Martin to the mat. Or at the very least written a document that couldn’t be codiciled into irrelevance.
The Beer Six version of history, oddly, takes me back to an unusually clear-eyed replaying of events pretty much exactly as they happened. I got pregnant. We bought this house. I began my suburban exile. I quit my nursing job in my sixth month. Martin was miserable at his job in the city, where programming, a skill he’d developed as a hobby, an intriguing mental challenge to supplement his interest in systems of logic, had become his whole life, the thing he could do that made money.
Then “some guy” at work told him about Next. From the beginning, Martin was open about his interest and committed to getting me involved with him. At that point, I knew nothing about Next except that a few starlets with more silicon than gray matter were ardent followers. But I could see that Martin was benefiting from it. At first in ways that I actually liked. Though he was home less and less, when he was here there was more and more of him. Just as my belly was swelling, Martin began filling his body in a way he never had before. He’d always been tall, but for the first time he seemed tall. And he’d always had a deep voice, but before Next he’d modulated it, swallowing his words so that I’d have to lean in close to hear what he said. His timidity had forced me to make more and more of the decisions—like having a child and buying this house—for both of us.
After a few months of Next, though, Martin the Soft-spoken was transformed into a Rush Limbaugh clone. Suddenly his every utterance was delivered in a bone-rattling bellow with a majesty and volume that reverberated off the high ceiling of the great room. His new assurance made everything he said sound obvious and irrefutable, like he was explaining gravity and I was an idiot if I didn’t agree.
Which is why, when I was eight months pregnant and he said, “Cam, the best thing you could do for yourself and our child is to go to the Hub and take the basic Next course,” I agreed. “The Hub” was the converted nursing home that “the congregation” met in for classes and exorbitantly expensive “counseling sessions.” It was where Martin had taken to spending all his lunch hours and most evenings except for the few when I put my foot down and made him stay home and do something like assemble the crib, whereupon he’d act like a teenager who’d been grounded. So I thought, Why not? I tried to look upon it as something we could do together, a shared interest like salsa-dancing lessons or a wine-tasting class.
The course turned out to be two parts assertiveness training combined with one part three-year-old’s birthday party. We had staring contests in which the first to blink was the loser. We played Simon Says and took turns ordering other class members to “Go stand on the chair!” “Jump up and down!” “Go drink out of the aquarium!” The entire time our trainer kept yelling that if Next technology was not causing us to be filled with “bright surges of energy” and “connecting with our own power source,” we should leave. Walk out. Right that very moment. Then the class, champing like hounds on the hunt, waited for the backsliders among us to reveal themselves. It was a canny crowd-control intimidation tactic. Each time you didn’t have enough gumption to declare yourself an infidel by walking out, you were, essentially, doubling down on Next; you were publicly announcing, “I believe.”
For our final challenge, the trainer took away all our money and commanded us to go out into the city and use our newly honed mastery over time, space, and the unenlightened boobs of the non-Next world to get something for free.
I drove to the nearest convenience store; bought an Almond Joy with the five-dollar bill I’d slipped into my bra; went to the library; discovered that all material about Next was kept under lock and key, since adherents considered it their sacred duty to steal or destroy anything negative about the church; gave the librarian my driver’s license to hold while I perused what books and articles they’d been able to replace; researched Next; concluded that it was one Spanish Inquisition away from being the most dangerous group ever to pass itself off as a religion and that