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Nailbiter

May 31

Pete the Greek was from Philly, used to run a bar until it got shot up by, in his words, “this drunken Irish fuck.” Pete took three bullets himself, two in the back, one through the left biceps—all scars he liked to show off to whoever came into his place. Thing was, his place wasn’t a bar in Philly, not anymore—it was a used bookstore in Pittsburgh. (“I’m a youse guy in yins territory,” he was wont to say.) The store, Squirrel Hill Books, was owned by Pete’s sister, who lived in Florida, and figured that Pete needed to relax in his later years, and that a used bookstore would be just the pace he needed.

Pete didn’t read anything but the newspaper. He was proud to have never read a book in his life. His mobile phone was an ancient flip phone—one step above a pager.

So, there he sat behind the counter. Surrounded by books he’d never read, never would.

He looked up over the lip of his paper at Owen, who waited at the counter.

“You’re not in till tomorrow,” Pete said.

“I can’t come in tomorrow,” Owen said. He nibbled at a fingernail. “Or the next day either. And not sure about the following—”

“Then you’re fired.”

“What?”

“I don’t have anybody else. Means I have to cover for you, and I don’t want to, but Sissy”—that was Pete’s sister—“says the place has to be open, and you’re my guy. My only guy. So if you’re not gonna be my guy, you’re fired.”

“It’s only a few days. A friend—” Is dying, but it came out different. “Is dead. He died. Going to his funeral.”

From Pete, a grunt. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“How long you worked here, Owen?”

“Six months.”

Pete looked him up and down. Evaluating him, and not in a good way. “Look at you. Always wearing black. Always looking like your dog got run over. And you got those—” Pete pulled at his own ears. “Those big holes in your ears. That loopty-loop in your eyebrow. Who knows what you got elsewhere. Nobody else is gonna hire you, that’s for damn sure. I dunno, Owen. You just go through job after job after job and for what?” He shrugged. Then sighed. “Fine. Back in three days, not four, and you keep the job. If you care.”

I don’t, not really, Owen thought, but he forced a smile and said thanks.

Pete grunted. Conversation over, it seemed. On the way out, Pete yelled at him, “And quit biting your nails. I keep finding the little nail bits all around, it’s fuckin’ disgusting, you hear me?”

—

He did not want to fly. He hated flying. He hated everything about it. The discomfort. The waiting. The disassociation. And of course, the persistent chance of death, given how the mere act of being in a plane felt like grave hubris.

He stood there in the Pittsburgh airport. He’d made it through security. Owen found the gate with an hour to spare, and it was in this spot he stood rooted, as slowly the crowds gathered, as they started to call boarding groups, as they called his boarding group, and still he remained where he stood.

They’re going to close the door .

That thought danced a sideways eight around his head again and again, looping back on itself so many times it started to sound like gibberish.

They’re going to close the door, Owen.

They’re going to close the door .

His mouth was bone dry. His hands and armpits were swamps.

“Last call,” the gate attendant said, “for Flight 1213 to Boston’s Logan Airport. We are boarding all groups. Last call.”

P.S. Hey, Nailbiter, I know you’re not going to want to get on a plane, but you gotta get on that plane, I don’t care if you chew your fingers to stumps.

Fuck.

Owen got on the plane.

—

You can handle this. It’s no big deal. Hour and a half. You can handle this . A mantra he repeated as his heart tried to kick its way out of his chest, as his jaw tightened so hard he could feel the tension in his pinky fingers, as his mind built up every mental wall it could to block off the catastrophizing images of people screaming while the plane plunged like a gull diving toward the sea.

“You’re bleeding,” his seatmate said. Lumpy guy, smelled like hoagie oil.

Owen looked down. Sure enough, he’d picked away a half-moon of thumbnail and tugged it to the side, and a bubble of blood had ballooned up. Now both hands had thumbnails bitten down deep. He’d been trying to control it.

The blood was red as a clown’s balloon.

“It’s no big deal,” Owen said, realizing it was a weird thing to say. (Just another thing he could worry about later. Hey, remember when you said a weird thing to the guy sitting next to you on the plane? It’s three a.m. , a great time to think about this, isn’t it? ) To clarify, he said, “I’m okay.”

“I didn’t used to like flying either.”

“All right.”

“You know how I fixed it?”

“Make little fists with your toes?”

The guy grinned. “ Die Hard. Ah. Yeah. But no. Marijuana.”

“Weed. Oh. I just—I just assumed you had a trick.”

“That’s my trick. Weed. I mean. Medical marijuana.”

That’s not going to help me now, Hoagie Guy, Owen thought, but kept his mouth shut. He offered a cursory thanks, then went back to staring at the seat back in front of him, fighting off the feeling of a heart attack.

His therapist—when he could afford her, anyway—had diagnosed him with OCD. He’d always figured OCD to be that thing where you had to have your books arranged alphabetically, or where you had to flip a light switch a specific number of times for the universe to feel okay. But she said his thing was obsessive thinking. Intrusive thoughts. Catastrophe lived inside his skull, sharks circling in that dark water. It was that and the nail-biting, and the cuticle picking, and the hangnails, and the occasional hair plucking, and all the other repetitive “self-grooming” habits that Kirsten, the therapist, said embodied the BFRB (body-focused repetitive behavior) part of OCD. “It’s not unusual for people who have experienced trauma,” she explained. (Implicit in that: people like you, Owen .) She said also, “You live in your amygdala.” The fear center of his brain. Said he was like a lizard caught in the shadow of a bird circling overhead. Sometimes he froze, other times he ran.

Story of my life, he told her.

He would’ve told her more, but that had been their last session. Three years ago now. Because COVID really fucked everything up. After that, he lost (yet another) job, lost health insurance, had too little money.

Without the job, without the insurance…no more therapist for him.

So he never really did find out how to get out of the place of fear.

He built a house in that part of his mind and rarely left its cold comfort.

—

The plane did not crash. It could have at any moment, he knew. It sometimes hit a puff of cloud and the plane would buck and bounce like a spooked horse, keenly reminding him there was nothing underneath. Nothing but the void. He thought he’d read somewhere, too, that planes were rarely serviced nowadays. Pilots had less training now, too. Climate change had made turbulence so much worse. His mind conjured everything short of gremlins on the wing of the plane. For most of the flight, he wanted to crawl out of the seat and find stable ground, but there was no stable ground up here. So instead he just sat in his seat, rawdogging the flight, white-knuckling the fuck out of the armrests, feigning being fine even though he was sweating and shaking like a detoxing addict. And whenever he forced his mind out of that place, it went instead to thinking about Lore, Hamish, Nick, Matty—and the terror of seeing them again. How they’d see him. How they’d judge him, and how little he’d done over the years. It was more terrifying than flying, thinking about that. More terrifying than crashing.

And then, it was over.

The plane landed.

They didn’t crash.

But a little part of him wished they had.