We Begin Our Ascent

Chapter 2

At the hotel I move slowly, conscious of my need to recover, cued by the rush of racing to enjoy the stillness of the dim hallways. I make my way to the small room I share with Tsutomo. A dirty kit lies on the floor, two energy bars beside it, as if remnants of a very exclusive rapture. He has been and departed already. He is having his massage elsewhere in the hotel. The room is quiet. The curtains are closed already. I sit on the bed. My phone connects. “Hello,” says Liz. We talk for a while, go over the same things said earlier. I hear B in the background. His voice rises and falls in response to the activity of someone else, of his grandma.

* *

I met Liz by chance. I do not like to think about that, because to do so invites the consideration of alternatives, draws me into visualizations of different lives. My training and inclination make me a believer in necessity and causation. I need to be convinced of the efficacy of preparation, of the sure reward of my conditioning. If I were to truly attend to luck—to how easily a puncture or the crash of a rider in front might ruin a race, or how much my successes rely on the misfortunes of others—then I would struggle to prepare, to get myself out on the bike on winter mornings.

We were both flying back to London, making connections in Barcelona. It was a Sunday evening flight, and it was delayed at the last minute because there was a problem with the fluid that they were using to clean the plane. In compensation, the airline issued passengers meal tickets to be redeemed in any of the airport food outlets. We both joined the end of the line to receive these. I sensed Liz’s prettiness beside me, some force outside my field of vision. She was tall. She had straight brown hair, hooded eyes that gave her glance a steadiness. I remember that she was dressed smartly, in a jacket and black jeans. I noticed this because though I wear team tracksuits often, I still try to dress up to fly. I have always felt the need to reject the clothes people wear in airports, the denial implied by such outfits: the elasticated sweatpants, the soft shoes, the neck pillows they wear hung in place as they pace the concourse, as if any sense of the speed and distance of a flight is only something to be blocked out.

Liz looked at the fifteen-euro voucher when it was handed to her. “I can spend it on wine?” she said.

The flight attendant didn’t look up. “You can spend it on what you want,” she said, “but alcohol is very expensive in this airport.”

“Yes?”

“Believe me.”

Liz looked at me as I received my own voucher. “You want to go halves on a bottle of red?” she said.

We ate in a counter-service pizzeria, in a seating area roped off from the echoing belly of the concourse. We had a bottle of wine, two plastic cups, and a small pizza on a paper plate. The sun was setting and the glassy corridors were full of soft light. Mr. Torres Pereira was missing his flight at gate twenty-seven. The announcement of that fact came again and again over the speakers. From the table, we could see out to the runway, to planes taxiing, made insectile by the expanses of glass and steel and tarmac around them. I was coming back from a training camp, she from a conference. We were unlike the others, I realized, because we were both glad of the delay. I felt this myself, and I sensed Liz’s concordance. She had green eyes, and a funny way of holding her finger just beneath her chin as she talked. We were both busy people with hectic schedules, and suddenly here was a gap in our days for which neither of us had accounted. Perhaps we each knew, from the pleasure we were taking in this break, that there was no one waiting for the other at home. I asked her about her work, and she told me about her PhD: the zebra fish, the gene expression and breeding and lost-function experiments. “So what’s the aim?” I said.

“To get my PhD,” she said.

“The general aim?” I said.

She sighed. “You find the purpose of a gene in a fish.”

“Suppose you do,” I said. “And then?”

“Anything,” she said. She kneaded the edge of her eyebrow with her fingers, looked at me. She wanted me to make the rest up for myself, and I recognized that desire. She had ambitions that she was reluctant to say out loud, and I knew this: the sense that you sought an objective rare enough that it felt too stark, almost childish, to simply say it.

It seemed so unlikely that I should find this woman, this feeling reflected back, in this airport, in all the drag of getting home. All meetings are chance, of course, but this one felt so especially.

* *

“You did well, from what I saw today,” she now says over the phone. B gives a sharp cry like something being dragged across a polished floor. I ask her how he slept, what he ate. Liz gives answers of such scientific detail as would satisfy Rafael. We are that kind of parents now, though I do not mind this in the least. The sound of a vacuum cleaner comes from Liz’s end of the call. Her mother is with her, giving a hand in caring for B. Liz will be going back to the lab in the early evening. We talk about her day at work, her return to it later. She sighs. “My students couldn’t find the end of their own noses if I drew them a map,” she says.

* *

My first sense of her was that she made things happen around her. To go around London with her was like going on a treasure hunt of her devising. She had a gangliness that read alternately of girlishness and durability. She took me to a sushi restaurant above a barber in the West End with her friends, and it was good, so improbably so that I felt her due credit for its existence. When she went to the bathroom, her friends and I blundered on, like people trying to persevere through a power outage. I wondered how she came to be with me. I looked at those around the table and thought that they must have despised me for my good luck. She and I were both only children, and both had a similar sturdiness, a self-sufficiency born of that fact. She had something beyond it, though. She could pull others into her plans, bear them along in a way I could not.

We went to museums. Though I lived so close to the city, I had not done that much before meeting her. It is not that I had not thought museum going a good thing to do, but that I had not opened myself to it. The city offered so much that seemed a distraction, and so I was used to passing up experiences which would have been perfectly pleasant. Liz was different, in this respect. The thought that someone took interest in a subject she knew nothing about would unsettle her. She would return from parties and click through Wikipedia articles until late into the night, researching things she had talked to others about, learning more about the careers of those she had met. She had a deep desire to be rounded. She played a continual thought experiment: “Imagine you were sent back in time four hundred years,” she said. “How much of the modern world could you describe and explain?”

In Tate Modern, we walked through the bright rooms. She watched me examine the paintings. I strained to identify them. I would look at a picture and try to guess the author of the work from the limited cast of names I knew. I would consult the label, then, to check my intuition. When I had failed too often at this strategy, I tried to guess only the nationality of the painter. “They’re not flash cards,” Liz said, when we sat in the café on the third floor, a light rain hitting the windows. “Take a moment with them. See what really works for you.”

The implication that some of them might not “work” for me was surprising. Here were paintings worth many millions of pounds, and Liz was suggesting that it was possible, simply, to not like some of them. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if she had said that I could reach out and run my fingers across the pictures. Still, it was difficult to proceed with this knowledge, to stand and look, with Liz all the while seeking to gauge the authentic effect of the works upon me.

In one of the upper rooms there was a brass sculpture: a figure striding forward, the specifics of its body lost in stylized whorls and dashes of teased bronze. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. I read the caption, about motion and futurism and the Nietzschean superman. “It’s you,” said Liz. “It’s a man totally dedicated to his motion through the air.”

I shook my head. The likeness did not strike me as true. This figure was so substantial, so defiant in the way it bore itself forward. The superman was bold, fleshed out. My teammates and I, however, were skinny, unique not in capabilities we had gained but in those we had chosen to jettison. The figure seemed to confront the wind, while we, I said, sought only to slip past without its noticing.

She was pleased with this. I felt her satisfaction in the way she turned away from the piece. We rode down through the building on the escalators. I suppose that I had cheated a little, achieved a victory on familiar ground, but I did not think of it that way then. It was exhilarating to meet her challenge.

* *

We end the call, and I leave the hotel room and walk down the corridor. Pictures of sailing boats alternate with sconces along the hallways. I round a corner to see Fabrice sitting on the carpet, his back against the wall. He fidgets, jogs his knees. He is thinking of the end of today’s stage, I am sure. He and I are the same age—nearly thirty—and yet I am younger to it all. He has been racing since he was thirteen. There is still some of that teenager in him—his bounce, his fidgeting, his Kafka ears. One gets the sense that the real world has had little chance to make its mark upon him. He has had some good results in his past: one-day victories, stage wins, and a top-ten finish in this race two years ago. He has struggled for consistency, though. His promise is thought yet unfulfilled. There have been fewer comparisons to past champions in the last year, more mentions of those who flared and were forgotten. This tour is a chance to reinvent his potential, to bounce his story back into its former groove. I lean against the wall, slide down until I am seated beside him.

“Seeing the Butcher?” I say. He nods.

The Butcher is what we call the chiropractor. If he were really a butcher, however, he might be compelled to clean his equipment. The massage table holds a history in its complicated odor of sweat. “What’s the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath?” says Fabrice.

“Is this a joke?” I say.

“No no,” he says. “It’s a what you call it … an inquiry.”

“I think that it’s something to do with the intensity.”

“Right,” he says. “That sounds correct.”

Fabrice goes before me, and when I see the Butcher, he is weary himself.

“You guys wear me out,” he says. He is Norwegian. In mannerism and personality, he is more of a carpenter. He presses into my back. Parts of me crunch and readjust. He takes my neck and he cracks it left and then right. I don’t like people cracking my neck. My impulse is to resist it. However, I am extremely good, and I do not joke here, at submitting to things which I do not like.

* *

Outside the Butcher’s room, Rafael is waiting for me. “Solomon,” he says. He uses my full name always, he and my mother only. “How did the Butcher do?” He stands close, furrows his heavy brow. He sucks aniseed drops constantly, and his breath is thick with the smell.

“Well enough,” I say.

“Good,” he says.

Rafael has been distant since the race finished. The result of each stage, for him, is always material from which something can be built. Sometimes he is triumphant, sometimes self-justifying, sometimes incensed. Never, though, is he resigned. Rafael’s success is based upon a fierce blindness to chance, an ignorance of the limits of his influence. He closes one eye and rubs at the lid. He looks tired, dangerously so.

“There were issues today,” he says.

I nod.

“You.” He nods back. “You were not totally shit.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Other people were totally shit. Other people let you down.”

“Maybe.”

“Yes. They let you down. Aren’t you angry?” He looks at me expectantly.

“Raging,” I say, feeling a need to placate him.

He raises his eyebrows.

“Inside,” I say.

He shuts his eyes now; he resets himself. “A flat day, a flat day, a hilly day, the rest day,” he says. “Then the last week, the mountain stages and a time trial.” He does not need to spell out the plan for coming stages. The days with gradients are days on which Fabrice will seek to make time, the flat days are days to be endured. Each night Rafael pores over route maps, makes tallies of where gains may be made and losses limited. He inputs the data of the past day and works with it until he sees a path to the results he desires. I think of a shopkeeper recounting his takings again and again in the hope that his next calculation should make the cash and the receipts match.

“We’ll do our best,” I say.

He nods, cautiously satisfied, and moves away. I walk slowly down the nautical corridor. My muscles are loose, my vision clear. The light seems to flicker. The boats shift on lapping seas.

* *

Liz is close to her mother, Katherine. Katherine is clever, slightly spiky, grand in her manners. Liz’s father, a professor of political economy, died in a car accident when Liz was very young, and Katherine is remarried to a man called Thomas, who owns a building supply warehouse in East Anglia. The two of them traveled down to London on the train four months after I had first met Liz, and we greeted them at Kings Cross. Katherine was tall like her daughter, with a straight nose, dark hair subtly dyed and held implausibly in place. Thomas was a broad, neat man with a mustache that I sensed he had worn for years. “So this is him?” Katherine said, and looked at her daughter for a steady second. We went to a grubby Chinese restaurant, which surprised me then but would not now. Katherine’s terror is not dirtiness but mediocrity or inauthenticity, and the place was better on those terms than all the nearby Italian restaurants with columns around the doorways and tall pepper mills. She asked me questions about cycle racing that were pointed, as if the racing could not possibly be an end in itself but merely a way of attaining some other higher thing, which she expected me to articulate. “People like to watch this?” she said. “They understand it? They concern themselves with the details?”