The World’s Strongest Librarian

  “You are planning on going, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Of course!” I don’t know.

  “Good.”

  I graduated from high school in June of 1996 and spent that summer working as a delivery driver. If I served a mission, I wouldn’t leave until early in 1997, so I had to figure out what to do with myself by summer’s end. My friend Erik was going to a college in Twin Falls, Idaho, for a semester before his own mission. Jennie still had a year of high school left. I didn’t want to hang out at home and work at the mine.

  “Mom, I think I want to go to college at CSI with Erik for a semester.”

  She was delighted. “Great! I think that’s really smart to get one semester behind you before you go.”

  Right. Before I go.

  I was the same age as my dad was when he confronted the same question about conversion. He could get baptized and marry my mom or not.

  To avoid my own confrontation, I played along as if I had unshakable faith, but that semester was nothing more than a desperate grab at distraction.

  Here’s the least you need to know about young Mormon men going on missions:

  Jesus told his apostles to scatter to the winds and spread the word. Mormon doctrine instructs us to follow what Jesus taught. Whether Mormons are Christians is hotly contested in some circles, but I’ll tell you this—at that point I had watched my family worship Jesus Christ, and only Jesus Christ, for eighteen years. Regardless, Jesus said that other people needed to hear his message, so that was why we served missions.

  When Joseph Smith got the party started over in America a couple of millennia later, it couldn’t have gone anywhere without missionaries. There was no Twitter and you couldn’t put a stupid Facebook ad for the church in front of everyone. Those early elders took their Books of Mormon, chose a direction, started walking, and preached. It’s the same idea now. When it’s time, you submit your paperwork and then wait for your mission “call” to arrive in the mail. You don’t know where you’ll spend the next two years—missions for elders last twenty-four months, versus eighteen months for sisters—until you open that envelope. The Philippines? Guam? Toledo? Los Angeles? Okinawa? You don’t know. Once you learn where you’re going, you get started at a missionary center and then you’re out in the field, trying to baptize everyone.

  It is assumed that you’ll go when you’re nineteen if you’re a male. Sisters don’t go for a couple more years, and many marry during that extra time. Mission expectations are different for women. Nobody is forced to go, male or female, but if a woman was to say, “I’d rather stay home and go to school or get married or work,” nobody would question that.

  During that semester I took some introductory classes that were as boring as they sounded. The one exception was a psychology class. As I read the syllabus I noticed a Tourette’s discussion during the abnormal psychology unit. The lesson was a disappointment, however, and merely restated what I’d already heard: There is no cure for TS but doctors are working on it.

  My relationship with Misty was getting painful. She wasn’t violent, but the repetitive strain was taking a toll on my joints. I saw how much pain I could eventually be in if the current level of tics maintained over the next few years or even decades.

  I drove home to see Jennie on the weekends, but we spent much of the time fighting about things that didn’t matter. I was always in the mood to argue. One night she asked, “What’s the worst part about having Tourette’s?”

  I bit back whatever I was going to say. “You know…I’m not sure.”

  “Think about it. I’m not sure what’s going on with you, but I don’t like you much lately.” I wasn’t ready for the “I’m not sure I want to go on a mission but can we be together anyway?” discussion. Or maybe I wasn’t sure that Jennie was capable of it. I didn’t know how to tell her that Misty was trying to rip me away from her, which is how it felt. When I started dating Jennie, everything felt new. Every day felt like the morning after a rainstorm when everything glistens and smells fresh. We were unblemished and faultless. We knew just enough about each other to want to know more. Now we had been together for over a year and we knew enough about each other to want to keep certain things to ourselves.

  “Jennie, I’m not sure I’m able to be happy,” I finally said.

  “Well, that’s pretty melodramatic,” Jennie said as she hugged me. “Of course you can be happy. That’s why I love you. When you’re happy, you’re happier than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  I tried again. “Okay, I think the worst thing is that I’m always waiting for something. And I’m not talking about waiting for time to pass. Not like waiting to go to college or waiting for a basketball game to start. Or waiting to see you or to go do something fun or go on vacation or anything. I mean….”

  Why was this so hard to explain?

  “I feel like there’s someone else here. Like I’m not able to make all of my own decisions, because there’s this thing in my head that decides what I’m capable of. I hate it that I can’t make you understand exactly how it feels. I know I’ve been a jerk, but when it’s bad, I feel mean. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. I’m not very good at waiting for things, and now I’m always waiting for the next tic. I never know what’s going to happen, even though it’s not that bad. It’s exhausting. I don’t know if I know how to be happy or nice when I’m this tired and anxious all the time. What if I can’t do the mission? What if you can’t ever rely on me for anything?”

  “You’ll go and I’ll wait for you. You’ll do what you can, and that will be enough.”

  “But—”

  “It will be enough for me.”

  “Do you really believe it all, Jennie? The church?”

  She looked at me for a long time before nodding. “It feels right to me. It feels real.”

  I drove back to Twin Falls the next evening. Erik wasn’t home. I let myself into our place and sat in the dark. I listened to the clock ticking and the cows lowing outside in the nearby pasture. I was annoyed to realize that I had tears in my eyes. Too many tics. Too many unmade decisions. Too much uncertainty and worry that things might not get better. And worry that things weren’t all that bad to begin with and that they simply felt harder than they should. That somehow by feeling so burdened, I was proving that I was weak and weak-willed. The house was suffocating. I ran outside, into the driveway.

  It started to rain when I got into my car. The paved roads turned to dirt as I left the city and drove to nowhere. How many years were in the average life? If I were lucky enough to have a long life, how many tics would be in those years? On that road, in the dark, it seemed that there was so little to believe in. So little cause for hope. The road ended and I stopped the car. The rain beat at the windows from every angle. Looming over the doubt and dread was the awful suspicion that I was just being a stupid drama queen and that I should really just suck it up and get to work. That’s what Dad would say. Was I just a kid, experiencing a kid’s immaturity and worry about the future? Was this just teenage melodrama? Even if that were true, wondering about it, acknowledging it in some way…wouldn’t have made it feel true. What felt true was that I was wracked with panic and tears. What was true was that I was sitting in a car that was much too small for me, out in the middle of rural Idaho, at the end of a rutted road, far from the reach of the town’s lights.

  I cried embarrassingly hard. There was a set of Scriptures under my seat. They usually got put there on my way to church and then forgotten for the rest of the week. I opened the books at random, settling on Section 6 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a series of “revelations” to the prophet Joseph Smith and others. Section 6 was a revelation given to Oliver Cowdery, the scribe who had assisted Smith in the translation of the Book of Mormon. Verse 22 is allegedly Christ speaking to a doubting Oliver:

  If you desire a further witness, cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things. br />
  I’d said hundreds, if not thousands, of prayers, simply going through the motions. I knew the words. I knew the actions and the reverent posture. I knew how it was supposed to work and how it was supposed to feel. But I didn’t know what it meant to really cry out in my heart. To beg for an answer. To need an answer for my own sake. Relying on my mom’s faith, or whatever Jennie wanted me to do, wasn’t enough tonight. I started talking. “I need to know. I don’t know what to do. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me and I have no idea how strong I’m supposed to be before I deserve help from you. I don’t even know if you’re there. I hope you are, but I don’t want to believe things because they make me feel better. I want to believe them because they’re true. Is it possible to know that? Is it?”

  The wind stopped. The rain stopped. Despite the goose bumps that stood up on my arms, I was warm and calm inside, as still and peaceful as the weather outside. If you’ve ever lost control of your body to sobbing, you know it’s hard to calm down until you’re cried out. I’d been in the thick of that, nowhere close to drying up. And yet it had happened. One moment you might have thought I was weeping at my mom’s coffin. The next…everything was fine. Clarity and calm flooded through me. Part of me watched this happening from a distance and said, Now hold on…is this really an answer?

  But it was a small part of me. The rest of me marveled at how different I suddenly felt. I wish I could describe it better. I would tell that to a bishop later and he would laugh as he said, “Why should you be able to use mortal words to accurately describe something divine? Doesn’t the very use of words cheapen the experience? How could it not?”

  Feeling was enough for my parents, for my leaders, for the girl I planned on marrying. And now it felt like it would be enough for me. I couldn’t explain away what had just happened, because I’d never felt that way before. I didn’t say That was an answer, but it was close enough for me to decide. After the next week of school Erik and I drove home to Elko again. That night at dinner I said, “I think I want to put in my mission papers.”

  “Good!” said my mom.

  “You sure you’re ready to leave your girl here for the wolves?” said my dad. The dinner passed in predictable chatter. “I wonder where you’ll get sent?” “Where do you want to go?” “What language would you want to learn?” “Are you scared?” It wasn’t much of a scene because I don’t think anyone but me ever doubted it.

  I told Jennie I was going. “I’m scared,” I said. “How do you feel?” had been her second comment, right after “Oh, Josh!” I let her be proud of me. It felt good. It felt right. It gave me purpose; her happiness seemed like an end worth pursuing.

  I spent the next month doing paperwork, getting a physical, applying for a passport, checking boxes, getting fitted for white dress shirts, and wondering where I’d go.

  My call arrived in the first week of December. I held the envelope while my mom called my dad at work. “Yes, he’ll wait until you’re all here.”

  Another cliché: That was the longest day of my life. Inside that envelope was a summons to do something utterly foreign to me. It was a membership card to the ranks of the missionaries, plane tickets that needed to be booked, a physical symbol of the conviction I said I had, a sign to Jennie that I wanted to marry her, and the end product of a revelation I had received during a rainstorm, that now looked far less portentous and insignificant inside of an eight-and-a-half-by-four-inch square of paper.

  By seven P.M. everyone was there in my living room, watching and smiling. My heart leapt about. “Everyone,” I said, “I’m not sure how I feel about all this. So if it’s okay, after I read it, I don’t want a bunch of cheering and hugging. I just want to go outside and think.”

  My mom visibly deflated. Jennie’s mom nodded. My dad laughed. “Do whatever you want. It’s your night.” Jennie rubbed my shoulder as I opened the envelope and read aloud:

  Josh Hanagarne, you have been called to serve in the Washington DC North Mission, where you will teach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the Spanish language.

  I would leave on January 7. One month away.

  Everyone gave me the distance I’d asked for. “Fix the government while you’re there!” said my dad. I stood and exited through the front door. I walked out into the center of our yard, the snow crunching beneath my feet. It was an impossibly clear night and the air was pure and sharp. The door opened and closed somewhere behind me and Jennie was at my side. “You think you can see stars like this in DC?” she asked, kissing my cheek.

  I smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “How do you feel, Josh?”

  I half succeeded in smiling but couldn’t put it into words, so I just said, “I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m going to miss you all. I’m going to miss you.”

  “We’ll be here when you get back.”

  * I’d been taught that even the lowest level of Heaven is so great that, if we could see it, we’d kill ourselves to get there. But it’s only in the celestial kingdom that you can have your spouse, your family, and be in God’s presence. Ultimately, anything but the celestial kingdom sucks and you’d spend eternity racked with regret in the lower kingdoms, knowing you could have done better, but the chance has passed.

  CHAPTER 5

  289.3—Mormons Missions

  193—Knowledge, Theory of

  “This is the nonfiction floor, right?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” He looks beyond annoyed at my answer.

  “Okay…Josh,” he says, leaning in to sneer at my name tag. “Then why is the religion on this floor?” And now it’s clear. There’s a shrill atheist standing before me. But his question is valid. It’s a question for Mr. Dewey himself, I suppose. As cataloging issues go, this was thorny.

  If you classified religion as pure fiction, you’d annoy the devout. And the fiction department that already groans under the weight of so many James Patterson novels would be stressed to its limits. But if you classified religion as nonfiction, you lent it credibility by placing it on the same floor with the sciences and books about cupcake decorating.

  People who raise this issue never ask about the Sylvia Browne books or the occult mysteries section, also on my floor. They’re never annoyed that the healing power of crystals is advocated at great length one mere aisle away, or that the massive books of reptile-paranoia guru David Icke take up a square foot here and there. They accept that people who want to summon fairies would visit my department, but that anyone who prays to a God or Gods is an imbecile who mustn’t be tolerated.

  Even as a mildly religious person I am fascinated by this question. My fascination rarely makes atheists less irritated, but I find this the ultimate distillation of theory vs. experience. Anecdote versus empiricism. This floor also houses the psychology and psychiatry section, the self-improvement books, books on reflexology and alternative medicine, and the endless, trendy volumes of stock speculation. I find these books every bit as dodgy, in terms of verifiability, as the religion books.

  “Well, who can I talk to about getting this resolved?” he asked. What ambition he had! The debate of believer versus nonbeliever has been raging for—oh, I don’t know, since we can’t even agree on how old the earth is, but it’s been at least a few thousand years, even for creationists. But this man was going to resolve it. Once and for all. I sent him to admin on Level 5.

  Maybe our library director could handle this softball.

  Every Wednesday, hundreds of missionaries enter the Missionary Training Center (the MTC) in Provo, Utah. Most of them are young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, but there are plenty of senior citizens serving various types of service missions, and there are the sister missionaries.

  As my parents drove me to the MTC, we didn’t talk much. My mom stared out the passenger window and sniffled occasionally. My dad wasn’t doing much better. He kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I’d try to smile but only manage a hideous twist of the mouth that betrayed my nerves and excit
ement. Nowadays, parents drop their missionaries curbside where they are whisked away by other MTC trainees. They say their good-byes in the car and away they go. But when I went through, parents and kids went in together and checked in at the front desk. The MTC resembled any college building—long hallways, high ceilings, classrooms, dorms, auditoriums. But here pictures of church leaders past and present lined the walls. They watched us walk to a conference room with a couple hundred other newbies.

  The president of the MTC—this was a calling as well—spoke about the great work we had embarked on. He commended our red-eyed parents for their sacrifices, but assured them that we’d be protected and watched over. I wondered if he was thinking, Okay, everyone, toughen up. Good grief.

  To us, he said, “Remember that because you have made this choice, the time in the mission is not yours. You have dedicated it to the Lord. Serve with honor and you will be rewarded. And the families you find will be blessed.” Then we were all standing up and hugging. My mom wrung her skirt in her hands and stared at the ground as my dad embraced me. “Seven hundred and thirty days,” he said in a shaky voice. “See you then. I’m so proud of you.” I turned to my mom.

  “I love you, Josh.” That was all she could say. Of course this made me cry too, but not as much as I’d expected. All around us were the sounds of backs being slapped and noses being blown and apron strings being snipped. Then it was time. The parents left the room. We were now missionaries. Righteous, anxious kids in new suits and skirts being herded into processing.