The World’s Strongest Librarian

  College life at Ricks was fine, but I was surprised to find that going to church was one of the best parts. Every Sunday, everyone in my ward—a few hundred kids comprising a few apartment complexes—got dressed up and went to church to check one another out. It’s an interesting experience to watch religious males try to out-righteous one another to catch the eye of the women. A bizarre bit of posturing, everyone trying to put the “stud” in Bible study. I got caught up in it, which was great for my spirituality. If our Sunday school class was going to be discussing the Book of Mormon, I’d better be ready, so I read. If we were going to do a service project, I’d be the first one there.

  I’d decided to major in philosophy. I really don’t know why, except I liked the idea of myself thinking deep thoughts. It was kind of like when I decided to be a chess prodigy. It was more like I thought, “You know, I’m the sort of person who should be a chess prodigy.” But then I realized I had to practice and study chess matches and so I quit. I liked the idea of Josh, the philosopher. I liked it so much that I enrolled in an ancient Greek class. Misty didn’t appreciate my studies. If I sat in the library, she had me shouting, then up and pacing around, trying to outdistance her with my lengthy stride. But she was a shadow that didn’t fade with the sunset. And she wasn’t merely attached to me at the heels. Every single cell in my body had a parasitic shade clinging to it. There were no depths or heights that I could descend or climb to in order to leave her behind. There was only the hope that she’d get distracted.

  “I’m really sorry, sir,” said a voice that really and truly did sound really sorry. “Someone has complained about the noise. Is there anything I can—” I was studying for a Greek test. I had managed to escape into the Middle Liddell Lexicon as I prepped for a frenzy of conjugations and translations the following morning. Suddenly, a hand on my shoulder.

  I was already up and gathering my things. “No, no, you’re fine,” I said.

  “I just meant—”

  “It’s not your fault. I can’t help it but it’s not going to stop.” I hadn’t even known I was doing anything. This was something new. I’d been absorbed in something and still having tics. Was nothing sacred, to bellow clichés at the sky?

  “No, I had no idea it was happening,” I told my mom on the phone that night.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well…shoot.”

  I lifted weights exactly one time that school year. It was a night when I was trying to study for a Book of Mormon class. Every time I tried to take a note, Misty yanked my pen across the page. One page ripped, then another, and then the pen moved past the page and now there was a big pen mark on my desk. I put on a sweat suit and walked to the school’s weight room.

  It was full of people. A big line of guys waiting to bench press, groups of girls talking and laughing, a bunch of people on treadmills, and me. Everyone looked like they had so much energy. The current medication made me slow and weak.

  “Huh!” I yelled. Misty had followed me. Nobody looked. The room was full of grunting, so hopefully we’d go unnoticed. And maybe if I slapped my face, everyone would think I was just psyching myself up for a big lift.

  I went to the squat rack, which of course was not being used—squats are hard and legs aren’t mirror muscles. I put 135 pounds on the bar. I put it on my shoulders, squatted down, and…that was that. I couldn’t stand back up. I sat down, letting the bar find the safety pins that were three feet off the ground. I rolled onto my side and crawled out of the rack. I noticed a couple of people watching. When I stood back up, my head swam.

  I couldn’t stand to be weak, but having people see it was worse.

  I didn’t go back.

  “Have you given any more thought to the Botox?” asked my mom during a desperate phone call. The first semester had ended and I told her that I wasn’t sure I could handle the spring term. She’d heard about an experimental treatment. Botulism toxin to paralyze the vocal cords. No more screaming, in other words. This wasn’t the final frontier for youth-obsessed people who simply had to know that their potentially sagging vocal folds were restored to the peak and vigor of their twenties. This was for people who treated public spaces as if they were recording booths for gag-reel noises. This was for people who, when they happened to make noises, made the wrong ones.

  “No. Yes. Yes, I have, but just right now. Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay all right. I guess. I’ll come do it.”

  You might think that before agreeing to something like voice-stealing injections in your windpipe, you might study up and figure out what you were in for. Nah. I was much more interested in figuring out how I could convince a girl I was pursuing to come with me for the procedure. Cyndi. She was tall. She had red hair. She said that if I ever wrote a book she’d read it. She’d never date me, but we hung out constantly. She wouldn’t kiss me, but she said she liked me as much as she’d ever liked anyone. Maybe that was why Misty tolerated her: Cyndi made it look as if there were a We, when in fact it was still just me.

  Cyndi agreed to go with me. I wasn’t sure how the injections would go, but I’d be able to dazzle her with courage and comeliness under pressure.

  On the way to Salt Lake, Cyndi and I stopped for dinner and then drove to a park. I had my guitar and a blanket in the back of the car. “Do you mind if I play for you for a while?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said her mouth. What are you up to? said her eyes. Don’t get any ideas, said her arms, which were now folded across her chest.

  “I just want to play for a while. I don’t know when I’ll be able to sing again.” This was going to be my sentimental trump card but my voice broke and I realized that it was true. So I sang. I strummed and sang while the stars came up. Cyndi wrapped the blanket around herself. My fingers were numb but the songs were as clear as they had ever been. I finally stopped when I had played every piece I had written or learned. As the final note died away, I had a tic. I could see it in the cold air between us, this sudden burst of breath and nerves.

  “That was nice,” she said. “But they were all sad songs.”

  “Sad songs are all I know,” I said.

  Then we drove to my aunt Cathy’s house, where we’d sleep. My mom met us there.

  Otolaryngology clinic. What an ugly word. What an ugly place. Nobody in the waiting room smiled. Why would they? They were ostensibly all here to get their throats or larynxes snipped or molested or savaged. They’d all be shambling away in a couple of hours, greatly changed. Diminished.

  But I didn’t expect this demeanor from the staff. For all his nonsense, Dr. H’s inane cheer had been more calming than these icy cyborgs. An unsmiling woman signed me in. An unsmiling orderly shuffled into the room and stooped about, replacing tissue boxes.

  The doctor who would change me was bald. So very bald, with the type of gleaming skull that one only affects in order to convey an air of menace and sociopathy. His glasses had no rims. He was utterly mad and soulless.

  One knows these things.

  “Hello,” he said, unsmiling. “I’ll be back in a few minutes after you’ve been prepped.”

  The madman’s assistant robot monotoned the procedure. “You will lie on the table. You will have gel applied to your temples. The doctor will aim needles through your throat over and over until his arms are exhausted. You will be voiceless forever. Cyndi will never kiss you. Bleep bloop.”

  The reality didn’t feel any better than my mental interpretation. I sat in the reclined chair. The man I would come to know as the Joyless Healer swabbed my head with some foul goo that smelled like the inside of a Halloween mask. I turned my head to look at my mom and Cyndi.

  “Hold still,” commanded the orderly with a whir of grinding gears.

  “We’re here,” said my mom.

  “Heh-heh,” I said, “this reminds me of that scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where they get him ready for electroshock.”

  “This is quite diff
erent from that,” said the revenant doctor. “This is not electroshock therapy and this is not a liquid conductant. You are getting botulism injections in your vocal cords. Now, lean your head back, don’t move. Don’t swallow. “After inserting the needle I will need to move it slightly to get into position. Hold still. This will be uncomfortable.”

  Pressure in my throat. A pinch. Momentary release as the needle punctured my windpipe. It was unpleasant but not agonizing. Just uncomfortable.

  “I said don’t swallow,” said the doctor. “Do it again and we may have to start over. This is not a booster shot.” It tasted sort of like the mist of an asthma inhaler. An antiseptic tang that I felt as much as tasted.

  Finally he withdrew the needle. I unclenched the hands I didn’t even realize I’d turned into fists, and began to sit up.

  “That was only halfway,” said the doctor. “Sit back. Don’t swallow.”

  Vocal cords! Plural! Silly me.

  When it was over, I felt my face to see if I’d been crying. Nope. My mom, on the other hand, looked as though someone had been sticking needles into the throat of her firstborn as she watched with a dreadful mixture of horror, hope, and fascination. Cyndi looked bored.

  “All through,” said the Joyless Healer with what sounded like tremendous disappointment. “Your voice will probably begin returning within weeks. Please see the nurse on the way out if you’d like to schedule your next round.” He departed in a whoosh of lab coat and malice.

  I stood. “Well,” I said. Wait! I could still talk!

  “Are you okay?” said my mom.

  “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Cyndi took my arm as we walked down the hall. She didn’t look at me, and nothing about her said anything to suggest that I should grab her hand or propose to her or kiss her, but it was good. We walked to the parking lot. My mom hugged me. “It’s going to be all right.”

  I nodded. “I hope so.” Then she was gone, driving west to Elko.

  Cyndi and I stopped at a gas station and bought sodas for the drive. In the car I turned on the radio. “Oh, I love this song,” I started to say before realizing that my voice was losing power. By the time we made it back to school it was nearly gone. A week later it was as gone as it would get. I could whisper, but not with enough force to speak over the phone.*

  It took tremendous effort to whisper.

  I toyed with the idea of wearing a sandwich board that said in big, blocky, crooked letters: CAN’T TALK MUCH. STILL LIKE TO TRY. WANT TO MAKE OUT?

  The tics: While it was true that I could no longer scream, and being in public was easier, I finally had a verification of something I had long suspected—there was a daily intensity quota that must be met. I had to expend a certain amount of energy on tics each day. It could be meted out over many small tics, or a few dozen huge ones. So even though I wasn’t screaming, my body was still trying; it just couldn’t make the noise. If I couldn’t be noisy, I could still be an abomination of motor skills gone amok.

  With sweat pouring down my face I traversed a crowded café on my way to class. “Hey!” My flailing arm had just knocked soda into a kid’s face. “Oh oh oh I’m so so sorry,” I whispered, grabbing a handful of napkins off someone else’s table. It seemed very quiet as I reached toward him. Then I realized he didn’t want me mopping up his face. “I’ve got…I’ve got—”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. I get it. Just please stop.”

  “Really?” Really? Please explain it to me.

  Every five or six weeks, my voice would return to the point of making me self-conscious and uneasy. So I’d head over to Salt Lake and surrender my voice to the Joyless Healer. I was still doing my silent screaming all the time, which gave me six-pack abs for the first time because every single cell in my torso contracted with great force from sunup to sundown.

  But the shots helped me get through both semesters. I went home to Nevada after spring term with more confidence than I’d had in a long time. I worked as a delivery driver during the day and went to the gym at night.

  As long as I was making some sort of progress in the weight room I could make progress in other areas. I couldn’t put it into words yet, but I was learning that the more I could do, the more I could do. Progress in one direction made progress in other directions, if not easier, more likely. It made me want to engage with other challenges. It made me want to go back to school and get going again. I had something resembling hope. Perhaps I was benefiting from an illusion of control in a universe of chaos, but the results were so good I couldn’t slow down enough to care.

  Until one morning when I was getting in the shower. I wasn’t one to sit around and stare at myself in the mirror all day, but I wasn’t above the occasional appreciative look at myself to verify that, indeed, I was lifting weights. I enjoyed seeing a new muscle, a new vein, a new narrowness.

  But nothing this new. A pink bulge the size of a peach sprouted from my abdomen, just to the right of my groin. I tentatively pushed it with my finger. It slid back into my body. I flexed my abs. The bulge reappeared.

  “Mom, I think I’ve got a hernia,” I said.

  “Let me see!” I let her see.

  “Yeah, no doubt about it, that’s a hernia. Well, shoot, honey, I’m sorry.” I saw a doctor that afternoon. A week later I had hernia repair surgery. I woke with a mottled black-and-blue abdomen. If you’ve ever quit an exercise routine, you can probably guess what happened to me six weeks later when I was allowed to lift again.

  I didn’t lift. I didn’t strive to regain the strength. The element of control was gone. I let it go, but it was gone nonetheless.

  And when it was time to go back to school, I couldn’t face it. So I didn’t.

  * Over the years I tried everything that neurologists try. The Klonopin didn’t help. Neither did Risperdal. Or Haldol. Or Clonazepam. Or Clonidine. Or Zyprexa. Or Tetrabenazine. A neurologist put me on a nicotine patch, which apparently had helped someone in some study. Every few months I tried something new. Every few months, a new letdown. My neurologists said they hadn’t dealt with many cases as severe as mine. They seemed delighted to have this chance to experiment.

  * From here on, just assume that if I’m talking, I’m whispering. I could communicate, but I only had the energy for five-to-ten-second bursts of whispers. Most of the time, it just wasn’t worth the effort.

  CHAPTER 7

  646.78—Marriage

  591.473—Mimicry (Biology)

  There’s no lovelier place to watch a snowstorm from than the reference desk on Level 3 of the Salt Lake City Public Library. In the fading light, in this glass magnificence, it’s a happier world out there, something from a Christmas card. Even during this phone call, I can’t keep my eyes off it. Yet…an urgent situation of considerable shrillness is developing behind me.

  Our desk is round. Librarians sit inside the hole of the doughnut. Voices behind me are now raised so loud that I turn around, hand the telephone to my colleague, and say, “Take this and take a break.” He does.

  Now we are alone. Our eyes meet. Above her right orbit, a thin purple eyebrow drags its right edge toward the siren call of something beneath her large straw hat. She presses her heavily lined lips together. They are so glossy that I can hear the noise of them closing.

  “He is”—she gestures toward my receding colleague’s back—“…unsuitable person.” She relaxes her face. The eyebrow stays on high alert. “I wonder if you—could you be…suitable?”

  I smile my least confused smile and ask, “How can I help you?”

  “He is unsuitable person.”

  “Yes, but how can I help you? They don’t get much more suitable than me!” I sound much peppier than I feel. How can there be that much snow in the sky? How can it fall so quietly?

  “Yes, I have problem. Downstairs I am trying to listen to compact disc. The machine does not work. Fix it. You fix.”

  “This is Level Three. We don’t have anything to do with that. Have you told them abo
ut the problem down there? Would you like me to call them?”

  “I ask them once. The American girls laugh. They are not interested in helping. You fix it.” After several iterations of this routine I agree to send an e-mail to the technology department.

  “No. I will send. You give me their address.”

  I print out their e-mail address and hand it to her. “Here you go.”

  She looks at it and makes a sound that sounds like pyeh! “You can’t send?”

  “You said you wanted to do it.”

  She squints at my name tag. It’s an old one, a spare. At one time it read:

  The City Library

  Josh

  Manager

  I’m not a manager anymore, so now it looks like this:

  The City Library

  Josh

  Manager

  I only use this tag when I forget my usual badge.

  “Is not even you? Pyeh!”

  “Yeah it’s me. Manager’s crossed out, not Josh.”

  “You send that e-mail. You send now.”

  I send the e-mail. It says:

  Computer Services, I told someone I would send you this e-mail. I know it’s not your department. I asked her to contact AV first. But she insisted that you see the e-mail. Good luck. Josh.

  “Sent!” I say.

  “Americans…” She looks around. I see how long and thick her ponytail is. It is glorious. I am ready to forgive it all. I’m ready to—

  “You know what I say if American millionaire asks to marry my daughter?”

  “No.”

  “I forbid. I forbid it ten thousand times!” She narrows her eyes as if I’m hiding a cushioned ring box behind my back, ready to surprise her daughter—whose name is almost certainly Svetlana, or maybe Pyeh!—from bended knee.