I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

11. Resurrecting a Body Half

IN HIS HOTEL ELEVATOR Armando fingers the executive-level key card and stares up from his wheelchair at the four-inch screen showing the Israeli prime minister at a podium with the red breaking news headline “Israel Prepares for War with Iran.” The screen flashes to a police sketch of someone Chicago authorities search for. Armando wonders how one slides into the position of sketch artist. His local police department — where he volunteered briefly — lacked the money, so when necessary they would bring in the high school art teacher, Trent Kellogg. He would show up with his charcoal set and pound the paper. He wasn’t an accomplished artist, and most of the time the department would be embarrassed to put the sketches out, but what Armando remembers in detail is Kellogg’s face while he drew, the bundled forehead and contorted mouth, saliva leaking out.

This sketched suspect on the elevator screen is a white or Hispanic male, twenty-five to thirty years old, five-foot-eight to six-foot-one. A moment passes before Armando recognizes the absurd range of people who fit this description, but when he does, he recalls the details he slung at Kellogg: a red-haired female in a blue sweatshirt. At least he could describe the car, the brown Buick LeSabre that ran the stop sign on his early-morning jog and smashed him. A day after his spinal surgery Kellogg came in and they walked through it — the thin nose, the haircut, the chin — and Armando realized he didn’t know as much as he thought, but he overheard himself dealing out a description that barely registered, and before he knew it, he and Kellogg had created someone. Kellogg was into it big-time, shaking and groaning, using the side of his hand and fingertips, whipping the charcoal lump like a madman. He finished and Armando sat up in the hospital bed and studied the bust of a woman he half recognized, so he nodded and sent Kellogg on his way and returned to the dreaded wheelchair catalogue.

In this elevator, on the small screen, the artist has conveyed an androgyny and universality that denote everyone and no one. Armando considers his own features, and someone softly touches his shoulder, then his neck. He twists around awkwardly, and a smiling, attractive woman brushes his cheek with her hand. She leans back and settles comfortably against another woman. The space is packed, and Armando turns back to face the front, trying to neutralize the confusion that erupts. What just happened? In his dreams he has neared this experience and he always has something witty to say, but here, in the moment, he freezes. Pity? Desire? My cheek? His fingers throb, and in what appears to be a miracle, he feels a twinge in his groin for the first time since his accident. He tries to summon the courage to acknowledge the feeling, to turn back to them, but what would he say? Thank you? Let’s go? I’m married, but she’s lost interest? The problem is, he wants everything to be easy: no stories. He wants one of them to invite him to her room, where they’ll undress him and lick each other before they take control and use him, but as he imagines the scene he has already lost their faces. There was a time when this squeeze and cheek brush was all his body needed to respond with an uncontrollable erection, but tonight a twinge means more than anything in his past. He smiles and a surprise desire fills him. He’s uncertain where to reach or how to breathe. Chatter fills the elevator: a feminine voice murmurs of a bad back to a friend, two teenagers about Derrick Rose and the upcoming season for the Bulls. He has three floors to go, with no plan, no idea of what he’s capable of, and then he’s at his floor. The doors open. He takes one look back to get the faces and they look right back, and seconds before the doors close on his healers, one of them nods and smiles. The elevator doors close, and he turns to watch the numbers scroll upward, noting the pauses (23, 27), until the elevator starts back down.

Two months after the accident, at the official lineup, he saw her, the woman in Trent Kellogg’s drawing. He knew that there was no such thing as closure or justice, not when you lose your legs and spine to a person driving and texting. He picked her out, said, “That’s her.” In the end his eyewitness testimony was important, but less critical than the woman’s dented LeSabre, previous driving convictions, and eventual confession.

On the way home, Anna drove — has, from the moment of his accident, always driven — and held his hand in the car.

“May she rot in hell for what she did to us,” she said. “Fuck her. They should cut her hands off.” Armando didn’t say anything when the obscenity left her mouth, but the word us haunted him instantly. What she did to me, he thought. What she did to me.

The hotel’s handicapped-accessible room is smoke-free, but Armando smells the dirty cigarette smell in the walls. He sits in his wheelchair, naked, the shower warming up, television tuned to the first presidential debate:

MODERATOR: But if I hear the two of you correctly, neither one of you is suggesting any major changes in what you want to do as president as a result of the financial bailout. Is that what you’re saying?

OBAMA: No. As I said before, Jim, there are going to be things that end up having to be—

MODERATOR: Like what?

OBAMA: —deferred and delayed. Well, look, I want to make sure that we are investing in energy in order to free ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. That is a big project. That is a multiyear project.

MODERATOR: Not willing to give that up?

OBAMA: Not willing to give up the need to do it, but there may—

Armando turns away. Poor McCain, he thinks. No matter what Obama says, you got no shot.

In the spacious hotel shower Armando turns the temperature way up and lets the steaming water drench him, and he sits on the specially equipped shower seat and touches his wet body. He feels his chest and face and hair. He rubs at his eyes. He pinches the skin at the elbow without nerve endings. He thinks of how his spoiled body retains his healthy name.

He soaps his arm and touches his biceps scar, then reaches down and soaps and rinses his feet, a raised scar on his left foot. He recalls a photo taken two days before that jog. In it he stands in their living room in a bathrobe he hates. He poses for Anna, sticking his belly out in between the crossing flanks of cotton, patting it. After she took the photo Mia screamed from her bedroom, and in his rush to her he cut his foot on the doorstop to her room before calming her down from a nightmare. All of that action he has to create from a photo where he stands frowning at his body. He considers sliding out of the shower, but the hot water keeps coming and he feels like he breaks even with the pricey room when he drains an extra five minutes from a steaming cleanse.

Armando scoots to the edge of the plastic seat and caresses his testicles and fingers the space beneath them, pressing hard. He searches for the twinge that receded after he returned to his room. He tries to convince himself of the miracle in the elevator, that it actually occurred, and he knows that the only proof is to feel it once again. Once is a mirage. Although he has washed himself already, he again soaps his penis, testicles, groin, inside his ass and he dreams up images of the women’s mouths on him.

Once Armando feels lightheaded he turns off the water, but he stays seated while the steam escapes through the slightly open window. He grabs at his narrow quadriceps and pushes down, running his hands to his knees. After he and Anna were married they would routinely make love in the shower, everything slippery and smooth. He’d crouch down to a half squat to enter her, and after, he’d always let her get out first to dry. They’d lie on the bed and he’d silently curse his aching knees and knotted legs before falling asleep. In the long hotel mirror he considers his rehabilitation in the elevator, debates the consequences of sex without his wife, whether there must be morality in miracles.

He dries as best he can and squirts cologne on his neck, buttons up a tailored shirt and squirms into slacks, then finds his fifth of Wild Turkey. He unscrews the top and sniffs the bottle before taking a few biting gulps and hearing talk of war on the television.

OBAMA: And so John likes — John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni. And you were wrong. And so my question is—

MODERATOR: Senator Obama—

OBAMA: —of judgment, of whether or not — of whether or not — if the question is who is best equipped as the next president to make good decisions about how we use our military, how we make sure that we are prepared and ready for the next conflict, then I think we can take a look at our judgment.

MODERATOR: I have got a lot on the plate here…

MCCAIN: I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy. But the important — I’d like to tell you, two Fourths of July ago I was in Baghdad. General Petraeus invited Senator Lindsey Graham and me to attend a ceremony where 688 brave young Americans, whose enlistment had expired, were reenlisting to stay and fight for Iraqi freedom and American freedom. I was honored to be there. I was honored to speak to those troops. And you know, afterwards, we spent a lot of time with them. And you know what they said to us? They said, let us win. They said, let us win. We don’t want our kids coming back here. And this strategy, and this general, they are winning. Senator Obama refuses to acknowledge that we are winning in Iraq.

Armando runs his fingers along his jaw, his short, well-kept beard. He mutes the television. Oh, McCain, he thinks. Then, out loud to the television, to a close-up of McCain’s face, mocking, “Let us win, they said. Please John, let us stay here forever and win. We love it here! We’re winners! Fuck you.”

He runs the channels on the muted television: SportsCenter, a Friends rerun, news, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie trading punches.

Six months ago, a Tuesday night marked the three-year anniversary of the hit-and-run accident, but no one said anything, and Mia threw a fit over dinner in her purple overalls, screaming and pushing. She knocked her chicken enchilada on the floor and told Anna to shut up. At five years old, Mia knew it was spanking time, but she darted away and taunted Armando. He put down his tumbler of whiskey, but he couldn’t catch her in their white kitchen, and he could see the confidence in her young eyes. Catch me, cripple. With a rush Anna snatched Mia’s shoulder and spun her. Armando wanted Anna to bring Mia to him so he could teach her a lesson she wouldn’t forget, but before he knew it Anna wound up and delivered a fist to their daughter’s lower back. This adult-world punch cut the wind from her and she fell to the kitchen tiles. Anna grabbed the bottom of her straps and yank-lifted her up and slapped her temple, picked her up again and slapped her red cheek. Armando saw Mia’s eyes, vacant and disbelieving. Anna said something, but he couldn’t hear the words above Camila’s screeching. Anna looked up at the ceiling and screamed and somehow Mia slipped away and bounded to him, crashed into his chest, shaking and choking him. Anna moved toward them, leaning into the stride with her shoulders, and for the first time in his life Armando feared her and realized there was little he could do, so he lifted his arm in defense, heard himself, in a voice unfamiliar and weak, begging his wife to stop.

Armando senses the energy and whispers of opportunity in the city night, so he wheels around the hotel lobby, trying everything he knows to appear as if he isn’t waiting for someone. He may luck into a chance encounter with the women, but the odds aren’t good. He’s willing to wait awhile before he asks the doorman if he’s seen the women. On a normal travel night, he’d do some mind fucking, because when you’re married it’s the best self-preservation, even for the guilt seekers. A few minutes before eleven and he debates the strength of his whiskey breath. He pops a mint, and because this is his night, the women emerge from the elevator and one of them has a late-night sway Armando recognizes. She is younger and plumper than he remembers from the elevator, in a red skirt that shows her meaty legs. She says something from a distance that he doesn’t catch, and her friend wraps her hand around the swayer’s biceps and gently pulls. Armando waves and they walk toward him.

“It’s Courtney,” she says with a southern accent, and takes a breath as if she’s run out. Before he can reply with his name, she comes close to him. “Okay, tell me.”

“Motivational speaker,” he says. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

“We could talk around it, but I want to know, because she says”—pointing over to her friend—“that by the look of you, all of this is new.”

She smells like strawberries, and her cross necklace dangles close to his face. The faintest twinge returns to his lower body, and a biting sensation at a toe. Armando senses gathering emotion, but he holds himself together and runs through a catalogue of stories and picks one that answers Courtney’s lazy eyes.

“Come close, because it’s embarrassing,” he says softly. She does, her ear inches from his mouth, head bobbing. “Have you heard of Kabul? Of course you have. So you know the battles and bombings. The bottom line is, I was caught in the middle, doing what I could. There’s no easy way to say it. The Taliban were closing on our position outside the city, but we managed to save most of the children. We had them lie down at our feet while we fired back. The fighting was brutal, but we hung in there. In many ways I’m lucky, even with all of this.”

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.