ORD

I sit on a grate metal bench and I dig through my messenger bag.  I pull out my prescription of Lorazepam and I pull out my iPod and I pull out my noise-canceling headphones.  I pop half a pill and I pick a song and I put the headphones over my ears.  I listen to the ambient music and I close my eyes and I concentrate on my breathing.  My heart has slowed and I feel stable again.  I drop my headphones to my shoulders and walk to the electronic console and I scan my credit card for my e-ticket.  The boarding pass is spit from the machine.

My flight number is 343.

Three is odd.  Odd is bad.  Four is even.  Four is good.  Three is odd.  Odd is bad.  Thirty-four is even.  Thirty-four is good.  Three hundred forty-three is odd.  Bad.  Three plus four, seven is odd.  Bad.  Three plus four plus three, ten is even.  Good.

I find my place in a line of people.  As per the security standards, I empty the contents of my pockets into a dirty grey dish.  I put my iPod and my headphones back into my bag and I put my bag in an open box.  My chest starts to hurt and I take my shoes off and put them atop my bag, soul side up.

I try not to look down.  I try not to think about the guy in front of me, about his feet, about his sweat soaked black socks, about the bacteria dripping from between his toes, about the germs he has transferred to the floor in front of me.  I try not to look at the stains as I follow him through the metal detector, walking on my toes, trying to be subtle, moving like an untrained ballerina.

I get through security and I find the gate where my plane is boarding.  I go to the fourth seat in the fourth row and I sit.  I rummage through my bag and pull out my Nook and I read two pages from a mystery novel that I recently downloaded and then I put the Nook away and I take out my iPod and I listen to the first twenty-two seconds of a song and I put the iPod away and I pull out my Nook and I read two more pages and I put the Nook away and I take a package of Twizzlers from the bag and I eat a couple of them and I put the rest away and I take the Nook out and I read four pages this time and I put the Nook back and I take out my iPod and I thumb through the songs and I feel my chest hurt again and I remember what Dr. R____ said, so I look for music that I find relaxing and I take another half of another Lorazepam pill.

I listen to a full song and I feel a little better and I take my headphones off and I put them in my bag and I take out my Nook and I prepare to make another attempt at reading.  People are around me.  They are moving in patterns, like ants, marching towards their specific destinations.  They are eating.  They are talking on their cell phones.  They are chatting among themselves.  One person, I realize, is speaking to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, looking up and seeing a girl standing over me.

“Is that a Kindle?” she asks.

I look to the e-reader on my lap.  “It’s a Nook,” I tell her.

“Oh,” She says, “is that the same thing as a Kindle?  I was thinking about getting a Kindle.”

“I don’t know.  I think they’re similar,” I say, and as I say it, I think I feel a drop of sweat under my oversized tee shirt.

“Do you like it? Can I sit here?” She motions to the empty seat next to me.

“Yes,” I say, in answer to her question about the e-reader and then she sits down.

“I was thinking about getting one.  A Kindle. I mean, I don’t know.  I go back and forth.  I have to travel a lot for work and I like the idea of not having to lug a big, heavy, hardcover book around, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say, distracted by my sweat.

“I mean, I have a book in this bag -feel how heavy this bag is,” she says and she hands me a large black messenger bag.  I lift it and I nod in agreement.  The bag is fairly heavy.  “See?  The book makes it heavy.  I mean, it’s not just the book.  There’s a laptop in there too.  I know the bag isn’t designed for a laptop, but I don’t care.  I keep it in there anyway.”

“Can’t the laptop become damaged in a bag like this though?” I ask, noticing that the bag doesn’t have any padding.

“Probably, but I don’t care.  It isn’t mine.  The laptop belongs to my work.”  She laughs and, even though I don’t think it’s that funny, I laugh too.  I hand the bag back to her.  “Thanks.  I love this bag.  It’s a Diane Von Furstenberg and it’s adorable.”

“I don’t know much about bags,” I confess.

“Can I see your Kindle?” she asks and I hand her the Nook.

“This is cool.  It’s lighter than I expected.  Can I touch the buttons, or will that mess it up?”

“Yeah.  It’ll remember what page I’m on.”  I rest my hands on my biceps and nonchalantly rub the tip of my thumb under the sleeve of my t-shirt.  It’s slimy with deodorant.  I want to go home and I want to shower again and I know that I can’t.  I don’t have enough time.

“That’s cool,” she says.  “This would make traveling so much easier.”  She lifts the device and examines its underbelly.  “But I don’t know.  I love books, you know?”

I nod absently.  I am concerned with the sweat on the side of my chest.  I imagine the drop of salty water traveling down my ribs.  I wonder if I have damp stains under my arms.

“I guess I’m just not hip with technology, you know?  Like, I never got into the whole blog-culture thing.  It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she says.  She hands me the e-reader and I put it in my bag.

“Blogs are written by people who can’t get published,” she says.  “I’m being a pretentious bitch, I know,” she says as she smacks the back of her hand against my knee.  “I’m mostly kidding,” she continues.  “I’m just resentful because I love books so much and I don’t want blog culture to ruin that.  I hate all these kids who post their diaries online and then refer to themselves as writers.  You need to write a novel to be a writer.  You need to be published.”

12 swipes?  10 swipes?  The deodorant label should say how many swipes should be used under each arm.  I don’t want to go too low.  If I go to low, I would sweat even more.  That would be terrible.  The bacteria would grow.

“There is something so romantic about a book, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” I say.

“Whenever I go to a new person’s apartment, I like to look through their bookshelf and then secretly judge them based on their choices.  Like, if I see, like, a Stephanie Meyer book, or something, I’ll know that the person has no taste,” she laughs.  “Although I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see the first Twilight movie, but that’s mainly because Robert Pattinson is hot.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Want to hear something funny?  I have a book at home, Treasure Island, that my brother hallowed out.  You know?  He cut the pages out with a pocket knife and made it into a little box for me.  I hide jewelry in it.  So if you ever rob me,” she laughs, “you don’t have to wreck my apartment.  Just take my Treasure Island book.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You wouldn’t be able to hallow-out a Kindle.  I mean, you could, but it’d be, like, super-expensive,” she laughs again and she hits my knee again.

I smile and give a polite chuckle.

“I also love going to libraries.  God I love them.  It’s such a cool a communal thing, you know?  I mean, other than books, can you think of one thing that people share like that?”

I, again, shift focus.  The woman continues speaking, but her voice seems distant and becomes something like background music.  I rub my hands together, scrubbing them as if they were dirty.  I think of libraries.  I think of the filth on hundreds of thousands of hands rubbing on hundreds of thousands of books.  I rub myself harder.  I visualize dirt and oils seeping from the skin of different fingers and collecting in the pores of each page of each book.  I imagine novels full of microscopic levels of dead skin and semen and blood and shit.  I begin to scrub frantically and I begin to breathe heavily.  I count each exhalation of breath.

OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelve.

The girl puts her hands over mine and I look up at her.

“Whoa.  Are you okay?  Are you nervous about flying?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say.  “I just,” I say.  I inhale deeply.  I say nothing else.  I pull my hands away from hers and I wipe my forehead.

“No. No.  I get it,” she says.  “Trust me, I get it,” she says.  “Flying is scary.”

She doesn’t get it.  I’m not worried about flying.  I have faith in the mechanics of the plane.  The damage is internal, not external.  I’m worried that my head is malfunctioning.

****

This next part of the story is where it gets really fucked up for me because I know that it didn’t really happen the way my mind tells me that it did.

****

A guy sits in a seat across from me, but off by one; third row, third seat.  He is bald, in his mid-thirties, and is wearing a black-shirt and blank expression.  He tilts his head slightly downward and his eyes pierce into mine.  The man is me.  He is a different version of me.

He doesn’t say a word, but he still communicates with me, somehow.  “You’re anxiety is getting worse,” says the bald guy.  “The breathing exercises that Dr R___ taught you aren’t working like they used to.  The ambient music isn’t working.”

The woman is still here.  She is still talking to me, trying to sooth me, trying to distract me.  She asks me where I’m from and I tell her.  She tells me that she’s never been to my home state but the she loves The Jersey Shore, a television program about people from the area.

“Maybe you need stronger drugs,” the bald guy says.  “Why don’t you take more of the pills that you have in your bag?” the bald guy says.

I tell the girl that I’ve never seen the show and she tells me more about it.  It sounds familiar to me.  It sounds like my childhood.  I immediately hate the show.  She asks me the last time I visited New Jersey and I tell her 2002, eight years ago.  Two.  Zero.  Zero.  Two.

“Take the pill bottle from your bag,” the bald guy says, “and eat the entire bottle.”

She asks me if I have family there and feel my anxiety worsen and I tell her that I do.  I volley the conversation and I ask her where she is from.  She tells me that she grew up in Minneapolis; one of the Twin Cities.  Two.  Even.

The bald man taunts me with exaggerated laughter.  “Dude, you’re getting worse, you know that, right?  A year ago –and don’t get me wrong, you were still crazy a year ago – but you weren’t this crazy- a year ago, if someone said ‘twin’, you wouldn’t have thought anything of it.  Now you’re so bad that the word makes you think of your even numbers.”

I ask the girl what she was doing in Chicago and she tells me that she’s just waiting for a connecting flight, that her final destination is Atlanta.  She asks me if I’ve ever been to Atlanta and I tell her no.  The woman talks about Atlanta.  She tells me that she’s been traveling there for years and that the city feels like a second (two) home for her.

“I kind of understand the germ thing,” the bald man says.  “It isn’t rational, but I get it in concept.  You think that you’ll get sick from dirty things, right?  You think that if you touch a dirty toilet seat that you’ll get some sort of disease or something.  You’re wrong about that.   You need to be around germs.  They build immunity against sickness.”

The woman is talking about a heat wave that hit Atlanta last summer and I nod as she speaks.

“But as strange as your germ-phobia is,” the bald man continues, “your issue with numbers is much worse.  That shit is completely insane.  Where did it even come from?”  I think of my childhood.  I think about a cliché that my brother used to say: Safety in numbers.  The bald man leans into me and responds to my thoughts, “There is no safety in numbers when the numbers are all in your head” he says, touching the side of my temple with a pointed finger.

I try to ignore the man and listen to the woman.  I tap my foot on the ground as they both continue speaking.

The woman tells me a story where she was in a rent-a-car with a broken air conditioner, stuck in traffic, and sweating profusely.  She guesses that it must have been one hundred degrees outside.

“Good thing it wasn’t one hundred and one,” the bald man jokes.  I think about the number.  One plus zero plus one equals two.  The bald man sighs.

The woman stops speaking because she hears an overhead announcement.  The airline changed her gate.  She tells me that she has to go and she tells me that she enjoyed meeting me and she tells me not to worry, the flight will be over before I know it.  She squeezes my hands and she gets up and she smiles and she waves and she leaves.

Her flight number is 1937.

I reach into my bag and pull out my iPod and I listen to the first twenty seconds of a song and I put the iPod away and I pull out my Nook and I put the Nook away without looking at it and tap my fingers on my lap and I take the Nook out again and I put the Nook back again and I take out my iPod again and I page through the songs again and I put the iPod back again and I take out my bottle of Lorazepam and I read the label.

“C’mon,” the bald guy says.  “Eat them all.”  He gives a sharp smile, head still bowed, eyes still fixed on mine.  His jaw lowers and rises, as if he’s chewing.  I look away from him.  I take my boarding pass and I read my flight information.  And then I read my flight information again.  And then I read my flight information again.  And then I dig into my bag and I pull out my iPod.