The World’s Strongest Librarian

  When I bought that baby-name book I thought the process was buy a baby-name book, have sex, baby wearing an adorable bonnet appears. But no.

  “Your chances of conceiving a child are less than four percent,” said the fertility specialist.

  Janette sighed. “Four percent?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but there are options. I would propose starting you on a regimen of…” He talked, far away in Doctorland. I held the test results, which said that my sperm spent their time cavorting, swimming in circles, bumping into one another, guffawing with self-effacement every time they lost their way and found themselves at another dead end.

  Part of me was relieved. I hated that part of me.

  If you’re married, or you’ve ever been married, and you went into it with the hope that it would somehow fix your problems or bridge the gaps in your personal failings, you’re a sucker. I suspect that you know it. All honeymoons, literal or metaphorical, end. After Janette and I got married, we moved to Salt Lake so I could finish school at the University of Utah. That semester I was a classics major for some reason. Within a month I told my Greek professor that I wasn’t sure I could complete the semester. That morning I was fine in class, but I struggled in the hallways. Too many bodies. My arms flailed over my own head, to keep everyone else safe. I shouted my repertoire of nonsense syllables. I avoided eye contact as my right shoulder jerked up over and over with such force that I fell against someone.

  I told the humanities advisor I doubted that I could finish the semester.

  “Do you think it will get easier?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not sure why it would.” She helped me with a medical withdrawal, filing a form with the head of the College of Humanities and getting it approved. So I terminated my semester without receiving failing grades.

  I wanted to work while I regrouped. Janette was working in the church office building downtown. It’s a tall building where administrative church stuff happens and men grow rotund bellies. She was a secretary, and then became an editor. I looked for graveyard shifts at gas stations, or jobs at bookstores.

  I entered a Barnes and Noble while someone was putting up a “now hiring” sign. They interviewed me and I started a week later.

  I thought that working in a retail store would be thrilling, amazing somehow, as long as the product was a book. I’d walk in, shelve a few volumes, and then sit around sipping a hot chocolate from the café while talking about books with my coworkers.

  The reality, though…I arrived at 6:50, clocked in, and shelved books for four hours while musical abominations blasted from the store’s speakers. If you’ve never heard the Beach Boys singing “Be True to Your School” at an unholy decibel level at 7:00 in the morning, I envy you.

  On my first day I shelved for an hour before the morning briefing. We gathered around the information desk while our managers outlined the day. What was corporate pushing? What were the new releases? Yes, James Patterson really had another book out. And then our manager introduced me.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Welcome, Josh,” said our manager. “What do you like to do for fun? Tell us something about yourself.”

  “Well, I just got a literary agent,” I said. WHAT! No, I didn’t! What was I saying?

  It seemed that some of the other employees’ eyes widened. Others narrowed. What had possessed me? I wasn’t above the occasional embellishment to tell a better story, but this was an absolute lie. Years later I would read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Better an important fake than a real nobody,” said Ripley, who was also a sociopath and eventually a murderer. It was like the scene in The Karate Kid where Daniel Larusso, the insecure new kid in town, lies about knowing karate to impress someone. Well, it starts innocently enough, but it’s not long before he’s getting his face kicked off by a dojo full of hooligans. But I wasn’t some kid, I was a grown man! Except I wasn’t, obviously.

  Soon I was telling other would-be writers how to go about getting an agent. I received an imaginary offer and then flew on an imaginary plane out to New York for an imaginary meeting with imaginary publishers. Upon returning I announced an imaginary two-book deal with Viking. I can’t remember why I chose Viking. At least it was a real company. As opposed to imaginary, like everything else about me. Every time I opened my mouth it got worse, because it was usually to answer a question about how great things were going for me and “how excited I must be.” Each new lie was a bar in the cell I was forging for myself, and I didn’t know how to let myself out of the cage. And I had no idea why I’d started building such a stupid cage. Soon, I’d repeated my publishing fable so often that I was barely aware that there was a cage at all. “You’re living my dream!” said one teenage girl who worked in the café.

  I returned from my imaginary New York trip to see an all-too-real banner stretched across the second-floor balcony. “Congratulations to our new author and bookseller, Josh Hanagarne!” I gladly/horrifiedly accepted congratulations from patrons and coworkers that day. It was only a matter of time before Janette came in and saw it. It might be an hour, or a month, but she’d see it. So I did the only thing I could think of.

  “I’ve got some great news!” I said over dinner.

  In the store, she looked at the banner. “Wow!” she said. Then, more quietly, “Wow.” I didn’t know how to interpret these “wows.” She was either happy and awestruck, or she was onto me and couldn’t figure out who she was with. I made it through one more day before breaking down.

  “There’s no book deal,” I said. “I have no idea why I said it but now they all think this is happening and I don’t know what to do!”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know what to do? You’ve got to tell them! Why would you do this?” She was angry, which was a relief. Better that than pity. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got to tell them!” More than anything, she sounded tired.

  “But I’ll get fired!”

  She was quiet for a long time. “Josh, do you love me?”

  “Of course!”

  “How can I believe you if you can just lie like that?”

  Ouch. “Okay,” I said. “I deserved that. But I do. You have to know I do.”

  “Look,” she said, “so what, your career as a bookstore shelver is over? So what! Go tell them, let’s figure out how to get you back into school, and you can work on something you actually want to do.”

  “Okay.” It made sense. The next day I went into work prepared to tell my boss the whole story. I wimped out. “Janette is really sick,” I said instead. “I can’t get into it but I need to quit. I paid back the book advance and called off the deal so I can spend more time with her.” That was my last shift. As I watched my manager’s face, it seemed like she wasn’t quite as upset by the news of Janette’s devastating illness, or my departure, as she should have been. Did she know? Was it that obvious?

  “I’ll find another job,” I told Janette. I elided the conversation about her imaginary illness. There were still new lows for me. I decided that if I ever published a book it would be called How a Despicable Person Became Slightly Less So.

  The next three years passed in a similar pattern. I’d enroll in school, then withdraw for medical reasons. Occasionally I’d complete a class and get a couple of credits. I’d get hired at menial jobs, then quit shortly thereafter. I told Janette that things would be okay, but they never were. And she continued to be patient and generous and kind and wonderful, although I think she’d tell you that if she didn’t struggle with codependency issues she might have been brave enough to cut me loose.

  Through it all, we kept trying to get pregnant.

  One morning Janette woke me while it was still dark.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Josh, I’m pregnant.” It was the first week of October.

  “What!” That afternoon I called my mom. She screamed! I called everyone in my family. They screamed! I told the few friends I had in our ward. They were thril
led! Janette did the same with everyone she could think of, everyone who knew that we’d been trying for so long.

  It had been four years. Four years of trying. Now sex itself was almost odious. Sex on a schedule bordered on tedium. I’ll never forget the non-afterglow of one uninspired bout when I realized that Janette was crying. I wonder if it worked…

  But now! We couldn’t look at each other without laughing. We threw out nonsense baby names all day. “We’ll name it Headlock!” I said. “Headlock Hanagarne!”

  “No,” she said. “How about Hoth? Or Darth?” Janette’s a Star Wars fan. “We’ll ask Jim and Amy for suggestions tonight.” We went to dinner to celebrate with our friends.

  Janette had been in the restroom for several minutes by the time we ordered dessert. “There’s blood,” she said as we walked to our car. She called her gynecologist, who prescribed some pills, which I picked up that night at a gruesomely lit Walgreen’s.

  Janette bled all night.

  The next morning we sat in the waiting room of her doctor’s office. We didn’t talk.

  Janette’s pregnancy officially ended that night. I lay on our bed for hours and held her. She shook with sobs. I cried, but it was nothing like what she was experiencing. I pictured oceans of tears filling up, overflowing the shores of Bleakland, and drowning unsuspecting peasants. When she had cried herself out and her breathing had steadied, we fell asleep.

  We didn’t talk the next morning. I tried to read. She stayed in bed. In the afternoon I went for a walk. Our apartment was a block away from a park. The sounds of a kids’ soccer game reached me before I saw it. At one time, each of the children in the bright jerseys had been a mere idea. Someone’s dream. Someone’s accident. Planned or unplanned, it didn’t matter: They were here in this world. More than anything Janette wanted to bring a child here to earth to play on a soccer field, or learn the piano, or get good grades, or wrap its little fingers around her own and squeeze.

  I wanted Janette to have what she wanted but the responsibility of a child felt unreal. I hadn’t made my peace with being an unreliable, unequal partner in my marriage and hoped I never would. Feeling like a sponge was bad enough. But worse was the fear that Janette would be so long-suffering that I’d never have to change. Staying the same would be easiest, though I wouldn’t be happy about it and it wouldn’t be fair to her. But the thought of disappointing a child…of being a bad or inept or reckless father…that was unthinkable. But I wanted a child. I wanted to have it both ways. I’d always loved babies. I’d always wanted a little boy. But there were always qualifiers. I was in the thick of my fight with Misty. A child would just give her a new plaything. I wanted a child; I didn’t want a child with Tourette’s. I wanted a child who could have all the chances that other “normal” kids had; I didn’t want a child who would need to live with his mom forever or sponge off his future wife. I wanted a child I could be proud of; I didn’t want a child whose love affair with couches would rival my own.

  A boy scored a goal. Cheers erupted. I screamed and slammed my heels together hard enough to trip myself. I’d been walking in a circle around the soccer field, head down, and fast enough to make me pant.

  A slobbery, rolling tennis ball stopped by my shoe. A long-haired red dog appeared and looked up at me. “Hi,” I said. “Woo!”

  The dog barked.

  Janette and I spent the months after the miscarriage avoiding each other’s eyes most of the time, offering small, pinched smiles when we did. All of our talk had the forced, false chirpiness of a sitcom. Without talking about it, we skipped church on Mother’s Day, then again on Father’s Day. But little by little, small talk, all talk, became possible again.

  Janette never seemed angry, just sad. Church continued to give her the comfort it always had, but it wasn’t helping me. I was angry, although I knew that whether God existed or not, being angry with Him wouldn’t change things. Janette didn’t deserve any of this. There was a clear difference between us: Janette was more likely to ask, “I wonder why God let this happen?” or “What is he trying to teach me through this experience?” while I had thoughts like “Hey! Are You up there? Leave her alone!”

  Another year passed. I enrolled in school, then withdrew. I sold women’s shoes at Dillard’s during the Christmas season. It was as horrible as you think it was. I got a job at Salt Lake City’s first Best Buy, worked for a few months, then quit when the tics were too much. I loaded a truck at UPS for four hours each night, frantically scanning and stacking boxes into a wall that grew endlessly. I reveled in the exertion of it. I quit the job at UPS so I could spend more time in yet another school. Then I withdrew from school and was back to having no job again. Back on the couch. Janette no longer tried to hide her frustration. But she managed to be more frustrated by the situation than with me. When I pressed her to tell me how she was feeling about everything, she would always say, “I know who you’ll be. I’m just not sure when. We’ll get there.”

  But if I couldn’t go to school and I couldn’t work, what was I going to do? Where were we going?

  My dad once told me about a guy who said there were finite amounts of misery and happiness in the world. Meaning there was only so much of each to go around, so if you were happy it meant someone was sad. “Dumbest thing I ever heard,” said my dad. “The easiest way to forget yourself is to help someone. Your mom said that to me once. I don’t always do it but I believe it. And if it’s true then there’s no reason to think that any of us should be sad forever, unless everyone gets everything they want and there’s nobody left to help.”

  I remembered that discussion during a long, sleepless night. Helping other people was something I hadn’t tried yet. But who? Janette was the obvious answer, but helping her meant school and/or work, and I wasn’t ready for another try yet.

  Janette left for work.

  That was when I heard the children across the street and, before I could second-guess myself, I put on my clothes, went outside, and walked across the street to the brick building. The building spanned the block and at certain times of day it sounded like a wild puppy pen: the joyful sounds of recess. It was a special-needs school. I never really thought about these challenged kids in terms of their disabilities when I’d see them on the street, but having so many kids around did keep our struggles with infertility fresh in my mind.

  “I’d like to volunteer,” I told the woman at the desk.

  “Oh, honey,” she said slowly, “if you’re going to be here, you’ll want to get paid. I’ll take you on a tour. We could use someone with the older kids’ program.”

  During the tour, I saw kids in wheelchairs. Kids rocking back and forth to silent music. Kids playing basketball. Kids speaking English and kids jabbering away in what may not have been any recorded language. Kids smiling, laughing, crying, and playing tag. A boy hugged me around the waist, then ran away before I could say anything.

  Two weeks later I’d been fingerprinted, background-checked, and was an assistant in the class with students in the nineteen-to-twenty-two-year range. The goal was to help them acquire “life skills.” My first week we took them to the state fair. I was in charge of eight kids with eight different disabilities. As soon as we got off the bus at the crowded fair park they all ran in different directions. I rounded them up by the time we had to go back to school, but just barely. What “life skills” had they learned at the fair? I don’t know. We bought elephant ears, and posed for sepia photographs that were then plastered onto a giant novelty button that I wore on my shirt for the rest of the day. One young man asked if he could ride the Zipper, but I said no when he threw up halfway through his elephant ear. But most of the day I felt like I was chasing kids around, hoping they wouldn’t get hurt or lost. It was fun, in a nerve-wracking type of way.

  During my first week we had an assembly. Suddenly the Jazz bear—the mascot from the Utah Jazz, Salt Lake’s NBA team—ran into the room. It was like someone had detonated a bomb of distilled joy on the students. I have nev
er seen such unrestrained happiness. Everyone was screaming and laughing and trying to get close enough to hug the bear. As usually happens in noisy places, my tics were intense. I shouted and jerked, but nobody noticed! Or if they did, it just didn’t matter. There were so many symptoms and conditions in that place that nobody would ever look in my direction twice no matter what Misty compelled me to do. This realization gave me goose bumps. I could stay here forever and be at ease.

  I was patient enough for the work. I was capable of changing adult diapers. I played games, led field trips, took the students to a vocational training center once a week, and did more puzzles than you can imagine. One day I was invited to play a game with “the King of Games.” The boy who asked was nearly as tall as I was, with dark hair and darker eyes. He was very serious. He would draw game boards on construction paper. We would roll dice and advance around the board. Each square had a command written in it.

  “Do it,” he said as I landed on a space that said, simply, “Sharp your foot.”

  “What does sharp your foot mean?” I asked.

  “Do it. Sharp your foot.”

  I tried but, unsurprisingly, couldn’t get it right. “When I landed on “Dance like a jackass,” he was more accepting of my efforts. I got it right on the first try.

  Then it was October again. Another normal morning interrupted by a positive sign on a pregnancy test. Once again we were elated and terrified, but this time the celebration was muted and tentative. “We’ll tell everyone in three months,” said Janette. She visited her gynecologist who said that everything looked great. Two weeks later we were in a room with a doctor who looked like Gene Wilder. He manipulated the sonogram equipment and squinted. “Can you tell what we’re looking at here?” he asked.

  I looked at the gray blobs in that alien environment. It looked like the negative of a bowl of Rice Krispies and sea monkeys. “No,” I said, sure that he was about to say, “I’m sorry, but it’s happened again. October is simply not your month.”