We Begin Our Ascent - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a degree in philosophy and politics from the University of Edinburgh, an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Manchester. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR, the London Evening Standard, and Corriere della Sera. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.

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We Begin Our Ascent

Chapter 1

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...