Sarah Gerard - Binary Star

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!

Cataclysmic variables require two stars: a white dwarf primary and a mass-transferring secondary. The white dwarf accretes matter from its companion.

I write a description: Decentralized, independently operating units committed to liberating animals by any non-violent means. We act anonymously. We are your sons, your daughters, your soccer coaches, your neighbors. We are in your living room.

If accretion exceeds the critical mass of the white dwarf, it will ignite runaway carbon fusion.

I drink the Adderall water. I snort a line.

I eat a baby carrot. I chew it longer than I need to. I chew another, but spit most of it into a napkin.

I tell myself I shouldn’t have done that.

I make a gallery of suffering animals with captions: Piglets are snatched from their mothers at only a few weeks old.