Binary Star (12 page)

You treat me like a dog.

This is the only way you can do it. This is the only way you will do it.

That was the best sex we’ve ever had
and you thought it was an insult.

It pays to be unspecific.

It’s true that I miss you. It’s true that I wish you were here. I follow you endlessly reaching and never reach you. You follow behind me.

We need to be apart to stay together. We need to be alone, both of us, to be together.

You need to get me alone.

For my own stupid, ugly, selfish reasons.

For my petty, shallow, overblown reasons.

Supernova. Self-worth: unreason: supernova.

Please be unreasonable. I am unreasonable. You’re a child. I’m a child. I’m her only, perfect, stupid, worthless child who can’t love.

Yes, Mom, I’m fine.

I’m lying.

Help me, please.

Know what I won’t say.

Know me better.

Better, yes.

I want to be better.

I sit on the red futon you turned to ash. I lick the ash and this is the only thing I lick.

I lick my lips.

I lick an ice cube popsicle.

I freeze-dry myself onto any hard surface: preservation. This is what starvation feels like.

Please don’t look at me like that.

Please don’t touch me. I’ll explode.

Objectified? Disrespected?

No.

No.

This is what I want. I just want.

To cling to you.

To cling to your shoe.

What about the fish that die for rubber?

Follow your star to the dark horizon.

Redshift.

I just want all of you.

In the spring, I fly to Chicago because it’s my turn. We’ve been apart for a month. My flight lands early, so I take my time getting to the baggage claim, and walk through the duty-free Hallmark store and Hudson News. I buy a Chicago snow globe for ten dollars even though I have no one to give it to. While I’m paying for it, I buy an extra pack of Orbit gum and a sugar-free Red Bull just because.

During our time apart, John registered for his summer class and we began planning what will happen in May. It’s now early March. I’m surprised by his uncharacteristic show of initiative but I don’t say so. I don’t want to embarrass him.

In the car, I say that I want to go to the Adler Planetarium. John agrees, but instead we stay in and order Chinese food. I throw it up in the bathroom while John sits on the leather couch watching a documentary about the Zapatistas and drinking a case of Corona. I come out and stop by the bedroom, take two Hydroxycut from my purse, and drink them down with the broth from the vegetable soup without him noticing. I break open a fortune cookie but don’t eat it. The fortune reads,
A journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step.
I show it to John. He doesn’t care and he doesn’t suspect anything.

We finish the documentary and he turns off the TV and tries to remove my shirt. At first I resist, but he tries again and I don’t want him to feel rejected. We kiss and he goes down on me. I try to enjoy it.

I want you to be rough, I say.

How?

I don’t want to fuck you. You have to make me.

We pause and he grabs my legs and pushes them down. He’s drunk.

Make you what?

Make me fuck you.

Ow.

Make me fuck you.

I grab his hair and yank it.

Make me fuck you.

No.

Make. Me. Fuck. You.

Ow.

Hurt me. Get angry.

I hurt you, didn’t I? Now you have to hurt me.

He goes to his room and brings out a basket from under his bed. There are nylon ropes inside.

This is the only way I can do it.

Fine.

Turn the fuck over.

He ties my hands and feet together. The ropes are soft and come untied with the slightest pressure. He has to keep stopping to retie them. This happens three times and then we give up and he tells me to pretend.

Don’t be a fucking pussy. Make me hurt.

This is how I used to do it with Michele.

He holds my shoulders down and pretends to spit on my face. I picture Michele in my position. I picture his cock deep inside her.

I don’t like that.

She hated it.

So do I.

Good. Shut up.

I’m serious.

I hold my wrists together because the ropes don’t do it. I hold my feet together above the leather couch, so he can pretend they’re bound there. I drift across the room and see him above me, see me lying still beneath him. He finishes on my ass and falls asleep. I stare at the dark TV.

Back in New York, I call him and lie.

I just threw up my food.

Why’d you do that?

I don’t know. I just did.

He’s quiet for a minute. Then he says, You said you wouldn’t do that anymore.

Are you mad?

Yeah, I am.

Good. I want him to be mad.

It really hurts my feelings that you would lie to me, he says.

I didn’t know how to tell you.

Are you doing it all the time?

Just sometimes.

Well, stop. Do you need to see a therapist?

I don’t think so.

So you’re going to stop?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. I’ll stop.

You better. You know I’ll tell your mother.

What the fuck?

I’m not putting up with it.

THE THIRD DREDGE-UP

THE RED GIANT DEPLETES THE HELIUM SUPPLY IN its core but continues fusing hydrogen into helium.

It builds in a shell around the core, and reignites in a flash, leading to a thermal pulse within the star.

Helium, carbon, and s-process products are brought to the surface, outweighing oxygen.

This is the third dredge-up.

John calls me three times a day in the month after he leaves to make sure I’m eating and keeping my food down. Sometimes I’m honest and sometimes I lie to him. When I’m honest, he’s upset and I like this. I find being honest and lying equally useful. I text him a picture of a meal that I’m about to eat and then text him a picture of my empty plate half an hour later. Then I text him a picture of my mouth, open without food inside. This only seems to prove something. It’s what he wants to see but he also wants me to call him later to tell him I’ve lied. He doesn’t say so, but this message is as important as the first; it keeps us connected, circling.

We want to be concerned. It’s what we have to talk about. It gives us something to do.

Someone to blame for our own behavior.

I really don’t want to lie. I really do want to get better.

I’m afraid of this.

I want not to do this anymore. Not to think about what, when, how much, and what to do afterward.

I feel myself growing dimmer by the day.

I feel I’m growing cooler.

A white dwarf can cool to zero temperature but still have high energy.

I weigh myself once an hour when I’m home. Now that I’m eating for John, I can’t help but eat all the time. I don’t feel hunger when I feel it all the time. Now I know when I’m hungry — when I should be. I hate this.

I hate.

When I’ve eaten, I feel the food moving inside me. I buy groceries but don’t digest them. They’re gone within a day, down the toilet.

I can’t stand the feeling of food. I feel it on my organs, feel it weighing me down.

I purge and then fear that I haven’t purged it all and take pills to burn the remains.

I drink Red Bull like water.

I think of other ways to be empty.

He sends me articles about the dangers of constant purging but I find them motivational. He tells me he won’t find me attractive without any teeth, but I think this won’t happen to me.

I don’t care if it does.

I also know it will happen but feel powerless to stop it.

Many times I kneel before the toilet not wanting to do what I finally do.

Many times I walk to Walgreens without deciding to do so. I find myself standing in the diet aisle and I don’t know how I got there; it seems I was compelled.

I take Hydroxycut to the register and while I’m there, I buy
Star Magazine.
I don’t know how it happens.

Miley Cyrus’s Tiny Workout Clothes. Christina Aguilera Shows Off Sexy, Slim Figure on Music Video Shoot.

The 10 Ugliest Celebrities. The 15 Sexiest Sports Moments.
Ask Yourself These Questions: Know If It’s Moods or Depression.

Win It! A Year’s Supply of Pocket Protein.

I’m not dropping weight because I’m not always purging. I think about the zero-sum ways I abuse metabolism: I store more fat because I only starve sometimes. I eat more when I eat because I only starve sometimes.

I gain a couple of pounds because I can’t purge constantly. I’m storing water because I’m dehydrated. I feel bloated all the time. I know that I smell bad.

I’m dizzy.

And I feel that my fate is inevitable.

I scratch my hands, my arms, I bite my nails.

I grind my teeth constantly.

An accretion disk is matter that is gravitationally drawn into the field of the black hole.

Quasars are regions surrounding black holes at the centers of young, active galaxies.

Angular momentum prevents the material from moving in a straight line into the region.

Instead, it spirals down into it.

I can’t do it. I can’t do this anymore.

At the end of the month, John calls me from jail. He’s been arrested at a club for fighting with the bouncer, who kicked him out for sleeping at the bar. The bouncer wouldn’t let him go back in to get Michele. John punched the bouncer in the face.

He kicked my head into the pavement. I have fifteen stitches.

I look up his mug shot. The wound starts at his left temple and travels to the middle of his cheek, winding around his cheekbone.

That’s a horrible scar.

John, don’t drink so much that you fall asleep at the bar. This scares me.

I wasn’t drunk; I was tired.

Please don’t do this anymore.

It’s not a big deal. He laughs.

Michele thinks it’s funny.

John lands at MacArthur airport the first week of May. I drive an hour and a half to meet him. I’m late, and by the time I arrive, he’s been drinking at the concourse bar for thirty minutes. He’s recently changed medications and sounds confused on the phone. He can’t tell me where he is.

I walk in circles around the baggage claim and the drop-off, walk through the CNBC News gift shop and the Long Island Travelmart, and finally see him across the security checkpoint. I call his name but he doesn’t hear me. I wave my arms but he doesn’t see me. Finally, he answers his phone. We collect his bag from the rotating conveyor and start back toward my apartment.

It’s just after sunset and stars are faintly visible on the horizon. We follow a featureless four-lane highway through acre after acre of grey parking lots and squat concrete strip malls with tattered awnings advertising pawn shops, check cashing places, Mexican restaurants, and used sporting goods stores. John takes my hand across the console and tells me about a documentary on the May ’68 Paris uprising he thinks I should see. As he talks, he becomes more lucid, and I wonder if his prior confusion wasn’t just the residual grogginess of an in-flight nap.

A wide pink scar wends its way down the left side of his face. I’ll have to get used to its being there.

We begin to talk about what we should do this first night together. John jokingly tells me to stop at a strip club we pass, then together we decide to do it. I turn around and drive back half a mile. We’re laughing as we pull inside. The sex shop next door has a mannequin in the window wearing a teddy shaped like Saturn’s rings.

The club is sparsely attended. Four dancers and a handful of
tired veteran patrons pass each other and keep walking toward opposite sides of the room. The red of the velvet booths folds into shadows on silver-speckled black carpet. The walls are covered in black vinyl peeling away at the corners. John orders us drinks: a Red Bull and vodka for me, and a Scotch for himself. He leaves the bar and two strippers take his place. The bartender fixes them drinks without them having to ask.