On the slopes of the Klausenpass, in the mountains outside of Lucerne, our cyclist Lojze Klemenčič's eyes feel like billiard balls rolling around in his skull. Sometimes he gets the strength to suck oxygen deep through his nose to try and calm all the processes in his body begging him to relent, the speed of his cadence disconnected utterly from how much distress he is currently in. That's what all the training was for.
In his moment of physical pain, which he will not quite remember in full, his mind dredges up all kinds of fragments as though the strain is forcing his memory to leak into his consciousness like a lemon in a juice press. That consciousness drifts dangerously towards unconsciousness the deeper he goes and there's not much deeper he can go than where he's at right now. He's nearing the bottom of his cave, and if he doesn’t remember his own humanity soon he will reach the other world where the beautiful mowers mow with big scythes, like in the old story. The dew on the grass. The beads of sweat on his skin. The swings of the scythe. The rotation of pedal stroke after pedal stroke. This is as close to death as the living can taste while knowing they can still stop at any minute, can still pull the safety rope tied to the cudgel. But he will not stop, and neither will the fragments, which he gradually strings together into one moment of clarity:
When I was a boy, I would look up and see the stars and they were so clear. Like God had splattered the sky with paint. And all the stars had names in books, but I gave them my own, too, orienting the stars to the mountains and the valleys and my house and the road where my father would drive home in his red sedan. Everything fit in those stars, the whole world which, as a child, seemed vast and unknowable. I don't look up at the sky at night anymore. I don't think it means much to me now. The world is smaller than I used to imagine. Or perhaps just my world, and perhaps I was the one who made it that way.
Feeling some kind of strange guilt in his deliriousness, he looks up blearily at the sky, and it takes quite an effort for him to do so because the gradient he's climbing is inhumane, tilting him ever so slightly backwards. Under this bright, cloudless sky, the big dome of the sky, curved and limited by the pressure of his eyes against his eyelids, it feels as though he's trapped in a terrarium, inhaling his own moisture. The blurred, elegant conifers become mere pipe-cleaners in some absurd diorama. There it is again, the concept of the finite world. Like a terrarium. Or a diorama. Or those cake platters they have in the fancy bakeries in Bled. Something with a dome, the big dome of the sky. He latches on to that phrase, keeps saying it to himself with each breath.
The big dome of the sky.
The big dome of the sky.
The big dome of the sky.
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