* *
It is a nothing moment when Liz comes out of the police station. The media have chosen to ignore her imprisonment: a favor extended to us because of Fabrice’s death. “You should be grateful,” said Rafael when he gave me this news over the phone. I could hear the interior of the team bus in the background: the rattles and whines of a vehicle in motion. I did not bother to protest.
I stand on the west side of the building, the car parked beside me. There is a blank wall, a single door near the dustbins, a collapsing fence, a van with a flat rear tire. The door opens. A policeman emerges. Liz comes out following him. She wears the red cardigan that she had on three days ago when I last saw her at the bar, when she dropped me outside my hotel. She holds her hand over her mouth. I am the only person waiting. The policeman nods at me. He moves to the side, allows her to pass. She walks across the asphalt toward me. She looks back briefly in response to the sound of the policeman closing the heavy door behind him. She turns slowly back to me again.
I move forward to greet her then. We embrace stiffly. We hold on to each other for long minutes. We are each waiting for the other to move. She is the one who draws away eventually. She opens the door of the car, climbs into the passenger seat.
I take my place at the wheel and begin to drive slowly through the car park. I glance across at her. She looks straight ahead. I want time to examine her, to seek differences, to gauge the effect of these past days on her. She looks at me briefly, if only to shake off my glance. There is the mole at the side of her nose, a rawness to her skin. Yet I cannot draw upon a true picture of her from my memory. I have that old fear of being unable to hold an image of her in mind. I could study her for years, I think, and still not recognize the precise ways she has changed.
We pull out onto the road in front of the station. There is no traffic. We drive in silence. I know that I should talk but I cannot. She lowers the window, and I can hear the burr of the air, the reverberation of the engine bouncing against the buildings we pass, rising and falling like a crude sort of sonar.
She is the one to speak first. “I need a shower,” she says.
“I can imagine,” I say.
“Can you?”
We stop for traffic lights. Now she is looking at me, and it is there in her look, I think: I should have gone to her. This will be a fact to live with, as solid, I realize, as Fabrice’s fall. I knew, of course. I have been waiting, I realize, for this rebuke: a bodily anticipation, curled within me, beneath reason, beneath thought.
She presses the button to raise the window. She begins with the practical information. She is being charged with “importing medicines dangerous to health,” she tells me. The investigating judge, she says, was not impressed with the defense mounted by Rafael’s lawyer. Rafael and the Butcher will be called in for questioning in coming days. “I’m going to get my own lawyer,” she says. “I’m going to give the judge everything as it really happened. I think that this is the best strategy, having been there and—”
“I will back you up,” I say. I cut in.
She looks at me.
“I will tell them everything also,” I say.
It is as if she is still waiting, seeking an explanation as to why I have interrupted her.
“I’ll corroborate,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I’m quitting,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to support you.”
“Yes,” she says again.
We stop again at a junction. I look at her. She glances back. I am waiting for a reaction, I realize, waiting for her to understand what I have said.
The road is clear. I pull away. I glance at her again. She does understand. And yet she does not feel a need to remark, to make a show of receiving the news.
It is a small thing, this promise that I have presented to her as if it were a gift. It hits me only then how much hope I placed in this gesture of renouncing the team. It is the minimum. It is the smallest measure of support and she takes it as her due.
And yet I thought that it would change things. I thought that I could just say it. I have an image of Fabrice tumbling into the gorge. “I am letting him go,” I want to say, but that is not her story, not ours. I am gripping the wheel of the car so that the tendons stand white across the back of my hands. She seems to be waiting. “You were saying?” I ask.
She shakes her head. I slow to allow an old woman over a pedestrian crossing. I release my grip on the wheel. I take hold of it again. In a playground to the right of the road four boys are kicking a ball against a fence. I think of all I have done to become only a moderately successful racer. I think of having B. There should be a word for the moment at which one realizes what a task truly entails, comes to see how little one has really understood what is required to reach a goal. We navigate one junction, and then another. I follow the signs for the hotel. Perhaps there is already such a word, unknown to me. We pull in to the car park. There is a van outside the building. Men are collecting laundry from the lobby, carrying bulging white bags of bedding on their backs as if they are ants. I come to a stop in the row of spaces farthest from the doorway, facing a block of flats. On the first floor an old man is tending to plants in a long window box. It is an utterly ordinary day.
I cut the motor. The man looks up from his watering, sees us, then returns his attention to his plants. He spreads the leaves of a fern with one splayed hand, pushes the nozzle of his can toward the soil. I watch his careful work, gladdened a little by it. He wears a loose white shirt; a small straw hat balances on the crown of his head. He straightens, turns to hunch over a rose. It is his lack of interest in us that gives me a tiny lift, I realize. We are ordinary in our graveness, our desolation. Some hope in that, perhaps. The question is not how to do what is remarkable, as it has been for so long, but to do what is sufficient, to know what is enough.
Liz is quiet beside me, watching the man as I am.
We are just a couple in a car. Could we allow ourselves to begin with this?
We do not move. The engine ticks as it cools.
“So, here we are,” she says.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Amelia Atlas and Amanda Urban, for believing that this novel could be published, and for the work and vision that allowed its publication to become a reality. Thank you to my editor, Jonathan Cox, whose insights and suggestions have improved this book immeasurably. I am deeply indebted to other readers who have given advice: Lindsay Norville, Emma DeMilta, Matt Grzecki, Simone Richmond, Grady Chambers, Richard Cohen, and Steven Koteff. The Syracuse University Creative Writing program gave me the time and space to finish the first draft of this book, and the teachers I had there—Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, George Saunders, Mary Karr, Chris Kennedy, Christine Schutt, and Bruce Smith—will be an influence on my writing as long as it continues. Thank you to José-Luis Juárez-Morales and his colleagues for taking the time to show me around your laboratory and having the patience to answer my questions. For too many things to mention, thank you to my partner, Jenny Brown, and to my mother, Nicola Bennett.
About the Author
PHOTO © JO HANLEY
Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a degree in politics and philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. His short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic. He is currently living in Edinburgh. He is working on his second novel and pursuing a PhD at the University of Manchester.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Joe Mungo Reed
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reed, Joe Mungo, author.
Title: We begin our ascent / Joe Mungo Reed.
Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014606 (print) | LCCN 2018018173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501169212 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501169205 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501169229 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PR6118.E4547 (ebook) | LCC PR6118.E4547 W4 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014606
ISBN 978-1-5011-6920-5
ISBN 978-1-5011-6921-2 (ebook)
We Begin Our Ascent Page 22