The World’s Strongest Librarian

by Josh Hanagarne

  Mom turned the edges of her hands into blades and threatened me with karate chops, a tactic she often employed when we said we were too sick for school. She sliced the air between us. “Yah! Yah!”

  I climbed the stairs, Mom trailing.

  My first week home we’d all had a great time getting reacquainted and sharing stories and laughing and moaning about poor Josh and how we were going to do “whatever it takes” to fix things. A couple of weeks after that my siblings were finding other things to do than sit around and watch me cry. I didn’t blame them. Misty was uncontrollable. The noises were louder, the punches were harder, and she never left. I could barely think. I drove to Salt Lake to visit Jennie, but after a couple of weeks with her I could tell that she was wondering whether she had other things to do than be my nurse. I couldn’t blame her; there were no signs that things would improve. We spent the next few months talking about getting married once I got better. Then we stopped talking about it altogether. Then, in a burst of loneliness, panic, and impulse, I kissed another friend in Elko when she was over late one night, told Jennie about it, and she dumped me. This was heartbreaking, but then, everything was. I was a twitchy, delicate little daffodil with feelings made of porcelain.

  My mom didn’t know what to do about my emotional state, but she was determined to stop Misty.

  Wind chimes greeted us as Mom and I entered Dr. H’s office. Somewhere a tiny band of pan flutists piped away. My doubts grew at the sight of the Kachina doll on the wall, at the smell of incense, at the sound of cowboy boots clomping down some dark corridor toward us. The man who emerged from a bead curtain had definitely read Stephen King’s The Stand and modeled his appearance after Randall Flagg, the Walkin’ Dude. Jeans. Boots. Smiley-face button. Denim jacket over a collared black shirt. A long, thin gray ponytail unfurling behind him like the remnants of an old cape. A predacious smile. He offered a hand. I shook it. His hand was very soft. The pan flutes played on.

  “Well, we’re here!” said my mom.

  “Yes,” said Dr. H. “Yes, you are.” He locked eyes with me, trying to convince me that I was a toothsome cut of pork. He stepped closer. When I retreated and groped behind me for the door, he said, “Welcome to the place!” and hustled us inside. He was a chiropractor. “But so much more.” He bid me look at the table with its doughnut-shaped headrest. Stuffing leaked out from the cracked upholstery. Pictures and paintings of elk and meadows and angels covered the walls. “I am a healer, Josh.”

  I looked at my mom.

  “I heal.” He invited me to lie facedown on the table. “Ever been to a chiropractor before?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because I’m much more than a chiro. All right, just relax then. What religion are you? Wait, don’t answer that yet.” Dr. H placed the heels of his palms on top of my fifth lumbar vertebra. “Exhale.” Crack. He pushed, something gave, I gasped, and yelped, a tic that sounded like “Woo!” It’s not working.

  “We’re some of those Mormons,” said my mom.

  “Correction, you are two of those Mormons,” he said. “I shared your faith for a while. I share it still at times. It is all in the sharing. Ever been on a vision quest?” Crack.

  “No, I—”

  “Don’t answer that…” Crack.

  At his behest I turned faceup.

  “When I was on my first vision quest I saw who most people might refer to as the Lord. Turn your head to the left, please. Relax.” He placed one hand against my ear, one on my shoulder, and cracked my neck.

  “But it wasn’t the Lord,” said Dr. H, “because how can we really tell, do you understand? Oh my, your jaw is tight. Open your mouth please.”

  His ring tasted the way you’d expect a piece of metal that had been on a finger for years to taste. Having my jaw cracked was not unpleasant, however. There was release in it. Much of my pain was from overuse and rigidity. Beyond the specific pains in the tense areas, there was an overall systemic tension that I hadn’t been aware of—until this valorous healer began pretzeling me. He stepped back and put his hands on his hips. “Do you want to know about perfection? Do you want to know about calm?”

  I looked at my mom. The interlaced steeple she’d been making out of her white-knuckled fingers was drooping under the burden of this folly. When she saw me looking, the sagging frame sprang back to life. “Sure!”

  “Do you believe there is a cure for you?” Dr. H asked, leaning into my face. If I’d had any money, I would have bet that the white fleck in his beard was a small chip of long-dried Ramen noodle. “The key to your cure is to become as calm as young Joseph Smith was when he walked into the Sacred Grove and saw God. Do you know what Tourette’s is? Do you know what causes it?”

  “Dopamine?” I said.

  “The same thing that causes all of mankind’s ills. Have you read Brave New World by Orwell?

  “Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World.”

  “Ah. But do you want to know what causes your Tourette’s?”

  “Sure!” said my mom.

  “A lack of perfection.” Dr. H extended his arms to his sides as if he was about to be pulled apart by horses. “Now, I want you to imagine yourself in a perfect, perfect circle.” He brought his arms forward in a slight curve. “If you can imagine that perfect, perfect circle for seventeen seconds, you will be healed. Do you think that Joseph Smith could have seen what he did if he had not been able to stay still for a measly seventeen seconds?”

  “Well,” said my mom, “there was actually more to it than that….”

  Or less, I thought.

  “Well, perhaps,” said Dr. H, “but—”

  “I’ll try,” I interrupted.

  “I’m proud of you, Josh,” said the good doctor.

  “Thank you.” I concentrated. But alas, I only made it to fourteen “perfect, perfect seconds” before Misty’d had enough and tasered me.

  “I’m still proud of you, Josh,” he said. “We can’t all connect the first time out, can we? When was the last time you read the Book of Mormon, by the way?”

  I’d come home prepared to avoid the slump I’d heard about from other returned missionaries. Suddenly you’re home and there are all these other things you want to do and if you let it go you’ll fall out of all the habits you’ve gotten into, like reading your scriptures all the time.

  “I read some this morning,” I said. I’d actually spent most of the morning reading The Shining, a welcome-home present from Jennie.

  “Good, then this next part will go easier.” Dr. H vanished into another room. “We can still cure you,” his voice announced before his body reappeared. “And don’t worry about the circle. It will always be there when you’re prepared to revisit it.” He was brandishing bottles of clear liquid.

  He set the bottles down with great aplomb, announcing them as if they were visiting dignitaries. “Zinc!” Thump. “Copper!” Thud. “Tungsten!” He looked down at me as if expecting me to jump up and scream, “Oh yeah, now you’re talking!” before we exchanged thunderous high fives. When I didn’t move, he sighed and tutted and said, “Cross your arms.”

  I crossed my arms. He placed one of the bottles—I think we started with zinc—atop my crossed arms. He grasped my right wrist with his hands and said, “Now I’m going to pull back. I need you to resist. Can you resist?”

  I inhaled. “I can resist.” I was tired and wanted to resist the teeth out of his head. I resisted while he pulled my arm. I resisted in my head when the result seemed to please him. He produced a little notebook and jotted with as much exuberance as one can jot with. He performed more tests to determine which minerals my body needed. Bottle after bottle on my chest. “Resist me! The body speaks!” he said each time. Based on the resistance, he prescribed bottles of copper and zinc water, which Mom purchased.

  In the parking lot later, Mom looked at the bottles clinking in my lap and said, “That was so stupid.”

  I laughed. We went to lunch and said, “Resist me!” for an hour.
<
br />   Dr. H eventually went to prison for a year. No matter what anyone tells you, there’s no magic bath that cures cancer.

  He hadn’t been the first stop. My neurologists—in DC and now one in Salt Lake—had already prescribed several medications, with mixed results. The problems with the pills were that 1) they didn’t work and made me feel like crap; or 2) they seemed to work and then stopped because I’d outlasted the placebo effect; or 3) they actually did work but then they stopped, which was worse than never working to begin with.*

  Dad wasn’t surprised when I recapped our visit. “Criminy, what did you think would happen with that guy? I saw Gail the other day and she was limping around like a cripple.”

  “Frank!” Mom said. “She didn’t go to him for her knee!”

  Dad winked at me. The next day he walked through the living room, saw me lying on the couch half awake, and nudged me with his boot. “Get up. Get some shorts. Get in the truck. We’re going to the gym.”

  I reached for a ready-made excuse. The bag was empty.

  We drove to town. “Why do I have to do this?”

  “You don’t have to.” He turned on the stereo and fired up a Dwight Yoakam tape that my mom hated. “But you need to. And so you’ll do it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have gotten in the truck, smart guy.”

  “I’m smart.”

  “Then you’ll admit that the chances of that couch you’re so in love with driving itself down this road with you laying on it are pretty poor, right?”

  “Lying.”

  “What?”

  “Lying on the couch. Not ‘laying.’”

  He whistled. “Wow, is it nice? Being a genius? It looks nice. Thanks for the correction. I’ll turn around and tell your mom that she’s got nothing to worry about. All I meant was that if you’d stayed on the couch, you wouldn’t be in the truck.”

  “Okay.”

  “No. Not okay. You’re going to the gym with me. I think this will be good for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve been depressed before. I know some things. But listen, can I ask you a question?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there anyone you look up to? I’m serious, now. No jokes.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. What good would it do to say I looked up to my dad? Or my grandpa? Or the prophet or Pee-wee Herman for that matter?

  “Well,” Dad said, “you’ve got to find someone to follow. Do you know who that is?”

  “You?”

  “I wish. But no. It’s you. You have zero confidence.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Yes, you have zero confidence. No, I know that’s not what you meant, but, no, you don’t, and do you know how I know?”

  “Because you’re in touch with Navajo spirits.”

  He exhaled hard through his nose. “Do you ever get tired of being so funny? It’s a nice little smoke screen, but I know you. Confident people do stuff. They get stuff done. They make things, even if it’s just making money. You know what you’re making?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re making our couch sag. That’s about it. You’re making your mom sad because you’re not trying. You’re making your siblings miserable because you’re acting like you’re miserable.”

  “I am. I’m depressed and on a bunch of drugs. I want to take more of them every day just to feel different.”

  “This isn’t depression and that’s not their fault. But I don’t want to fight. I think what we’re about to do is going to give you a way to make some progress.”

  “There’s nothing important about lifting weights.”

  “There’s nothing insignificant about progress. Let’s just give it a try.”

  Dad had been lifting inconsistently for most of his adult life. He’d usually go until he injured himself showing off, take a couple dozen months off, wait for New Year’s to roll around, and then decide that this would be the year he got his bench up to 350. He once hurt himself in a Denver sporting goods store by bench-pressing for the Broncos cheerleaders, who were duly impressed as my mom let him lean on her for support as they exited.

  The gym parking lot contained few cars. Nothing about it screamed “Salvation!” or “Remake yourself!” Except for the poster on the wall: a man in a black string tank top doing curls under the words “Remake yourself!”

  My dad scanned his card. “And he needs a guest pass,” he told an old guy behind the counter. “And he’ll need one of those slinky tank tops from that poster he’s looking at.”

  “Don’t sell ’em,” said the guy.

  There were four other people there. Two peppy women in spandex hopped up and down while holding tiny dumbbells under their chins in both hands, as if they were trying to fill chalices with the sweat of their labors. “Wow, they’re really laying it all on the line, aren’t they?” whispered my dad. “This place gets some weird customers.”

  A short guy wearing a fearsome black bandanna stalked before the wall-length mirrors. He yanked up the hem of one leg of his Daisy Duke denim shorts and flexed his quadriceps in the mirror. He nodded. He had an enormous tattoo on his calf.

  “We need to get you some little shorts like that,” said my dad. “Man, you’re skinny. Let’s get started.”

  “Okay. How?”

  He led me over to the rack of free weights. “Just find a couple of dumbbells that you can put over your head and start pressing them until you can’t. Let’s start there. I’d like to see your shoulders get a little bigger.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I’m going to go bench. Now lift.”

  I tested a few dumbbells and settled on a pair of 45-pounders. I could only manage a couple of consecutive overhead presses before I got wobbly and pulled out of alignment. I felt silly. But as I began to fatigue, the other people faded. There was just me and my body. My stupid, thin, Benedict Arnold of a body. I could focus on getting the movements “right” or I could worry about everyone else. I focused on the details.

  “Just rest until you can get a couple more reps, then get a couple more,” said the guy next to me. “There’s no trick. Only patience. And food. And sleep.”

  When I couldn’t lift the 45s, my dad appeared and said, “Keep going down the rack. Do what you can with the 35s, then the 25s, then the 10s. They’ll start feeling heavier.” I ran the rack. It astonished me how something so light could weigh so heavily on my body when moments earlier it had been so easy. For forty-five minutes, I repeated the process with various exercises. Back in the truck I realized that I hadn’t thought about my tics for nearly an hour.

  “Was I having tics in there?” I asked my dad.

  “Yeah.”

  I wanted him to say “No and that’s what I was getting at! You’re cured!” But if I was oblivious to my symptoms, wasn’t that the same result? “Huh. Why did you say you wanted my shoulders to be bigger?”

  “It’ll change the way you walk. It’s hard not to be confident if you walk like you’re wearing a cape, with it blowing out behind you. Big shoulders help with the cape. Should we come again tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” I did want to go again, to see if I could replicate that experience of feeling like I had control of myself, or the experience of not worrying what anyone else thought about my tics.

  “Great. In that case, we’ve got to make a stop.” We pulled into a store where Dad bought a spiral-bound notebook. “You’ll want this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that”—he tapped the notebook—“is a small victory. That’s where you track your wins. Find a way to win and you start getting things done.”

  Not only did I go back to the gym the next day, I went back every day that week. I even went alone once. I got a look at the short-shorts guy’s tattoo: It was of himself, wearing his workout outfit, doing the leg press in a column of fire.

  Misty fussed harder than ever, but it was as if she were barred
from the gym. Afterward, yes, I would pay for it with savage tics. But during those sessions of clanking weights and sliding pulleys and yes, even the stupid guy with the aviator shades admiring his thighs, I forgot about the price I’d pay. What I did in the gym made everything outside easier. What a fascinating, bizarre turnaround; I was choosing to do something so difficult and painful that my symptoms didn’t seem as bad.

  I grew. I no longer looked like a svelte bone with glasses. I was wearing the cape.

  That was in the spring of 1998. I spent the next year at home with my family, recovering. I lifted almost every day and put most of the weight back on. But the biggest change wasn’t physical. It was spiritual; I could go to the gym and lift myself into a quiet oblivion, but Misty insisted on tagging along when I went to church. Being in that quiet chapel was too much, so I stopped going. At first, I missed it. I felt guilty being home while my family worshipped. Soon I stopped feeling guilty and looked forward to the three hours of quiet each Sunday when I had the house to myself. Well, myself and Misty.

  I got a letter from Erik, the friend I’d attended college with in Idaho before our missions. He was finishing his mission in Brazil and let me know that he’d be going to Rick’s College—an LDS junior college that would later become Brigham Young University–Idaho—in the fall of 1999. I resolved to go with him.

  “That’s great,” said my dad. “I’ll help you pack. Let’s go do it right now.”

  We didn’t pack that day, but a year later my dad said, “Do you really have to take these?” as he taped up another box of my books.

  “It’s not that many,” I said.

  “It’s eight boxes. That’s eight boxes too many when you’re going to have other books to read, like your textbooks that I’m paying for.”

  “Yeah, I know, but…”

  “But what?”

  It was a good question. “I want to take them.”

  “He wants to take them,” said my mom. But then, after hefting a box herself, she said, “Now why do you want to take these?”

  That evening, the first one in my new apartment, I unpacked those books and filled our living room’s one bookcase with Stephen King, Socrates, a bunch of Far Side anthologies, and a bunch of other volumes that, yes, I truly didn’t need to bring with me. But it was too late.