Permanent Revolution

Roland had sworn that he would never return to la Bretagne.

The Tour de France’s seventeenth stage, however, would pass straight through his hometown of Plumelec the next day, and even he had to admit that it would be a shame to quit the race for the sake of staying far away from his father. Cycling was all he was good at.

And it wasn’t as though a son were obliged to visit. His filial obligations, he felt, extended only to the money he wired to his father’s account each month. In fact, he had been on the phone with the bank just that afternoon about a large sum that had inexplicably gone missing. After dangling a cynical suggestion of elder abuse, Roland had the stuttering representative promising a speedy and thorough investigation: things would be made whole again.

Later, in the hotel conference room, Roland and his fellow cyclists were watching drone footage of that morning’s team time trial. The single file of their black kits evoked a dispassionate funeral procession as they wound their way through the Pyrenees. Leading the last charge was Roland himself, barely even opening his mouth to breathe, about as emotional under his helmet and shades as the machine he rode.

Coach Skårsen was recapitulating his strategy for the next day’s stage, while Willaby, an up-and-coming British piss-taker, was undoubtedly brewing up some new way to get under Roland’s skin. The Frenchman was pushing thirty-three, already past the average professional cyclist’s age of peak performance. The young Brit reveled in reminding him.

All that, combined with his regretful homecoming, had the lead cyclist feeling far away, his mind like a motionless lake of glass. Yet, something was bubbling to the apparently molten surface: the same memory he always recalled when he reflected upon home.

~

Roland was twelve. His bastard father had sent him, as he had every week, to fetch milk from one of the indistinguishable dairy farms that dotted the Breton countryside. Not the neighboring one, no, nor any along the road into Plumelec, but a specific cattle pasture several villages north.

Such French communes were a meagre ten kilometers across at most, so it should have been an easy bike ride for Roland. A demanding week of similar chores, however, had left his thighs and calves so sore that he could hardly hold himself off the seat to climb hills. A sea of frigid mist that had swept in from the English Channel, furthermore, painted the distance as vague and unending. Pitying heads turned throughout the intermediate towns as the boy shot by with a pair of empty milk pails swinging from his handlebars, not stopping to say so much as bonjour before fading into the same fog he flew out from.

From the day Roland had been able to make it to the end of the street without toppling from his bicycle, his father, a former professional cyclist himself, forbade him from using any other means of transportation, whether he was running errands or seeing friends. Even if Roland were to abscond from home, he wasn’t sure that his father would care, so long as he biked away.

Roland was frankly surprised that he wasn’t made to ride down the hall to the bathroom, too, or that he wasn’t beaten with an oily bicycle chain instead of a belt, but those potential hells kept him obedient in his living ones, and until he lost his faith in God, he had only ever made two prayers every night. The first was for the eternal soul of his mother, who had died giving birth to him. The second was that they would never move near the Pyrenees or Alps.

His understanding of his father forcing him to bike had evolved across his life. At first, it seemed natural that a son should do what his father does, as an apprentice follows the master. Then, he figured that his father was training him, and that such hardship would eventually be rewarded with love. That day, fighting lactic acid and the pain of a bruised groin, Roland felt on the cusp of yet another insight.

The dairy farm appeared, replete with the muted aroma of chilled cow shit. He turned onto the weedy, winding driveway and stopped against the wooden fence, looking up to try and find the sun. Anaïs, a girl about his age, emerged from the house and galloped across the field, startling some of the cattle into less graceful trots. Sleek metal pails of milk bounced in her hands. She must have been waiting for him at the window.

“Roland!” Anaïs gasped for air. She dropped the pails and threw her arms over the fence, her trailing pigtails hanging like ropes behind it. “You’re early! Did you come to visit me?”

He shook his head and dispatched a few ten-franc pieces from his pocket.

“Why don’t you come inside and have some bread?” she asked, pocketing the coins. “It’s cold out, and you look exhausted. The oven’s burning; we could sit by it and eat together…”

Roland dropped the empty pails on her side. She made sure the lids were secure on the full ones before heaving them over and hanging them onto his handlebars with a huff.

“Fine, suffer in silence, but hurry home. It’ll rain soon, and you’ll only feel worse.”

Anaïs leaned across the wooden beam, tipped her toes off the ground, and pecked his cheek goodbye. Roland leaned on one side of his bicycle, staring like one of her cows.

“Allez!” She shooed him off with flapping arms before crossing them back in, either embarrassed with herself or annoyed with his stupid look. “Roullez, Roland!”

And roll he did, his bike sinking from side to side with the added weight. Looking back, he saw her still at the fence, watching him until he vanished. Soon after, the rain that she had predicted began to patter. Before long, it poured.

He raced as fast as he could, skidding around every bend to make up for lost time. Blisters on his palms popped from the friction with his handlebars. Reaching the last hill before Plumelec, he pushed off with his screaming legs and climbed. A temporary relief for the bruises between his thighs and buttocks—until he crested the hilltop and let his weight crash back down.

The maddening pain in his groin stole his breath and made him think of his mother—the suffering she must have withstood in her final moments. If he was crying upon emerging into the world, it was surely his attempt at a tearful apology. An insufficient one, Roland thought, for he now suspected that all this cycling was his father’s way of punishing him for what he’d done.

Here, his final revelation came. That life was nothing but an excruciating bike ride unto death, where suffering begat suffering as surely as one gear ground another. Where victory was impossible, and love—whatever little he knew about it from an innocent kiss on the cheek—was more often than not an inadequate lubricant. Where those without the courage to kill themselves had to stay silent and endure.

The mist remained, but upon rolling to a stop in front of his house, Roland, too cold and wet to sweat, was convinced that he had dispelled some great mystery.

His father stood in the doorway. A television buzzed behind him, incomprehensible and distant. With the click of a stopwatch, he shook his head, and went back inside.

The door swung shut, and Roland stood on the stranger side of it until the rain running down his cheeks and into his open lips took on the tinge of salt.

~

“Should I bother prohibiting you from seeing your podium girl tonight, Roland?”

The prickly voice of Coach Skårsen, that micromanaging Nordic dork, pulled him back into the present. The recording of the race had ended.

Willaby piped up next: “It’s the only stiffy the old man’s gonna have this year!”

“And when his muscles need to metabolize zinc, will it be in his bloodstream? Or dissolving away inside of some Breton milkmaid?”

“There won’t be blood to spare, if it’s all in his—” Willaby turned, frowning, as tavern laughter overtook the meeting. “Oi, Roland, are you deaf, too, you geriatric fuck? I’m absolutely rocking you right now. Wonderful, our champion is on autopilot, again.”

Skårsen adjusted his glasses. “I’ll just have oysters sent to his room tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s a perfect stage for him. A moderate length, hilly but not mountainous.”

“Might want to win a round at the Tour before you retire, eh Roland?” Willaby offered.

Skårsen gave him a look and circled his finger in the air to signal the end of the meeting. The riders filtered out of the room, Roland sortieing last behind both coach and Brit, who were now speaking privately. Perhaps Willaby was making his case for replacing Roland as team lead. He was currently a mere domestique, a servant charged with cutting the wind for Roland at the expense of his own energy, which must not have sat well with his ambitions and brash candor.

Roland was ready to move on, pulling his phone out to text Anaïs. The Breton milkmaid was the only person he took solace in, and the one silver lining of returning to Brittany. She used to travel to see him often, but when she took over the dairy farm the previous fall, their encounters became less frequent. Roland couldn’t be upset, for she had asked him to move in with her. Anaïs was the only woman whose warmth his cold could not withstand, but Plumelec and its neighboring towns were far too tainted by his father’s presence to ever call home again.

Upon emerging from the hotel, he was instantly set upon by a microphone-armed woman and a posse of cameramen and sound technicians.

“Is now a good time for the interview?” she asked, nearly pushing the mic into his mouth.

Roland turned and grabbed Skårsen, perching his head just over his coach’s shoulder.

“Didn’t think to warn me?” Roland grumbled.

“Ah, but I did, Roland, just now!” Skårsen whispered back. “It’s not my fault you’ve been practically comatose since we got here!”

The cyclist looked back at the expectant press, and then released his coach.

“Just say pleasant things for the sponsors,” Skårsen added. “This woman’s from Le Fig!”

“And try to pretend you have a soul,” Willaby said. “Fans are starting to think you never had parents to love you. That you weren’t born, but manufactured from recycled bicycle parts.”

Roland glared at Willaby. “I need a coffee.”

Skårsen, Willaby, and the press corps followed Roland into a nearby café where he ordered an espresso (Decaf, the coach corrected, the man needs to sleep tonight) and took an awkward seat in the corner. The cramped space forced the microphones and cameras right into his face and relegated his teammates to the back of the shop.

It didn’t take long for Roland to understand why the reporter had been so insistent on cornering him. The questions were innocent at first, all answerable with the I’m very humbled and it’s a team effort brand of bullshit responses. As the interview went on, though, the reporter dipped her toe into the topic of Brittany, and then into the surrounding towns that the race would be passing through. Roland remained laconic, but frustration began to corrode his patience.

“It’d be a nice stage for you to win, wouldn’t it?” she asked, smiling.

“Why?” he snapped. “Any stage is a good stage to win.”

“Well…” She struggled. “You grew up here, didn’t you? Your father still lives here. It’s home to you.”

“Home?” Roland chewed the inside of his mouth before letting loose. “Do you mean the town of Plumelec, where my mother died bringing me into this world? Or do you mean Brittany, where my bastard father made me ride myself half to death?”

Willaby looked as though he were trying to swallow his lips. Skårsen’s head was planted in his palms. Despite their years training together, these might have been revelations to them both. Roland stood. He grabbed an exposed pack of cigarettes and lighter from one of the cameramen’s vests, striking up in the middle of the café. If the coach had been looking, he would have thrown a fit.

“What a stupid question to ask,” Roland continued, the spewing words now accompanied by smoke. “I am here to bike. I do nothing else. As far as home is concerned, I would just as readily ride straight from the finish line to the airport at Brest, hijack a plane, and fly it right into my father’s house for the way he damned me to this life.”

Skårsen shoved his way through and slipped a skinny arm around the enraged cyclist, noting, in broken French, that the race had everyone stressed, and that the interview would have to be postponed. He tried to pluck the cigarette from Roland’s fingers, but the cyclist threw it to the café’s floor and extinguished it with a stomp.

Roland shook his coach off and stormed back to the hotel.

~

Hours had passed since the interview. Anaïs was curled atop Roland in bed.

“I don’t care that they’ve changed the rules,” she purred. “I’m going to kiss you on that podium, and I’ll be upset with you if you don’t spray that champagne all over me.”

“Why is everyone expecting me to win this stage?” Roland asked. “I’m past my prime.”

“I have always believed in you. I won’t make that reporter’s mistake by saying more.”

He examined the ridge of calluses across his palm. “Was the interview that bad?”

Anaïs lifted her head up and balanced her chin on his chest. “Despite all your efforts to appear like a machine, Roland, you aren’t one. And do you see what good it does to play pretend? Did that outburst even make you feel any better?”

“Not a bit. I thought I could just ride through town and leave, but it’s getting to me more than I expected. I had a whole year to prepare, and yet…”

“You should go see your father,” she interjected. “He’s getting old.”

“He probably doesn’t want to see me. In that case, I’ll respect his wishes. If he does want to see me, then I refuse to give him the pleasure. If he’s streetside, tomorrow, I’ll spit at him.”

She traced gibberish into his chest with her nails, saying nothing.

“It’s insane that I bike at all, given how much I hate him for making me. Yet, when I was young, I was grateful for what I had. A home. Food. Most of all, the bicycle—how else would I be able to do all that cycling he demanded?” Roland laughed through gritted teeth. “I guess he had me carry my own cross; riding was the only way I could escape him.”

“We’re all stuck with our parents, Roland,” Anaïs said. “Look at me. I’ve taken over the farm I was raised on, though everything’s mechanized, now. It would cost you nothing to forgive him, and so much to keep carrying that hatred with you on every ride.”

Unwilling to entertain her moralizing, Roland allowed himself to drift towards sleep.

Anaïs went on: “My own parents told me, every time I was furious with them, that the best revenge is a life well lived. Why not give him that vengeance? …Roland?”

~

The bank representative had left a voicemail while Roland was asleep. He held his phone up to listen and went to open the door. A platter of oysters sat on the floor outside. Skårsen.

Back in bed, Anaïs’s eyes fluttered. They were soon sitting on the mattress together, their legs crossed, cradling the platter between them.

“Fresh from the bay,” Anaïs said. “But he didn’t think to send champagne?”

Roland reached for the telephone. She slapped his hand.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked in between slurping shells.

He nodded. In reality, he was considering the phone call from the banker (which had, indeed, explained the missing money from his father’s account), as well as the night he had spent with Anaïs. A dollop of caviar on the pile of shit he had spent his life eating. They weren’t kids anymore. She had something on her chest. He had something in his head.

He thought about the kiss she had given him on the cheek all those years ago. Back then, he had already been aware that there would be far greater pleasures awaiting the two of them as they reached adolescence and adulthood. They did share those moments, but, outside of the few seconds of ecstasy, each instance never felt like more than a momentary relief. How could the heart be recaptured, after love had been poisoned with all the intrigue and politics of desire? When they kissed, now, too much was attached. She was kissing a wound that would not heal.

After the oysters were finished, Roland left the bed and began to dress. Anaïs laid on her side. The spandex of his kit stuck to his skin. He could feel her appraising his flesh.

“We should have a child,” she said, just as he was about to walk out the door.

That froze him up. It was an awful habit of hers, saving that kind of nonsense for the very last moments between them. He blinked a few times, and then, unsure of whom he was speaking to—or what he even meant—said, “I could never do that to you,” and left.

~

Roland had a table to himself for breakfast. Though Skårsen was surely monitoring his macronutrient intake from afar, neither the coach nor Willaby came to bother him from his meal. Perhaps yesterday’s outburst would mark the end of his time with the team—and with professional cycling altogether. There existed mistreatments that no apology could make up for.

The time passed blandly, along with the yogurt and oatmeal, and before he could comprehend the start of the stage, Roland found himself in the middle of the peloton.

As far as he could tell, at least. The Breton peninsula had been overtaken by mist, and though Roland could observe the sea of helmets and cyclists ahead and behind, there was no way to know which position he was in or how the race was shaping up. What grueling drudgery even the most spectacular events eventually became. La vie, par example, Roland thought.

“Dangerous conditions, gentlemen,” Skårsen called out in his earpiece. “We can’t see anything from the drones or the media. The support cars are anxious to do their own scouting. We’re bumper to bumper, practically racing our own race back here.”

“Got Roland ahead of me,” Willaby reported, atypically curt. Several other call outs came over the radio as the riders tried to piece a picture together. The buzz of confusion spread over the entire peloton, but the cyclists continued forward.

As the coach ordered the riders to hold position, Roland heard a great commotion coming from the front of the group. Cries of stop! and car! sounded through the mist in a Babel of tongues, followed by the clinking of metal and the screaming of men and skidding tires. A tidal wave of helmeted heads seemed to ripple up in front of Roland, and before he knew it, he was lost in a storm of limbs, helmets, and bicycles. “Team, be advised—” Skårsen began.

Cyclists flipped over. Handlebars twirled out of control. Spandex slid over the hoods of stopped support cars. Roland, sharpened by adrenaline, was able to steer around the downed men and machines, and he even shook off somebody who tried to grab him to stop their own fall. Yet, another mess of bicycles at a fog-concealed turn took him by surprise, and though he tried to jerk his wheels up into the air like a mountain biker, he too flipped forward and tumbled across the asphalt, his bike withstanding a pathetic bounce before scraping along at his side.

His head was ringing. Concussed? He was bleeding, all torn up around his elbow and hips. If not for his helmet, his brains might have been spread across the street like soft cheese.

He got up on his legs—nothing broken, thankfully—and remounted his bike, standing on the pedals to accelerate. Pushing off, he heard Willaby behind him, accusing some Italian tart of stealing his earpiece. Roland hurried, wanting to leave the catastrophe behind. Skårsen wasn’t sounding off over the radio, anymore. Had he been caught in the crash? With another car, perhaps? The whole race was botched. Roland had even seen the yellow jacket—the race’s overall leader—caught in a mangle of roadside carbon fiber and broken limbs.

After putting some distance behind him, Roland tried to sit, and found himself unable.

The saddle was bent out of place, stabbing into the back of his thigh whenever he lowered himself. Could he race like this? Standing provided leverage for hill-climbing, but it wasn’t aerodynamic enough to make gains on the flat segments.

“My seat’s fucked, I need the support car,” Roland said. Nothing but static came back over the earpiece. “Skårsen, the support car. My seat…”

Was the radio shot? Or had such hell broken loose that the team had left him for dead? Alone now, he decided to push forward. Partially in defiance. Partially to find another group to ride with. Having someone to draft might mitigate the seat issue. Of course, seeing past a few feet in front was impossible, and even the spectators lining the road looked like a gauntlet of ghosts, haunting him with incomprehensible noise as he passed. He must have seemed the same way to them, he thought, and to the press helicopters he heard hovering somewhere above.

Still stuck on his legs, Roland began to tire after the halfway point of the race. He hadn’t found anyone to slipstream. In his still-ringing head, he heard Willaby shouting his name in that obnoxious British accent. It came over and over again. Roland!

The Frenchman only cycled faster. The mere thought of Willaby inevitably overtaking him put him into a state of terror. What kind of abuse would he face when he was no longer the team’s leader? The race was inescapable. Why did Roland even bother?

The consideration didn’t slow him. In fact, he peddled harder.

“You bloody maniac,” Willaby called out, now undeniably behind him. Roland was indeed battered and torn and splotched in sanguine red from the fall. “The hell are you doing?”

In the corner of his eye, Roland spotted Willaby’s ear. Empty. He hadn’t found his earpiece after the crash. There was no Skårsen to remind him of his responsibilities. How could Willaby resist? Roland, for all his dispassion, could remember his own days as a domestique—the silent humiliation of taking the wind for another man’s win.

“Get behind me, Roland. We’re both burning up here.”

A ruse? They were beside each other, but Roland wouldn’t let Willaby pass.

“Christ, Roland.” Willaby bellowed. “I’m sorry about what I said. I didn’t know about your parents or any of that shite. Not shite, but, erm… Look, just let me in front!”

Roland looked up from his handlebars. The weather was beginning to clear. In the distance, he saw another rider, kitted in red. The back of a new peloton? Why wasn’t Willaby leaving him behind? By his side, the Brit was still struggling to get in front to take the wind, nearly driving Roland off the road. Roland looked at the bike, and then at the man, the whole ensemble a mirror image of his own. Their gears were both spinning. Their black jerseys were both bloodied. They were racing the same race.

Roland’s head sank. How horribly had he misunderstood?

“I—” The wind rushed into Roland’s mouth, cutting the back of his dry throat and forcing him to cough. “Willaby, I should be the one saying sorry, I—"

“Save your breath, you old bastard. The whole team admires you. Yeah, you’re a prick, and you could stand to treat the boys a bit better, but none of us would race half as hard as we do if we didn’t see you at the front. Now, be a darling, and let me lead. I’m about to pass out, but I can still get you some distance. We can have a good cry over a pint afterwards if you want.”

Roland nodded and accepted the new formation, feeling the wind immediately ease up.

With less than a quarter of the race left, the two had made up some of the distance to the red rider, though Roland’s legs ached. The growling of an engine came from behind them. Roland didn’t think much of it until Skårsen began to shout in his ear from the passenger seat.

“Roland, why are you standing? You’re not aerodynamic like that, don’t you kn—”

“Spare us the science, you number-knobbing nonce!” Willaby shouted. “His seat’s all bent up from the crash. Nearly has a second stick up his arse!”

Roland grimaced. His thighs were on fire. He’d be burnt up soon keeping this pace without a seat. He didn’t look over at his coach, still keeping his suffering close, but he could feel Skårsen’s eyes analyzing the situation, cutting through his thick spectacles like plastic wrap.

“We’ll have to replace it,” the coach concluded.

“You have a spare seat in there?” Willaby asked.

Skårsen directed the driver to pull closer. Willaby understood, muttering a curse as he stood up onto his pedals. The two of them slowed, catching the air like a pair of sails. Willaby reached his hand out to lean on the car, but the coach beat it away with a wrench. The race jurors were on the cusp of canceling the stage, Skårsen explained. It was no time to provoke them.

The Brit did his best to keep his bike steady, but it still wobbled from side to side. Skårsen, leaning out of the car with a surgeon’s expression, undid the bolt fastening Willaby’s seat to his bike, and then lifted it out altogether. The car pulled back to Roland, and Willaby, seatless, continued to take the wind. The driver held them in as steady a parallel as he could. Skårsen, leaning out from the window’s edge (so far that he looked as though he might fall out), removed the broken seat from Roland’s bike and replaced it with Willaby’s. Altogether, they rode along the French countryside at a breakneck pace, tottering along like a haphazard machine that could fall asunder from innumerable points of failure at any moment, killing them all.

But, in short order, the operation was complete, and Roland sat down. His quads shuddered in relief, while his hamstrings, relatively rested, called out for blood.

The car took some distance from the two. Skårsen sank back inside and shouted:

“The rider ahead is a sprinter, Roland! He’s not trained to withstand what he has.”

“Like me,” Willaby gasped. “I’m nearly gassed.”

But the Brit pressed on, Roland following close behind. The distance to the rider in red shortened. So, too, did the distance to the finish line. Plumelec was close.

And when Willaby could no longer lead the way, he broke off.

“Bastard thinks he’s won!” he rasped with the last of his breath as Roland passed him.

The support car stayed back with Willaby, who was now shouting in pain as his legs spasmed into cramps. Roland, on the other hand, felt nearly as fresh as when he had first started the race. Ready to meet the rider in red, he leaned down and dug into his pedals.

He was quick to halve the distance. Once he had halved it again, his adversary realized the precarity of his lead, and began to push himself harder. It became a battle between terror and will, the red rider desperate to keep his rank and Roland desperate to dethrone him. Roland would get closer, but the leader would pull away. The finish line was now visible, sitting atop the last hill into Plumelec. A helicopter buzzed over them, able to capture the action at last.

The two riders were standing on their pedals, the bikes tottering from side to side as their legs jammed down. Both were professional athletes. Both had started at the same place and taken the same path. They each had as much of a moral claim to victory as any other.

But only one had grown up riding these countryside roads. Only one had been born into these lands—lands seeped with so much of his own blood and sweat and suffering. Roland imagined his father in the doorway of his childhood home, still holding the stopwatch. Roland was the boy, again, climbing the hill in agony, lost in an endless mist. Time ticked away, just like life, but for what? Here, finally, another revelation.

The stopwatch clicked to a halt, returning Roland to the race. He had passed the finish line, a full bike length ahead. The crowd erupted, ecstatic over the upset. The commentators lauded his victory from booming loudspeakers. Anaïs, standing well in the back by the podium, held her hands up to her chest, laughing and tearing up all at once.

Roland did not sit up and hold his arms out in a triumphant pose. Nor did he pull the brakes and grind to a halt. Instead, he allowed the momentum to carry him down the runway. Spectators cleared a path, shouting his name and slapping his back as he passed. Anaïs locked her eyes on his, and, fully understanding in her own way, pulled the fences of the finish area apart, allowing Roland to escape through the small gap she had made.

Then he was alone, riding through Plumelec. It was a bright day out. Denizens of the town watched him pass. An older couple waved at him from an outdoor café. A crowd of children leaned out from a set of windows and called his name. Roland wondered if anyone from his own youth remembered him. Plumelec was a charming town. What a gift it was to have grown up here. What a shame that he had neither enjoyed it nor returned.

But he was not a racer, now. He was only Roland, on a pleasant ride through his hometown. A son of his father. A son of Plumelec, where his mother had passed into death to bring him into life. At the hospital right here, in fact, where Roland now dismounted and set his tired bike to rest. Upstairs, in palliative care, he found the room that the bank representative had reported in the voicemail. In its bed, his father was being kept alive by the grace of machines. The television mounted in the upper corner of the room buzzed softly. The Tour.

The old man’s head tossed from the television to Roland, an expression of terror stuck on his exhausted face. Roland remained still and wondered why he hadn’t been told that his father had been hospitalized. Had his father insisted upon it? Had he been scared for his son to find him like this? Roland was now titanic and musclebound, bloodied up and indomitable, while his intubated father laid decrepit, perhaps already faded to dust beneath the hospital blanket.

Anaïs would eventually find him there and take him into her arms. Willaby and Skårsen would follow, bringing with them the entire racing team, dressed in black, to offer their condolences. A life would be waiting—to be lived well, with any luck.

Before all that, though, Roland was alone with his father, unsure of whether the old man he would one day become was conscious, or if his eyes had merely been glued to the race, and then to his face, as a reflex.