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    DO GEESE SEE GOD
    DO GEESE SEE GOD
    DO GEESE SEE GOD
    Ebook126 pages2 hours

    DO GEESE SEE GOD

    By Todd Hearon

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    About this ebook

    "I don't care what you've done. I don't care what happens. I only want to be with you."


    Twins-orphaned as children and reunited after a separation of fourteen years, juvenile detention and alleged abuse in the New York State foster-care system-return to their hometown of Ithaca, New York, seeking vengeance and (in their mi

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNeutral Zones Press
    Release dateDec 3, 2021
    ISBN9780578316369
    DO GEESE SEE GOD

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      Book preview

      DO GEESE SEE GOD - Todd Hearon

      Advance Praise for DO GEESE SEE GOD

      " With its forceful, elegant prose and unblinking honesty, Todd Hearon’s DO GEESE SEE GOD reminded me on every page of the work of Dennis Lehane and Cormac McCarthy, two writers I greatly admire. The characters here, utterly original and deftly if lightly interlaced, wander the bright halls of love and connection, and plumb the dark depths of religious fanaticism, troubled sexuality, and violence. There are disturbing scenes in abundance, but Hearon always stops short of despair and the gratuitous; always there is a mystical twinkling, a magical turn of phrase, a splash of poetry, a glimmer of hope, a redemptive moment. I enjoyed every word."

      ROLAND MERULLO

      author of 24 books, including

      Breakfast with Buddha and The Revere Beach Trilogy

      " The best portal to DO GEESE SEE GOD is a map of surrender: no signposts, no boundaries, only the glorious invitation to fall and believe and be. Allow the pieces of this fractured family saga to sing to you. These are the voices of siblings and parents, of minders and ghosts, and within this dark vortex are the everyday fierce desires and laments we all know—a story that will move you in ways you won’t expect. In weaving this gorgeously written tornado, Todd Hearon has created an epic that lingers in the secret corners of our complicated hearts."

      ANNE SANOW

      author of Triple Time

      " Todd Hearon’s DO GEESE SEE GOD is wild, ferocious, vulnerable—a deep song that beautifully captures loss and loneliness with hilarity and precision. Read it for its big-hearted characters; read it for the voice that embraces you, speaks to you, and takes you in. A wonderful debut."

      PAUL YOON

      author of Snow Hunters, Once the Shore and The Mountain

      ALSO BY TODD HEARON

      POETRY

      Strange Land

      No Other Gods

      Crows in Eden

      DO GEESE SEE GOD

      By Todd Hearon

      © 2021 by Todd Hearon

      Published by Neutral Zones Press

      Brooklyn

      neutralzonespress.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in

      any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author

      except in the case of brief quotations embodied

      in critical articles and reviews.

      Cover and text design by adam b. bohannon

      For any information,

      please address Neutral Zones Press: editor.neutralzonespress.com

      ISBN: 978-0-578-30521-9 (pb)

      ISBN: 978-0-578-31636-9 (ebook)

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,

      events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s

      imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I am grateful for a fellowship from Dartmouth College and The Frost Place, during which time a portion of this manuscript was completed. Thanks to those who read it at various stages and offered their encouragement, guidance and support—Mary Hubbell, Greg Brown, Anne Sanow, Paul Yoon, Tanya Waterman, Roland Merullo—and to Dan Falatko for his faith-made-fact.

      "Stranger, the ways of dreams are fickle and perplexing,

      And not everything we humans dream comes true

      Because of the doors, the two doors, through which dreams enter,

      The one carved from ivory and the one of polished horns.

      Those dreams that pass the threshold of the tusks

      Deceive and come to nothing in the end,

      And those that come winding through the antlers’ crowns

      Come true, to those of us able to discern them.

      But surely my nightmare didn’t come from there."

      Odyssey, XIX, 560-569

      CONTENTS

      The Dream of One

      Be Still My Soul

      Wade in the Water

      Seneca

      I Will Lay Me Down

      DO GEESE SEE GOD

      THE DREAM OF ONE

      It is the tendency of shit in fucked-up lives to snowball. The worst is not, so long as we can say, This is the worst. As Father always said. If the law of eternal recurrence is true, and the sins of the parents are multiplied and heaped upon the heads of the children, there’s no escaping clean; all heroic gestures of resistance or resilience can be sized up in the ant’s ability to withstand the avalanche. There’s one cold comfort you can take as you’re swept under: the two of you, your shadow and yourself, were holding hands.

      I trace the origin of our long line of fuck-ups—Carrie’s and mine—to the death of our parents in a car crash on the highway near Ithaca, New York, when we were eight. That’s a convenient, if arbitrary, marker. It might have started long before—probably did, after a series of botched in vitro, at the unlikely moment of conception when we entered the wings of the world as separate eggs. Or when, the story goes, we emerged blue from the birth canal tangled in each other’s umbilicals. Why did it not end there? A lovers’ pact—preemptory, redemptive—in the lion’s mouth of the waiting world. They had to cut our cords from around the other’s throat.

      For better and for worse, from that point we were inseparable. If not one flesh, one intelligence and spirit. I could predict when she would walk into a room. She knew—and would tell me in the morning—what I’d dreamed. So all those years that we were physically apart never felt to me like distance. She was always there, in that inward space I’d made for us of memory and lost potential, I the wandering soul and she the fixed and certain star. It’s probably why, when I found her again, my long in-oh-so-many-ways-lost twin, it felt, in some strange cosmic way, directed. Like destiny, or a doom you willingly put on because it is your own.

      It was near Buffalo. Or somewhere. Maybe Syracuse. Or Rome. Or Ilion. Those old New York names, the debris of antiquity hauled from its sarcophagi and reimagined in calcite and titanium. Which, Father said, would outlast time, though I never understood the utility of that. A hot June night. I had come in late, having driven all day and most of the night before, the semi light, on return to the company in Albany. Sick of the road, sick of the heat, sick of Cassandra’s smell in the berth. There were never any rooms on the highway at that hour, but I found a sign lit up on a spur a couple of miles over, a swaybacked joint with weekly/monthly rates. FREE ADULT ENTERTAINMENT flickered in red neon like a desperate, spastic dancer.

      I don’t ascribe it to coincidence that I was handed a greasy key with 216 on the ring, my birthday. Or that, when I turned the TV on and fell back on the bed, the entertainment was hot underway. I was too weary to get up—or is that just what I tell myself? Be honest, Benjie. In the loneliness and poverty of my life, I felt compelled to watch.

      There is something about two naked bodies struggling to fuse—and, in pornography, attempting a third merger with the viewer, you—that I find unspeakably sad. It is so human in its hell-bent fluster to achieve what can never humanly be had: the dream of one. And the sadness so much sadder when the desperation’s being played, when it’s a sham. I lay there for a long time, despite my need for sleep, trying to imagine the people in the screen as people. As daughters. Sons. Maybe even mothers and fathers. (Maybe even, by some impossible chance, actual lovers.) Real people with real lives outside the screen that they’d step into after like a clean set of clothes, have a bowl of Cheerios and begin the day. People I might actually meet in my life. And then, as always, it seemed so sad, these things we’re stripped to, these bodies, these camera-cut appendages and torsos severed on display as at a butcher’s counter. Nothing but quivering, thrusting cuts of meat. And I felt myself in my weakness, in my own diminished state, becoming drawn to the appendages and torsos, to their sculpted angularities and soft, inviting curves. And I thought, God, why not, if this is all there is? Nothing but the play, the appearances of passion. Nothing but the pixilated forms that love or passion takes, so cruelly limited by these bodies that give the passion form. And then I gave myself, in fantasy, over to them, and I entered—I allowed myself to enter—their luminous adjacent room. And I stood inside the screen and watched the pixel people play, a bundle of pixels now myself slimed with their secretions, for what seemed an eternal sleep until I woke.

      The sun was strong, shining through the cracks in the blinds. I cursed myself and rolled onto my side and stared for a long time at the slender blinding bars that meant life. The TV was still on, but muted as I’d had it. I rose to shut it off and stopped. On the screen, in a pose of theatric degradation, eyes trained on me, on anyone, mouth open in an attitude of agony and hunger, my sister, Carrie, played. No mistaking—though more than fourteen years had passed since I had seen her—no mistaking those eyes I knew, even at their most seductive, to be a mockery (how many times as a child I’d seen that same expression in our games, heard her voice pretty, pretty please promising to love me always, always just to coax whatever coveted possession from my grasp and, after, to whiplash into icy triumph). And as her face turned, now, to the unseen face thin-lipped with straining over her, its body rocking hers with all its terrible force, and the tight thighs lifted and her red mouth opened into little imagined gasps and cries (please again, and please, please, pretty please), I took my hand from where it had inadvertently fallen to my shrunken groin and reached and stopped the agitated screen.

      I never went to Albany that morning. I took the truck and headed south for New York City where I knew with all a snowball’s chance in Hell (I knew) I’d find her. My lost shadow. My severed secondself. Soiled star

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