FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

Dori’s departure stirs Pretzels. She hobbles to the edge of the high porch and sniffs, her black nose twitching as she picks up the scent of a squirrel she can no longer see. Some ancestral synapse is triggered by the smell; she growls her muted, grumbling growl and her legs twitch.

“Steps, girl! Steps!” I yell, remembering Black Ice Night. I jump up and lead Pretzels to the stairs at the middle of the porch. Once she’s positioned in front of them, I hoist up her arthritic hindquarters, and as she puts one trembling front paw down, then another, I help her down to what remains of the grass. She settles onto a sunny patch and pokes her nose into the breeze.

I return to the porch and watch my sweet old girl. She drops her big head onto her front paws and discovers a black-and-white mockingbird feather lying in the grass beside her. After chewing on it for a bit, she picks it up, waves it around in the air as if she’s conducting a tiny orchestra, lets it fall, rediscovers it a moment later, snaps the feather up, and starts conducting all over again.

With Dori gone, I am free to play my favorite game, Time Travel. I return to my last Christmas with Martin and replay the way it really happened: Two-year-old Aubrey unwrapped BeeBee and hugged her to her chest. I hugged Martin to mine and pleaded to know what I had to do to keep our marriage together. He told me, “Join Next and raise our daughter as a Nextarian.”

Aided by my fourth Milwaukee’s Best, I rewrite that history into an alternate reality in which, instead of my informing my husband that he had gone totally fucking insane and that my child would be raised in his science-fiction pyramid scheme of a cult over my dead body, and him then walking out of our lives, I say, “Hallelujah, sign me up, baby!” And Martin, Aubrey, and I live happily ever after in this and the next ninety-nine incarnations.

In the Beer Five alternate version of reality, I respond by finding the most bloodthirsty hellhound of a divorce lawyer ever created in the cyborg attorney lab, so that when Martin comes to the table flanked by a couple of Next’s legal pit bulls, and announces that he has signed over all his worldly assets and basically indentured himself for all eternity, in exchange for “the church’s extraordinary generosity” in putting a big chunk down on the Parkhaven house and setting up an irrevocable trust that will fund Aubrey’s college tuition, provided he never has any contact, whatsoever, with either of us again, my goons would have taken 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 I had to save Martin and our unborn child from its patent idiocy.

When Martin came home that night—late as usual because he’d had to attend “muster” at the Hub—I expressed the belief that he was being brainwashed by a dangerous nutball cult and demanded that he quit. Now. For me. For our child. For us.

“Cam, how do I make you open your eyes?” he’d asked, his own eyes glittering the way they always did after a session at the Hub. He spoke quickly, with a hint of mania. By that time, even his smell had changed. It was sharper, almost acrid. “I want my life to be a masterpiece. I want your life to be a masterpiece. I want the life we create together with the child we have created together to be a masterpiece. Next has the tech to give us that.”

“Martin, Next is a scam. A giant, snake-oil-drenched scam.”

With all ten fingers, Martin pointed to his eyes and demanded, “Is this a scam?”

“Martin, your vision was never that bad to start with.”

“But bad enough that I needed glasses when I drove. I ran Opt Tech and look.” He indicated his glasses-free face. “Do I wear glasses anymore when I drive?”

“No, but that doesn’t prove to me that you no longer need them. In fact, I might be endangering my life and the life of our unborn child every time I get in a car with you.”

He shook his head at that, more sad than angry. “There is something worse than not being able to see, Cam. Imagining that you can see when you are totally blind.”

“Oh, my aching ass. Did you really just say that?” I laughed. Laughing was a mistake.

“You dismiss Next at your own peril,” Martin intoned in the Old Testament voice he’d developed. “And the peril of our entire planet. I know this for an absolute, indisputable fact: The only way we will survive as a species is if we all learn and implement Next tech as expeditiously as possible.”

“Martin, please, I need you. Our child needs you. Come back to us. Quit Next.”

“If I had a kidney disease would you beg me to stop doing dialysis?”

“You don’t have a kidney disease.”

“I might as well. Without Next I’d be just as useless to you, to myself, and to our child.”

We argued until dawn. I dragged out all the articles about Next that I’d Xeroxed, along with warnings about tactics cults use to brainwash converts and separate them from their families. Martin tossed back brainwashed-cult rantings that separated us more and more.

In very short order, we became a virulently hostile interfaith couple, Martin turning from me to protect the bright jewel that was the beliefs I ridiculed. Me hanging on, clinging to the hope that the instant his child was placed in his arms, Martin would come back to us.

I was pregnant through one of the hottest summers on record. At night, I stopped sleeping. During the day, I sat on our porch and pretended to work on the online course I was taking to upgrade my nursing diploma to a bachelor’s-in-nursing degree. But every time my eyes hit terms like “concepts of management” or “collaboration with an interdisciplinary team,” they glazed over. My grandmother Bobbi Mac had died that spring, and all I wanted was to be with her and her nurse buddies in North Africa. With Pee Wee, Speedy, Slats, but especially I wanted to be with Crazy Mac. I wanted nursing to be having a gang of friends who put on talent contests and watched out for one another. Mostly, though, I wanted to walk into a room where a person was hurting and make it better. Right away. Not after “collaborating with an interdisciplinary team.”

I might have stuck it out with nursing if I hadn’t been pregnant. Or not in despair. Or not lonelier than I’d ever been, trapped out in the suburbs where the one person I knew had turned into a stranger. But I was pregnant, lonely, and in despair, so instead of studying, I sat on the porch and rocked, like I am rocking now, while Martin spent his days in the city working at a job he hated and his evenings at a place he loved more than me, and I watched our new suburban lawn parch and turn to straw.

Right after the delivery, when Martin and I were alone in my hospital room for the first time since two became three, he picked up our child, and the love that flooded his face was so undeniable that I knew the spell had been broken: Martin had been returned to me. To us.

He cooed to our child, bounced her gently, sniffed her head. We decided to call her Aubrey after a song that Martin used to sing to me because it was about a “not so very ordinary girl or name.” Aubrey’s eyes flickered beneath blue lids closed tight against a painfully overlit world as he stroked her head. I thought we were going to be all right.

But Aubrey had colic and screamed eighteen hours a day. Martin begged me to allow him to take her to “a practitioner” at the Hub. “We do astonishing work with gastro issues,” he said, but all I noticed was that he said “we” when he talked about Next, and I couldn’t recall the last time he’d used “we” when he talked about us.

Martin spent more and more time at the Hub. In addition to sleeping, I stopped eating and having rational thoughts.

When I sobbed through Aubrey’s twelve-month well-baby visit, the pediatrician sent me to a psychiatrist who put me on Lexapro. Clearly, I was too far gone for Lexa-amateur. Martin promised that if I swallowed the same fistfuls of Next-produced vitamins and supplements that he did, I would have no need for the “lobotomy in a bottle” dispensed by psychiatrists. I suggested that he was a deranged lunatic who should either stop actively torturing me or get the hell out of my life.

Martin begged me to try to understand. He bared his soul. He wept. We had desperate, amazing sex that I thought signaled a new beginning, but was actually a long good-bye. By Aubrey’s second birthday, Martin was in the process of turning over all his worldly possessions to Next. At the divorce hearing, I learned that it was an extraordinary concession on “the church’s” part to let Martin hold out enough money to put a big chunk down on the house and set up the college trust fund. Of course, Next made Martin promise in return that he would have no further contact with Aubrey or me. And if he ever did, that would lead automatically to the forfeiture of the trust. And, for the next sixteen years, there had been no contact.

It is obvious now, though, that he and Aubrey had been in contact. Just one more of the apparently limitless things my daughter did last year that I knew nothing about.