Binary Star
“By now I’ve read
Binary Star
twice, and I’ve become so entwined with it that I’m reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I’ve never read anything like it.”
HARRY MATHEWS
“Two lost souls hurtle through a long, dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard’s young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity—ideological, mental, physical—comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed.
Binary Star
is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is ‘I want to look at the sky and understand.’”
JUSTIN TAYLOR
TWO DOLLAR RADIO
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Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Gerard
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-937512-25-5
Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.
Cover image by NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.Soria & K.Wu
Author photograph by Josh Wool
Printed in Canada.
No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For David
“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased by the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”
—Raoul Vaneigem,
The Revolution of Everyday Life
I am a white dwarf.
I spend all my energy, compress my core, I ionize electrons.
Each night, I find the burning center of my hunger alone in my apartment. The walls breathe the space between them and the distance tastes metallic.
If I stare at John’s painting on the wall, those walls left and right expand and cool.
Everything has a shimmer, including me, and I am empty. I find my emptiness in the center of the room: the dead space.
I and the dead space are most alike.
The sounds of Earth below reach me on the futon. I sit in a way complementary to my thighs: one crossed over the other, leaning more on the right hip than the left: a perfect balance.
There is work to be done, but I won’t do it. I will curve around the empty space between the work and me, and we will fall toward each other but continue to orbit.
I will study the main-sequence chart on the wall, the one John gave me. That John’s parents gave me.
The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its fate.
A star is held together by its own gravity.
When I visited John in Chicago last spring, I awoke to his urine in the bed. He can’t wake from the Seroquel he takes to fall asleep. It’s pointless to try to make him. Even if I succeed, he’s delusional.
That time, he was angry. He thought I’d spilled something.
What time is it? he asked. Late is not a time.
It’s four in the morning. You wet the bed.
No I didn’t.
It smells like urine. You peed the bed.
No I didn’t. Snoring.
I blow smoke into the center.
I lie on the cold leather couch his parents bought him. Leather isn’t vegan, John.
I didn’t buy it. They did.
John is not responsible.
At two o’clock today, I ate half a bag of sunflower seeds and drank 20 ounces of coffee. At six o’clock, I had half of a raw carrot. I had a Red Bull at eight o’clock.
All morning, I tried to work the TV. John slept until four in the afternoon.
How many pills did you take?
What I was supposed to take. Two.
Whatever.
He has been alone for too long.
I don’t have keys. I can’t leave when you sleep this late.
So?
A revolution.
I can’t be responsible for you.
Because what if you weren’t okay? No, I don’t blame you.
Of course not. How could I blame you?
We’ll get used to this.
We’ll find a balance.
Closer to you than you are to me. You are massive.
We need to do things on our own.
I can’t.
I was alone in a second empty apartment with Dog.
To own a dog is cruel, John. To own a living thing is cruel. It’s not vegan.
It takes time.
We only have so much time. It is only a matter of time until.
I do away with all of my possessions, including myself.
The scale in the bathroom sits partially on the bathmat. I move it to the hallway and set it on the wood for absolute accuracy. Zero. Give me zero. I was 92 yesterday.
91. One o’clock. Some of that is urine weight.
Soon, I will disappear into the wall.
Soon, I will be light as gas.
There is work to be done.
Think of class.
Tomorrow, I will go to the school where I intern.
My students will take in matter about stars. I will radiate it toward them.
They will expand and harden at the center.
Convect new matter.
They aren’t not my students.
They’re interred. I have to study.
It’s late, I have to sleep.
I won’t sleep. I never do.
To sleep is lazy. I feel guilty when I sleep. I don’t need it like you do, John.
Just being awake burns calories. Just being awake brings me closer to you.
To perfection.
Tomorrow, I will work for free and then go to class where I take in stars.
A star’s luminosity is determined by its mass. I am faint.
I feel faint.
I am reeling. I shine.
A binary star is a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass.
Binary stars are gravitationally bound.
Gravity is the way we fall together.
In personal time and in universal time.
Tonight is the end of all time.
Tonight I want to stop time.
My time, John. Your time.
John and I follow our paths into the center but we never reach the center. We are objects drawn to each other in space. We are space.
We fall together.
I am tired but awake. I eat nothing.
I eat nothing but time.
John is thousands of miles away but I feel him.
He doesn’t call me.
Nobody calls me.
John calls me sometimes.
I try not to lie.
I just lied.
John loves me.
I take two Hydroxycut and sit on the red futon. I smoke and blow my smoke into the center and buzz. Sounds of Earth below reach me rolling like fog through the windows. I’m alone. I am always alone.
I’m disgusting.
Hunger burns and rises in the chest.
Up the ladder.
Tomorrow, I will lead a test on starlight.
1. Stars are born in clouds of gas and
a. Thighs
b. Arms
c. Tummy
d. Ass
Stars are born of gravitational collapse.
Stay away from the vodka, John.
One more.
Two less.
A hundred.
More.
A dense, hot core.
The total energy radiated by a star per unit time is its luminosity.
The more massive a star, the more luminous it is.
The brighter it burns.
High-mass stars rapidly exhaust their core supplies of energy.
And burn out.
I feel that this is the end of suffering.
I feel that I will be extinguished.
This is the end of indecision. Of two desires orbiting the empty space of why.
I will finally disappear. Be final.
Desire requires two bodies: This and that.
The final exam.
Evaluation.
John says: What does it mean to be primitive in the city? John thinks he’s primitive and he thinks I’m primitive.