I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (25 page)

His lie sounds magnificent. He slows the story down now, varies the intonation, and remembers to include her name.

“Well, Courtney, I was in the wrong place, doing the right thing. Courtney, I remember the sting, the fire tearing through my back. I remember running away, then crashing down with my blood on me. But I was hit in the back, so I didn't see the blood leaving me. That's a crazy thing, to feel your blood leaving you but you only have your hands to tell you how much. You can't see it. It's not easy to see what's supposed to be inside your body on the outside. I fell in a soccer field, as my fellow soldiers and children gathered around. I don't talk about it often, but I want you to know. Courtney, I can tell you'll understand.”

He needs her to touch him, even a brush, or at least look at him. More sensation. Another toe. He touches his legs and senses the slight pressure.

“So you weren't born with it,” she drawls.

“No, Courtney. In Afghanistan . . .”

She pops upright, somehow satisfied, and strides toward the bathroom. Her friend, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, lets her go.

“Wait,” he says. “Just wait.”

At the door Courtney stalls.

“Coming?” she asks the door.

Armando moves to the middle of the marble corridor and stops as she enters the women's bathroom.

“Hey, buddy. You go in there . . . ,” says a voice behind him. It's her friend, still facing away. “You go in there, you walk out with something. I'm not judging.” The statement confuses him, but she puts her right index finger to her nose and shakes her head. He wheels to the bathroom door and places his hand on the door's dull brass push-plate. It's warm, and a whiff of cleaner stench hits him. The fake mahogany door is an inch thick, on hinges, but he can't bring himself to push. He imagines Courtney on the other side, leaning back against the black marble counter, the top three buttons unfastened, waiting, and as he rolls back from the door he wonders how long she'll wait for him there. Heart and mind racing, he's frantic, time leaping ahead, and he glances at the friend, now leaning at the intersection of two walls, and nods. He hears Courtney emerge, speak over him. She flicks her nostrils with a newfound awareness in her eyes.

He guesses:
Cocaine?

“Should have come, hero.”

“Courtney,” he says, but she passes him with no hint of recognition and walks to her friend, puts her arm around her, and they exit through the heavy front doors of the hotel.

He follows, hoping for a glance back, a beckoning, a tease. The doorman, quick on his feet, gives him a chance to catch up, but he has no clue what to say or do. He hears their laughter as they disappear behind a row of taxis.

After the accident Anna waited months before asking him what he wanted from her. He knew this meant that she needed something, anything, even if the offer was to him, so he took down the sheets and kissed her mouth, breasts, lower stomach, and moved down while he held her hips in his hands and tongue-searched her to hit her spot—the spot he used to know, but it had been so long—and he searched for the accompanying pressure that always arrived in him but felt nothing, not even as she moaned and jerked and pushed his head away. He watched her flail in the lamplight. She smiled and helped him to his back. She hovered over him, serious and tender.

“Do you want me to try? Do you want me to touch you?”

Armando wheels to the side of the entrance to the hotel, purgatory for all smokers on windy nights—just warm enough to make the buzz worth it but too cold to enjoy the burn. The space is abandoned except for the bass from the club down the street. Across the street, Grant Park, then Lake Michigan and clear skies.

Twenty minutes later a woman in a wheelchair wheels up and stops, puffing smoke from her extra-long cigarette into the night air. He's just finished his cigarillo, and to start a conversation he pulls a new one out and asks for a light.
Midthirties,
he guesses. Her delicate jaw slides into a petite chin, a seemingly reconstructed nose odd-fitting with the rest of her face. No wedding ring.

“You know what I hate?” she asks after lighting him. The question sounds rhetorical, but he thinks of guesses, still shaking off his encounter outside the bathroom:
Paralysis? Wheelchairs? Life?

“Stars,” she says. “What a crock. Most are dead, yet here they are, shining away with all their fake-ass light.”

Armando winces. He guesses there could be bad poetry coming his way, but he nods to project interest. She smiles at him as if she's let him in on a secret.

“I don't think
most
of them are dead,” he says. “Maybe a couple.”

He needs to keep the momentum going, so he pulls out the fifth and tilts the bottle. Ms. Starlight sits in a fading light the color of weak iced tea.

“No. All of them are dead,” she says, in a confident, near-preachy voice. “It takes their light a million years to get here. I know this stuff. Nothing we see in the sky is actually still there except the other planets. It's all a mirage except shooting stars, which aren't stars at all, just lunar dust particles floating around. But you know this. You can't trust your eyes.”

Armando is fairly sure she spouts flawed astronomy, but she rides in a wheelchair, and although he understands that makes them equals in a way, he still registers a healthy dose of sympathy as the woman puffs on her cigarette. Her chair is a power model, glistening blue. Her right hand clutches the joystick, tenderly fingering the top. He can tell she wants him to understand all this celestial babble as she leans over her armrest toward him. Her blouse lifts up over the collarbone, revealing a red bra strap. He considers for a moment what they would look like on the bed together.

“Sure, all of them are kaput,” he says, but his voice sounds tired and dismissive.

“You don't believe me. Fine. Not important to you.”

“Yep,” he says, and she leans back.

“You, at the fancy hotel. You, searching for someone your type. You, a damn believer.”

The shift to awkward accusation surprises Armando, and before he realizes that he won't understand any answer, he asks the question.

“You're not staying here?”

“Doesn't matter.”

“What?”

“I know a broken vet when I see one.”

“What?”

“You're a war man. You care about nothing because you think you've been through everything. I got a cousin like you.”

“You don't know me.”

“I'm good at guessing. Let's see, a war hero, back to a country that doesn't take care of you. VA sucking the life out of you with long lines and doctors that, let me guess, just don't care. Married, broken dick, so kids are out of the question, war hero wears off, and you cry when you drive by fucking pick-up basketball games.”

“I have kids,” he says faintly, before the adrenaline hits and pours out over everything. “Okay,” he says, then takes a drag, holds the smoke in his mouth, and thinks. The chemicals burn his tongue and cheeks.

“Since you're a bitch that can fit into a dress, I figure a dud in high school, but an athlete, cheerleader maybe, doing the big boys, flunking science. Had the looks before you were T-boned. Couldn't have been your fault. New nose, but Johnny Ballplayer walks away after four weeks, and thank God he never used the ring sitting in his drawer. Nice settlement, but it doesn't help the old back, and you'd climb on anyone if they'd only offer you a compliment. Let's see here. You're not so bad in the shadows.”

He knows he has her, because she swivels the chair to face him and reaches up to touch her ear, making sure it's still there. She grins with a hint of defeat, and he figures he'll forgive her in the coming minutes. The pause stretches, and he questions whether he got all of it right.

“You think I can't walk, don't you? You think this isn't a choice?”

Armando goes mute. He's at the end of a tunnel. No matter what has happened, this is a line, one he would fight over—
faking it?
—but this insane question scampers away and he can't bring himself to answer. His mind spins and the muscles in his back tighten; he's tired now and conscious of the last seventeen waking hours. His cigarillo is a nub.

He's about to give up and respond, flick his smoke away, and head up to his room. He's decided on “I'm tired,” but before he gets the two words out, Ms. Starlight stretches both legs outward, holding them parallel to the ground.

Armando's vision flexes and blurs. His anger forms from somewhere deep. The doorman nods off, and the pounding bass from the club has disappeared. Legs still extended, she scowls at him and laughs.

“All of this,” she says, “just a temporary thing. Nothing but a fall and three weeks while the bruise heals. You, on the other hand—” She stops midsentence. Her forehead crinkles in frustration. After a few seconds he's convinced she's said everything, so he turns back to the doors, but before he gets to the entrance she clears her throat.

“You sorry fuck,” she says.

Alone in the elevator. The screen displays the police sketch again, a full-body sketch, and Armando realizes that the accused always stand in the police lineups. His head aches while he replays his lobby story to Courtney, Ms. Starlight's parting words, and now, unsolicited, a dark and shifting memory materializes—this time the M4 bucks on his shoulder and the Afghan girl runs at him barefoot before exploding from the chest out, and when he reaches her she is somehow whole again, but dead, and Armando raises her shawl, but there is no vest, no bomb, nothing but her shirt and ribs and chest.

The elevator screen shows forty degrees and foggy at the airport, which is never good. His 7
A.M.
flight will be delayed. He tries to think of the plane, tries to hold the image, envision its angle upward into the early morning, but the late night engulfs him and he thinks of Anna at home and he wonders if she's ever had another man over while he is away. What kills and saves him is that the answer is very likely no. More likely Anna wallows nightly in the crushing guilt of the “for better or for worse.” He imagines her greeting him tomorrow in the driveway, taking his suitcase from his lap. He hears her yelling to the kids that Daddy's home, and the girls rushing out, arguing about who gets to push him up the ramp. He can taste his wife's kiss the first time they tried to make love after the accident.

They had waited months, her floating over him.

“Do you want me to try? Do you want me to touch you?”

“Yes,” he said, and being so scared of the silence that followed, scared to look down, scared to count the seconds pass as he sank into himself, feeling Anna's hand on his chest, stomach, then nothing, only empty, numb, nothing below, and later, with shaking hands and an upper body on fire with anger, wheeling to the kitchen and pulling out a bread knife. The serrated edges of the knife pulling against the sharpener, taking his boxers down and gripping his genitals in his left hand. He felt the knife's weight in his right hand but nothing when he pressed the sharp edge to the base of his penis. He saw the skin open slightly and blood began to run down the blade and onto the floor. He heard one of his daughters rise and use the restroom down the hall, heard the toilet flush, the tap run and stop, soft footsteps, and the closing bedroom door. The house quieted and he heard night insects outside and he stopped the bleeding with paper towels and cleaned the floor and cleaned the knife and put it back in the drawer he could reach. He turned off the lights and sat alone in the dark room.

The elevator doors open to his floor and he starts out, but something in his arms fails him and he pauses in between the closing doors. They close and open, close and open around him—chewing. He ponders the worst thing that could happen if he gets back in the elevator, but before the doors close for the third time he's back in, pressing the 23 button. Something in his working bones tells him that Courtney's room is on the twenty-third floor.

He rolls off the elevator and takes his place beside two fake leather chairs and a granite console table with a gold-faced lamp. He stares at the two elevator displays, digital red numbers stuck on L. One of them moves to 4 and down again. Another begins its ascent, and he's stuck in this miracle lottery. The number climbs above 17, stops, and starts up again. His seat creaks as he adjusts. He isn't sure how long he can last, if he has enough resolve to stick this out, but as he looks down at his bent legs in his wrinkle-free slacks, he feels a warming in his gut and begs it to lower. He understands the astronomical odds, but he has faith that the elevator doors will open to him and for the first time in years he'll feel his pants slide down over his knees before they fall to the floor. Ms. Starlight was right, he's a believer, he has to be, and tonight there will be a reckoning, a savagery, enough passion and blood and faith to resurrect the universe at one in the morning, but as the elevator doors open and he sees Courtney's smeared makeup, he wonders if he has enough of anything.

12

T
WO HOURS BEFORE
showtime in his army dress uniform at the Fourth of July parade, Wintric lounges on his living room couch, fingering a recently purchased pocketknife as his three-year-old son, Daniel, tries to balance on one leg. Daniel teeters on his right foot for three seconds before losing his balance.

“Put your arms out,” says Wintric, miming the arm movement from the couch.

Daniel glances at his father and raises his arms out to his sides. He lifts his left foot a couple inches off the living room floor and wobbles, then stomps the foot down. He tries again.

Wintric's left foot rests on the carpet. His only remaining toe on the foot—his big one—brushes at the light-pink remnants of an old cranberry juice stain he recently gave up on. His big toe has done this minor back-and-forth dance as long as he can recall, but the involuntary movement has become even more noticeable since the other digits disappeared.