Binary Star (5 page)

I get in the car and shut the door.

Just leave me alone, John.

Fine. You’re alone.

It rains in Texas and we get stuck in the mud driving between cow pastures. It was my idea to stop and look at the cows, but John drove too far off the main road and slipped into a ditch. Our shoes and pants are full of mud. There is mud on our faces and on our hands. I think it’s funny but John is too worried about his car to see the humor. I tell him he’s cute.

We pitch a tent among patties and see above us a sky full of stars, all fixed.

All fixed.

John takes his Seroquel and falls asleep in the tent before I can stop him. I’m too hungry to sleep, and I lie next to him, staring up at the apex where the tent’s two sides come together. An hour goes by in complete silence until I see lights shining through the flap. Four deer hunters hook their truck up to the back of John’s car and pull it out. They offer me jerky.

No, thank you, I’m vegan.

Where’s your man?

He’s sleeping in the tent.

They laugh.

They disconnect the car from the tethers and sit on the hatch. Stickers on the truck advertise John Deere and a local radio station called “The Pig.” They wipe the mud from their boots.

You look like you need some jerky.

Thank you.

That’s not nice, Wade.

She knows I’m kidding.

What’s vegan?

Still.

It’s a dietary restriction.

More than that. It’s a lifestyle.

I couldn’t do it.

Tell you what.

No shit.

One of them spits on the ground.

I need a good steak every now then. What’s your man like? He a sissy?

He’s not vegan.

Is vegan why you’re skinny?

Don’t you miss a big rare piece of meat?

Not really. I don’t like meat.

You’re lying.

You’re crazy.

Thank you.

No, I mean like, really crazy.

Thank you.

That night, I lie awake until the sun rises. When John wakes, he’s upset that I left him alone while I talked to the deer hunters. They could have hurt me.

We make love in the tent and lie there to watch the sun rise, then drive into town for breakfast. I order fruit salad.

We go back to the hospital first thing the next day. I have pinkeye probably caused by cow dung. I throw out my contact lens and wear a patch over my eye. I refuse to leave the car because I think people will stare at me. I can only see in two dimensions and I can’t see my whole periphery; I see ninety degrees to my right and that’s all. I can’t see John.

When I take the patch off my eye, all the world looks blue.

We drive toward New Orleans passing in and out of towns of clusters of three buildings, passing junk shops and farms laid fallow by the cold, billboards for Jesus and against homosexuals, for Popeyes and the American Bank of Texas but against Obama, for NASCAR and Keller Williams but against socialism. I eat four banana chips and regret it because they’re cooked in coconut oil and sugar. I feel like a failure.

John buys us coffee with cream when we stop at a RaceTrac and I use it to wash down two Hydroxycut, then remind him that I don’t eat dairy. My stomach turns circles in my chest and I roll down my window and stick my face into the wind.

John rolls the window back up. He’s exhausted. His pills sometimes make him tired all day. I think he’s mad at me.

I’m sorry we did that again, I say.

He’s not listening.

I roll down my window. He rolls it back up.

It’s cold, he says.

I’m claustrophobic. I need to move around. Or get out. I need some air.

Are you on something? You look terrible.

Thank you.

I’m serious. Did you take something?

What would I take?

Sit still. You’re making me nervous.

I can’t. My heart’s beating really fast.

What’s wrong with you?

I put my seat halfway back and shift around.

No offense, but you’re kind of annoying me, he says. You need to calm down.

I am calm. I have a headache.

We drive in silence for a long time before John asks me to plug in his iPhone and pick a song. Brown farms flow past us on either side like muddy rivers. I launch his Pandora and scroll through preprogrammed lists of like artists. I pick Billy Bragg and choose John’s favorite song. We listen for a few minutes until the station plays a Nissan commercial and then we switch to another station.

I hate that Pandora plays commercials, John says.

I guess they have to.

I’m sorry I can’t drive.

It’s fine. You’re blind.

I really am.

You really are. You’re totally blind.

We’re silent for several minutes while I study the margin of the road. We pass billboard after billboard for the same strip club.

I need to go to the bathroom, I say.

Jesus Christ.

I tried to hold it. I can’t hold it anymore.

I can’t believe you sometimes.

Tonight I am only proud of my abbreviated parts.

I have taken in one half cup of Eden pumpkin seeds and one cup of coffee with two Green Tea Fat Burner supplements. I am thinking about the grapes in the freezer. They’re little frozen spheres.

Cold food takes more energy to digest than warm food.

The body has to heat it up to break it down.

Time is a matter of scale and balance.

Equilibrium.

Of keeping myself intact while shedding outer layers.

I turn in circles before the mirror.

I urinate and return to the mirror.

I turn in circles.

I try on everything in my closet before the mirror and hate it.

I look terrible changing.

I weigh myself again and again and again and still I am 92.

By sunrise I will be 90.

When I die, I will be 0.

I walk back and forth from the futon to the scale to the spheres to the futon to the scale.

I urinate and drink more water.

I urinate.

You only see yourself, John says.

No, you only see yourself.

No, you only see yourself.

Every time it ends with you, John.

Tonight I feel the matter of emptiness.

I cannot control what my body does, though at times I feel I can control what I do to it, and thus what it becomes.

A morning is becoming.

I drink my Red Bull in the classroom this morning. I think nothing but feel my students watching me.

I luminesce. I cannot control them, I feel.

I cannot control the variable of morning. Of continuous morning.

This morning I was 92.

Still.

The longer I live in time, the less I believe in the future.

I am becoming in coming undone. I unbind.

I rise like the morning: revolution.

This morning, I turned in circles looking for my keys. I had never been asleep. I don’t sleep anymore.

John suggested a unit on primitivism. I have become so much
him that who I am is empty. I have very few ideas of my own. I have very few new ideas because I am consumed by a singular idea.

I am an ideologue (an idealogue). I cannot teach them primitivism, John; I only teach the stars.

I have made myself empty of intention. My body is hollow: a form. A vessel.

An exploding vessel.

Gas.

To disagree with John would be to renounce what he believes are our beliefs, what I believe he believes are our beliefs. To disagree with him would be to admit that I’ve lied. He’ll know I’m lying.

Lying about all of it.

All of what?

I believe very few things about myself. I believe in the possibility of perfection. I believe that I have mostly starved myself of will.

Something is dawning that I cannot explain, though I know it’s related to darkness.

I am not really here though I am here, though I cannot be sure that I am anywhere, if I am even sure of that.

I mean that I’m not sure I’m anything.

Starvation is a matter of privilege.

I take advantage.

I stand at the back of the classroom, a core unhardened into flesh and reanimated, cold like space, and white.

I stand at the back until the bell.

I am always in the back.

This is how things are done.

This morning I turned in circles before the mirror so that I could see my back.

I know I am air because I hear and because I can see through myself. I would not if I was not.

Most of the time, when I think I have heard something, it is only my heartbeat. Sometimes it’s so loud I can’t sleep.

That’s a lie.

At times I feel it struggle.

That’s a lie.

I would not if I didn’t have to. Do not if I don’t have to. If I don’t have, I don’t have myself.

I drive straight lines across my back. My ribs, which are curves, are straight lines.

I have mixed feelings about curves.

These are not my students. They are only students of culture. Proximity does not imply a relationship. We are only near each other. We were born of civilization.

We hear each other.

We file out in a line that is rough at the edges and curves through a door, like sheep to the slaughter.

We moved in a clustered line down a hallway, some slower and some faster, like the river that winds through the bottom of the Grand Canyon. John disliked the canyon. It was just a hole in the ground.

Really a gash.

A wound.

Once, he tied me to the bed and played knives across my skin, but did not draw blood. John is a coward.

This is the only way I can do it.

Last night I touched my absence.

Beauty can be tricked into being where it is not.

It is naught.

It is not the past. Because the longer I live in time, the less I believe in the past.

I carry it with me but I can’t carry much.

To consider.

We stand at the edge of the gash. We are there for a moment, but we see it. We see ourselves in it.

The river at the bottom reflects nothing back.

Is absent.

I found that it was absence. Only mine.

I am faint.

I’m often faint.

Our palms sweat together. The canyon yawns before us.

John takes his hand back.

He dries it on his pants.

He’s dry and I’m impaired.

I’m hungry, he says.

This summer, when John was here, I weighed myself at least five times a day. Sometimes I am already in the bathroom. Other times I just need to have a precise number. We all gain weight around each other.

It is thought that our weight can fluctuate between two and four pounds a day, depending on a number of factors, including the proximity of one’s companion.

And how much water one consumes.

In other words, how dry one is.

I have never liked water pills. I believe caffeine is enough. But still.

I’ll try anything.

I drink four cups of coffee every day. The first, I get from Dunkin’ Donuts. They know me. The rest, I get anywhere I can get them.

I find the displays in Dunkin’ Donuts especially motivating.

I drink two 12 ounce Red Bulls every day, at least. Sugar free. Sometimes I spring for the 16 ounce can.

And tea. And water.

I make this a “thing I do,” to always have some vessel with me, holding liquid.

All the time.

All time.

To train for zero gravity, I’d have to float in a swimming pool. This is not a real simulation, as water resists movement.

In zero gravity, my organs would drift under my ribcage, reducing my waist to a thin line.

In zero gravity, my hair would have body, lift off my skin.

My breasts would lift off. I wouldn’t feel them.

Shed water.

And blood.

My body thinks it holds too much.

Which I do.

Some astronauts describe zero gravity as womblike: a more primitive state of being.

The human arm weighs nine pounds on average.

Not to have arms or legs or torso.

I don’t want to stay in New Orleans, but John thinks it will be fun to go to a strip club. We park outside the French Quarter and walk through streets churning with bourbon and sweat.

There’s a man dressed like Homer Simpson with an erection drinking beer on a barstool in the middle of the street. A black-and-neon devil flashes red and blue under a wrought-iron balcony in front of a tobacconist. Four overweight Midwesterners stand around an open-air barfront waiting for daiquiris to be poured from spinning dispensers. Old women in floral prints limp along with Big Gulps next to men with frozen margaritas.

Bars follow restaurants follow bars and music pours from every entrance, jazz and zydeco, and classic rock and Rihanna.
Yellow diamonds in the light / And we’re standing side by side / As your shadow crosses mine.

A girl in a string bikini dances in the doorway of a club painted red. She spreads out, holding the doorframe, and rubs herself catlike against John.

What brings you here?

Celestial navigation.

You’re funny. Ten gets you in.

Together?

Separate.

John pays for us both and orders a Red Bull for me and a Dewar’s for himself. We follow the leather curves of the club through legs pointing toward the edge of the stage, and sit at a table. Above us, a woman in a silver thong and tassels turns in circles around a pole in the shape of a star. John throws his Scotch back and watches her until he gets dizzy, then stands to order another.