The Miscalculation
BREAKFAST AT THE HANSON table had been choreographed around their collective inability to function before 11:00. The kitchen, in a perpetual state of disrepair, went untouched from the day before. Oatmeal simmered around the forgotten bowls that lay in the sink, coffee, weak as it was, brewed just above the microwave. They arrived at the table within five minutes of one another – Zac measuring the oats, Walker turning on the coffee pot, Diana rinsing out the bowls, and Berta refilling her flask that sometimes spiked the oatmeal. Walker had been particularly fond of bacon, but it had been at least fifteen years since he saw a piece, and requesting it would undoubtedly resort in a cold stare from Diana and the burden of washing the dishes for the next week. After one morning of scrubbing the dried oatmeal from the leftover bowls, Walker had decided the reward wasn’t worth the price, and he resigned himself to the soggy beige breakfast. It wasn’t that anyone necessarily preferred the dish, but shared indifference left it as the only viable option.
Taylor was perched in the kitchen when they arrived. He had not jumped from the roof after all – one more minor crisis averted for now. “Morning, son,” he said. “I see you still haven’t found your pants.”
“Wasn’t looking for them,” Taylor responded.
“You’re in my seat.” Berta shuffled towards Taylor, shooing him. “That’s not a statement either. Move.”
“Hi, Grandma. Long time. So lovely to see you.”
“I’m surprised I’m not dead already.”
“Don’t be silly, Berta, you’re never going to die.” Walker offered, sitting next to his estranged son. "You're either going to have to spike the oatmeal or move to another seat. Those are the rules."
“Rules were meant to be broken,” Zac said, diving into his oatmeal. “Hey, Taylor,” he added with a grin, “Wasn’t that one on that list of yours? ‘Break a rule’?”
A ravenous twenty-two, Zac had the appetite of a hung-over frat boy, craving both sex and nourishment, neither of which was ever really satisfied. “New York finally blow up in your face?” he asked between bites.
“Oh, nice one Zac. Thank you.” Taylor scoffed again, leaving the seat open for Berta.
“That’s a legitimate question,” Zac pointed at his brother with his spoon. “You smell like guilt and failure, by the way.”
Of all the things that were bothering Taylor since his arrival, the one he couldn’t quite get past was the transformation of his brother over the last five years. When Taylor first left North Carolina, Zac was borderline obese and roaming the house in nothing but torn grey sweatpants and an outdated ironic t-shirt that displayed his widening midsection. Zac had fancied himself a student of the world after one semester at UNC Greensboro. He then withdrew, having learned all he could from institutionalized education, and he remained in the Hanson family house perfecting his performance art and distributing his poorly composed deconstructive poetry in public bathroom stalls.
And now? Svelte. Well-dressed. Restrained. Despite that curiously half-transparent moustache that sprawled across his upper lip that left him looking hipster and French, there was a strong possibility Zac had even dabbled in homoerotic scenarios.
“Is that my scarf?” Taylor managed to blurt.
“It’s not like you need it, what with this whole nude look you’ve got going on.” Zac petted the fabric around his neck. “Also, I’m going to assume that means that yes, in fact, New York did blow up in your face.”
Taylor crossed his arms. A spirited and honest confession would undoubtedly go unappreciated as so many had before.
“New York’s great,” he answered with a bounce. “Have you evolved a finely tuned effeminate sense of fashion or are you finally taking it up the ass?”
He caught Diana’s eye and the two locked into a stare. Her unmistakable snarl still sent chills down his spine. Who would dare to break this silence?
“If you’re insinuating that my remarkable transformation, matured wardrobe, facial hair, and sense of refinery that have developed over the last five years means that I’m gay, then you would be incorrect. While both facts – my being awesome and my being gay – are true, they are mutually exclusive, you close-minded, ignorant bigot.”
Walker held in a laugh. “Taylor, you should learn to embrace your brother’s unique form of self-expression. We all think it’s very brave that he’s comfortable enough with us to be himself.” He was not the kind of man given to such bullshit, but the line was so well rehearsed by that point that he didn’t have to think about what came out of his mouth anymore.
“Everybody loves a little fruitcake in the wintertime,” Berta sang to her own tune. “Isn’t that right?”
Taylor could feel his temperature spiking.
There had been some gravitational shift in the universe in the last few weeks. The world had not ended, fine, everything was in its place, okay, but as far as the Hansons were concerned something was terribly off. They were a notoriously intolerant bunch, as evidenced by a constrictive childhood that left Taylor terrified of authoritative figures and quietly suspicious of antique portraits of the Lord and Savior. He also never shook the feeling that someone was constantly staring at him.
The painting of Jesus that Diana insisted be hung in the bathroom didn’t help, either.
There was no doubt in his mind that Diana was behind this change. Behind that cold stare was a glimmer of power, of satisfaction. The second Taylor had tossed his converse sneakers in his gym bag and took off in the middle of the night that summer, she’d changed the rules just to spite him. He envisioned the morning after she made pancakes, served mimosas, suggested the family skip church that Sunday and mourn the parting of their eldest son. She probably bought self-help books about coping with lost family members and empty nest syndrome, books with titles like One Less Egg and Empty Nest, Full Heart. She probably cried a little bit, letting her husband hold her while she softly admitted to a false sense of guilt. “I pushed him away,” he imagined her saying between tears. “I was too pigheaded-“ that was her phrase, that nonsensical, blood-curdling phrase she always used - “I was just too pigheaded to let him just be himself.” Walker had probably coddled her when she called herself a horrible woman. He would have told her she was a fine mother, a finer wife, even an upstanding woman just to calm her down. He would have told her that Taylor had just needed his space, needed time to figure himself out. That Taylor would come crawling back one day asking forgiveness.
And here he had, damn it, but not to seek absolution. It wouldn’t matter either way in her eyes; he’d come crawling back and she had the satisfaction, that sneering, self-aggrandizing fulfillment of knowing that all these years she had been right.
Taylor hated when other people were right.
Walker would have agreed with him, but lately he had grown weary of life, of marriage, of family. The daily responsibilities of maintaining some degree of sanity in that household had finally worn him thin. His only defense now was to nod and smile and continue reading the newspaper. He had grown Diana-repellant and preferred to keep it that way.
“You should bring in a seat, son, you look horribly awkward just standing there.”
“Walker, the boy’s not wearing any pants. He looks awkward sitting too.” Berta winked. “Are your undies pink, boy?”
Taylor clenched his jaw and took a seat on the counter.
Diana tapped her spoon on the edge of her bowl, eyes still locked on Taylor. “Zac, did you read about this crazy group of kids in New York?”
“No, mother, please tell me. I’m terribly interested.”
“Yes, it seems they all thought the end of the world was happening last week, and they got themselves drunk and tried to set a subway car on fire. Now what,” she asked, this time with a hint of a smile, “Now what would ever compel someone to do something pigheaded like that? Can you imagine? The world ending!”
“Crazier than Zac’s Hitler moustache, I tell you what,” Berta spoke up. “Would it kill you to shave?”
“I’m expressing myself, Grandma.”
“Well, I suppose New York is where all the crazies go anyhow. Zac wouldn’t try to set anything on fire, no matter how upset he was. Would you, sweetheart?”
Taylor restrained, gripping the edge of the counter. Diana Hanson, as all spiteful mothers would have, wasted no time eviscerating what little spirit he had left.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about this lately,” Zac said pointedly. “If I had one night to live, you know, what could I do to ensure total fuckery and shenanigans to the max?”
“That’s quite a good question. What do you want to do before you die?” Diana sang.
Taylor was practically foaming at the mouth with rage. The nerve, the absolute nerve of that woman to mock his mission.
“Now, Taylor’s turning a funny shade of purple. My guess he’s dying to come back with some quip about me being gay and wanting to bang a bunch of dudes in a crowded public arena while wearing something colorful and sparkly or some other stereotypical activity he’s heard homosexual men engage in. I mean, the fact of the matter is he’d probably be right, but aside from that he needs to know he should be embarrassed by the fact that he can’t even come up with an original defense against his younger, gayer brother. I know, I’m sorry, you hate being predictable. The problem is, Big Bro, you’re too much of a cliché. But, mother, to your point, I think I’d honestly like to sky-dive from a privately-owned jet into a vat of maraschino cherries while reciting my latest poetry. Do you think that’s gay enough? I mean, I really want to go out with a bang, here.”
That laugh, that knuckle-biting laugh that followed from Diana was the same one that rang through Taylor’s head on nights when he couldn’t sleep. He felt the lump in his throat as he tried to swallow.
Across the room, Walker flipped through the pages of his newspaper without really reading them. “I think I’d like to make it through breakfast.”
Diana persisted. “Maraschino cherries sound lovely! Wouldn’t those be lovely in a pie?”
“Drop it Diana,” Walker responded flatly, tossing a glance towards Taylor. “You haven’t cooked in years.”
There was a palatable moment of tension where Diana’s lips crushed together and Walker’s grip on his newspaper became ever so slightly firmer. The two locked eyes over the table in a palpable power war. Diana and Walker were never the type to fight with one another in front of others, no their bickering was far too subtle for that. He was never one for arguing, so at the moment of confrontation, Walker often shut down completely and refused to speak until his wife of 40 years regained some level of rationality. Walker had learned the hard way that he very well may be the only rational human being left on the planet.
“Well,” Diana finally spoke, shaking her head and turning towards Berta. “I for one have been so tired lately, have you noticed that? All that decorating will really take it out of you,”
“You have been sleeping a lot lately, dear,” Berta added, patting her on the knee.
“I swear just yesterday I crawled in bed to read a book and the next thing I know it was 9:30! Can you imagine?”
He was insulted, really, by their total disregard of his presence. Taylor had lost command of the situation and his dignity the second he pulled up to that mailbox, but he didn’t think his reunion would be this embarrassing. The Hansons were not the kind of people to welcome self-expression; no, that family was known for their repression and denial. He, for one, was not going to put up with it anymore.
“I’m sorry, I have to interrupt here. Is no one going to ask me what I’m doing back?” he finally asked. “Do none of you really care, seriously? It’s like that insignificant of an event that I’m here that you have to talk about your goddamn sleeping patterns?!”
Walker closed his newspaper to pay attention.
“I knew it. I knew you came back for something,” Zac started. “What is it? Money?”
Taylor held up his hand. “Before you start having a mantrum about how you told me so and you knew it all along and that Dad owes you fifty bucks, let me just stop you right there, Zac.” He cleared his throat and turned to face the entire table. “It may come as no shock to any of you that I had no intentions of returning. But the fact of the matter is, well, I’m here now.”
“We know,” Zac snapped. “We can see your underwear.”
“Hansons,” Taylor announced with another sweeping hand gesture, a display of which he’d become quite fond in the last 24 hours, “I have returned to Providence to kill myself.”
There was a reasonable moment of silence in which several similar opinions arose. First and foremost, Taylor was being overdramatic. Prone to overreaction since an early age, the Hansons were used to Taylor’s cries for attention, including but not limited to running away, hunger strikes, and refusal to bathe for weeks on end. This death threat certainly fell into that category. Walker rolled his eyes. Berta continued sipping her coffee, looking especially amused. Diana pretended to be distracted with something out the window.
Zac uncoiled the scarf from around his neck. “Oh, look everyone. Taylor’s acting out again.”
“Come on, son.” No one had ever taken his spectacular overtures seriously before. There was no reason to start now.
“What the hell else would you be doing on the roof in your underwear. I mean, you could at least be more creative about it,” Zac added.
“Excuse me.” Diana removed herself from the table and disappeared into the living room.
“Oh, come on!” Taylor, arms outstretched, protested.
“What? Just because you popped out of Mom first you think you’re entitled to some sort of emotional response from all of us? Just because you’re completely unhinged… ‘Oh noes, you guys, the world is going to end! Better pack up all my shit and run to New York so I can embrace the life I was supposed to have instead of waste away in this pedestrian, rural wasteland!’ Quote, unquote. Go back where you came from and bitch to your pseudo-intellectual coffee-drinking investment banker friends, Taylor. Or have they finally figured you out for the failure you really are?”
Taylor infrequently suffered from rage blackouts, but given the circumstances he suddenly felt that unfamiliar quiver in his body, he saw the flashes of light behind his eyes. Things were beginning to spin. This was not how he’d imagined his homecoming.
“And by the way, Taylor, Mary Alice Tudor gives great rebound head.”
“You dicktease, you don’t even like vagina!” Taylor yodeled before losing all control of his body and launching himself at his brother.
Soon, his gangly, bare legs were wrapped around Zac’s torso and the two tumbled to the ground in a mass of unkempt blonde hair and grunts. The two boys, neither well equipped to defend themselves in such a physical confrontation, struggled effortlessly to pin the other. Zac went straight for the hair-pulling while Taylor attempted to choke out his brother with his forearm. Zac’s arms flailed in front of his face, occasionally slapping Taylor away for only a second.
“You son of a bitch!” he quacked, kicking Taylor in the side of his head.
Taylor squealed as they rolled into the cabinet. “Take it back!”
Berta politely pushed herself away from the table and helped herself to some leftover pie in the fridge. She looked at Walker, shrugged, and stepped over the boys as she exited the room.
Rolling his eyes, Walker set his newspaper on the table next to his half-eaten oatmeal. During the scuffle, Zac and Taylor kicked the table leg and the bowl crashed to the ground. It was a meat and potatoes kind of day, anyhow.
FROM THE BEGINNING, and you can choose any beginning because there have been several, and they are all a means to the same end, Taylor had it in his mind to die.
While he had not bothered mapping out how, exactly, this elaborate death was to take place, he knew there was really only one item left on his list, and he had to go about striking it off somehow.
It took several hours on the roof for him to realize that, yes, Walker had been correct. No matter how he fell, the fact of the matter was the drop was still only a few feet down, which was not nearly enough to cause any real physical damage.
Death, it seemed, was a tricky business, and going about it was supposed to be as elaborate and acrobatic as it was feared and misunderstood. Taylor had done some research on the matter the night he’d crawled down from the roof, and his search for “innovative means by which to die” had turned up impossible suggestions (most of which were hosted on outdated platforms like Angelfire and boasted solid black backgrounds with red, Times New Roman font. The aesthete within cringed, but he supposed there was no room for vanity where death was involved). Disembowel and choke self with intestines. Superglue shut all orifices. Swallow several lit sticks of dynamite. Jump into a pit of rotating chainsaws (Really? … Really!?) Where would anyone even find enough chainsaws to fill a “pit” for one, and secondly how was someone supposed to effectively turn them all on, keep them in one confined area, all conveniently close to an elevated space from which he could jump?
Taylor took a moment to fully appreciate the fact that he was hungrily searching for suggestions on how to die, at which point he had backed away from the computer. Later the next day, as he was showering the oatmeal from his hair, he began to create another list: one of the traditional and, frankly, feasible ways to off oneself. This one he did not bother writing down, though he did go to the trouble to draw the first few items into the condensation on the tiles of his shower. The irony of the list-making situation did not escape him.
The usual suspects came to mind – bullets, pills, exsanguination, jumping – but to be perfectly honest Taylor was the noncommittal type of man who often couldn’t decide what he wanted for dinner, and traditional forms of death were just too predictable (Or utter failures. See attempt at jumping off roof.). And Taylor had already been pegged as predictable once that morning.
Out of the shower, he could overhear his brother talking in the room the brothers used to share. “No, I mean it’s called moosing. It’s pretty simple, when she’s going down on you, you just, you know, make antlers with your hands and wait to see if she looks up at you. If she doesn’t, you’ve moosed her. If she does, then you just look like a jackass…No, no, it works with guys too.”
Curious, Taylor leaned away from the bathroom mirror and pushed open the door. Zac was dangling from the edge of his bed on the phone, stroking his grotesquely thin moustache.
“No, Taylor’s too embarrassed to say anything about it; I knocked him out at breakfast and he’s been licking his wounds in the bathroom ever since. Mom thinks he had something to do with those subway cars, though.”
“I can hear you, fuck face,” Taylor yelled from across the hallway.
“I can kick your ass, day lily!”
Zac had taken over Taylor’s half of the room, turning it into a writing studio/sex shop of sorts – the Sin Bin, his mother would have likely called it. Pages torn from library books, words Zac had probably never bothered to read, adorned the wall just above a hand-painted desk. One of the drawers was propped open and brimming with prophylactics and blue plastic goodies.
“Jesus, man, it looks like a whornado blew through our room.”
“I’m sorry, hold on.” Zac put his hand over the phone. “First of all, way to be rude. Second of all, and not to get all abandoned sibling on your ass, this is strictly my room. You can sleep in my room, but it is my room. Nice word, by the way.”
During their adolescence, sexual expression of all forms had been strictly prohibited. The desk had been the place where they hid their guilty pleasures. In the beginning, it had only been filled with risqué nude photos, ones they’d downloaded from a dial-up Internet connection that had taken what felt like years to download onto their screens. As the brothers had aged and Zac’s interests began leaning more toward the creative and Taylor’s became more focused on whatever his libido insisted he do, there had been a turf war over drawer space. Ultimately, Taylor lost.
“Who the hell are you talking to anyway?” he asked.
“What, you come home for two days and you’re suddenly interested in my social life again?” Zac returned to the phone for a second, “Of course he hasn’t. No one’s been near that taint in years.”
“Again? You never had a social life to begin with. Aside from that time you had an imaginary friend. How is Snuffles these days?”
Zac gave his brother the once-over. “Better than you, clearly.”
“Fair enough.”
The Hanson brothers reached an impasse, and signaled so with a silent, respectful nod before returning to their activities – Taylor designing the perfect death to maintain what little dignity he had left, and Zac gossiping about the logistics of misogynistic sex games. Turning back to the mirror in the bathroom, Taylor could hear his brother add, “Why, did you want to come over later and try?”
There was undoubtedly a shift in the earth’s gravitational force whenever he was below the Mason-Dixon. The fact that he even still called it the Mason-Dixon, as so many of his northeastern friends had pointed out, was proof enough that you couldn’t take the south out of the man no matter how far he ran away. This fact, along with several aspects of the people under that roof, often kept Taylor awake at night.
His own efforts at seduction were far subtler in comparison to his brother’s. Taylor was a man driven by the desire to share unsolicited information about himself to the women he had once, or would have eventually if the timing worked out, slept with. He was eating a pork sandwich; he had purchased a red futon; he had recently accepted a temporary job as a proofreader for the memoir of a celebrity with a defunct career and a thriving pill habit. These details, he believed, gave a range and depth to his character that would invariably charm the women he’d wanted. And while they pretended to be annoyed with the over-sharing, the Jennis and Hannahs and Sesalees saved in his contact list were, undeniably, charmed.
In New York, on his turf, glaring character flaws such as these were seen as conversation topics, quirks that made him stand out from all the other scrawny blonde hipster kids living in East Harlem to save money on rent. These were sources for confidence, to say the least. But face-to-face with the people who made him the neurotic, list-keeping man that he was, this ill-informed sense of confidence dwindled to anxiety. What had once helped him coerce women to lose their clothes in his bed was now sabotaging any remaining hope he had of appearing somewhat in control of his life, decisions, destiny, etc. Taylor soon found that, when pegged with apprehension and nervousness and resentment, the kind that only rears its ugly head when you find yourself 25 and back home with the parents that had betrayed your childhood, his proclivity to over-share manifested.
“Hey Zac, have you ever noticed that pocket lent spontaneously germinates in orifices?” He heard himself saying. “Nothing was there three days ago and now there are farms of it living in my belly button, and I mean I just showered but, damn.”
He hated it here.
“Taylor, what the fuck are you talking about?”
Having spent the last five years in New York, Taylor fancied himself an open-minded guy, but there was something about hearing his younger brother solicit another man for sex that made him impossibly uncomfortable. So, fine, then, some level of social conservatism had worked its way into his daily life.
“I just, um.” And it occurred to him in a flash, the perfect death. The desk, “That drawer,” Taylor pointed at it, his finger wagging, held the key to a death that was certain to offend and disgust his mother every day of her life. “Do you have any of my straight porn left in there? And maybe a belt?”
Zac immediately hung up the phone. “What the hell are you doing? Not that I care, because I don’t, but the curiosity is killing me.”
Taylor, who had helped himself to Zac’s desk and was wrist deep in gratuitously lewd media, scoffed at his brother. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
As Zac spoke, the pieces finally came together. “Get your jollies while you hold up your pants—oh my God. Oh. Oh, my God, man. Are you going to jerk yourself off to death? I have to be totally honest with you – New York made you so fucking weird.”
Taylor snatched a belt off a nearby chair. “Something like that.”
Zac’s jaw dropped, but his smirk remained. After a thoughtful moment, he asked, “Can I tape it?”
“Dude. No.”
“Fine,” Zac rolled his eyes. “Well, it was great to see you again. Thanks for letting me kick your ass this morning and, ah, have fun killing yourself. Try better this time, yeah?”
SPORTING A ROBE he’d stolen from the back of the door in the bathroom, Taylor marched out to the tree house in the front yard where he’d first given in to those early teenage vices. Taylor appreciated that sense of full-circle, there it began/there it will end. Too many things in life were linear and terminal, but full-circle… now there was Zen!
As he’d hoped, Zac still had a stash of cigarettes hidden inside, and he fully intended on smoking as many as it took to build up the courage that was suddenly waning. The thought of suicide, the concept of it was turning out to be much more glamorous than the procedure. He began to unravel the belt and hang it from one of the tree branches that ran through the top of the little house, but he stopped to put out his cigarette. Motivation was quickly giving way to regret as he wished he’d researched how exactly to make this work.
He reached for another cigarette.
Come to think of it, he’d never learned how to tie a secure knot. All those summer’s at Boy Scout camp for what? A lousy handful of badges? A feather in his proverbial cap? He couldn’t even remember how to start a fire without lighter fluid. And for that matter, it wasn’t like he would have ever used any of those skills in adult life. Like trigonometry, Boy Scouts, had it succeeded in training him, was utterly useless in practical adult life, unless he’d pursued nobler, more adventurous careers. Popcorn selling and leaf identification were among the few skills he’d somewhat accomplished and yet where was that confidence now? Where was that knowledge? Copyediting required so little brainpower, so little imagination. Little boys didn’t grow up dreaming that they’d sit in front of terrible manuscripts every day, correcting the grammatical errors of egotistical, maniacal authors who paid some listless, bitter ghostwriter to make them sound accessible to the Common Man.
Little boys didn’t grow up thinking they’d be dead before 25, either.
“You’re a goddamn winner, Hanson,” he reminded himself.
Spitting out the butt of a cigarette he’d all too quickly consumed, Taylor cleared his throat, beat on his chest, and grunted in a decidedly animalistic manner. No, Taylor Hanson did not somewhat reluctantly drive himself down I-95 just to stand around idly and be humiliated by his now suddenly open-minded family. Taylor came to die.