I want to know, then, the role of the rescue, the frantic trip to hospital, the medics, the beeping machines. It makes me angry to think of Fabrice, already dead, submitted to these vain indignities. I raise my hand from the rows of seats. “What?” Rafael says.
“Did they not know?” I say.
“There was a possibility,” he says. “Apparently there was a possibility.”
I find it strange to think that the whole of my descent off the peak, my turning back, that ride to the line, all happened in a world of which Fabrice was already not a part.
Next to me, Tsutomo weeps, wipes at his face with the backs of the cycling gloves he still wears.
Chapter 14
The hotel is the same as so many we have stayed in before, and yet of course everything is different. In the reception, other guests view us cautiously. The staff look into the middle distance with expressions of studied blankness. These vacant looks cover an interest in our arrival, I think, a desire to detect the marks of the tragedy upon us.
The Butcher lists off the numbers of the rooms in which we will be staying. His voice is steady. There is an effort behind it, a care he would not usually exert. We step forward to collect keys. Riders leave the lobby silently, one by one. And yet I stay behind. I catch Rafael’s eye. His telephone is ringing from his pocket but he does not acknowledge it. “The other business?” he says.
“Liz,” I say.
He flinches, as if annoyed at my vocalizing what he had merely implied. “I’ll come to your room in fifteen minutes,” he says.
* *
I am sharing a room with Tsutomo, and he is inside when I arrive. He lies on his bed with his clothes on. He lifts his head to look at me when I enter, and this look is something different from the gazes of hotel staff or fans or the riders from others teams whom I met in the finish area. There is none of the inquiry those glances held. There is an understanding of this day, I realize, that will always exist between us, that others will never quite be able to approach. He closes his eyes again, lies back.
The TV on the chest of drawers in front of the bed is on but muted. There is footage of a large building, a bus parked outside, and I realize slowly, dumbly, that it is our own hotel. I go to the window and part the curtains, and there, across the street, are two television vans; a reporter is standing in front of a camera, gesturing behind him. I look back at the TV. The footage runs a couple of seconds delayed. The window from which I look is too far away to make out in the picture. This event is escaping us, I think, already gaining its own momentum. I leave the window. I go to sit on my own bed. The TV pictures cut to footage of the corner where Fabrice left the road, where I and others waited just a couple of hours earlier. There are plastic-wrapped bunches of flowers there already. Fans are placing cards and photographs. A woman kneels and tries to light a small candle. A man behind her is putting down another bouquet. What brought them there, I wonder, with such certainty that there would be others? Where has all this grief emerged from? Another man talks to the camera, red eyed and fervent in whatever he is saying. The picture cuts again to a woman with a toddler, the two of them examining the tributes left at the verge. I realize that I am envious of these people. There is a sureness in their acts. This death has given them something, I think, and despite themselves they are grateful. I recall the way the fans watch us riders as we pedal uphill, searching our expressions, seeking a breaking point, some elemental sense of our being. There is so much in this sport that is hidden from them, and yet in Fabrice tumbling into the gorge they have an undeniable truth, a point of calibration amidst all the other uncertainty. The magician has been felled by a bullet he did not catch, and his act, therefore, has been proven true. The camera focuses for a moment on a sketch someone has done of Fabrice and left by the road in tribute. The television picture draws out again to take in the woman with her young child. She dabs at her tear ducts with her little finger.
“They can never get enough,” says Tsutomo. He has opened his eyes and is watching the screen.
“They have come out for him though,” I say. Tsutomo sighs. I think of the way he hurries past Shinichi each morning.
“They are so hungry,” he says.
* *
I wash my face in the bathroom. I drink from the tap. When I come back into the room, the news has moved on to another story: footage of a factory, of a cashier in a supermarket. There is a rapping at the door, and when I open it Rafael is outside. “We’ll go to my room,” he says. We walk down the corridor silently. His phone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and rejects the call. He opens the door of his room and beckons me in.
“She is out?” I say. “She is on her way?”
Rafael closes the door behind him. He comes around to face me. The room is dim. The curtains are drawn and no lights are on. “She was apprehended in a very small town,” he says. “The police there—how shall I say it?—are not your Sherlock Holmes.” He waits for a reaction. I have that sense I had watching the Butcher reading out the room numbers: that I am seeing someone working carefully, trying to lose themselves in a habitual action. I think of Fabrice starting to pedal on the trainer in the morning. “They were very confused about what they found. There is a provision in the law for a case that is complex. They are able to hold a suspect for another twenty-four hours.”
“Are able to?”
“Are able to and have, I should say.”
“She is still not out?” I say. I feel a vertigo, a sudden nausea. Yet this reaction is not from the bluntness of a surprise but from the feeling that I should have known this, that in some part of my mind that I did not attend to was the expectation of this betrayal.
“Yes, yes,” says Rafael. “You understand.”
“But you said you had this in hand.”
He steps back a little. He is unused to my tone, my intensity. “I am not all-powerful. I think today you have seen this, no?”
“She is in prison still with our child!”
“Your mother-in-law is there. Your mother-in-law has Barry.”
“You said you were looking out for us, and yet you fucked us.”
“In this, I think you are not being impartial,” says Rafael. “I understand you have a reason to be upset.”
“You are a slug,” I say. “A worm.”
“Yes, yes,” he says. “We are all not ourselves this evening.”
“I am done with you,” I say. “I am done with this job.”
“She will go in front of the judge tomorrow morning. We are very sure that she will be released for now. Whatever charges they throw at her, we have a plan to help her, provided, of course, that she works with us.”
“Sorry?” I say.
“We will make her imprisonment just a memory.”
“What do you mean work with you?”
Rafael steps back another pace. “It is important we have a straight story between all of us,” he says. “These prosecutors are tricky people. Also, there is now a man at the center of this who cannot protect himself.”
“What are you saying?” I say.
“I am saying what I hoped I would not have to say out loud.” He kneads his brow. There is an anger in his words now. “Fabrice has just been killed.” He waits a second as if I am receiving this news for the first time. “There are certain things your wife could say which would damage the way our friend is remembered. You understand?”
“I know what you are implying.”
“It is that simple,” he says. “We will not be racing tomorrow. We have forfeited the race. The organizers will not punish us for this. The other teams will ride tomorrow’s stage only symbolically. There will be a silence beforehand. Everything is changed.” He glowers, and I realize that for once this does not worry me.
“I would not ride if you told me to,” I say. “And whatever Liz wants to tell the police I will corroborate.”
“There are certain bits of information that would really damage the reputation of Fabrice,” says Rafael. �
��If things have, shall we say, the wrong emphasis. I would just like to be sure that Liz shares these concerns.”
“She will be telling the truth,” I say. “There is only the truth.”
He spits air. I smell aniseed. He looks at me as if I am making the most rudimentary mistake. “There are facts,” he says. “I will give you that. But whether the facts make a truth is another question. You know, I had an uncle who once died of a heart attack at a brothel. Do you think they mentioned that at the funeral?”
“This is not the same,” I say.
“They told everyone just that he died in bed,” says Rafael. “Do you know why?” He slaps his own thigh. There is an unsteadiness to his way of speaking now, an uncharacteristic lack of control. “He went to the brothel irregularly. This was not, in his heart, the man my uncle was. However, the thought of him dying beneath a prostitute would have been difficult to dislodge from the minds of people.” He pauses for a moment. He stares into space. “There is a truth beyond truth,” he says.
“If people want to understand,” I say, “they will understand.”
“No.”
“As we do.”
“They are not us. They do not have our perspective. They will not take the time,” says Rafael. He fixes his gaze on me. “This man was like your brother and you do this to him.” He strokes his hands together as if rubbing dust from them. “You would not be here if it were not for him.”
Rafael would say this. This is all within his method of working. And yet the image comes to me of Fabrice, easing past me on that climb at the end of our spring training camp. I realize he must have had to argue for my inclusion in this race.
Love all of it, he had said. What to do with that? Where to put it?
“It’s just a sport,” I tell myself. “A game.”
I am surprised to hear Rafael answer, to realize that I have spoken aloud. “For you,” he says, “it is not possible to believe this.”
I feel a shudder, the lurch of having fallen in a dream. It works through me. Rafael is right, I think. I did not admire Fabrice just as a man who played a game.
“You were not good this winter,” he says. “I did not want to bring you to this tour, but Fabrice was insistent.”
I glimpse again Rafael’s strategy, his compulsion to press his points. It is this that rallies me, gives me back my resolve.
“I’m going to go,” I say.
Rafael steps back. He shakes his head. “I am going to see the body soon,” he says. He looks at me pleadingly, as if he wishes me to corroborate the horror of such a necessity.
“Right,” I say. I push down the thought of Fabrice as a corpse.
Rafael exhales. He sits on the hotel bed. He looks at me sadly. He is surrendering, or choosing the tactic of seeming to. I realize he is not wearing his built-up shoes, which lie thrown off by the door. “He was a man totally dedicated to one thing,” he says. “He gave himself up to a task. He was not a man of our age in this way. Who really believes in something bigger? Who really gives themselves up these days?” There is something pleading in these questions. He knows, I suppose, that he is not reaching me. My anger lessens to a numbness. Probably it has always been this simple to step beyond his grasp. This realization does not make me feel strong though, but weak, like someone seeing a billowing sheet in the daylight that had scared them nearly to death the night before.
“You cannot control everything,” I say.
He glares at me. “But I will do him the decency of trying,” he says.
I shut the door. I leave him to himself.
* *
I take a taxi to the small regional airport, where there is a car rental franchise. I arrive just as the rental counter is closing. The woman serves me quickly, without interest. I get an anonymous silver car. The sky is white with cloud, the air warm. It is a calm evening. I still have not eaten since the race and I am running on a strange reserve. The world is made oddly luminous. I take a toll road, then turn off toward the mountains. The evening is coming in, peaks casting their shadows across the valleys. I pass alpine villages, factories, reservoirs. Electricity cables span the valley above me, blinking lights hung on the wires to mark them out to aircraft.
I stop at another hotel. Katherine comes to greet me. She holds B. She takes charge. She seems more watchful though, less assertive than I have known her. I have a sense that things are suspended, that she is waiting for clarity. We take the elevator to her room. B’s crib is there. She puts him into it. She notes the way I am looking at my son. “You need to wash yourself before you look after him,” she says. “You need to eat.”
We walk out into the corridor. “I am sorry,” I say.
Katherine looks at me with a certain amount of distaste. “You’re apologizing for what?” she says.
I shrug. I shake my head.
“You don’t know?”
“I suppose not.”
She sighs. “It was her choice?” she says.
“To carry the things?”
“Yes.”
“She volunteered,” I say.
She looks at me wearily. “I thought so.”
“It was just bad luck,” I say. “We did not expect this.”
“Naturally.”
“She is meticulous, always.”
“Yes.” There is an unpleasant sternness to the way Katherine concedes this.
“You should be proud of her,” I say. “I have never met anyone so able. She is like you.”
Katherine watches me a moment, as if seeking a signal of my seriousness. “Do you think I want her to be like me?” she says.
She points me in the direction of my room then. She tells me to shower. She has a bowl of pasta brought up to me when I have finished washing. I eat, and when I am done, Katherine brings in B. “How was Liz?” I say.
“I saw her only briefly when I went to collect him,” she says. “It was not a proper visit.”
“And how is she?”
She thinks. “You will have to wait and see,” she says. “My seeing her is one thing. You two being back together another.”
* *
B is glad to see his father. He pulls at my sweatshirt as I hold him. He cackles. I put him on the floor and he waves his hands. He bounces on his bottom. It is all this joy that slays me: his belief that I am so unequivocally good. He does not doubt me but revels in my arrival, and this pleasure undoes me completely. I weep as I watch him play on the carpet in front of me.
I cannot give such faith what it deserves. I pick him up, but he wants to be on the floor. He has energy. He cries out when I have held him for a minute. I put him back down.
Later Katherine and I bring in his collapsible crib and assemble it, and then I put B to bed and go to sleep at nine. He wakes only once, and I wake up myself and go to him quickly. I hold him, rock him. I speak to him in a soft voice; the act of paying him attention is some block against the rushing back of the past day, the return of all that self that comes with waking.
* *
In the morning I feel a soreness growing in my throat. I will get a cold soon. The body always knows when it may collapse, when one is finally done with racing. At nine the lawyer calls. He tells me that Liz will soon be going in front of the judge and that after lunch I will be notified of when she will be released. I eat breakfast. I tend to B. Katherine stays in her own room.
I turn on the television to watch the start of the day’s stage, the moments of tribute that will precede it. The television helicopter films from above, taking in the people who fill the square from which the stage will begin, the trees and lampposts and bus stops marooned within a seething sea of bodies. They have the special certainty of a crowd. Once more I wonder where all this grief comes from. Is it just for Fabrice? Is it channeled and repurposed from other incidents in these many lives? There are so many versions of him, I think, so many perceptions. I think of what Rafael has said about the effects of the revelations that Liz and I will make. I leave the TV for a moment. I
go to the hotel window and look out at the ordinary midweek street. This moment of tribute is happening, I tell myself, and nothing I do in the future will change that. Yet even as I indulge this thought, I am aware of its refutability, because what have I been watching in the memorializing of Fabrice but the process by which some large event will color the understanding of all that led up to it, the extent to which the past, as we carry it within ourselves, may be changed? He is a tragic hero now, his racing life, his stunted successes a prelude to this state.
When I return to the TV, the silence has begun. I watch my teammates in their matching tracksuits standing ahead of the other mounted riders. They are different, on the screen, these men I have spent so much time with. Unlike those fans the camera picked out, they look uneasy. Only Sebastian does not stare at the ground. A church bell sounds. The TV speakers crackle as the broadcast microphones strain to convey the deep reverberations. Then the commentator begins speaking in low tones about Fabrice. The silence is over. My team moves aside, and there is a flutter in my stomach at the thought that I will not return to the bus with them, will not have a plan placed ahead of me. What I said to Rafael now hits me: I will never again be part of that team, that half-thinking thing. They will go home. They will rest. Together they will build a context, a bearable story around these days. They will return to racing in time, fortified and excused by the idea that what they do is what Fabrice would have wanted (as if he could have really considered such a thing).
The broadcast cuts to archive footage of Fabrice. He is young at first, in saturated video from the youth world champs. Then there are clips of him riding for his first team, then his second. After that is an image of him standing next to Rafael, and then him in the team kit that I have ridden so many days in: speeding up a mountain pass two summers ago, coming to the finish in a spring classic. For an instant I catch a glimpse of myself watching him from the background as he moves through the crowd at a finish line. I look at my own face and feel for that man in that moment as if I am witnessing a swimmer caught in a current.
We Begin Our Ascent Page 21