The World’s Strongest Librarian

  “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Adam said. “And I’ve seen some shit.” He stared without incredulity or pity. He didn’t grimace when I told him about the worst of it. I wouldn’t even have thought he was curious about it except for his questions.

  “What makes it worse?”

  “What makes it better?”

  “What do you think causes it?”

  “What do doctors think causes it?”

  “How the fuck have you not gone insane?”

  After a couple of drinks, Casey started bragging about how good she was with a shotgun—she’d also served in the air force. As they debated who was more lethal with a scattergun, I was suddenly able to eat without any trouble.

  “Hey!” said Adam, after seeing me take an uneventful bite. “What just happened? What was different about that time?”

  “You weren’t looking at me.”

  He stared. “I see. Very interesting.” Then he stared some more.

  Hey, you just passed my turn…

  Maybe this had been a mistake.

  Back at his house, Adam showed me to my room. “I tried to put you in the room with the most books, but Casey said you couldn’t sleep down in the basement, so this is the room with the second most books,” he said. The bookshelf also held scrapbooks with newspaper articles about Adam’s strongman performances. “Glass bends steel,” read one headline. Adam showed me his military ribbons and awards, telling me what each stood for.

  Two fat brown-and-white bulldogs waddled in, then flopped onto their bellies.

  “This is Brutus and Julie,” Adam said. He got down on the floor and stared at each of them in turn. He tickled the dogs behind their ears and growled playfully. “What did you goofs do today?” It was like he forgot I was in the room. He might have stayed there all night if I hadn’t whooped and startled him.

  There were pictures of the dogs everywhere, far more than of Adam or Casey.

  “I’ll show you something,” he said, leaving the room. I sat for a few moments before realizing I was supposed to follow him. In the kitchen, he stood at attention next to a counter on which bottles of supplements stood in a row. Fish oil. Calcium. Flaxseed.

  “Okay, here’s what I would like you to do,” he said. “Touch your toes.”

  Was this a trick? If I started leaning forward, would he club me over the head?

  “Lean forward,” he said, “but don’t stretch. Just let your arms drop and hinge at the waist. Stop just before you start to feel the stretch. Stop at the point when going farther would mean you were stretching.”

  I did it. My fingertips dangled just below my kneecaps. “Like this?”

  “Now tap your shins with your fingers. Just to remember how far down you went. It doesn’t have to be exact.” I tapped at mid-shin and stood.

  “Now pick one,” he said.

  “One what?”

  He pointed at the bottles. “A bottle.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on whether it’s one bottle. Just grab one, not three.”

  I grabbed the zinc pills. “Okay?”

  “Now do the toe-touch again, same as before, while holding the bottle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  I did it, feeling stupid. But this time my knuckles scraped the floor. I’d either gotten more flexible in the past ten seconds or I’d stretched with too much effort. But I hadn’t stretched at all—hadn’t felt any tightness in my hamstrings or calves.

  “So,” he said. “What did you notice?”

  “I went down farther?”

  “It didn’t resist you as much, did it? Not while you were holding the bottle. The brakes are off.” I thought of Dr. H and those stupid bottles of water and minerals in Elko, Nevada. “Resist me!” he had said.

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Try it again. See if anything changes.”

  I did, with the same result. My knuckles hit the floor. “But I’m sure it’s just because I’m getting more warmed up each time I do the toe-touch.”

  “Then drop the bottle and do it again.”

  “Okay.” This time I tightened up at mid-shin, just like the baseline test. “What’s this all about?” I asked, intrigued and weirded out.

  “Would you say that an increase in range of motion is a good thing, generally speaking?”

  “Sure.”

  “So, a couple of things. More mobility is a good thing. Why wouldn’t you take every chance to gain mobility?”

  “Okay.”

  “If you can tell if a food increases your range of motion with this test, would it make sense to say that food is good for you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We’ll talk about it more later. Get ready for tomorrow. Go rack out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sleep.” Adam went into his room and closed the door.

  We drove to the gym in the morning. Eyes boring straight ahead, Adam said, “What’s the worst thing one person can do to another person?”

  “Uh. Kill them?”

  “No.” He ran a hand over his scalp. “I’ve got a big dent up here from where my head got crushed in a riot with a tent stake. Big gash somewhere else too, somewhere I won’t show you. Now I get migraines. Constantly, acutely, ninety-plus-hour migraines where my eyes fill up with blood, and it’s the least convenient thing in the world. And people say, ‘Wow, you’re tough.’ And I want to say, ‘Yeah, okay, so what?’ I don’t want to be tough. I want my head to stop hurting, that’s what I want. Toughness is severely overrated.”

  “So that’s the worst thing someone can do to you?” I said, pointing to his head.

  “This happened because people weren’t where they were supposed to be and I had to fight my way out of an unnecessarily bad situation. The fact that I literally can’t elaborate on the particulars—I’m not allowed to and I don’t want the DOD breathing down my neck—is bad, but it’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is that I got let down and part of me is still stuck on that day. I can’t let go. I can’t let it go.” His voice was a mixture of pleading and fury and what sounded like a great loneliness.

  We passed a store called Sophisticated Man of Minot. “Hey, do you ever shop there?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know it,” he said. “I’m nothing without my bowler hat. But listen, take some of the so-called ‘friends’ in my life. Facebook friends, military acquaintances, fitness industry punks who want me to mail for their products…they’re part of the problem, they’re why I have a hard time making it back from that day. Stuck. They want me to do shit for them, but do they ever return my e-mails? Phone calls? Let me tell you something, the people who tell me they’ll e-mail and then they don’t, well, that matters. The people who abandoned me in that riot probably started their career in not following through by not returning e-mails and phone calls like they said they would. But I knew you were different.” Suddenly he laughed and pointed out the window. A tall thin dog was walking down the street. “Look at that dog walk! My dogs can’t even walk two feet without needing a nap. Those goofy fuckers. Eighteen hours of sleep every day. You think you’d feel better if you had eighteen daily hours of rack time?”

  “I’d have fewer tics.”

  “Yes. But it’s not time to sleep.” We were at the gym.

  Mirrors lined one wall. On the mirrors were written, in marker, various poses and forms of knife combat that Adam drilled on his own. Black rubber mats lined the floor, and bent horseshoes—part of Adam’s strength-building protocol—hung from pegs. A banner on one wall showed a silhouette of a man’s face and the words “POW/MIA: Gone but not forgotten.” Upstairs, a children’s karate class was in full swing. Grunts and “hi-yahs!” and the sounds of stomping feet drifted through the floor. I glanced at a stainless steel rack of tools that I knew were for strengthening the grip and my hair stood on end. I was itching to lay into everything around me.

  “Today you’re
going to press that bell. With your right arm.”

  He pointed at one of the many kettlebells lined up like prisoners against another wall of his gym, Unbreakable Fitness.

  I looked at the kettlebell and laughed. Press ninety-seven pounds? That weight was four pounds heavier than my best press. For months, nagging shoulder pain had kept me from pressing more than thirty-five pounds.

  “Maybe with both hands,” I said. A year of on-and-off physical therapy, Ibuprofen, ice, enthusiastic cursing, and rest hadn’t alleviated the pain in my right shoulder. I had all but stopped using it.

  “We’ll fix it when you come up,” Adam had said on the phone. “Just don’t make it worse until I can deal with it.” Like Mulder, I wanted to believe. I was sick of the pain.

  Adam scowled. He had many scowls. I classified this one as mildly affectionate. “You’ll do it in five minutes. Get on the stairs. Let’s fix your shoulder.”

  I’d been to two doctors and an osteopath. Each had sent me home with a pamphlet and a large rubber band. I’d tie a knot in the band, slam it in the door, then waggle my arm back and forth. This never helped. “Of course it didn’t help!” Adam said when I told him. “Doing those fucking rotations only makes you better at doing those rotations. The goal isn’t to do those rotations. The goal is to press something overhead.”

  “The doc said I shouldn’t do that.”

  “A doc told me that once. You know what I told him? I said, ‘I want to do it, so give me the right answer or imshi.’”

  “What’s imshi?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” (I looked it up later. It meant “go away” in Arabic.)

  Adam had me stand sideways on the bottom stair and dangle one foot over the edge. “Push your heel at the floor like there’s a pencil on the bottom. You’re trying to draw a perfect circle. Keep your chin level. Don’t look down. Relax.” Echoes of Dr. H. A perfect, perfect circle. I followed these instructions and would have rolled my eyes if he hadn’t been so close, glaring.

  After some reps, he had me wiggle my jaw, open my mouth as wide as I could, and walk around on the balls of my feet for thirty seconds. What did this have to do with my injured shoulder? Adam pointed to the ninety-seven-pound kettlebell. “Now press it.” When I stalled, he said, “Go do it. Quit thinking. You won’t die, I promise.”

  I walked over to the kettlebell, grasped it in my right hand, cleaned it to my chest, and pressed it with less effort than any press I’d ever done. It fell out of my hand from the top position and hit the ground with a thud.

  “Yes!” he said. “Damn, I’m good!”

  “What just happened?” I said. Adam opened his training log and ignored me. “What just happened?” I repeated. I was ecstatic, confused, curious, pain-free, and slightly freaked out.

  “The same thing that will happen with your tics,” he said without looking up. “It’s fun to be smart. You’re lucky you’ve got me.”

  Ninety grueling minutes of kettlebell training later, Adam said, “I want chicken wings.” We passed a young woman walking on the side of the road. Her hair was blond, with black roots. “What is she, a bumblebee?” he said. “I’ll tell you what you just saw, Josh. A lack of personal excellence. You know who could use a good old-fashioned public shaming? Just about everyone, including you and me sometimes. Ponder that.”

  We talked about Tourette’s over lunch. “Honestly, I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “Having control of my body is one of the only things that keeps me this sane, and I’m pretty wrecked.”

  “It is what it is,” I said.

  “Look me in the eyes,” he said. “Men look each other in the eyes.”

  “It is what it is,” I repeated, looking him in the eyes.

  “No. It isn’t. That’s stupidity right up there with ‘failure is not an option.’ Of course it’s an option or there wouldn’t be any sort of adventure to it, would there? The word ‘adventure’ means undetermined outcome, did you know that? So failure would have to be an option, right? I’ve seen people blown up right next to me. I’ve watched people hop around after losing their limbs, and this shit you deal with is just as bad as any of it.”

  “No, it isn’t!” I said.

  “I saw a kid with rebar sticking out of him after a bomb. He had it worse than you, definitely. But this is as bad as some things we went through. Maybe worse, because you don’t understand it. Someone whose arm gets blown off by a bomb knows why his arm is gone. Someone who hits himself in the face without warning—”

  “There’s kind of a warning,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I usually know that something’s coming.”

  “How?”

  I think this was the first time that someone actually asked me to think about what was happening to me. My doctors, as knowledgeable as they were, never asked how I felt. They treated symptoms. Well, they tried.

  “Okay, if I have a tic where my shoulder jerks up toward my ear, there’s a sensation in my shoulder before it happens. I know my shoulder wants to move. It’s like the buildup to a sneeze, it just happens faster and the urge doesn’t really leave once I have the tic. It starts building again.”

  “Okay, here’s the mind-set I need you to be in so we can cure you,” Adam said.

  I didn’t roll my eyes, because now that we were making eye contact he’d have seen it.

  “Change gears,” he said. “What makes a good trainer? Someone who gets results and shows clients how to figure something out for themselves. I’ll give you an example of a bad teacher.” He mentioned a kettlebell instructor who uploaded technique videos to Facebook and YouTube. “This guy, and I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, but he’s a terrible trainer. Terrible presentation. He’s got these dead eyes and this dead voice. Here’s how uncomfortable watching his videos makes me. Picture an endless row of urinals in a public restroom. You come in and see me urinating at one of them. I’m the only one there. You have your pick of the place. But you choose a toilet next to me. Then, as we relieve ourselves, you lean over and softly start batting at my penis.”

  I started to choke on the celery I’d been chewing. When he saw that I would live, he said, “Watching his videos makes me more uncomfortable than that scenario would. The only ethical way to train people is to help them understand how their bodies can teach them.”

  When we finished eating, he drove to Best Buy. A couple of helpful workers approached him while he was browsing the CDs. Each time he looked up and smiled before they opened their mouths. Each time, they smiled and walked away without saying anything. In War and Peace, during one of the many drawing room scenes that open the novel, Tolstoy describes Sonya Rostova as wearing a “company smile.” I’d made ten runs at War and Peace before finishing it, and each time I noticed this phrase. And in American Gods Neil Gaiman describes the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday as smiling “as if he learned to smile from a manual.” Adam didn’t remind me of Sonya or glass-eyed Mr. Wednesday, but his smile did. Being smiled at by Adam feels more like being smiled at by a predator than welcomed by a friend.

  Adam picked a CD and walked toward the cashiers. My right hand smacked my cheek with that familiar, hideous thwack. Adam turned and saw me shaking my fist out. “Now that’s a sound I’d know anywhere. Are you fucking kidding me?” I felt like I was in a zoo. But he nodded slowly, a smile creeping onto his face. “I see it.”

  “You see what?”

  “Not yet. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “You know what?” he said as we got into the car. “I like you. I do. So I’m going to tell you a story. Someone was giving me the eye in a bar once. Alcohol is fucking phenomenal when it comes to creating stupidity. If you were going to start shit with someone, would it be with me, I mean, based on looks?” He laughed. “I’m amazed that there’s enough alcohol in the world so that I start to look like someone who’s going to put up with your eye, or your finger in my chest. Anyway, I stood up, I walked over, and I sniffed, real obvious and slow. ‘I
don’t like that aftershave,’ I told him, and then I gave him the eyes. You’ve seen me do it, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “‘I’m not wearing aftershave,’ he says, and his voice doesn’t sound as tough as he wants it to.”

  “‘Wipe it off anyway,’ I say, ‘because I don’t like bullies and I feel like you were trying to bully me. That was a poor decision.’”

  Adam really started to laugh now. “And so he says, ‘I’m not sure what I was thinking.’ And I say, ‘We can start over, but first wipe off the aftershave you’re not wearing.’ And he did it!”

  “Wouldn’t you have done it too?” I asked. “If you’d been in his position?”

  “Well yeah, but if I’d been in his position I wouldn’t be giving the troops the crazy eye, but what do I know about what I’d do? It obviously made sense to him. For about ten seconds.” Adam paused. “But let’s get back at it. So how do you know if a movement is good for you?”

  “I’m not sure. If it doesn’t hurt?”

  “Let’s consider something. A man lifts weights on Monday. What does he do?”

  “Bench.”

  “Correct. Most programs dictate that you will bench press on Monday. Who knows why? Now, would you consider the bench press a good movement or a bad movement?”

  “Well, wouldn’t it depend on your goals? I’d ask why you thought bench was the right—”

  “Wrong starting point. Lifting weights is an activity. Forget about right and wrong here. This isn’t church. It’s pushing a weight off your chest. So—good or bad?”

  “Okay, I’d say it’s good if a heavier bench press is your goal.”

  “Yes. Specifics. But what if benching hurts your shoulders?”

  “Well, I can’t think of a good reason to do it if it hurts you.”

  “It doesn’t always feel good, does it?”

  “No, some days feel better than others as far as that movement.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of things can change the way a workout feels.”