The World’s Strongest Librarian

  Be kind and compassionate.

  Serve others.

  You are responsible for your actions and should be accountable for them, if only to yourself.

  Don’t be a dick.

  Don’t lie, kill, steal, or cheat.

  Family is the greatest joy on earth.

  Study the best books.

  Be accountable to yourself.

  I’ll tell him that, as usual, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

  Tiger got to hunt,

  Bird got to fly;

  Man got to sit and wonder,

  “Why, why, why?”

  Tiger got to sleep,

  Bird got to land;

  Man got to tell himself he understand.

  That’s from Cat’s Cradle.

  I’ll tell him that I was the luckiest, happiest kid in the world. I will tell him that there are no words I can use to describe how much I love my parents, and how grateful I will always be for them.

  When he asks Janette what she believes, she will tell him what she believes. Together, we’ll try to make sense of our lives and move forward, together.

  In the mission field, people who are open to hearing the message are called investigators. I suspect that I’ll spend my entire life investigating. I’m open to listening, to reading, to studying the scriptures, and to pondering what is taught by this church, or any other.

  Investigator is a title I proudly accept. If it was good enough for Encyclopedia Brown, it’s good enough for me.

  It’s taken thirty-five years, but I feel like I can finally breathe.

  CHAPTER 13

  616.042—Abnormalities, Human

  165—Fallacies, Logic

  305.891—Highland Games—Social Aspects

  One evening Max and I were watching TV. I looked over at him, hoping to catch him smiling, which he does during every second of any episode of Curious George. I sneaked out my finger to tickle him, then stopped.

  Max saw me watching. “What, Daddy?” he asked. He wore an orange T-shirt that said “Tough Guy” over the number 36. His blond hair was shaggier than I liked because cutting his hair was always a battle. His lips were redder than usual from the ICEE I bought for him on the way home from the library. I would say that he was the skinniest kid I’d ever seen, but that wouldn’t be true; I’d seen pictures of myself at his age. We could have been twins.

  Max smiled at me, the way I once smiled at my dad as we sat on another forgotten couch in front of an older television. The smile stopped me from saying, “You’re blinking your eyes a lot more than you need to be. Why are you doing that?” As I watched, his lip curled a little bit and he did it more and more.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  No.

  No, not this.

  Not for him.

  Not for my son.

  I kissed his forehead, went to my room, and closed the door. I got on my knees, laced my fingers together, and closed my eyes, but the words wouldn’t come.

  The door opened. “Josh? Are you okay?” Janette put a hand on the back of my neck.

  “He’s blinking!” I said, in a hysterical tone that would have been better suited to a phrase like, “He’s on fire!” “He’s blinking way too much. He’s blinking. He’s—”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. But—”

  “I can’t talk about this right now. I can’t.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She left.

  I was still kneeling. I closed my eyes again. I tried to figure out what to say, and who to say it to. I stayed on my knees for a long time.

  But nothing came.

  There were no words.

  When there were no words, I tried listening.

  I heard nothing but my own pulse in the stillness.

  In the climbing-disaster documentary Touching the Void,* climber Joe Simpson recounts the thoughts he had while trapped, dangling with a broken leg deep inside a black crevasse within the Peruvian Andes’s Siula Grande mountain. He had no reason to think he’d survive:

  I was totally convinced that I was on my own, that no one was coming to get me. I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I’d long since stopped believing in God. I always wondered if things really hit the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn round and say a few Hail Marys and say, “Get me out of here.” It never once occurred to me. It meant that I really don’t believe and I really do think that when you die, that’s it, there’s no afterlife.

  My situation certainly wasn’t as grave as his, but I didn’t feel any more capable of asking for help than he had.

  The next morning, before the library opened, I was carrying a stack of books to the shelves and enjoying the quiet.

  Misty sat on the desk, leaning back, legs crossed, a sharp, cruel-looking shoe dangling from one foot. She startled me so badly that the books fell from my hands, breaking the spine of the largest. I hadn’t felt her in months, although I knew she’d been been spying on Max.

  If you had stumbled across my story that day while making your rounds, it might have been titled:

  So Your Ex Is Back?

  How to Feel Desperate and Terrified

  So You Thought You Were Riding Off Into the Sunset?

  Maybe she hadn’t seen me. She couldn’t be here. She couldn’t. I hurried past her into the staff room and snapped my name tag onto my shirt with as much authority as possible, but it’s hard to do it impressively. Click. The sound was nothing compared to my teeth as they snapped together, my tongue escaping just in time. My neck knotted. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  Maybe I’d imagined her. Maybe I was trapped in a dream. Maybe if I stayed in the back and hid under the lunch table she wouldn’t find me. Maybe if I just went home. Maybe—

  I screamed. The effort grated my throat. Misty had snuck up behind me, slinking in without an access card, somehow slithering beneath the door. I clapped my hands over my mouth and hustled out to the reference desk. The only chance was to stay ahead of her, make her chase me. Maybe I could lead her off a cliff. My shift was about to start. As patrons flowed from the elevators, Misty sat next to me and pinched my cheeks with my own fingers until they were hot and sweat bloomed on my face. She bit the knuckle of my right thumb until it bled. She curled my toes until they ached with hyperflexion and the ends of the toenails began to roll back from the effort. I kept her quiet but couldn’t remove the hooks she jabbed into every part of my vulnerable body.

  The Longest Day

  How to Eat Lunch Without Spilling All Your Food

  I took a long break to lift in the library’s fitness room. I locked the door. In the middle of a barbell jerk, my neck tightened as Misty grabbed it. I yelled, my head twisting to the right. I was able to catch the bar and lower it to the ground without falling or breaking the floor. There was no sanctuary here.

  What to Do When the Custodian Appears and Asks You What in the World Is Happening? (Spanish Edition)

  I had a meeting after lunch. I chewed my mouth to hot, electric ribbons and sweated myself into a disgusting mess.

  Five o’clock. Finally. In the underground parking garage Misty’s voice echoed in the cavernous room. She darted between the pillars, leaping out to poke and prod me.

  Self-Defense for Dummies

  In my truck I leaned my head on the steering wheel and forced the first full breath of the day through my lungs. It was the worst day I’d had in over a year. But I’d done it. I’d worked my shift with Misty hectoring and abusing me every minute. I’d done my work. I was exhausted and terrified. Misty wanted my son and now I’d revved back up into a wild state.

  But I’d defied her. I had survived on pure spite.

  That night I took Max to the park. While Janette read on a bench, we flew a beagle-shaped kite as the setting sun glared like the eye of Sauron. I watched him for signs of tics, but there was nothing. If a kite flyer can get “in the zone,” Max was in it. Janette came and sat on my lap. I kissed her neck and let my head rest on her shoulder. “Today was awful,” I s
aid.

  “What happened?”

  “Tics.”

  “Mommy, look!”

  She waved at Max. “I see you! There’s a lot going on. It’s not that surprising, is it?”

  “Probably not. But I really thought I was done with this. Maybe it’ll just be today.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “No. Believe me, I’d ask. Hey! Max, no!” He’d seen a moth in the early evening and was chasing it as the kite sailed away on the wind.

  One day when I was four years old, I went outside to play with friends who lived down the street. I held a fearsome whip made of rope. My dad made it for me when I told him about the dog at the end of the street that always barked at me from behind its fence. That whip made me feel safe, even though I never hit anything fiercer than a pile of leaves with it.

  But before I reached the dog I saw something on the sidewalk. I looked down. My eyes widened. I screamed! Lying there in vivid, moist, grotesque bas-relief, was a moth.

  The moth had bright purple wings. The wings had vivid yellow streaks in them, like fingers. Its body was a dark brown, and two dark feelers extended from its head. Nothing too extraordinary about any of that. But I kid you not, from wingtip to wingtip that moth must have been a foot across. It was enormous. It was gorgeous and horrific.

  I ran into the house, grabbed my mom’s hand, and dragged her outside as I babbled and exclaimed.

  I took Mom to the spot, pointed at the ground, and, of course…there was nothing there. I sputtered and protested and told her what had happened, but I couldn’t reproduce it. I had no proof for her. No way to show her what I’d seen.

  Mom could have reacted in a lot of different ways. She could have said:

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Stop telling stories.”

  “It’s not nice to lie.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  Mom could have said a lot of things. Instead, she looked at the spot where the moth had been, she looked at me, she put her hand on my shoulder, she looked at the sky, and she said, “Hmm…Where do you think it went next?”

  It was the right question, at the right time, from the right teacher. There was only one possible result: I couldn’t help but wonder.

  That’s been good and bad. I think just about everything is interesting. However, I’ve not been able to stop wondering about things even when I want to, or especially when I want to.

  Like the night after we flew the kite and Max chased the moth. I thought, He was perfect, but part of you is in him. You did this to him. Now he’s broken. What’s going to happen to him? What are you going to do?

  “Joooo-osh,” said Janette as I shifted yet again, causing the mattress liner to slip off the corner with an obnoxious thwap. “Calm down. It’s going to be fine. He’s going to be fine and so are you.”

  “But what if he can’t handle school? What if he can’t work?”

  “What if he can’t? Then we’ll do what we need to do. It’s not happening right now.”

  “What if he blames me? It’s my fault.”

  “He won’t. And even if he does, he’d be wrong. And it would be our fault. But this is totally irrational. You don’t know if he’s got it. Even if he does, you know it might not be as bad as yours. It could stop when he’s five, or ten, or tonight.”

  I hoped so.

  I hope so.

  Janette was right; nobody knows better than I that if Max has Tourette’s, there’s no guarantee that it will be anything like my case. Maybe he’ll never do more than blink. Maybe he’ll stop blinking when he’s five and that will be the end of this piece of his story. Maybe, like my own case, he won’t really have trouble until later. Maybe he’ll have a case so much worse than mine that they’ll rename the disorder after him.

  I can’t know. But I can’t stop wondering, either, especially now that my own tics have erupted again, worse than ever. I have to admit that I don’t know as much about Misty as I thought I did.

  She came back because of new and potent stresses that overwhelmed my system: first, Max’s tics. Then I learned that a dear friend had breast cancer. My sister Megan was having new and horrible health challenges of her own. I thought I’d throttled Misty. Now Misty was back to throttling me.

  I did what had worked before. I tested out my exercises. I tried to move better and rid myself of extra tension. Nothing helped. And every time a previous solution failed to bring relief, there was the stress of thinking, “Well, if you can’t figure this out, how are you going to help Max?” This fed the stress, and around and around it went.

  I didn’t know what else to try. When I told Adam, he said, “That sucks, man, I’m sorry. Any idea why it’s bad again?”

  There was too much to say, and he’d already heard most of it. “I think I’m just too busy. I can’t free up any space in my head. I’m a little embarrassed, honestly. I really thought I was cured.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s fun to be wrong. It just means you can learn something. Can I help?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m still doing everything you taught me. It’s just not working right now. I’ll figure it out.” I didn’t sound confident.

  “All right. Tell me if I can help. Don’t be one of these proud douche bags who thinks he has to do everything himself or he’s weak.”

  And he hung up.

  What I didn’t tell Adam—because I wanted to figure out the problems without his help—was that I was injuring myself constantly and there were few movements I could try without pain. Misty was constantly forcing me to tense my body, contracting the muscles all at once, as hard as I could. Normally this just wore me out, but if it happened when I was in the wrong physical position, it actually damaged me. These new mega-combo tics were showing up more often. For instance, imagine that you’re standing on my left and suddenly the back of my left hand slaps your stomach—my arm has rotated out at a right angle. (I wasn’t hitting people, that’s just the motion.) That wasn’t a new tic, but now, once my arm was rotated away from body, my elbow and bicep tendons were in a vulnerable position. And that’s when I was contracting the hardest, once it got to that point. The tendons would scream and the muscles would grate over the bones and suddenly I wouldn’t be able to do any pushing or pulling for a week.

  There were equivalent pains in my legs, hips, neck, ankles, and jaw.

  One by one, the movements that had once been beneficial to me were being taken away. Movements didn’t test well—increase my range of motion—if they hurt, and now everything hurt.

  I had gotten myself up to a 590-pound dead lift, a 375-pound squat, and a 350-pound bench press.* Now I couldn’t lift half of those numbers without pain. And the most maddening thing was that it wasn’t pain from pulling nearly 600 pounds off the ground! It was pain from stupid tics!

  But the numbers were never the point. Progress was the point. Dan John—a legendary track-and-field coach and dear friend—is fond of saying, “The goal is to keep the goal the goal.” Meaning, don’t get distracted. But Dan was used to having guys tell him, “I want to bench press five hundred pounds,” but when he’d tell them to bench more often to improve the bench press, they’d say, “Well, someone on the internet said that the key to benching more is to press light kettlebells really, really fast. Shouldn’t I be doing that?”

  I just wanted my weightlifting numbers to go up consistently, to be stronger than the day before. I didn’t care what the numbers were. And now, because of the pain, my ability to get stronger every day was in jeopardy.

  I talked to my dad on the phone a couple of days later. “What does Adam say about it all?” he asked.

  “He says don’t be a proud douche bag. That’s about it.”

  He laughed. “That’s probably always good advice. Do you want to know what I think?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, let me ask you something first. Are you still lifting?”

  “Not like I was. No. I mean, I do a little, I just haven’
t had the urge. Now that it’s not helping as much.”

  “Yeah, I can see that, but you need to do it. We’ve all seen it. You’ve seen it. Now why aren’t you doing it?”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “No, you’re not. Why aren’t you doing it?”

  “I’m too busy.”

  “Ha! Are you going to answer me?”

  Nope. I really don’t know why it was so hard for me to admit that the tics were hurting me, but it was. “Dad, it’s not helping like it used to. It’s actually making it worse. And that’s scary because I’ve got nothing else to try.”

  “Oh, so you feel better if you don’t do it? So you try nothing?”

  “No. I just…I’m tired of this. I want to know why it’s happening again.”

  “Forget about knowing why and get back at it. If you’re tired of what you’re doing, do something else, but do something. Hike up your skirt, sonny.”

  I did it. Literally.

  That night I played around online before going to bed. On Facebook, I saw a picture of a man wearing a kilt, mid-spin, preparing to heave a massive weight on a chain.

  I Googled “getting started in Highland Games.”

  The next day I ordered a kilt and sent a check for twenty-five dollars to the liaison for the Highland Games in Payson, Utah. I had two months to prepare and no idea what to do. This is what constitutes due diligence in my decision-making process.

  The Highland Games are contests of ancient Scottish athletic events. Most of them involve throwing weights, stones, logs, or sheaves of straw for distance or height. I had no experience with any of them and the techniques I watched online felt impossibly clumsy when I tried them, so I decided to go it alone this first time.

  I spent the next two months throwing things in my backyard. Kettlebells, stones, chains, forty-five-pound plates, logs, and whatever else I could find. Throwing was totally different from anything else I had tried. It required fast, explosive movement. And little by little, to my great surprise, the tics began to let go of me again.*

  One night when I got home from work I asked Janette to come talk to me in the backyard while I threw. It was dark.