The Miscalculation
THE SPECIFICS of how Taylor came to believe that the world would end in 2012 are insignificant at best. He had simply wanted Mary Alice Tudor, his mother had wanted him to come to Jesus, and Philip Honea had wanted to ruin everything.
The Turning Point went down in the dressing room of The Hansons church, just after Taylor had finished playing a shepherd in the annual living nativity. His robes smelled of sheep manure and stale hay, and as much as he would deny it, he basked in that scent; he lived for it. Taylor had never been on a farm, but the concept of it, the man and hands and earth and reaping part of it, he couldn’t help but imagine that that was how sex was supposed to be.
He had only just entered that awkward period where he found himself staring at the back ends of girls and wondering what their hair smelled like and what their skin felt like and if they ever felt the same way about him. None of his friends had similar sentiments, and if they had they sure as hell weren’t going to say anything about it. Half of his friends were still playing Mario Cart and trading baseball cards and wandering around the house in socked feet and red capes like it was cool and they were going to save something. What Taylor had not realized at the age of 12 was that most of his friends would never grow out of this phase, and that even by 25, after he had loved far too many women and had his stint with bi-curiosity and had accomplished everything in life that one was supposed to so as to be considered “fulfilled” and “satisfied,” those friends would still be pattering around their living rooms in torn boxers and capes, drinking stale PBR to combat the on-coming hangover and stroking a moustache that six days in was still barely visible.
Taylor would never fall into one such crowd; Taylor was too fascinated with the female form to spend his time pursuing anything else. And here it had begun, amongst sheep shit and mothballs and stale hay. He was already the type of hopeless romantic prone to ascribe cosmic significance to the most mundane interactions.
Now would be an appropriate time to explain that he was convinced Mary Alice Tudor was the only woman on earth who would ever matter. They had grown up down the highway from one another, and while they had been friends in the way that all children who live in the same neighborhood and whose parents insist on play dates were, Taylor was certain that Mary Alice Tudor was meant to be so much more than the girl who once beat him at tug of war. Case in point: Mary Alice Tudor was the type of girl who devoured novels about dysfunctional girlfriends because she did not understand her own and enjoyed roughing it with the boys much more than dressing up. She was the girl who kept a box of store-bought chocolate chip cookies beneath her bed for nights when she could not sleep. More than that, in the third grade, she had slipped him a piece of Doublemint Gum, unprovoked, just slid it across their shared table with a smile. This was their first interaction and one, he was certain, he would tell their grandchildren. It did not matter that, in actuality, Taylor was going through the phase where he refused to brush his teeth and she was just trying to help. No, what mattered was that Mary Alice Tudor was a giver and he was more than privileged to receive from her.
How could he not need someone so disheveled, so confused, so endearing?
The fact of the matter was that everything was going too well. Taylor had a normal childhood, an arguably normal family, a normal distaste for all things academic, and seemingly normal anxieties about how all that normalcy was going to render him unbearably boring. The simple truth was that Taylor needed to create tension and drama where there was none to be found. He was unaware of the machinations of his subconscious, but in reflection, in drunken, obliterated reflection on nights in New York when he couldn’t remember where on his face his nose was supposed to sit and how old the girl was that he’d taken home the night before, he distinctly recalled sabotaging his happiness at the living nativity.
Taylor had simply needed something else intangible to believe, and Diana believed that thing was Jesus.
“No son of mine is rotting in hell, not if I have anything to do with it,” she’d argue at his bedside on Sunday mornings. “You can go to hell on your own time, Taylor Hanson, but as far as this today is concerned you are getting up, putting on your nice slacks, and sitting with us in the sanctuary. And you will sing to Jesus, so help me God.”
At that, Taylor often pulled the blankets over his head and pretending to be overwhelmed with sudden and indefinable illness. Diana would lean in close to the blankets and whisper, “Hide all you want, Taylor, but you’re only going to make it worse for yourself.”
He should have known, even then, that Diana always infuriatingly right.
By the following week, Taylor was signed up for every church activity imaginable including bell choir, a group that consisted solely of buck-toothed home-schooled kids that played elegant bronze bells in between the convocation and the sermon.
“It’s all in the wrist,” Philip Honea, middle son in a family of seven who wore solid color clothing and read the Bible by candlelight and held hands while they prayed, had whispered to him one morning during their first performance.
“The hell did you say to me?” Taylor angry-whispered back.
“Wrists!” Philip smiled and proceeded to flick the wrists of both hands in a wave-like motion. “You have to make the bells undulate, Taylor.”
Taylor shook his head disparagingly. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said aloud to himself.
“No it’s really simple, see?” Philip tried to reach for Taylor’s wrist, but Taylor flinched.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I’m just trying to help Taylor. I understand you’re frustrated and nervous, this being the first time you’ve performed in front of the whole congregation.”
Taylor kept shaking his head, denying that this, this is what his preteen life had come to.
“Can I ask you a question?” Taylor whispered to Philip. “Are you really, actually into this stuff or is it all an act?”
Philip appeared to not understand the question. His naïve, wide brown eyes stared back at Taylor blankly.
“I mean, did your parents brainwash you or do you legitimately enjoy playing hand-bells?”
“What do you mean brainwash? Of course I enjoy what I do. I’m sharing my passion for –“
“Just… just stop right there.”
Taylor felt his neck begin to burn – being lectured at by Philip Honea, Jesus freak extraordinaire was nothing short of humiliating, and truly there was nothing he could retort with. And that, perhaps more than wearing a white gown, perhaps more than playing brass bells and pleasing his mother – that irked him more than anything else.
What Taylor had not expected, what he could have never been prepared for, was that Philip was far from the closed-minded simpleton he’d had him pegged as. Philip, too, had been jonsesing for Mary Alice Tudor, and while he had no game, while he was well aware that his solid-colored polo shirt and pleated khakis, floppy bowl-cut, and devotion to all things t-shaped and covered with a half naked Christ gave him a marked disadvantage in the dating department, he was determined to outwit and defeat his blonde-haired soccer-playing comrade.
It had taken several months for Philip to refine his plan of attack. Taylor was a difficult target, but after overhearing the story the Taylor’s Preteen Basement Ghost Hunters he was fairly certain his only option was to threaten Taylor’s sense of immortality.
Planting the idea had been surprisingly easy. A man on the prowl is often unaware of the predators after him; instead, he is busy warding off the ones who want his prey. It was an offhand comment, something about Mayan calculations and stars and salvation. When he heard it, when the words registered the lovesick grin on Taylor’s face quickly melted. Philip Honea was the kind of jackass prone to exaggeration and mythology, but no one had ever legitimately threatened Taylor’s security. His eyes glazed over, and for a brief few seconds the only sound he could detect was a low buzz despite the moving mouths around him. He had read of these low-grade panic attacks before, but had never really appreciated the sensation of motionlessness and disorientation until that moment. He was not, of this he was sure, being overdramatic.
“Oh my God, look at him, he’s actually considering it.” Philip was proud of himself, that was evident, proud that he’d so seamlessly and easily broken Taylor. So pleased, he was, he began to laugh.
Taylor couldn’t shake that cold, stirring feeling that any efforts at maintaining his rationale from here on out were botched. No one had legitimately threatened his livelihood before, and the fact that Philip had sacked up and was telling him that his days were numbered scared the absolute hell out of him. Life was finite, and possibility was limited. And that, that changed everything.
For the next several nights Taylor remained silent. Underneath his covers, he stayed awake, wondering what it might be like to face one’s end on such a magnanimous scale. In the darkness of his room to the soundtrack of his younger brother’s snoring, Taylor gawked at his extremities wondering how it might actually feel to be consumed.
He had been too embarrassed to confront his parents and too furious at himself for, despite all his efforts, finally buying into Philip Honea’s nonsense. He spent his free time holed up in his room, camped beneath his covers with a flashlight and an Exacto knife. Each night, he chose a different book of the Bible and, with meticulous skill, carved the flimsy, gold-tipped pages away from the binding. At first, he'd balled up the pages and flicked them off the edge of his bed, but soon he began to fold them into frogs, cranes, square-ish footballs. They collected gradually, building up against the trashcan, in empty drawers, beneath Taylor's bed frame.
Zac used to stay awake those late nights, watching from the distance of his own bed. "Mom's going to kill you when she finds those," he'd warned.
"Go to bed, Zac." Taylor answered monotonously, his fingers raw with paper cuts.
After a moment of silence, a curious Zac prodded, "What are you making anyway?"
Taylor thought for a moment and answered matter-of-factly, "Jesugami,” before flicking one onto his brother’s bed.
Zac unfolded the origami and smoothed it out along his quilt. “That’s really messed up, Taylor.”
“You have no idea.”
Taylor had not bought into the idea of the Apocalypse out of Christian faith – no, he’d never had that. Instead, Taylor became devoted to the fear. He feared the end, the finality, the loss, and that alone was enough to make him believe in anything.
BY THE AGE OF 12, Taylor wanted to be an adult. He resented the fact that things were out of his reach just because of his age. Age, he knew, was simply a number, a sum of the days he’d been alive, and that was no excuse to deprive him of the experience of driving a car, smoking a cigar, drinking gin, marrying a woman he didn’t all together like too much, and making extravagant, frivolous purchases he would only later regret.
At first he was unaware of the fixation he would have on December 21, 2012; Taylor’s only certainty was the brevity of the time he had left. It was the not knowing when that hit him hardest. In the beginning, he was utterly incapable of planning each day. Convinced every morning would be the last, and if he did not witness each sunrise he would regret it when the world did end, Taylor stopped sleeping. The effects of the self-inflicted insomnia quickly appeared in the dark skin beneath his eyes and the pallor of his skin and the layer of grease that began building up at his scalp. He did not shower for days thereafter, as cleanliness was no longer a priority. When he came around a few days later, the world still physically intact, Taylor finally took action.
After diving into a box of twinkies and surrounding himself inadvertently in their clear, empty wrappers, Taylor composed the premature bucket list that he would carry with him for the next thirteen years.
The first bullet point on his list was to punch Philip Honea square in the face.
In the wake of his crushing discovery, Taylor had grown defiant and ballsy – traits his father would have been proud for him to adopt under any other circumstance. At the time, they were still unaware that their oldest son thought the world would be ending, they simply thought he was entering that angsty adolescent phase.
On the first day back at school after winter break, Taylor gave himself a pep talk in a stall of the boy’s bathroom weighing the pros and cons of action versus nonviolence, kicked open the door, and marched to the cafeteria where he knew Philip Honea would be placing tapioca pudding on his tray and trying to flirt with Mary Alice Tudor.
When he entered, he stood at the double doors and belted, “Honea!”
The pause in lunchroom activity was rather dramatic, as all eyes turned towards a ragged-looking Taylor and a shaky, pudding-cup holding Philip.
Taylor stomped toward Philip, the crowd of students parting for him as he went. “You!” Taylor yelled, “I have beef with you now, Honea.”
“Hey. Hey there, Taylor, just calm down, now.” Philip turned a shade of beet red. “How was your Christmas break?”
The veins in Taylor’s neck began to bulge, and he reached forward to throw the tray out of Philip’s hands. Tapioca squished to the floor, and the reheated pizza square on his plate stuck to an empty chair nearby. In a delayed reaction, Philip gasped.
“Pretty shitty, thanks for asking.” Taylor grabbed Philip’s shirt and pulled him close enough so that their noses were touching. “What’s the matter, Philip?”
“Now, now just take a second Taylor and think about what you’re doing,” he pleaded.
“I don’t have that luxury anymore.”
And with that, Taylor socked Philip in the mouth. He was shocked how much his fist stung afterward and how empowered he’d felt, but he was not nearly as shocked as Philip, who’d fallen against the cafeteria line and caught himself in the jello.
Within a matter of minutes, one of the cafeteria ladies escorted him to the principal’s office. His parents were called, Diana paced up and down the office with her forehead in her hand asking repeatedly where she had gone wrong and what had gotten into him. Walker made a good effort to appear offended and concerned, but really he was proud that at least one of his sons was learning to stand up for himself. Zac was still in the habit of cowering under the playground equipment, the last he’d heard.
“Are you upset about the hand bells, Taylor?” Diana pleaded. “Is that what this is about? Are you acting out because you’re angry with me?”
It was hardly what any of this was about, but he wasn’t about to try to explain that to her.
He was suspended for at least a week. The Hansons brought him home and grounded him indefinitely, but Taylor had no patience for punishment; he had no time. Taylor snuck out in the middle of the night, shimmied down the drainpipe to the front yard, and took off on his bike for Mary Alice Tudor’s house. He’d gotten her attention by throwing sticks at her front window, and she followed him as they walked through the woods to the river by the train tracks.
“I’m running out of time,” he’d confessed, taking himself quite seriously and allowing himself to look at his reflection in the river.
Mary Alice Tudor had chuckled. “What, are you dying? Come on, Taylor. You’re fine.”
He hadn’t responded, and she soon realized he very much believed what he was saying.
“So Philip really got to you, huh? You know half of what comes out of his mouth is pure bullshit.”
He shook his head, well aware of the ridiculousness of the situation but otherwise unwaveringly convinced that Philip was right for once. “I actually sat down and read Revelations. It’s some terrifying shit.” Taylor held out the list for her to read. “So I decided I’ve got some stuff I need to do.”
“We’ve all got stuff we need to do but…” she paused. “What is this?”
“I made a list of the things I have to do before I die.”
She struggled to make out his handwriting in the dark. “What’s wrong with just taking life as it comes? Isn’t that sort of the point? You know, waiting it out and facing the challenges and enjoying the surprises that happen along the way?” Holding the paper closer to her face she squinted. “Wait, number four on your list is seriously ‘Ride a zebra?’ Taylor.”
Were the early winter moonlight not so obscured by the tree branches that night, Mary Alice Tudor could have seen him blush. “I was flipping through this National Geographic,” he explained, “And saw this picture of a Catholic-inspired carnival in New York. It made me think, you know, has any ever actually ridden a zebra before? Is it even possible? What’s the acceptable person-to-animal weight ratio? And it was there that I decided I must ride a zebra before I die.”
“That’s just totally irrational, though.”
“Yeah, but it’s a bucket list. It’s not supposed to be rational.”
“It’s supposed to be doable at least.”
While Taylor appreciated their banter, and some part of him swelled at the thought that he was the one she had chosen to come to that night he couldn’t help but feel somewhat irritated that, not even days into their seemingly exclusive flirtation, Mary Alice Tudor was already sounding a bit like his mother and picking apart his every inflated dream.
Mary Alice Tudor scooted closer to him. “I’m sorry.”
Taylor winced. “I find myself surrounded by the quiet desperation of the suburbs,” he said. “I have to change that. There’s more to life than this fucking town and that fucking house this fucking river.”
“You sound like my mom. But if I didn’t totally agree with you, I’d think you were being a bit overdramatic.” She folded the paper according to his creases and passed it back. “Can I join?” Mary Alice Tudor sighed. “I don’t buy into your theory, okay? You should know that right off. But there’s no harm in trying to make your life worth something.”
His jaw went slack. “Are you serious?”
“How does one dynamite fish anyhow?”
“I think I’m in love with you.”
Mary Alice Tudor laughed, and while he could not discern whether or not she was laughing at what she’d just agreed to do or if she was well aware of his unbridled affection for her and was otherwise uncertain how to respond, he did not care.
“To the end, then,” he said, a bittersweet grin spreading across his face.
TO EFFECTIVELY FISH WITH DYNAMITE, an individual must obtain one of several types of explosive devices, including but not limited to a stick of dynamite, a homemade bomb, fireworks or some otherwise combustible ignition. The larger or the more abundant the source of said combustion, the larger the area the shock wave will cover and, therefore, theoretically, the larger the resulting catch.
When preparing your device, ensure that the fuse will have a long enough delay to detonate deep beneath the surface of the water. Once the proper length of the fuse has been obtained, light said fuse and toss explosive far from the boat. Please note, do not simply drop the explosive overboard; it is very likely this will result in explosion and subsequent capsizing of the vessel in which you sit.
After the explosive has detonated, and you will very much know when that occurs, the afflicted fish will float to the surface of the water. Maneuver your vessel through the water and, using a nylon net or scoop, remove the fish from the water and place them in a receptacle.
Caution: this project may result in death or severe bodily harm. Perform only under careful supervision. Please also note that dynamite fishing is both detrimental to the ecosystem and extremely illegal.
Taylor, who had based every decision in his life out of fear, held onto the side of his rowboat to keep from shaking. Maintaining an air of ballsiness and defiance was difficult when there were explosives in his tiny aluminum craft. Mary Alice Tudor, who was reading the instructions aloud, paused when she noticed the white on his knuckles.
“We don’t have to do this,” she said. “You don’t even like fish.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “Yeah, but there’s something cathartic about senselessly killing an entire population of sea life with one single blast.”
“I mean, it’s a little heartless.”
“Do you want the fish?” he asked her, unfurling one of his hands from around the edge of the canoe. "Would that make you feel better if you ate some of them?"
“I don’t really like fish.”
"Yeah, me either."
The two of them peered over opposite sides of the boat. “So they’ll just…” Taylor pantomimed a mushroom cloud. “Boom, dead?” He had envisioned that his own expiration would happen in similar fashion.
Mary Alice Tudor reached in her bag for the dynamite they’d lifted from the store a few days earlier. Taylor had always admired the way she handled cylindrically shaped objects, especially those obtained in illegal and therefore exciting manners. His heart actually stopped beating for a moment as he watched.
Before the detonation, Taylor asked her, “What do you want to do before you die?”
She was caught up in the moment, the adrenaline that came with the knowledge that she was about to obliterate an entire ecosystem.
“Jimi Hendrix, Curt Kobain, they all died at 27,” Taylor began, not really caring at that point if she was listening to him. He had to get it out, whatever was brimming at the surface, he had to let it out. “They were great men, and looked what happened to them. I don’t want to fizzle out with an overdose or anything like that. I want to die creatively,” he said. “I want to be remembered.”
Mary Alice Tudor looked over her shoulder at him, “We all want to be remembered.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t matter either way,” he said, “If I were remembered or not. When I die, it’ll be the end of everything. What happens afterward won’t matter because there won’t be a person, a community, an anything to have that memory. There’s just nothing.”
She hadn’t been prepared for this conversation, so Mary Alice Tudor quietly picked at the paint that was chipping on the edge of their tiny boat.
He looked away from her because the confession was too intimate for faces and eyes, "I wanted to die a legacy, just past peak so I'd at least got the perception to appreciate that time I started a rock band and wrote a book and saved a life. And I guess I can’t have that, I guess I never could. Knowing it, though… it’s the knowing it that takes the thrill away."
Neither of them was looking at the other, and the silence had become too palpable to handle. They were too young for this conversation, these feelings, these worries, but there was no turning back. Taylor was disappointed, to say the least, that he’d given up that much of himself so quickly.
“How about some fish then?” he asked. She turned to him smiling.
As he lit the fuse she was laughing hysterically. “Oh my God,” she kept saying, over and over, “Oh, my God, Taylor!”
The fuse was long and damp, but as it took, as the white-hot ball disappeared beneath the surface of the water his blood pressure began to rise. A low, wide bubble of air began to billow up slowly, undulating at first. It was as if, for this moment, this collection of seconds, that time had slowed to impossible speeds. The lake gurgled, sputtering and burping before finally opening up upon itself and spewing a geyser of hot brown lake water into the sky.
Breathlessly, they waited as the fish, belly-up, floated to the surface of the lake. Mary Alice Tudor had mentioned that she thought the fish in their river would have been bigger and Taylor silently agreed. He reached out with his left hand and picked up one of the lifeless fish. It was small in his hand, and much warmer than he could have anticipated.
“It’s beautiful,” she gasped, reaching out to grab one of her own.