Binary Star (13 page)

John sits next to me and hands me a blister pack.

What’s this?

Ativan.

Is this your new prescription?

He nods.

I’ve never heard of it.

It’s for anxiety. Take one.

No, I don’t think so.

Trust me. They’re not strong.

I turn the package over. The thin aluminum on the back pops open easily and a small yellow pill falls into my hand.

What’s it going to do to me?

Relax you.

He pops another out for himself and washes it down.

We turn our attention to the stage. A bored stripper does basic tricks on the pole, looking nowhere in particular. Another checks her phone. A third dances for two businessmen sitting on the far side of the stage. They seem amused and talk to each other.

How long does it take to kick in?

Half an hour.

I walk around the room and see my students working together. Every time I pass my mentor’s desk, I take a sip of my coffee. Last night, I told my only remaining friend that John and I are happy together. Whatever she may think she knows about him is not based in fact, I said. Remember that.

I left my friend at the table after dinner and purged silently in the bathroom.

I splashed my face with water and returned to the table. She suspected nothing.

I have even done it in restaurants with people in the stalls next to me, but not in a long time. I haven’t needed to, as I don’t go to restaurants anymore. This night was a rare exception.

My students are making visual aids of spiral-ins. Not messy enough, I say.

It’s violent. They’re gas. They won’t hold together.

Picture one star eating another. Picture them both devastated.

Imagine bodies tearing through bodies.

I drag my hand in circles through a desk covered in plastic jewels. They scatter on the floor.

Like this.

Nothing is preserved but the cold, dead cores of the components. Sometimes not even those remain intact.

I want Styrofoam balls all over the floor. I want glitter everywhere. Broken pencils.

I want the floor covered in your partner’s hair. Cut it off.

Here, use these craft scissors.

Don’t be afraid to bleed a little.

A tooth will get you extra credit. A finger: automatic A+.

And if I find you in hard, little pieces at the end of the class, I’ll make you dinner.

But not eat it.

I watch headlights approach and recede in the black distance from our ship in the strip club lot. John sleeps next to me, unaware that we’ve left the club. We’ve been asked to leave. They hurled us free.

Light pollution obscures the stars, but most things happen unseen. A spotlight on the neighboring building has us at its center.

John slept beneath the woman whose body turned rhythmic circles over his crotch. She curved and rolled. She rested her ass on his dick.

A body circled me, too.

I kept my hands on the sides of the chair. Her breasts brushed my cheek, soft and maternal. I closed my eyes and reentered the womb. A man’s hand shook me awake.

You gotta leave.

Prolonged time spent in space will result in massive bone loss and musculoskeletal atrophy, severely inhibiting astronauts’ long-term flight capabilities.

Take him with you.

Astronauts could sustain injuries reentering a gravitational field such as Earth’s, or even stronger: that of Mars.

This is exacerbated by in-flight anorexia: a loss of appetite resultant of space’s adverse affects on human metabolism.

I cannot control what my arms do. I feel that they don’t belong to me.

(Sleep beneath her pressure.)

There are two mechanical forces: active and passive.

Wake up. I can’t drive, John.

Wake up, John. Help me.

I reach for the keys but miss. My eyes bob open and shut. I put my head back.

One leg on one side and one on the other.

I can’t see. Help me.

Wake up, John. Please.

He didn’t know his body and hers came together. He didn’t know when they separated. He breathed peacefully. Passively.

Can you drive?

She asked me what to do. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I couldn’t see. I was comfortable as I was.

Shut up.

I was comfortable there without body. I was gas floating in
the warm, dark walls. I turned to gas and floated away in the margins, moved like liquid mercury.

Had my own woman dancing. She was mine and I was nothing.

Open your eyes. Open them.

She was slim torso, long legs, full breasts, firm and encapsulating. She began as a nebula.

Open up. John, help me.

I slap my face. I slap the other side. Open my eyes. I’m awake. I slap myself again.

I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m awake.

John, I’m going to drive us home now. You need to help me.

I open the windows and shake him hard. I pull onto the road. I move in one direction.

Mom, please.

My arms are heavy and at the same time liquid.

I drive toward the silver gas of the city and the road’s margins.

I can’t do this. Mom, help me.

I shake and swerve and pull into another lot. I am always entering another lot. I am always arriving somewhere I didn’t intend to be.

I put the seat back and the car spins around me. John wakes at the sudden movement. He’s looking for what?

Where are we?

I don’t know. Mercury.

John, I can’t do this on my own.

My mentor finds me in the supply closet clutching coffee in one hand and a tissue in the other. Bits of tear-soaked tissue cling to my face. I am leaning on the pencil shelf.

What’s wrong?

I have a thyroid disease.

My last night in Chicago, I helped John design our distro’s
logo. We’re calling ourselves Black Masque. We’re selling zines, t-shirts, messenger bags, and the ideology of veganarchism.

And general Earth liberation.

We print the zines for free from the Internet and then we take our printouts to FedEx and make as many copies as we think we’ll need — 25 or 50. We keep them on shelves in his apartment.

We buy solid t-shirts from American Apparel because American Apparel doesn’t use sweatshops. We screenprint them with white ink if the shirts are black. If they’re earth-tones, we use black ink. The ink is vegetable-based and nontoxic, and wasn’t tested on animals. We ordered it online.

Our messenger bags will be sewn together from old jeans. I’ll sew them myself, this winter, after the school year is over. Then, I’ll mail them to John for screenprinting.

Most of our screenprints are the Black Masque logo: a freestanding figure holding a dog, wearing the signature mask. Other screenprints are anarchist slogans — some we found and some we devised:

Today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes. We are the crisis.

People are not profits. Longer leashes / larger cages.

One direction: Insurrection. One solution: Revolution.
This is my favorite.

In Arms!
with a picture of a revolutionary hugging a rabbit.

We’re planning to put the money we raise into a new project, one that’s still crystallizing.

We wake at dawn in the parking lot of a Sealy mattress warehouse, hearing a tap at the window. A police officer asks us to step out of the car and show him identification. My keys are still in the ignition and my headlights have been on all night. A line of crusty drool has dried to the side of John’s face. I motion for him to wipe it off but he doesn’t see me.

I haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and it’s apparent
that we’re both hung over. I lean against the car for balance. My head throbs. My hands shake. I’m faint. I feel like crying.

The officer leaves us standing with his partner by the trunk of the car and takes twenty or more minutes checking our records. When he comes back, John is rubbing the flesh between his eyes and looking around impatiently. He spits on the ground.

What brings you to New York?

Her.

What about you?

I go to Adelphi.

He hands our IDs back.

You all out drinking last night? Had a little too much?

We nod. He looks at John.

You got in trouble a few weeks ago, yeah? Assault? Drunk and Disorderly? Think maybe you should lay off for a while?

John keeps his eyes on the ground. The officer smiles at him and then walks to the front of the car and looks in the open door. He reaches inside and picks up something.

Ativan. You got a prescription for this?

Yep.

Can I see it?

It’s in the backseat.

He waits while John opens the back door and rummages around in his duffel bag. John pulls out the box. The officer reads it closely and hands it back to him.

Why don’t you go on home now.

He takes a long last look inside the car.

And maybe spend the next few nights there.

Greetings from the other side of the killing field.

We, Students for the Liberation of Animals, call for a non-violent revolution against all governments and organizations that aid or support the illegitimate terrorist state of the meat, dairy, and vivisection industries.

We are a decentralized group of autonomous cells. Any and all
non-violent actions taken against these industries may be claimed as actions of Students for the Liberation of Animals.

From this day forward, we refuse to perpetuate or tolerate the killing of millions of innocent livestock, victims of vivisection, and our brothers and sisters of the sea. We will use any and all means of non-violent direct action including civil disobedience, the building of checkpoints at slaughterhouse and laboratory entrances, online insurrection, arson, vandalism, infiltration, and leafleting. We will no longer stand by and witness the needless slaughter of our brothers and sisters.

The time for revolution is now. We want the world to know that it is not the ALF, SHAC, ELF, Earth First!, or Students for the Liberation of Animals who are the terrorists but rather the capitalist state that forces us into roles as passive consumers dependent on factory farms and vivisection laboratories. Comrades, you grow fat, dumb, and indifferent on our couches and in our shopping malls while our brothers and sisters suffer and die at the hands of slaughterers and murderers in lab coats. Hear the cries of our brothers and sisters.

Animals and human animals alike have been forced into a position of desperate self-defense. Chickens endure painful debeakings and lifetimes of confinement in battery cages. They are forced to lay over twice as many eggs as is natural per year, molt and suffer constant abrasion against cages and pecking from other prisoners, only to be sent down the shaft and ground alive for Campbell’s.

Cows are confined, constantly impregnated, milked dry, and fed a battery of hormones and antibiotics that harm them and their human consumers, suffer painful infections in their udders, and then are sent to slaughter when they’re no longer useful for pouring milk over our Cocoa Puffs.

Monkeys and dogs cry from behind the bars of their prison cells, bleeding from the ears.

We are no longer deaf to their suffering cries.

We stand up in arms in their defense.

It’s time for Americans of all backgrounds to protest and bring to justice those who oppress their brothers and sisters. Let us bring the struggle for
the liberation of animals to the streets. Our numbers may be small, but we have passion and the dedication to use all our means to end this genocide.

We will bring freedom to our brothers and sisters by any means necessary.

We will end their suffering.

In solidarity,

Students for the Liberation of Animals

I’ve been in the university library since seven o’clock this morning. It’s almost eleven o’clock at night. I have eaten two apples and five half-sticks of celery, a handful of almonds, and time. I have opened Adderall capsules and dropped them into water. I’ve crushed lines with my university ID and snorted them off the study desk. I’ve taken breaks to buy coffee from the food court, and have tried to take two ten-minute naps with my head on my arms, but failed. I hear everything around me. I’m alert and buzzing. My skin shakes on my flesh, I’m so cold.

I’ve chosen the coldest, brightest corner in which to confine myself.

I’m studying for a test of the evolution of cataclysmic variable stars. I glow faintly but burn no fuel. I accrete.

The smell of aging, moldy books in the cold reminds me of withered flesh, and of the passive drift of meteorites into orbit before they’re burned away.

John has asked me to make the Facebook page for Students for the Liberation of Animals. He says that I use my words in a way he can’t. I rewrote the manifesto.

Really, it’s just that I’m not sleeping.

I didn’t say that.

I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.

I’ll do it.

I study for class and work on the Facebook page and go back to studying for class. I focus intensely but can’t seem to focus for long. I go back and forth. I can’t settle.

Every time I move my head in a certain way, the hunger gets
worse and I’m dizzy. I pull my hair so I don’t feel my head throb. I bite my nails.

John will fly to Long Island next week. We’re planning an action, the first we’ll post on the SLA Facebook page. Of course, we’ll include pictures. We’ll say it was conducted by an independent cell that then contacted us.

Cataclysmic variables are binary systems in which the component stars seem to pulse.

They increase in brightness then rapidly drop back down to a state of quiescence.

I upload a user picture: a fist that clutches a freed rabbit aloft. I write,
We, Students for the Liberation of Animals, call for a revolution.

I upload another user picture: a man in a black ski mask cradling a duck before a burning building.
Liberation by any means necessary!