The Miscalculation
There was a detectable amount of bullshit going around, that was for certain.
Walker had always considered himself somewhat of a master bullshit detector, having raised two boys in the mid-to-late 90s when the kind of trouble they got into involved substance abuse and late-night visits from the local police department. He had not wanted to be that type of father, the one who had to lay down the law and be the bad guy and deliver undesirable punishments to teach his children lessons and force them to do manual labor when grounding was not effective enough. Walker had accepted long ago that in his middle-age he had evolved into the kind of man he resented, but he had also decided that this was the natural progression of all things: timidity, arrogance, and finally self-loathing and shame.
And look at him now, raking the debris from the yard like he gave a damn just because Diana told him to and, really at that point, being outdoors in the freezing cold was far better than being indoors with her frozen blood.
Taylor was certainly dishing out his fair share of bullshit. The boy hadn’t been the same since he ran off to New York, there was no question about that, but since his return he was particularly unsettling with that death-wish business. Everyone was miserable, especially in the Hanson house, but that wasn’t nearly reason enough to just end it all.
Walker took a break from his raking, tossed his tool aside, and during what he’d like to think of as a particularly poignant moment of reflection, heard a dense thud that rattled the foundation of the tree house nearby. His first thought had been squirrels, but no squirrel he’d ever seen in their yard would have made a sound that significant. Curious, Walker turned around to examine the situation.
And, really, the timing was serendipitous.
His first reaction upon opening the floor door to the tree house and discovering that his oldest son was half naked and unconscious was, “Jesus Christ,” followed immediately by, “Seriously?”
Taylor, by that point, had passed out and fallen to his knees. Due to the angle at which he’d landed, the upper portion of his body had continued its forward trajectory and his head had landed on the window ledge nearby. An open robe along with his magenta briefs, once again, were misplaced, hanging from his body and bunched around his knees. Porn scattered beneath his semi-prostrate body and, disturbingly, a poorly knotted belt clung to his neck.
Scrambling, Walker loosened the belt around his son’s neck. He was not sure if Taylor had actually expired, but given that he’d only just recently fallen unconscious chances were he was fine. Everything was fine.
But after a matter of seconds, the boy still had not moved. Walker was unsure if he had called the boy’s name or screamed at him or, if instead, he had remained quiet; memory, after all, is a faulty device and these details seemed unimportant at the time. Whenever he will recall this moment he will forget every aspect of the first fifteen seconds of this encounter.
Gradually, the pink flushed back into Taylor’s face followed by a desperate gasp that both father and son inhaled. It wasn’t until Walker exhaled he realized he’d been holding his own breath. Confident that Taylor had once again failed in taking his life, Walker slapped him clear across the face.
“Get the hell up, Taylor Hanson, you’re breaking at least three laws right now. Jesus H Christ.”
Taylor sputtered, his eyes bulging as he sucked in and coughed out the air.
“Put your goddamn pants back on. Jesus, son, how many times am I going to have to say that?”
Silent, regaining some composure, Taylor gingerly tugged his clothes back up to his waist. The pink in his cheeks deepened to a hearty red. The two men sat on opposite ends of the tree house, Walker pushing the magazines back into the corner, Taylor rubbing his neck.
“We’re not telling your mother about this, got it? None of this bragging about you trying to kill yourself, I can’t put up with that conversation again. You made enough of a spectacle the first time, Taylor, but you weren’t going to actually hurt yourself. This, however, this is just nonsense. Now go on,” he gestured at the ladder, “Go inside.”
Sinking his head to his chest, Taylor left the tree house and skulked across the lawn. Walker, on the other hand, stayed behind to watch, to think. Taylor was just going through a phase, a painfully inconvenient and violent second adolescence fraught with the bravery and stupidity Taylor had avoided the first time around. Jesus Christ in Heaven he was too old for this – both of them were. It was too early for Walker to appreciate the feeling that rocked through him. For the moment, it was just a curious flutter disguised as anxiety, though he welcomed its uneasiness.
There would be a bruise encircling his neck by that evening, but otherwise there would be no other physical evidence of Taylor’s foray in the tree house. Walker assumed something should be done about his suicidal son, but he was unsure what he was supposed to do. No one in the Hanson family ever voiced their problems, let alone went about trying to alleviate them.
LATER THAT EVENING when Taylor was curiously absent, Walker invited himself into Zac’s room and closed the door.
“Dad?”
Zac’s shock was indeed warranted. Walker hadn’t so hurriedly shut that bedroom door since he and Zac had that horribly uncomfortable talk about human sexuality and the impropriety of liking members of the same sex.
“I need to ask you something, son.”
“Sure?” Still visibly confused, Zac pulled out a chair and offered it. “Is this off the Mom Record?”
“You might say so.” Walker was reluctant, darting his eyes around the room. “Is this weird? This is a little weird.”
“It’s pretty weird.”
“I should go.” Still, Walker did not leave.
Zac waited for Walker to move, but when he did not, “You wanted to ask me something?”
“Right. Right. Look,” he began, not quite sure how to ask. “Did you have any idea this was going on with, you know, with Taylor?”
“I know what you do. We saw him on the roof, he said was he was going to kill himself. I don’t know, Dad, how much more blunt did you need him to be?”
All true, still, “Did you talk to him about it?”
Zac sighed. “He’s going to do whatever the fuck he wants to, pardon my French.”
“I’m just… Growing up, if you remember, he was always talking just to hear himself talk. The boy never actually went through with anything he threatened, at least not enough to actually do himself harm. Granted, we thought he’d drowned himself in the lake that one time, but that was just trying to scare us. He was holding his breath the whole time. But aside from that, you know, he’d been a pretty reasonable kid. Rational. But then he went to New York and grew a pair –“
Walker abruptly stopped speaking. Zac was stretched out along a purple mat, his arms lifted above his head and one leg lunging in front of the other. He was audibly groaning.
Baffled, Walker had to address, “Zac?”
Zac folded his body over and rolled himself up back to a standing position. Then, cracking his knuckles, he rolled the mat back up. “God, I feel so much better now.”
“Have you heard anything I just said?”
“Not a damn word.” Zac tucked the mat underneath his bed. “I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t deal with emotional confrontation. It’s just really uncomfortable.”
Walker understood this would be a fruitless effort. He reached out in an alien manner and patted Zac on the shoulder. They were just beyond an arm’s reach apart, and Walker had to lean in a bit to make contact. It was, without a doubt, unnatural.
THE NEXT THREE ATTEMPTS on Taylor’s life followed in rapid succession, and true to form, none of the Hansons tried to stop him.
On Tuesday, Taylor got the idea that overloading his system with 2% milk would do him in. At exactly 11:00 as the Hansons filed into the kitchen to have their morning regime of oatmeal, Taylor greeted them with a smile and a gallon of milk, the plastic kind with the blue plastic lid. Zac, as usual, was deeply suspicious.
“You’re up early,” Zac said, taking a seat.
“I’m always up early. You’re up late.”
“I’m always up late,” Zac challenged.
The two locked eyes for a moment while everyone at the table held their breath.
Berta was the first to break their silence, offering to trade Taylor her flask for his gallon of milk. The oatmeal, it seemed, was exceptionally dry that morning.
“No thanks, Grandma,” Taylor declined, unwrapping the blue lid from his milk and holding the gallon up to his mouth with both hands.
At that point in time, Diana was still refusing to speak to her oldest son. She looked away and dug into her oatmeal.
“He’s just going to drink all of it, look at him,” Zac said, his spoon mid-air, a clump of oatmeal clinging to the underside. “You bastard, I wanted a glass.”
“You’ll have to wrestle it from my cold, dead hands first.”
“Is that a challenge? I was pretty sure I kicked your ass already, do I have to do it again?”
Walker loudly cleared his throat. The two stopped bickering and stared at one another in their stalemate.
Taylor shrugged and took another gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “J-Dawg out.”
When he’d left the room, the family stifled a collective laugh. Berta asked, “Is that really what he’s calling himself now? I changed my name once after I graduated college.”
“You never went to college, Grandma,” Zac reminded her, swirling the spoon in his bowl.
“That’s not how I remember it.”
Walker was somewhat concerned that Taylor had that familiar holier-than-thou glimmer in his eye when he left the room, but was hesitant to confront his son so soon after their last debacle. Zac was right. When Taylor set his mind to something, there was no talking him out of it.
He could always keep the hospital on speed-dial.
Meanwhile, Taylor was putting false information to seemingly good use. He had read that it was possible to poison the body with too much water, and alternately, he assumed that milk would be a far more effective substance. Gallon in hand, he perched himself on the toilet seat in the bathroom he shared with Zac and tipped his plastic container towards his mouth. Taylor never was a fan of milk unless it was masked with chocolate sauce or laced with Lucky Charms. While he’d never bothered seeing a therapist at any point in time – and any one of his friends and colleagues will gladly testify that perhaps it would have been a good idea for him to speak to some kind of professional because, really, this whole tragedy could have been avoided – Taylor would have happily explained that his aversion to milk was due to the fact that his mother never bothered breastfeeding him. That kind of intimacy, he’d imagined himself saying, that kind of intimacy was a foreign concept to such a coldhearted, calculating woman. It was a shock, he’d always believed, that she was able to gestate a child in the first place, seeing as how her body was primarily composed of arsenic and bad attitude. He reminisced bitterly about his childhood with every gulp. The milk was utterly unpleasant, and he really had to commit to pushing through. It would all be worth it, he reminded himself as he felt his gag reflex kicking into action. This sort of way out was poetic, given his aversion to the stuff. Poetry, he decided aloud, yes by poetry was the only way to die.
Within half an hour, Taylor wasn’t feeling so well. Covered in a thick layer of sweat and completely disoriented from the nausea that seized his stomach, he began to angrily vomit. Stubborn, despite the odds, he persevered, convinced that he was on the right track.
It was only when he momentarily blacked out that he began to realize his plan might have been ill informed. He had only consumed half of the gallon, but he could not stop heaving long enough to finish. He eventually gave up, throwing the milk to the side and evacuating the remaining contents of his stomach until he passed out from exhaustion, hanging over the tub and spattered with regurgitated milk.
No one had bothered to check on him in the meantime. The game was on, and the bowls needed scrubbing, and really when Taylor set his mind to something, there was no talking him out of it. Better to let him make those mistakes on his own, really, it was the only way he’d learn.
On Wednesday afternoon, Taylor fished through the garage until he found a plastic kiddie pool his mother had kept since the early 90’s. This time leaving his clothes on, Taylor dragged the pool to the front yard, filled it with water, and crawled inside. He’d read that hypothermia was a blissful way to go and that just before the heart stopped beating, a wave of total euphoria swept over the body. It was simple enough, he figured, seeing as all he had to do was just sit there.
Yet as he waited patiently for the hypothermia to set in, the ends of his fingers and his lips turned purple, the hair on his skin stood erect. Minutes began to feel like hours, and besides being freezing cold, he was getting terribly bored. At least drinking milk and jerking off had been active, but when he ran it over in his mind, he could well be sitting there for hours.
And waiting around for death had been the problem from the start.
Reluctantly, Taylor stood up from the pool. Shivering, he kicked the blue plastic tub and walked back inside where Berta greeted him at the door with a cup of hot chocolate. “Pussed out again?” she’d asked, patting him on the back. He spent the remainder of the evening in footie pajamas in Zac’s other bed.
By Thursday, when the bruise on his neck had just started to dissipate into a yellow-purplish amoeba, Taylor was running out of ideas. Admittedly, he was running out of steam. Though his convictions were strong, his commitment clearly wavered. When it came to blood, Taylor was always squeamish, and that fact alone had really limited his options.
And, to be fair, he was being a little too easy on himself. He had planned on a peaceful death, one over which he would have had no control; taking matters into his own hands was far more daunting than he’d hoped.
Most of the day, he sat in Zac’s room by Zac’s porn desk staring at the various things in Zac’s room that had changed since it had been their room. Nothing was working. He couldn’t bleed. He couldn’t asphyxiate. He couldn’t freeze. Taylor looked around desperately for something, anything he could use to finally finish himself off.
The problem all along, anyone could have told him, was that he was simply over-thinking it. Death was something that was supposed to come naturally, unexpectedly, and on its own. Whether at the hand of some force of God or at the hand of another, the true art of it, the real threat of it was that it was unannounced. Killing oneself was cheating. Elaborately planning to kill oneself, for that matter, was just heinous disrespect.
The Hansons, by genetic design, were failures, Taylor especially.
It’s very simple: twenty-five years ago, Walker Hanson, now father of two and owner of a very broken, very rusted tractor, made the first of many mistakes (or second, depending on who you ask; the other first mistake was marrying Diana). On July 14, 1986, several significant events took place. Oil Can went missing and the Angels defeated the Red Sox12-3; Motley Crue's Vince Neil began his 30-day sentence for vehicular homicide; and Richard W. Miller became 1st FBI agent convicted of espionage. Walker, on the other hand, had been having an especially anticlimactic day starting with the un-cinnamoned oatmeal he had for breakfast and ending with the thinning heel on his sock that would eventually turn into a hole but hadn’t quite made it there. Walker’s life could be summed up as never quite making it there, up to and including never making it to the theater for About Last Night. He had made it as far as the front door – hand on the doorknob close – when Diana had finally decided to give him the sex he’d been craving for nearly a year.
The “seduction,” as it were, progressed rather uncomfortably. A bit out of practice in the mechanics of tweaking women, having exhausted his skill on farming equipment, Walker wasn’t sure where he was supposed to touch first. After Diana had launched herself onto him – legs around waist, hand pulling on hair, mouth suckling on what felt like the side of his neck though the shock had somewhat disoriented him – he’d been flailing his arms helplessly until he knocked over the nearby lamp.
His body was trying to tell him to stay in, but Walker Hanson had always been a stubborn man, and by nature refused to listen to any message that wasn’t explicitly spelled out. He would never have known that it was time to propose to Diana, for example, had she not taken him to the jewelry store to point out the ring. If you wanted something, you had to ask for it. Women, of course, were always conflicting and misleading, so on that account he felt like his cluelessness was not his fault.
Each time Walker was inside a woman, he found himself going internal – no pun intended. Waxing philosophic at the moment of coitus, he discovered that images became clearer, sounds became sharper, touch became so much more intense. Thoughts entered his mind – flashes of utter genius- that lasted for just that; flashes, milliseconds that he would not remember afterward: if a system is taken through a cycle, the sum of the heat added weighted by the inverse of the temperature at which it is added is less than or equal to zero and so forth. He had heard of such nonsense years before in college while under the influence of several hallucinogenic substances and it was only at that moment of utter, unbridled contact that the lessons of life and love and academia made sense! It was in these fractions of seconds that he understood he was meant for great things; cure cancer; visit Mars; design cutting edge lawn furniture. Life, and purpose, and possibility were at his shaky fingertips.
These flashes fused, and in an ironic twist struck him dumb. Words and phrases melted and coalesced into shapes and colors, and all that was left of his brief genius were absurdities. In any given moment of passion, Walker could be found belting out any number of shades on the color pallet: artichoke and aubergine, chartreuse and magenta. On July 14, the color was “butternut.”
In blurting the word, he began to sweat profusely until he reached that blissful tremor and gripped onto whatever was nearby to brace himself for the climax. You see, Walker was a good man, a clean man. For the last fifty-two weeks, Walker strayed from any temptation that could remind him of the intimacy he wasn’t experiencing. For twelve months, Walker did not patron any bookstores, restaurants, public squares, washing machines, or swimming pools – anywhere his brother might dwell.
It was time, goddamnit.
The concentration paired with sweaty anticipation and pure, unadulterated excitement, in turn, resulted in a mere trickle of passion. Diana’s teeth clenched and her body went slack under the weight of yet another disappointing romp in the sack. She should have held out longer, tortured him more. The twelve months of waiting weren’t nearly worth those two minutes and the subsequent trickle inside her thigh.
Taylor was born eight months later, a little ahead of schedule. From then on, of course, his timing had been terribly off, and his efforts to catch up had all but been disastrous.
Without another moment’s hesitation, Taylor rose from Zac’s desk, and with all the force he could muster from his gangly 6’2 frame, he charged for the window.
Unlike cinematic representations of defenestration, Zac’s window did not immediately shatter into droplets of glass. At first, Taylor stuck to the window like a fly on a windshield, his face pressed against the pane in unsightly formations. A few moments later, the impact of Taylor’s body against the window only, at first, created a fissure. Soon, though, under his weight, the window jaggedly broke apart and Taylor, bloodied and splintered, toppled from the second story window onto the front yard - unfortunately close to but not quite on top of the grass.
Walker had been nearby when it happened, and could be seen mouthing the words, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Taylor landed half on the sidewalk, his body stuck at unimaginable angles. The glass had rained down just before the fall, and scattered around him were the glimmering remnants of the house’s original panes. For a brief moment, before he could register the sensation of having sprung from a second-story window, Taylor was hopeful, yes hopeful, that he had finally done it. As he lay on the ground, a similar fuzzy sensation surrounded him, that feeling that had been so peaceful just nights before. Complacency. Preparedness. Completion.
Before he blacked out from the pain, a smile crept across his face.
WHEN WALKER APPROACHED HIM, Taylor was already groaning. Walker didn’t even bother shaming his son like last time. Once it was determined that he was just fine and being frankly a little melodramatic about the situation, and the pain, Walker just walked straight to the car and waited for Taylor to catch up.
The lock on the car door had frozen overnight, and Walker tried desperately to open it. Digging the key in, he braced himself against the door first with one arm and then with a foot. Diana was watching from the kitchen, and opened the window just long enough to yell at him.
“Walker!” she yelped, shading her eyes with her hand, “Walker what are you doing to the car?”
He knew they should have taken the time to clean out the garage before the winter set in but no, Diana insisted it wasn’t worth the effort.
“Walker, you’re going to kick in the door if you keep doing that!”
Taylor limped towards the car, cradling his right arm. “Dad, I don’t feel well.”
“Well, son, you did just throw yourself out of a window,” he said, then to his wife, “I’M TRYING TO GET INTO THE CAR, ABIGAIL! What the hell else does it look like I’m doing?”
“Where are you going anyway? What’s going on?”
“I think I’m going into shock,” Taylor stuttered, leaning against the car door.
“You’re not going into shock, Taylor,” Walker grunted, still jiggling the key. “Just… just relax for a second, this will only take a second.”
“Did you try jiggling it to the left? Try jiggling it to the left.” Diana instructed, still from the kitchen.
Walker wasn’t sure which was worse – the nagging, or the fact that she couldn’t even come outside to belittle him.
“I’M JIGGLING IT TO THE LEFT,” Walker yelled, feeling that tensing in the back of his neck again. “I’m jiggling it to the left, dear, and nothing is happening!” He stepped back from the car door for a moment to show her, to gesture wildly with his hands that yes, the key was in the door, and yes, the jiggling was ineffectual.
Thoughtfully, she cocked her head to the side. “Hold it upward while jiggling to the left. Did you try that?”
“Those directions don’t even make sense, Diana!”
They should have gotten rid of this car when they had the chance five years ago. They should have just handed it over to the dealer, but Diana insisted, she always insisted, that it would come in handy one of these days. Always good to have something around to haul that extra load of groceries!
“Would you just try it, Walker?”
Taylor swayed back and forth. “I really, I’m really going numb, Dad.”
Walker frowned and tried another vigorous jiggle of the keys. Mid-upper slightly to the left, the lock jerked open. He conceded with a grunt and unlocked the door for Taylor.
“See! Just a little jiggle!” Diana yelled as she shut the window to the kitchen.
For the duration of the half-hour long ride to the clinic, Taylor held his limp arm and whimpered. Walker, understandably, was too furious to say anything and so, as so many car rides before them, the two men sat in silence.