Jesse Goolsby - I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

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.