Binary Star
by Sarah Gerard
First Posted Jan 2016
I cannot come as much of a surprise that after 13 years of writing about the books I’ve read, repeated details spring up like mushrooms after rain. How many variations of, “This time, the excerpts were ______” will I push forth into the æther?
I basically rewrote the first half of this essay, though once I get through the rather pointless setup I do quite like what I wrote. Front-loading the bad parts is not a good strategy, past me!
The creation of pull quotes for this novel did not reach my standard for efficacy. Typing excerpts is done for a number of reasons beyond necessity—style mimicry is a big draw, but that proved elusive with Binary Star. The book is borderline poetry (I attenuate naming it “poetry” with '“borderline” because I am too fearful, and ignorant, to understand and apply of the term “poetry” in a way I feel fully confident). Poetry is daunting, but Binary Star is not. It is the whole, not the segment, that is interesting. It pulls you in, wraps you up, doesn’t let you look away.
When I mark out the pull quotes, it is with a needlessly erratic system of paper scraps. Tabs of scrap paper, rather than highlights or underlines, honor the communal nature of the public library while narrowing my subsequent hunt for meaning to two partnered pages. If nothing jumps out on the second round—perhaps the tone of the book has changed, perhaps the timbre of the reader—then the quote may not have been worth pulling in the first place. Or maybe I’ve become sleepier, more forgetful, less introspective:
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.
Binary Star is a book about space, about interstellar space where our minds are the stars and our relationships are the void between. God, does that sounds clichéd. Nothing in Binary Star will ever be that clunky, that explicit. It is elegant, it has words that float just behind your eyes while you sit on the train, trying not to panic, trying not to think about how miserable things can be. Are. Were:
John and I flip through the jukebox playlist. My friend stands behind us. The options seem endless. The record spins.
Then it repeats.
What do you want? says John.
A love song.
Pussy.
I want love, I say.
You shouldn’t have a hard time feeling it.
Burn.
That sounds like an accusation.
Okay. Motown.
Jackson Five.
No, Shirelles.
It’s my money. He drops a quarter in the slow. Jackson Five.
You get three plays for fifty, says my friend.
Maybe stay out of it, pal. Here’s another quarter, man. He walks away.
John drops the quarter into the slot.
Jackson Five.
No fair!
Too late. He smiles.
Are your coworkers trapped in that misery? The cashier, the barista, the delivery person? How many are drawn into the orbit of cruelty or coldness, distance or destruction:
Some stars are fixed and some are not. I am not fixed.
Some believe that our sun’s companion is Nemesis, a red or brown dwarf, or an even darker presence several times the size of Jupiter.
Nemesis is not always detectable, but occasionally sends comets toward Earth and may be responsible for Earth’s periodic mass extinctions.
Nemesis is therefore also called the Death Star.
It is amazing what one can endure.
I know each box intimately. I believe in the benefits of green tea. I believe that coffee is the best replacement for food and also the best supplement. I believe that I need its bitterness because I don’t like it. I don’t deserve to like what I take in.
She’s sick you know—the narrator, the character—and not just because of her destructive binary pairing. A book that might be about space might not be about the enveloping void, but this one is. It is about the fuel that burns at the core of every living thing; the fuel she does not accrete, cannot consume. One cannot know where causation lies, whether the bad relationship spawned the eating disorder, unearthed it, or both were drawn from the same well of infinite self-loathing; “I believe that I need its bitterness because I don’t like it. I don’t deserve to like what I take in,” was in full force at the opening of Binary Star without a genesis tale. Only parallel tracks of interpersonal, internal, interstellar destruction:
John bought me this mirror for my birthday. Or John used his parents’ money to buy me this mirror for my birthday. John used his parents’ money to buy me a gift card. I used the card to buy this mirror for my birthday.
Lie to yourself. Tell yourself you must be more than a solitary star burning in empty space waiting for the day you splutter out into darkness.