existence in the world. I feel it in my chest, however. The thought that he, in whatever condition he is in, is there, within my line of sight, has some power. I feel intensely my relation to Fabrice in these moments. I think of him in the helicopter, and then as it departs I count his movement away from us in my imagination: one kilometer, two, three. It feels like this can do something, as if my bearing his situation in mind can somehow help him. I imagine the hospital staff waiting for him: somebody on the helipad looking into the distance for the approach of the helicopter; gurneys, machines, and surgeons prepared for his arrival. When I attend to the process, break it into steps, into increments, it feels that there should be no space for him to slip away.

  I am drawn back to the moment of holding B for the first time and the shock I felt at having in my arms a new living being. He had been nothing, and then had come to exist. It seemed wondrous that suddenly here should be life: magic hiding plainly in the middle of a world which, since childhood, I had been assured held no such thing. I feel this in some inverse way about Fabrice. I know life ends, can end, and yet I cannot understand it in this context, this moment.

  * *

  The silence after the helicopter’s departure is broken by the approach of more riders: the large group of sprinters and back markers. They stream past, seeking to keep within the time cutoff, to avoid being eliminated from the race.

  Sebastian and Johan peel off from the back of the group.

  They stop by the team car. They place down their bikes. They stand. They look around. They clump over to the Butcher and me in their stiff cycling shoes.

  “Hey,” says Sebastian. He reaches a heavy arm around my back and pats me on a shoulder. His size makes this gesture awkward, yet there is something touching in its gracelessness.

  “How is he?” says Sebastian. The Butcher looks at him, and he gets it. “Right,” he says. He nods slowly.

  We stand and look out into the gorge.

  Rafael is still moving around with great intent, trying to learn what is happening from officials who are in contact with the helicopter, seeking to get a better idea of the specifics of the crash. He looks up and sees us, and I sense a relief in his realization that he can turn his energies upon us.

  “Ride,” he says. He waves his hands around.

  “What?” says Sebastian. “Keep racing?”

  “No,” says Rafael. He sighs. “Just ride. Get out of here. Do you not think I would, if I had a bike?”

  We move then, unthinking really, obeying Rafael as sheep respond to the bark of a dog. It is the thing that requires the least thought. There is nothing we can achieve standing on the road. Fabrice is gone. There are only these other stunned people.

  We fetch our bikes, mount them, point them down the hill. “Get out of here,” says Rafael. “Honestly.”

  We set off. We roll up to speed. The three of us string out. Sebastian leads and Johan and I trace the same path around the corners. This is the kind of thing we have repeated innumerable times at training camps.

  The three of us find a rhythm. I return to the pattern I went through with the banker: lifts and plunges, dipping in and out of the turns, the dreamlike motion.

  The gradient begins to slacken and the road flows out ahead more loosely. There are fewer corners and the trees have given way to fields. We no longer ride in the shade, and the atmosphere is warmer. We press into the heavy, hot air of the valley.

  In this final straight section of the descent we do not tuck ourselves down into the bikes as we would in competition, but sit up on our saddles as the air thumps into us. The eddies grab at our clothing, blow back the hair on our arms. Something about the air, the violence and unpredictability of it, brings me back into a bodily sense of myself.

  We pass into the town and go under the banner signifying the start of the final five kilometers.

  We drop into a cobbled corner, then take a leftward arc around a roundabout. We pedal up a tree-lined boulevard toward the center of town.

  * *

  People are cleaning up around the finish line when we reach it. I wonder for a second whether we should check that our arrival has been registered. Stewards are alre
ady working at the finishing arch, getting ready to dismantle it. They remove the large digital clock under which we pass each day.

  The three of us dismount. Johan and Sebastian walk off, wheeling their bikes. I wander my own way. The first person I recognize is Shinichi. He leans over one of the crowd barriers. He offers a small wave. I go over. “Hello,” he says.

  His eyes are reddened. I realize that I wait for him to offer some commiseration, and further that he is not the man from whom to seek this. He is struck by the shock of the event himself, I realize. He feels it has happened to him.

  I find I have no energy with which to speak. Instead I raise a hand in parting and walk away.

  I see other riders now, other members of staff from other teams. The atmosphere is muted. People come to me and say that they are sorry. I do not feel able to ask them exactly what they are sorry about. I turned my radio off at the crash site. I have not turned it back on. These sorrys pile up, form the shape of something. No one says it, though. Perhaps his fate is not known, and it is the indeterminacy, the worry, that causes all these grave looks.

  At the bus one of the mechanics, Hans, works slowly on the bikes. It is Hans who gives me the news, just like that. “He passed,” says Hans. Hans, who lives in Belgium, who listens to nineties rap as he works, whom I hardly know. “I’m sorry,” he says. I stand there. This moment, I think, will last for both of us. I have almost never talked to Hans, and suddenly here he is, telling me this. It is as if the interaction both justifies and explains our presence to each other in this world; as if he has existed all this time just to give me this news; I, for him, to receive it. Perhaps I will never so much as talk to him again, but I will remember this, the way he said, “He passed.” I hand Hans my bike. He takes it, turns, leans it against Tsutomo’s bicycle. He turns back. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  * *

  It is only when Rafael returns that the full story is told. He stands in the aisle of the bus, the same position from which he gave the morning’s race briefing. This day, more than any other of his career, has proven him powerless, and he is not insensitive to the way that a precise retelling of events gives him back the slightest measure of control. Dead on impact, is his conclusion.