I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (24 page)

I
N 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.”