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We Begin Our Ascent
Joe Mungo Reed


‘A dazzling debut by an exciting and essential new talent’ George Saunders, Man Booker Prize winning author of Lincoln in the BardoFor Sol and Liz, competition is everything. On the road or in the lab, it’s all on the line.As a young professional cyclist in the Tour de France and a geneticist on the brink of a major discovery, success looks within reach for them both – if only they can reach out and grab it.But everything comes at a cost, whether that’s starting a family or doping to keep up with the team, and soon the worlds of drugs, cycling and family will collide, and they will be forced to decide whether the price of accomplishment is something they can afford.In this powerful, gripping and blackly comic debut, this young couple must ask themselves: what is it we’re striving for? And what is it worth?























Copyright (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Joe Mungo Reed 2018

Cover design by Sim Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

Joe Mungo Reed asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008298159

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008298173

Version: 2018-11-26




Dedication (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


For Jenny


Contents

Cover (#u9379911c-f5c6-5c01-a7f3-048858f451bb)

Title Page (#u14d382b7-8a96-5d02-9d76-bc71837f2ba1)

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher




Chapter 1 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


We come from our rooms and stand in front of the elevator. We assemble quietly, treading slowly over the thick hotel carpet in our flip-flops. We breathe lightly. We do not talk. We watch the progress of the elevator in the illuminated runes above the door. We do not consider the stairs. Do not walk unnecessarily. This mantra is not merely practical but ideological. Energy is to be expended in only one way. “Sleep and cycle,” our directeur sportif, Rafael, likes to say. “Sleep and cycle.”

We enter the lighted, mirrored cabin when the doors slide back. We take our places, facing forward, a loose formation, which cannot help but bring to mind the grouping we will make on the road. We think about racing of course, finding life in cycling, cycling in life. We are preoccupied with thoughts of the day ahead. The fear is always worse than the thing itself: another mantra, its truth debatable, its usefulness clear.

When the doors of the elevator open, we step out and turn a slow left toward the private dining room of the hotel. We are in a lobby, the floor under our feet tiled now. Other guests notice us. We are grown men in matching sports clothes. Mostly, people know our business. It is the middle of the Tour. Roads are closed, press vans are on the streets, messages of encouragement adorn local shops. Perhaps these guests recognize us as individuals; more likely they know us merely as participants in something larger. The Tour is the real star of these days.

I have done speeches at sporting events, even opened a few bike shops. Whenever I do, whoever introduces me always says that the Tour is the hardest sporting contest in the world. I am just an artifact, proof that it is done by men. I am something which it has happened to, like a bolt fallen from a disintegrating spacecraft and recovered from a cornfield after the event, to prove that all that motion and brutality really existed. I accept this perspective, because this ennobles the activity, dignifies the fact that I am aging and breaking myself in doing it.

We eat our porridge, our omelettes, and our pasta quickly. We are, if nothing else, men of good appetite. I sit next to our team leader, Fabrice: a sort of privilege. He is a neat man. He has good table manners.

“How did you sleep?” he says.

“Normally,” I say.

“Did you dream?” he says.

“No,” I say. “You?”

“Oh yes,” he says, “very richly.”

Fabrice is crazy for Freud and Jung. He analyzes the products of his many hours of sleep. He has built an interest on the routine of his days.

“I dreamed of fathers,” he says.

“Yes?” I say.

“They loomed.”

“Loomed?”

“The fathers.”

“What does that suggest?”

“In short, that I was anxious.”

“Yes?”

“There are, of course, undertones, overtones, histories.”

Fabrice’s specialty is going uphill. He’s a climber. Tours are most often decided in the mountains, where a small number of men are able to kick away from the rest of us. Fabrice is one of these men, or aspires to be. He has little weight to carry. He, more than anyone, is a creature connected to his bicycle. His proportions are three-quarters of those of a normal human being. He has a thin, bony face. His hair is dark, shaved on the sides and back in military style. His chest is large though, and his eyes painfully big. There are hopes for him in this tour, grand enough to be seldom vocalized: a place on the podium, a shot at first place, even.

“Any premonitions?” I ask.

He has peeled a banana. He carefully slices it, laid out on its turned-open skin. “You misunderstand,” he says. “I’m not in the business of premonitions.”

After we have eaten, Rafael rises to speak. He, like Fabrice, is a short man. He wears built-up shoes to increase his height. His role as directeur sportif places him in the team car following behind us riders on the road, threaded into the action by the earpieces we wear. He picks our team, plans tactics, relays information. He jokes that he does everything for us but the pedaling. His is the voice that echoes around my skull, encouraging greater effort, greater power output, greater commitment.

We have done twelve days of the Tour already. We have eleven more days of riding, and two rest days to come. Rafael is acutely conscious of our place in the schedule, in the country, in his plan for things: a knowing beyond knowing, like that of a pianist in the middle of a piece, unreflectively aware of the keys they are touching and will touch next, a perfect form of the music in mind, awaiting realization.

Rafael takes his time to look around the table, to check that all eyes are on him. “I’m not going to tell you how wonderful, how able, how loved by your papas you all are,” he says. “To me, you are each capable of outputting a steady four hundred and fifty watts. I ask you to do that, okay?” His hair is thick, black, and short-cropped. He brushes one hand through it as if seeking to clean his palm. “If you do that, I give you a pat on the head. If you don’t, I think you are a bag of shit and maybe you don’t get a contract next year. All right?”

The bovine slowness of our nodding exemplifies our commitment to conserving energy, maybe also our reluctance to agree. Though he is in his late forties, Rafael is boyish. The perma-tanned skin of his cheeks is smooth. His neck is thin. His hair is still glossy. His dark eyebrows are thick and teased into a monobrow by a causeway of bristles arcing over the bridge of his nose. “Today is a mountain finish,” he says. “Obviously, you are supporting Fabrice. Shield him from the wind, bring him water, give him your bike if he punctures. If it makes you happy, make an inspirational speech about how much you believe in him and slap him on the bottom.” Rafael won eight stages of the Tour when he was a younger man. Once he rode so hard up to a mountaintop finish that medics strapped an oxygen mask to his gasping face as he crossed the line. “I will be more specific in the race briefing,” he tells us. “None of you fuck up. I hate it when you fuck up.”

We pick at the food that remains on our plates, then return to our rooms to rest.

* *

Before we leave the hotel, I call my wife, Liz. I am married, and even though this has been the case for nearly three years, in the midst of racing, this fact still sometimes hits me with a strangeness. We have a boy now also. He arrived last autumn with the simian face of a new human, lying in his crib, clasping at the air with chubby hands, his palms nearly creaseless.

When I am on tour, Liz takes care of our son. She is a research biologist, a postdoc. She breeds and dissects zebra fish relentlessly, looking at their spinal cells, seeking to fathom the workings of specific genes.

She picks up after the fifth ring. She knows it is me, even on our old home phone without a screen telling her so. That is a feature of our third year of marriage and our first of parenthood: it is inevitably the other of our partnership making contact.

“How are you doing?” she says. I can make out the sounds of our kitchen in the background: our son gurgling in his high chair, a kettle coming to boil, the radio on low. I feel a nostalgia for the routine I left behind just weeks before. Yet I know, also, that it is a pleasure I should resist, like a warm bed on a cold morning. The thought of that kitchen is a comfortable one, and I do not want to diminish the leaden-bellied feeling that I have come to associate with proper preparation for a race.

“I’m good,” I say. “Normal. Fine. Ready.”

Our boy is called Barry. This was Liz’s choice. A tribute to a favorite uncle, who died before I ever met her. She had been keen to name our child before he arrived, and so I ceded her this right and accepted a middle-aged man’s name for our new baby. I cannot yet extend myself to think of him as Barry, however, and have called him B in this first year of his life.

I tell Liz that we will leave for the start line soon. There is not much for either of us to say, beyond acknowledgment of our activities, our consciousness of each other in the world. “We’ve got things to do today,” Liz says. “I’m off to the lab, but perhaps we’ll watch you on TV in the afternoon.”

“Or the group,” I say. “My head bobbing among other identically dressed men.”

“I’m like one of those farmers who can recognize specific sheep,” she says. “Somehow I always manage to pick you out of a crowd.”

* *

The silence on the bus is heavy. As we drive to the start line we reflect upon our bodies, conducting an inventory of aches, of tiredness, of places of strength. The curtains are partly drawn. We sit mutely, the same few scenes, concerning or hopeful, vying for supremacy in our minds. It is when one is racing that it is easiest to believe in one’s power: when one is enclosed within the peloton, between those other bodies, part of a mass, rolling amorphously along the road like a drop of water down a pane of glass.

When we park, Tsutomo’s fan is waiting. Tsutomo is Japanese. He is a domestique like me, another man riding in support of Fabrice. He seldom talks and never offers up his dreams for examination.

Shinichi follows Tsutomo around. He wears a battered windbreaker and cycles part of each day’s route himself. He waves a Japanese flag. Tsutomo is entirely uninterested in him.

“Hello, Shinichi,” I say, when I leave the bus. I speak to Shinichi because Tsutomo will not. I wonder if this isn’t a small act of treachery.

“How is Tsutomo?” says Shinichi.

“He is well,” I tell him.

“Not sick?” says Shinichi. “Eating good?” Shinichi is chubby. He has a robust jolliness entirely lacking in his hero. Tsutomo is wiry, slightly distant, handsome, the only asymmetry in his face the slight leftward lilt of his nose, broken in a past race.

“Very fit,” I say.

Shinichi beams. He rubs his hands. He wears replica gloves and, under his windbreaker, the jersey of our cycling team. I wonder what it must cost, what Shinichi must go without, to follow Tsutomo around France each July.

“So,” he says slowly. “Do you think today he will win?”

“Oh,” I say. This is the dirty business of talking to people, of talking to fans. “Tsutomo will do what’s best for the team. Perhaps he will help Fabrice win.”

“Will you win?”

“I will help Tsutomo help Fabrice win.”

That is largely true. We are competing only to get our team leader, Fabrice, across the twenty-one stages of this Tour in as little time as possible. This cumulative time, the criteria on which the winner of the Tour is judged, is all that matters to us. Our own results are not important. We shade him from the wind, pace him, will give him our own bike if he punctures. These measures have just small effects upon his time, yet this is a sport of fine margins—decided by differences of seconds after days and days of riding—and so small advantages, wrung from our fanatical assistance of our strongest rider, offer our team the best chance of victory. We only think of the ever-rising time it takes Fabrice to make his way through this race, how that time compares to his rivals’, how we may act to lessen it.

The mechanics set up a headquarters around the team bus. Our bikes are mounted on stationary trainers to allow us to warm our legs. We are encouraged to drink a mixture of sugar syrup and caffeine. I spin on a trainer next to Fabrice. He is at ease in these mornings. He smells of Tiger Balm and saddle cream. His eyes are shiningly alert.

“A pedestrian steps off the pavement one day,” he says, “and is run down by a cyclist.”

“Right,” I say.

“ ‘You’re lucky,’ says the cyclist to the pedestrian.”

I nod.

“‘Why am I lucky?’ says the pedestrian. ‘That really hurt.’ ” Fabrice raises a finger, holds the pause. “‘Well,’ says the cyclist, ‘I normally drive a bus.’ ”

I smile.

He laughs himself. “It’s a good one,” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s not a good one.”

The PA system is blaring over by the start line, playing the greatest hits of the Police. Above us, a broadcast helicopter flies around, taking in the city, testing the thin morning sky.

Rafael comes over. The starting paddock is a small village, and Rafael has been walking it like a local notable, greeting journalists, organizers, other directeurs. He takes a moment to watch us. “Raise the tempo,” he says. Fabrice’s expression becomes stern. He shifts his weight to the front of his saddle. The hum of the trainer’s flywheel rises.

I think of Liz saying that she will try to watch us on TV this afternoon. Last year one of the other teams’ riders broke away from the pack and rode ahead of everyone for three hours. He was alone and riding hopelessly into a headwind. The peloton, with all the aerodynamic efficiency of a large group, caught and overtook him easily before the finish. He never really had a chance of winning.

Questioned afterward, he said it was his wife’s birthday. He knew that if he rode off the front she’d get to see him for three hours on her TV screen. Also, his sponsor, a manufacturer of household cleaning products, saw its logo displayed upon his sweat-soaked race kit for most of the day.

* *

When we start, we start slowly. Spectators cheer and blow air horns and we press down on our pedals and roll gradually up to speed. On the road something loosens inside us, because we are no longer dreading anything.

We are people who understand each other. We talk together. Cyclists from other teams often pull alongside Fabrice to ask him about their dreams. Teeth, I am led to understand, are powerful and recurring metaphors.

Tsutomo and I fall back to the support vehicle to collect water bottles for the other riders. Most often, this is what our assistance entails.

We roll through alpine foothills. We are on a highway cleared by gendarmes who now stand to the side of the road watching the crowds.

Our team surrounds Fabrice as we ride. We try to keep him near the front of the pack of riders, ready to chase down any competitors who might sprint off ahead.

Rafael shouts all sorts of technical details through our earpieces: speed, wind direction, projected wattages. He says, “I’m happy. Let’s not fuck this up.”

* *

Cycling is about moving through air. There are technicalities—distinctions like “turbulent” and “laminar flow,” for instance—but really it is that simple. To push alone through the air is so much harder than moving along in the slipstream of another rider. The peloton—the group composed of the majority of riders, moving close together, sharing turns at the front—is much more efficient than any solitary cyclist. Victory in a tour is about staying with the peloton first of all, and then breaking from it to gain time when other factors, such as steep gradients, crosswinds, conflicts, or confusions, temporarily diminish its capability. The role of myself and Tsutomo is to keep Fabrice ensconced safely within the group for most of the race, to leave him enough energy to push ahead when the rest of us falter.

I still remember explaining all of this to Liz for the first time: the pleasure she took in it, and the satisfaction I took in turn in her engagement. She has a biologist’s interest in adaptive strategy, in hidden motives and cooperation. We were in a coffee shop. She listened intently, leaning forward, fiddling with a sugar packet which eventually tore, spilling brown grains of sugar onto the wooden tabletop. “It’s kinship selection,” she said.

“Sorry?” I said.

“An evolutionary concept. You’re like a honeybee, giving up a chance to breed for the queen.”

“Yes?”

“The best strategy for your own reproductive success is to assist another who shares your genes,” she said. “Speaking figuratively.”

“Right.”

“ ‘Genes’ in this case being your team, your sponsors.”

“A maker of chicken nuggets,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, laughing.

It was flattering to be considered in this way, to have my dedication regarded as something worthy of inquiry. Until I met Liz, I thought of charm as a proactive quality, something one deployed upon others. And yet she is charming in the opposite way, finding interest in the lives of those she meets, drawing out their stories.

Presently, she has turned her earnestness to B. She doesn’t just observe his actions as I do but considers them in the context of his development. She hides a toy and speculates on whether he knows it hidden or considers it destroyed. She builds a narrative of his growth, threads events into a rich story, which, to my discomfort, currently advances forward without me.

* *

Lunches are canvas bags thrust out into the road by team helpers. We catch them as we move past, hook them temporarily over our shoulders, pick out energy gels and rice cakes.

There is an alpine river thundering along beside the highway, a railway on the other side. We roll past the outskirts of a town, past its supermarkets, lumber yards, and warehouses.

We leave the straightness of the highway. We begin to climb more steeply up a thinner, winding road toward some ski towns. Here the crowd is deeper. The spectators are attracted by the gradient: the chance to see us slow, suffer, begin to exhibit our differing capabilities. They have waited, written messages onto the road in whitewash. As the slope steepens, the peloton is less effective. Air resistance becomes a smaller portion of what holds us back. Riders start to tire, dropping gears, grimacing.

Fabrice is concentrating. Discussions of dreams ceased long ago. Tsutomo and I ride ahead of him, pushing hard, seeking to keep up with two teams, one sponsored by a northern European banking group, the other by a French manufacturer of farm machinery, who are raising the pace. People break from the lines of spectators at the roadside and run beside us. They bellow, wave their hands wildly. A fat man wearing lederhosen and a cowboy hat jogs at a speed one would not expect his build to allow, shouting into Fabrice’s ear.

Pedals creak on their spindles. Some riders stand, some sit and spin, their bodies rocking in the saddle. Fingers dig into handlebar tape. “You’re into the red zone, Tsutomo,” says Rafael over the radio. The red zone means that Tsutomo’s pulse is high, that he is exerting himself in a way that cannot be maintained. There is so much data taken from us that it must be returned simplified into a color-coded system. From the car, Rafael has access to our pulse rates, our speed, and the power we push through our pedals. Tsutomo slows and drops behind me and Fabrice in order to recover. I look back and realize that we have broken from the majority of riders. They are strung out behind us, down the switchbacks of the mountain, their progress assessable by flashes of their brightly colored kits and the activity in the crowd as they pass.

I am nauseous. We have to summit this hill, descend, and then summit another before the day’s finish. There are forty kilometers to go. I try to give myself to my pace, convince myself of its inevitability. The bankers and the agricultural machinists have lost riders too. Our group is now forty or so riders strong. I think of my feet making circles. I try to imagine these circles as being independent of me, mechanical and necessary.

Two kilometers from the top of the climb, Tsutomo passes me and settles in front. He seems to have energy back but his pacing is erratic. He surges and slows a little. I see his forearms quiver with the effort.

“Very good, boys,” says Rafael into our earpieces. “Let’s keep this.”

I stand on my pedals and glance back at the other riders, at the road falling away behind us. To my rear, Fabrice just holds his head down. He offers no hint of his condition. We crest the peak in the same group of forty. We begin to descend. As we start to freewheel, we do the zips of our cycling jerseys right up. The road dips away and we crouch into our bicycles. Having been unable to separate from each other, riders now work together, stringing out into a line. The wind rushing past chills us. Our sweat-soaked kits quickly become clammy. The air tears through the insubstantial lycra to our skin. There are few fans on this side of the mountain. The action is too fast to really appreciate. The only sounds are the wind and the buzz of our wheels against asphalt. If things are going right in a race, there is little pure fear. Instead, the experience is vivid, consuming. Fear is not quite fear if it does not have time to settle, but an energy, a strange quality of attention. My real anxiety comes to me in the evening, when I reflect upon past descents and anticipate new ones.

On the lower slopes of the mountain we enter a village. Shouts and clicks of gears echo off the walls of houses. Out of the village, the road levels. The riders bunch together into a group, two riders wide and twenty deep. We take turns to ride on the front, pushing into a crosswind. The detente which has prevailed during the descent will soon be broken. We anticipate the last climb: the thing that will decide the stage, determine the day’s beneficiaries and victims.

Through our earpieces, Rafael reads out our pace, the distance to the finish line. Tsutomo and I need not make it to the finish with this group, many of whom are team leaders, favorites to win the Tour. We must simply pace Fabrice for as long as we can bear, then we may slow and grind toward the end with the stragglers.

In the flat of the bottom of the valley, hay is being harvested. The air is filled with the rich, peppery smell of cut grass stalks. People stand on the edge of ditches, between the fields and the road, calmer than the crowds on the hillside. They hold up signs or simply applaud.

Gradually, the road tilts into a climb. As a group, we keep pushing, though we know the pace to be unsustainable for all but a handful of us. At times like this I feel it is hardly worth breathing. Something is escaping from me and all my sucking in of air will not return it. My vision closes to encompass just the space in front. Now that we are back on an upslope the crowds are all around us, a blur of replica kits and banners and sunburnt skin. “Concentrate,” says Rafael in my earpiece. “Ten kilometers left.” Tsutomo is behind me and I can feel him faltering. I hear the click of Fabrice’s gear shifter. Fabrice moves past Tsutomo and settles at my rear wheel. We ride a few moments longer and when I look back I see Tsutomo off the back of the group, suddenly just a man cycling up a steep hill alone.

As we go on, other riders begin to drop. Soon there are few more than thirty of us. Someone in the crowd sprays us with water. Spectators are forever proffering water. One may pour it over one’s head, but it should not be drunk. It has been decided that the crowd could contain any number of psychopaths with any variety of designs on our insides. The water could be poisoned, unsanitary, tainted with substances that would interest the dope testers. “You are accountable,” Rafael likes to say, menacingly, “for what goes into your bodies.”

One of the members of the banking team stands on his pedals and attempts to stamp away from the group. The rest of us are alert, however. The group lurches, and draws itself around him.

The life has gone out of my legs. The pace is a machinery greater than any one of us. I feel I am being dragged into it, like a Victorian unfortunate caught in a factory apparatus.

Heroes, here, are made in ten-second increments. I tell myself, Ten seconds more, and then when those ten seconds have elapsed, I tell myself the same thing again. If you can put off your collapse long enough, there is no reason you can’t take everything. However, in the moment, it all feels as rigged as a game at the fair. These increments just get longer.

Then I just drop. Fabrice gives me a nod as I seem to slide backward down the hill. I wait for that slower pace to calm me. I wait for my legs to return. They do not. No pace is slow enough. I pedal in hollow, aching strokes toward the line.

* *

The finish plays out over the radio. Rafael’s exhortations go from encouraging to disappointed and then to slightly threatening, the tone ever detectable through the static. One of the leaders kicks ahead in the final few kilometers, and Fabrice can do nothing to stay with the man. He loses time.

As I approach the line later, Rafael addresses me through my earpiece. “One more kilometer,” he says, “you lazy piece of shit.”

I just keep pedaling. Everybody is passing me. Who knows how many have passed me. Soon, perhaps, a clown on a tiny bicycle will come squeaking up the hill.

Tsutomo, even, is gaining on me. We need just to cross the line, however. Fabrice is the racer; we are his assistants. The fans don’t concede or even seem to know this. They are still hollering, urging us on, trying to hook into some submerged sense of pride. The last kilometer is cordoned off. They lean forward and beat high notes on the bars of the metal barricades. They seek some residue of spectacle, some desire, some fight in our eyes. They don’t get it.

* *

The leading riders, those who haven’t been packed off to massages, podiums, or interviews, roll back down the course warming down, spinning their legs idly. That’s how we recover from cycling: more cycling. I keep my head down and continue to pedal. I pedal and I live in my little increments, endure these blocks of time, and eventually I am across the line.

At the finish, we fight through crowds and trail back to the bus. We reassemble easily because there are no commitments for our riders, no prizes to collect. Fabrice does a couple of interviews. He is curt, visibly disappointed. In previous days he has been doing well, staying with the major contenders in the race, building what Rafael calls a foundation. Today the television people get none of the sunniness, the sly pleasure and jokes that they have become inclined to expect from him.

People push food into my hands: protein bars, rice cakes, recovery shakes. Our bus is parked on the backstreets of the alpine town. Here the barriers and cordons which separate us from the crowds are largely absent. We are protected by the banality of our routines. We take off cycling clothes. We flannel our faces. Mechanics spin the cranks of our bicycles, spraying oil and adjusting bolts. We wait for the bus to move. An elderly couple watch us from a balcony coolly, the man smoking, the woman holding a small, yapping dog as if it were a child.

I eat a protein bar. The next day begins the moment we finish the last, we are told. So much of our success is built not on what happens on the race course, but on what happens before we start. “There is no fuel,” Rafael says, “like the thought that you have done something in preparation that the other guy has not.” He has never needed to sell any of us on this notion. We came into this team having marked ourselves out from so many other aspirants. We each knew what separated us from all those riders who fell away into amateurism. In our early careers, we all outpaced our competitors with the confidence that we had woken earlier than they had, that we had tuned our bikes more comprehensively, that we had trained whatever the weather, that we had been out riding on Christmas morning. Rafael’s dictum has two aspects: positive and negative. We seek to do what other racers do not, and we do not neglect to copy gains our competitors make.

As I walk to the steps of the bus, I see Shinichi. He moves around the tour with some efficiency. Presence at both the start and finish is impressive. He sits on the pavement of the small street, his own bicycle resting beside him. He still wears his team kit and nods at me as I go over.

“A bad race,” he says, shaking his head.

“I suppose,” I say, “a little disappointing.”

“Tsutomo was very tired,” he says.

“We’re all very tired,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, “everyone is very tired. Very tired is no excuse.”

I shrug in reply.

On the bus, we pass around a little bottle with an eyedropper lid. Two drops on your tongue: that is the formula. It’s a tiny dose of testosterone, enough to aid one’s recovery, so small as to be undetectable by the drug testers. It is very important to feel that there is something within oneself doing good, fighting the insurgency that one’s muscles and joints mount in the evening. “The ancient Greeks used to use testosterone,” Rafael said to me once. “They used to eat ram’s testicles before a race.” He was overjoyed by this tidbit, wherever he had heard it. There is clearly some great justification in finding the roots of an action, any action, in antiquity. Perhaps I could have told him that the ancient Greeks used to own slaves and bugger children; maybe that would have been the smart reply. However, on tour we have no need for smart replies. I took Rafael’s comment on board, and now when I use the dropper I think about the lineage of the act.

We pass the bottle covertly. Though it is our own team bus, there is a need to contain these activities. A couple of the new riders on the team are, as I was until nine months ago, yet to be ushered into the program. Though they might have made certain assumptions in light of their teammates’ abilities, there is no need to offer them such evidence without good reason. The bus driver, for all we know, thinks us the most principled athletes to have walked the earth. Rafael has even taken care to keep our team doctor in the dark. Marc is only recently graduated from medical school. He has taken a pay cut to do what he says is a unique and fascinating job. He is a lanky, awkward guy in a perpetual quandary, it seems, about how to hold his body. He is balding in way that is painful to witness. His role is confined to the treatment of grazes and saddle rash. More illicit activities are performed by other members of the team staff and by doctors hired from outside the team. The era in which teams doped and were found out en masse has passed. Rafael has taken care to hire a doctor who can be shut out: “a useful buffer of ignorance.”

The bus moves into the center of town. The vehicle swims in the glass front of an office block.

When I turn on my phone, I have a text message from my wife. “We watched the finish,” it says. “We saw you. Good. Black socks and white shoes though?”

At first Liz’s friends called me “The Cyclist.” “What kind of adult,” she reported one of them saying, “worries about how fast he can ride his bike?” Liz found this funny, and it was, though perhaps a little close to my own anxieties. She has always been an advocate of my career among her friends, however. She has learned to talk about the tactics, communicate the nuances of the sport. “You’re missing out,” she tells friends who watch football or tennis or nothing at all. I am grateful for the advocacy, though also aware that, among her friends, it has caused me to be solely defined by my profession. I have read that when Minoans first encountered mounted horsemen, they came up with the myth of centaurs to explain what they had seen. To Liz’s friends, I think, I am at least half bicycle.

I sit next to Fabrice. He huddles against the window, the corner of his forehead resting on the glass. He watches the town stutter past us. “No one is getting a wing today,” he says.

“No,” I say. Wings are an invention of Rafael’s. Performances in which members of our team do their jobs beyond all possible reproach are awarded little stickers of wings. We attach them to our bicycle frames, like kills marked on fighter planes. There is debate about the symbolism. Some on the team suggest that a wing means we ascend like birds; others argue that it is to do with our sponsor, a manufacturer of poultry products. We covet them, anyway. Rafael, more than anyone, knows what we should be doing. A reward from him is never given without good reason. No one, so far, on this tour, has acquired a wing. We are all eager to be the first to do so. Fabrice has four for the season, Tsutomo two. I, so far, have none.

Fabrice closes his eyes. He lets his head roll against the window with the movement of the coach. He is not sleeping. “Tomorrow,” he says. “Tomorrow will be as smooth as cream.”




Chapter 2 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


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?”

All I could say was that people did watch my sport. It was Liz who came to my defense. She talked about tactics and psychology and the vicarious desires of the fans. Katherine nodded like she appreciated her daughter’s effort.

“She’s not keen on my career?” I asked Liz on the train home that night.

Liz exhaled in a way that signaled disagreement. “She just wants to be told why it consumes you. She wants to be sold on it.”

“Yes?”

“A meaning,” she said. “A sense of the story you tell yourself.”

* *

After our team dinner, I am not in the mood to sit and read or watch TV, and it is not yet late enough to sleep. I risk Rafael’s wrath, then, by walking slowly around the hotel.

In the lounge, I find some of our team sitting between the plastic plants. The lounge is unpleasant—badly decorated and with a view of the hotel car park—and thus a perfect place to congregate. No self-respecting holidaymakers would spend a minute of their vacation here, so it is ours. Johan lies on a pleather sofa. Sebastian sits upright in an armchair leafing through a magazine.

Johan is our sprinter. His job is to compete for wins in flat stages, those in which riders finish en masse. He pulls from the wind shadow of the peloton and thrashes for the line at the last minute. He is trained to ride in others’ tailwinds until the final meters. While the rest of the team work for Fabrice, Johan competes to win individual stages in the sprints, seeking prizes, publicity, and acclaim for the team in this way.

Sebastian is Johan’s minder. As we domestiques tend to Fabrice, he tends to Johan. He offers him shade from the elements and leads him into position for the finish. On days like the one just past, in which Johan has no chance of victory and must simply make it up and down the mountains within the elimination time, Sebastian paces Johan all day. I have seen neither of them much in the past twenty-four hours. While I was trying to help Fabrice, they were grinding along far behind.

“How’s the boss man?” says Johan, meaning Fabrice. Some other teams concentrate fully on their sprinters, ignoring the overall race. Johan would, of course, rather be on such a team.

“Okay,” I say.

“Didn’t quite get the finish he wanted?” says Johan, the pleasure with which he says this ill-disguised.

“Uh-uh,” I say.

“Flat tomorrow,” says Sebastian.

Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.

“It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”

“His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.

“You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”

I take a seat next to Sebastian.

“In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”

“You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.

“What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”

“He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.

Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”

“Too true,” says Sebastian.

Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls …”

“Really?” I say.

“The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”

As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”

I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.

“I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”

* *

I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.

I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.

“I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy many more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cots-wolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable polymath.

In the first weeks of knowing her, I became eager to be able to stay with her and her friends in conversation. I read more widely, picked up books and newspapers and worked through them wondering how I would discuss them with Liz. It was hard to learn the dynamics of her group, the popular books they didn’t like, the unpopular ones they did. When I got a handle on this, Liz met my competence with suspicion, however. “That’s what Peter would say,” she told me, when I described the drawbacks of a popular literary novel. She wanted something different from me. Sometimes one of her friends would say something high-flown and impenetrable and she’d laugh and look at me for a reaction, as if sure that it should naturally repulse me. I was awed by her friends though, by the breadth of what they knew, how they could talk.

“They are impressive, at first,” she said. “They want to give you that sense. They think they can do anything, but none of them do.”

“No?”

“Or they would be actually doing it,” she said. She nodded at me, as if to prove her point, as if I embodied this doing.

* *

When I return to the room I am sharing with Tsutomo, he is already in his bed, facing the wall, apparently asleep, his side moving with the rhythm of his breathing. The room is illuminated only by light coming from the half-open bathroom door.

I quietly try to prepare for the night, stumbling in the dimness. When I make it into bed, I take time to think. I do not intend to sleep for these moments but merely to feel my body, to have some sense of my aches and pains. I am not always hopeful, but in this time I try to be. There are other men recovering in other rooms all over the city, thinking as I now am that tomorrow will be a better day than the one just past. The reality for most of us is that this will not be the case, and yet we will be on the start line tomorrow, and so we must disregard this fact. I stare at the ceiling. I try to think of what has gone well since I finished the day’s stage, of the ways in which I feel prepared. I look up, visualizing these points of strength, trying to draw them into a constellation.




Chapter 3 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


The new day is sheathed in cloud. The light outside is dim, but the air is warm. This muted weather suits the care with which we leave the hotel. We load our bags onto the bus slowly and silently.

The day’s stage will take us out of the mountains. It begins tending lightly downhill and then runs flat across the plains. None of the other team leaders will be able to make time against the fierce efficiency of the peloton in such circumstances, and so the game is to keep Fabrice within the mass of riders, trying to work against the contingencies—the falls, punctures, and miscommunications—which could see him caught out.

On the drive to the start, Rafael stands in the aisle and speaks, working hard for our attention. He does something with eye contact. There are rules, and he is as brazen in the breaking of these as any New Ager: holding gazes longer than should be bearable, really staring into us. “Be ready,” he says. He indicates Fabrice. “Keep him with the other leaders. Be ready every moment.” As he is finishing up, he looks at Johan. “Other than Sebastian,” Rafael says, “we won’t dedicate anyone else to lead you out in the sprint. Fabrice’s place is too precarious. Do what you can. Follow one of the sprint teams’ lead-outs. Get in their space.”

Johan nods reluctantly.

* *

Shinichi is once more waiting when we disembark at the start line. He waves a Japanese flag, part-bundled in his fist, when Tsutomo walks past. “Good luck,” he says to me. I nod appreciatively but choose not to stop.

We wear running shoes when not in our cycling cleats: brilliantly colored, with reflective piping and technical flourishes rendered in different polymers. Provided by a sponsor, they’re clumpy and incongruous beneath our tight shorts and shaven legs. We have no need for them, we who do not run or walk any great distance. Like the sneakers of the elderly, of young children, of Americans holidaying abroad, they accentuate our immobility. We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.

I have pictured my inflexibility when B will be bigger, when he will play in our back garden and seek companions in this play: the awkward, loping stride, the hunched way in which I will kick a ball.

Today’s stage begins on cobbled streets, and our rubber soles squeak across the polished bellies of the cobblestones as we congregate outside the bus. The mechanics do final checks on our bikes, working in order. Fabrice’s is looked over first, my own fifth. The Butcher comes by, pressed into another role: exhorting us to drink a concoction of electrolytes and syrup. Stationary cycle-trainers are assembled and we’re summoned one by one to begin warming up. Fabrice and Tsutomo stamp into their cycling shoes and start to pedal. The increasing fluidity of their movements, and the rising zip of the electromagnetic resistance wheels, makes me think of something taking off.

Later, as I stand by the bus inventorying my kit, Fabrice wheels over on his bike. “Two men are in a bar watching the Tour,” he says.

“Right.”

“It’s raining, and the riders are going up a mountain.” Fabrice rubs at his hair and smiles. “Really filthy weather.”

“I know the kind,” I say.

“‘Why do they do that?’ says the first man. He does not understand. He shakes his head. ‘The winner gets half a million euros,’ says the second man.” Fabrice waits. Watches me with a faint smile. “ ‘I know that,’ says the first man, ‘but why do the others do it?’ ”

I laugh. “It’s good,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, chuckling. “It has truth in it.”

“Yes.”

He winks. “Luckily I am the winner.”

Rafael has been chatting with the directeur of the German banking team, over by their bus. He turns, laughing, finishing his own joke. He points at his colleague, smiles. “Be good,” he says. He walks toward Fabrice and me. “Steady,” he says. “No fuck-ups today.” He stands over the front wheel of Fabrice’s bike, slaps Fabrice’s cheek playfully. Rafael has more faith in his team leader than anyone. Rafael discovered Fabrice, so the story goes, on a holiday to Corsica, coming across a skinny twelve-year-old coaxing a rusty mountain bike up a pass as he himself drove to a hunting lodge. He had his mentor, an ancient Italian, visit Fabrice to examine the boy and feel his legs. The mentor sucked his dentures, it is said, and declared Fabrice a future great. On Fabrice rests not just Rafael’s hopes for the Tour, but the validity of Rafael’s judgment and an uncharacteristic sentimentality: his belief in a lineage of talent conferred upon small boys in remote towns, as sure and unpredictable as the rebirth of the Lama.

Riders are making their way toward the start now. Fabrice clicks into his pedals, rolls off toward the line with a little push of encouragement from Rafael. I put on my glasses. I climb onto my bike, and ride off in pursuit of Fabrice, offering my apologies as I cut through the crowds, past vehicles. I stop behind the line among the tight press of other racers. I smell sunscreen, saddle ointment, washing powder. Riders ratchet closed cycling shoes, do up helmet straps, adjust the placement of cycle computers.

It is the period before the starting horn goes when to be still is harder than anything. We shift and fidget: energy spilling over into action, like water from a brimful glass.

* *

When Liz and I had been together for a couple of months, she brought her mother and stepfather to watch a race of mine. It was an evening racing series in London: laps of a small urban circuit on the streets of Bermondsey. Sebastian and I did it without team support. It was nothing, a training session, but I felt as I rode a desire to do well. It was dusk, and there had been rain in the day. The air smelled of wet concrete, and the streets were slick. I pushed hard around the last laps. There were semipros who wanted the victory, for whom beating Sebastian or me would have been a great coup, and they were testing us, taking risks. On the penultimate corner, I went into the bend in first place yet skidded over as my front wheel lost traction. I lay in a crumple under a barrier as riders zipped past me.

I remounted and came home in the middle of the pack. I wheeled my bike over to where Liz, Thomas, and Katherine stood. I felt the burn of having wanted that small race too much. “You were close,” said Katherine.

“It was just a silly thing,” I said.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“It was the cobblestones,” I said. “They’re lethal in the wet.”

“Technically,” said Thomas, “those are sett stones. They’re worked stones. Granite. A nice job, I must say.” Liz frowned at her stepfather. She studied the bike as I leaned on it; it was undamaged but for some of the handlebar tape, which was torn and uncurling, hanging like ringlets from the bars. She shook her head. She knew that it was just a small race, an insignificant thing, and yet I saw that she had been seduced, as I had, by the thought that it was a chance to show her mother the seriousness of what I did.

It was a consolation, actually, to realize that Liz had felt the stakes too. I thought of something she had said about my career before: “It must be nice to be able to succeed so clearly,” she said. “To have such definite parameters. Clear successes. No one is cheering me in my lab.” That night, however, demonstrated the drawbacks of performing one’s profession so publicly: the way in which expertise and preparation could be occluded by bad luck, the way that an expected success can buckle under the weight one has put upon it.

* *

Less than a kilometer after we begin, a handful of riders from opposing teams sprint away from the front. The peloton does not react to this but instead grinds along. Most of us are still finding what the day will be, trying to conserve and gauge our energies. We compete on each of the twenty-one days of the race, but there are unwritten rules, expectations and traditions which reach back to the men with their steel bikes, bad teeth, and muddy visages, to the stutter and shimmy of old newsreel footage. Not every minute of every day is heedless competition. There are truces and lulls, and moments of peace. Some of Liz’s friends were disappointed to hear this, I remember, as if I were telling them that my sport was nothing more than professional wrestling. That is not the case though. The conventions observed among us riders do not contain the competition but channel it. They are flexible rules, liable to be shifted by resentments, disagreements, and alterations in fortune. We are governed by the will of the peloton, the mood of the mass, which is as changeable as that of any small village. On mornings such as this, on flat stages, we usually agree to make some progress before competition breaks out fully. We are content to sit together, to allow a few young men, back markers, to spend some time leading, in view of the cameras, taking the first applause of the fans. That is, as long as the men are sufficiently far down in the overall classification to pose no threat to any of the leaders, and providing that they have done nothing to offend the mass. The publicly outspoken, the gratingly showy will be chased down with pleasure. Local boys may be allowed down the road to enjoy the adoration of their home fans, until their lead gets too great and they will be brought back, swallowed up.

Today the seven men out ahead are adjudged unthreatening and inoffensive enough to be left to ride ahead. The peloton churns along steadily.

Tsutomo and I collect team lunch bags from helpers at the side of the road. We ride between our teammates, distributing them. Because he is the team leader, Fabrice is supplied, as is his wont, with a peeled boiled egg each lunchtime. He eats it like an indulged child. Though we’re moving at forty kilometers per hour, he sits up on his bike and rides one-handed. He seeks to eat off the white first, until he has only the dusty yellow ball of yoke left. Then he squeezes this with his greasy fingers, exposed by his fingerless gloves. The yoke breaks up and, depending on the duration of the egg’s boiling, either oozes or crumbles. The state of the yoke of each egg seems, to Fabrice, to constitute an important omen.

* *

Sometimes, I suppose, I have had too much faith in the arcana of my sport to engage and elevate me. The days before Liz had been smaller days, I now know. I had been racing, and thinking only about that. I was getting better, but I was also feeling the limits of what I did. I had assumed, when I became a professional, that things would be more intense, somehow, more vivid and real. The reality, though, was that my life had become smaller. I prohibited myself from many things, set myself in a limited pattern of thinking. It is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but obsession does not give you more, but less. I had the routines and the inflexibility of someone already old.

Liz accompanied me to a race in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. It took some time to arrange: the time off for Liz, the travel, the permission from Rafael. When we arrived, I recced the course, then rested and made sure I was hydrated and properly fed. It was a minor race, a preparation for the real season. Rafael would not have contemplated allowing Liz to stay in my room otherwise. The four of us racing—myself, Sebastian, Tsutomo, and Fabrice—sought to maintain our good habits. We sat in the hotel café for most of the day preceding the race. We talked, when we did at all, about racing. Liz was there for much of the time. She was exasperated but also slightly in awe at how limited a day we could live, as if she were finding out that there were men who could subsist on only air. She wanted to stroll along the seafront promenade, but I couldn’t bear to. I told her I didn’t want to walk anywhere the day before a race.

After lunch she disappeared and then reappeared in the hotel café, wheeling an empty wheelchair. “You don’t want to walk,” she said. Fabrice and Tsutomo laughed at me, shook their heads. Liz kept looking at me, daring me. I climbed into the chair. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said to my companions. Normally, I would have been mortified to be wheeled around, but that day I chose not to be. Liz cackled delightedly. “I told you we could do it,” she said.

It was spring. The air was warm but there was a breeze coming off the sea. There were sailing boats out on the water, tacking against the wind. Other tourists were stopping to take photos of the view, but we glided past them. I was silent for much of the time. I just listened to Liz speak. She had been reading her guidebook. She leaned down behind me to tell me the history of the docks, to point out the town hall, an old palace on a hill. I smelled her perfume and felt her breath on the back of my neck.

Rafael was in the lobby when Liz wheeled me back into the hotel. His presence struck me with a sense of foreboding. He looked at me steadily, as if deciding upon a response. As I waited for this, Liz walked around the chair and toward him. “You must be Rafael,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Something about her approach—not the words but her firm assurance that he would greet her reasonably—seemed to weight the scales in our favor.

Rafael smiled at Liz. He was shorter than her, even in his special shoes. He looked up at her, put out a hand. “I have heard a great deal about you too,” he lied. I rose from the wheelchair, treating others in the lobby to an apparent miracle, and walked over to stand behind Liz.

She gestured at the chair. “We were trying to have a good afternoon without exerting him too much.”

Rafael laughed. “Wonderful,” he said. I felt for a moment the boyish silliness of my fear of him. It was an eerie moment. He touched my elbow. “Why have you been keeping this wonderful woman from us for so long?” he said.

That night Liz and I had sex, utterly silently, the slow creak of the mattress merging with the whispering of a window pulled back and forth on its hinges by the night wind, my teammates asleep in adjacent rooms. There is a prohibition on sex before racing. Rafael believes that intercourse diminishes the body in critical respects, despite Johan’s marshaling of scientific articles that apparently refute this claim. The thought that what we did was prohibited intensified it.

The race went well. I spent time out ahead on a break. I was in the leading pack when we went up the small winding ascent on which Liz was waiting. I came home in eighteenth place.

* *

We are close to halfway through the stage when the pace begins to ramp up. The cadence of the group rises. The feeling, emergent among us, is that competition may be put off no longer. We breathe. We sweat. Heat rises from us as from stock animals penned tightly.

We hear the time advantage of the leaders come down in increments as we exert ourselves.

I am taking my turn at the head of the peloton when we catch the men. We’re on one half of a closed-off highway, which curves through the landscape. We come over a very gentle rise and I see the breakers strung into a short line, turning their heads as we approach. Warnings over radios and the passing of the motorcycle outriders who precede the peloton have already informed them that they are being caught, and there is something in their resignation that almost makes me sorry for the ruthlessness of the group I tow behind me. The peloton, really, is the thing: the center of the bell curve. We riders are defined by our presence within it or apart from it. The very best, the likes of Fabrice, desire to leave the peloton behind. Their dreams are rendered in opposition to the machine. The rest of us worry each morning that this might be the day that we can’t keep pace. Our nightmares see us left in the wake, among the team cars, the journalists, the riders fixing punctures. If ever there was one, I am a peloton man. I am happiest within the mass. I do not flatter myself that I can kick away and do without it. It has been enough for me to get here, to find a small place in such a famous event. Only, occasionally, as when we pass these eager, exhausted young men, can I see it any differently: as an aggressor rather than as an ally.

We come up to the riders. The seams of their kits are bordered with fine lines of salt from their perspiration. They ride at the side of the road, heads down. Warnings are called out as the peloton contracts to pass them. Then, they are gone, back into the mass.

* *

I have been only once to Liz’s lab, back when she was working on her PhD. It’s a cool, quiet place. She and her colleagues hunch over the benches, performing tasks on a microscopic scale. They work with the embryos of zebra fish. The fish are quick to hatch, and they are transparent. With the right magnification one can see right into them. On my visit, Liz took a little petri dish and shook it. In the center was a cluster of what seemed like bubbles but were not. They were embryos, about thirty hours old. When I looked through the microscope, I could see them: their miniature, newly formed spines, curved in a C around globular, translucent yolks. At the top of the spine were the first hints of organs blooming, a skull being formed, and beneath this was a tiny heart, filaments of red where blood was beginning to enter and leave it, the slightest twitching as it beat.

In the lab, Liz and her colleagues perform what they call lost-function experiments. They work on cells in the fish’s spines, on interneurons. They render different genes mute and seek to measure the effect of this on cell development. “It’s as if you have a car,” Liz explained to me. “And you’re taking out different parts to see what happens. Can it still drive? Is it faster, even? Is it better at going around corners?” The cells are modified to contain a fluorescent protein from deep-sea creatures, so that when viewed under a microscope, their growth is writ in neon. Liz sedates the fish, puts them on microscope slides. The transparency of the fish means one can look into them to register the way their glowing axons are beginning to thatch around their spines.

As a teenager, I was drawn to riding because of the certainty it offered, the way a clear objective made stark the choices of when to train and when to eat and when to sleep. Liz’s work is based in routine too, and yet the aims are different. I realized, on that visit, she was creating a system in the hope that expectations would be confounded, with the wish that something unbidden, inexplicable might arise. When I visited, she was coming to the end of her thesis research. She’d been studying a particular gene: the one she would continue to study in her postdoctoral work. She had hopes, supported by data, that this gene was operative in cell repair. “And so?” I wanted to know.

“It could teach us things.”

“Yes?”

“How bodies repair themselves, perhaps.”

“Which would be useful for humans too?”

“Maybe. Possibly the things you are thinking: disease prevention, cancer cures, that kind of stuff.”

“You think this is likely?”

“The chance is what wins us funding,” she said. “But we must still be lucky, of course.”

“You don’t like to trumpet your work?”

“The world doesn’t lack for ambitious promises,” she said.

“Right,” I said. I thought of my own career: the managing of my aims, the focus on single steps, individual acts.

“I’m putting my energy into the actual project,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “The doing.”

She smiled. “The activity itself,” she said.

* *

With the breakers caught, the racing begins in earnest. Teams coalesce into groups within the peloton, sprinters and team leaders are shepherded to the front. Everyone who surges out ahead of the group is chased down now. The pace lurches to absorb attacks. It is hard, even in the middle of the peloton, to keep pace. I ride in front of Tsutomo, who is in front of Fabrice. We are at the mercy of the most ambitious, the most nervous. “Keep your underwear on,” says Rafael over the radio. “Keep in there. Stay calm.” Out of the corner of my eye I see the flash of our team colors. Sebastian squeezes his way between other riders, Johan on his wheel.

We come into the town in which we will finish,hammering along. The peloton is beginning to shed riders off the back. It is a looser thing. There is traffic furniture to negotiate. The group stretches, and we slice around a roundabout. We rattle down these small roads like pebbles down a drainpipe. Our freewheels fizz as we cease peddling for a moment. On the outside, a couple of riders hop onto a curb, and down again. The noise of the crowd is intense. It is nearly impossible to communicate among the mass. The road kinks slightly up ahead. The riders in front of me judder together but stay upright. I glance my brake to avoid colliding with the wheel of the rider in front. A Slovak rider, a time trial specialist, goes off the front with five kilometers to go. He stands and sprints and then, when he has opened up some gap, he tucks himself into his bike and pounds the pedals. The two teams holding the pace at the head of the peloton seem to be modulating the speed of this pursuit. It is very likely that we will get him easily, and his leading in the meantime discourages others from attacking. I see Sebastian ahead of me, though he is slowing, being passed by others. Johan is somewhere in the melee at the front. My own thighs burn. Fabrice is huddled down behind me. Exhausted riders are dropping from the group ever more frequently, and so we are at risk of colliding with those slowing. We travel at motorcycle speeds without the hydraulic brakes or leathers. I come up by Sebastian, nearly glancing his shoulder. My legs are agony. I feel my calves on the verge of cramp. I check right, move to the side, try to get out of the main flow. We hit a corner and I concentrate only on keeping my line. Tsutomo leads Fabrice now. They are both in front of me. The cramp in my calves arrives, fully, but I cannot stop in the middle of this group. The Slovak is hovering forty yards ahead of the rest of us; I see him over the heads of others at the top of a slight incline. People are still accelerating past me. I feel like I am being left behind a breaking wave. I pedal. I hold my pace until it is truly safe to slow, to make my way to the line in my own time. The head of the peloton has no doubt surged around the Slovak. The helicopter moves in a steady line up ahead, following the sprint finish. The noise of the crowd on the final straight is deafening. I let myself freewheel down this last stretch. I turn my attention to preserving energy.

I find Fabrice at the finish line. He’s okay. He finished with the main group, lost no time. “It’s a meringue of a stage,” he says. “You’d never think so much energy would go into something so boring.” He is happy. He wheels over to a barrier and signs autographs. He gives a brief and playful interview to a young reporter from a local radio station.

Johan and Sebastian are already near the bus when we arrive.

“It didn’t work out for you?” I say to Johan. He scowls but doesn’t answer.

“He had a good day,” says Sebastian. “He came eleventh.”

“Please don’t brag about me coming eleventh,” says Johan. “I have some dignity.”

“Amongst this caliber of racer,” says Sebastian, “that is not a small accomplishment.”

Johan sighs and stalks off to cool down on the stationary trainer.

I cool down myself. I climb onto the bus. I retrieve my tracksuit, my phone, my wallet, my wedding ring.

* *

Liz and I married within nine months of meeting. The days of that first autumn together were swift, clipped days. Liz was busy in the lab, finishing a PhD, and I was training steadily. My landlord was putting the house I rented on the market. Liz’s housemate was moving out. It made sense to live together suddenly, and that fact seemed to open other possibilities. We were living strange, unbalanced lives, our eyes on the horizon. It was a comfort for each of us to be with someone else who thought about the future, who weighed days ahead over wearying present routines. The similarity of our positions, of our needs, felt so uncommon.

I didn’t know the register to propose in, how serious it should be. I felt that I was speaking a language that I only knew so well, in which I could communicate blunderingly or not at all. We were not those people, I hoped, who believed a wedding to be the climax or culmination of a life. We had objectives beyond the ordinary. I did not want to get down on one knee in a tastefully lit restaurant, to have others applaud as if we had actually achieved something, to have a bottle of champagne arrive in a polished stainless steel bucket. Still, I did not want to do it comfortably. It seemed important that the gesture should make me a little uneasy, and that I should endure that discontent. Doing it in privacy would have been a cop-out. I wanted to show the extent to which being with Liz had allowed me to step outside myself.

I asked her on the riverbank in the end. We had eaten an excellent dinner. It was a Tuesday night. We walked toward the river, close to the theater we had been to on that first meeting with Liz’s mother. I stopped her at the edge of the river, near a closed gateway that led to a floating ferry landing. The dark water lapped ahead of us. The fittings clanked with the shifting of the jetty. I did not get down on one knee, which I regret now. It would have been a small thing. I took out the ring it in its box and placed it on the wall we leaned against. “Will you marry me?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said, so lightly that I was disconcerted. Yet that was her, I thought: someone always ready for whatever came next. She sometimes seemed to know what I would say before I did. She was prepared for the world, forever set to meet what it would cast toward her. She smiled. She fingered the ring, put it on, took it off and played with it, put it on again.




Chapter 4 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)


I wake to birdcalls, to sunlight seeping through the patterned curtains. It is still early, and the alarm has not gone. I lie back. Tsutomo is still asleep. I clear my throat as quietly as I can. I feel my soft palate as I do so, alert to a catch, to a tenderness that might presage a cold. There is not a morning of the past ten years that I have not woken and worried about my state of health. My airways feel clear though. I concentrate on my breathing, on the inhale and exhale, on the slight strain of an intercostal muscle that this reflection makes clear.

I cannot sleep. I know my alarm will go soon, that the day will commence. I lie and let my mind run.

The hotel room is neat, plain. It lightens in imperceptible increments. It is an antiseptic life, this. In a couple of hours, I will pack my small bag, vacate the room without more of a trace of my occupancy than the rucking up of the sheets. It is so different from home, with B, so many things spread across floors and tabletops. I think of Liz getting up far away, making her own way into the day.

At the breakfast table, I sit next to Fabrice. He asks whether I dreamed. I think back and find nothing behind the sensation of having woken, my slow thinking as I waited for the alarm.

* *

Once she had agreed to marry, Liz went into it with a velocity. Neither of us had the patience or the time for worrying about outfits and dances and table decorations, but we had a large meal, a party afterward. My mother came. She had recently retired from her job as a hospital receptionist, and she had just seen a retirement counselor who had told her that her life from that point on was her own. She was on her way to Spain to buy a house, an act of uncharacteristic resolve that I sensed was a gesture toward a new imagining of herself. My mother is a quiet woman, capable but diffident. She cannot place herself at the center of an anecdote but loses her way in detail and texture that she does not have the confidence to discount. She sat with Katherine and Thomas, and I was gratified and a little surprised by the patience with which Katherine listened to her stories.

Liz and I moved to the northern periphery of the city. I came south to this new house, Liz north. Liz had finished her PhD and begun her postdoc work in the same lab straightaway. There we were, suddenly with all of this: a summer ahead of us; a largely empty house; neighbors; a street of London plane trees; a route for me, up along the river, out into the countryside above the M25.

We saw Liz’s friends when we could. We would meet them for dinner. Liz would come straight from the laboratory, and I would take the train into the center of the city. The friends were interested in our new lives, in our marriage, though, as a rule, not quite curious enough to make the journey to see us at home. We would barely have been in the house to greet them anyway. Both of us were busy then. I was riding better than I ever had, increasingly finding myself selected by Rafael for the bigger races. I wondered whether my new life, my new perspective, was helping. It was probably just conditioning, I told myself reluctantly: adaptation, development, the body as machine. The friends asked about my racing still, but it was hard to explain my advances. They expected, I think, when Liz mentioned my recent successes, that I should be winning races, appearing on television. They did not really understand the difficulty of making it into the ranks of truly world-class riders. They saw I was zealous, but not that this zeal could be surpassed by others, for whom racing meant even more. Liz could identify with this. She had similar problems communicating her own work with her friends. She had moved up in the hierarchy of the lab, and now the success of certain protocols, of essential parts of the study, rested with her. “If it goes well, it’s like cooking,” she said. “If it goes wrong, it’s like a murder investigation.” It was going well. She had good hands, an observant eye. Her results were regarded as reliable. It was patient work, systematic and unglamorous. I felt heartened to hear that she saw elements of her own work in mine, pleased by the sense that it drew us together. We were partners in our sense of isolation, in our preoccupations incomprehensible to so many. We both had our routines, our slogs, in service of single moments, possibilities. It felt noble, all this putting off.

* *

On the journey to the start, Rafael rattles around the coach like a wasp trapped in a Coke can. Today is another flat stage, another day to simply make it through. Tomorrow is a day of low rolling hills. We are in what Rafael has dubbed the “maintenance” portion of the Tour: days during which no great gains are to be made and losses are to be precluded. He is agitated. The bus sighs to a halt. Rafael stands at the front and speaks before we disembark. “I am not getting the best feeling seeing you all today,” he says. “You seem tired. You seem without interest.” I can hear the public address system, the patter of words, the high-frequency creak of speakers. “Let me say, nobody outside this bus cares about you. Nobody out there requires that you race. You do this because you want to.” Rafael sighs loudly and theatrically. “You care. I care. Otherwise everything is fucked.”

Later I join Fabrice on the warm-up bikes. “A cyclist is riding in a race,” he says, not looking up from his steady pedaling. “Halfway through, the race referee pulls up beside him. The race referee tells the cyclist that the car of his directeur sportif crashed into a tree half an hour before, killing everyone inside.” He looks at me now, though he doesn’t change his cadence. “ ‘Oh good,’ says the cyclist. ‘I thought my radio earpiece was broken.’ ”

“A good one,” I say.

* *

That new house was a surprise in all that it seemed to ask of us. Liz and I had chosen it, of course. We had driven around the locality in the estate agent’s branded car. It was what we could afford. It had good transport connections. I could travel easily to airports to fly abroad.

We had made the logical, forward-looking choices, encouraged by the man in his polyester suit. We were some way out of the city, and so we came to the understanding that we should be entitled to another bedroom, to a lawn. The garden was for the cat, ostensibly, but who would spend so much for just a cat?

Liz did not allow herself to settle too readily into this new life. She did not take her mother’s prompts to decorate or get to know the mostly older neighbors. She was keen to hold off the routines and compromises of our new suburban existence, I sensed, and I was glad to see this but also worried by the sense that her wariness strayed into a wider feeling of dissatisfaction. The more she progressed with her job, the more it seemed a source of distress. Her colleagues marveled at her fluency, but in her actual accomplishment of the position she had built so long toward, she was truly faced for the first time with the scant effect of the work she had chosen, the world’s apparent indifference to all her expertise.

It was not logical to think that the slow, steady science she was doing should have won her wide recognition, and yet we are not always logical in our hopes. I thought of all my slow progress in my career and the sense I used to have that others did not recognize the difficulty of all I did, that people around me did not take time to understand the milestones I was passing. I made a point to highlight her successes, to talk of what went well with her work. She was grateful but dissatisfied with the praise. I was partial, after all. It was not my role to offer the affirmation she sought.

For a while she exercised rigorously. She would borrow my turbo trainer after work, attach her own bike to it, and sit in the bike room, spinning, rubbing sweat from her forehead with a hand towel. She would go to the gym on her way into the lab. She jogged on the weekends when I went out to ride.

Liz had been a swimmer when she was at school. I could imagine it: the bleached-out hair, the loose walk, the smell of chlorine on her skin.

Her exertions seemed a way to channel frustration, to displace energy, and yet I also felt that there was some part of her that wanted to show that she could have, had she wanted, been doing what I did. I believed it. I did not deny that my work was more straightforward, that she would, had she really wanted to, have easily succeeded in my realm. My work was not the work of a lifetime though. There was that. It advanced more predictably, but then would be done so much faster.




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