We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

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