The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  “Let’s take him to the gazebo,” said the boy who would not tell me his name. “There are more nests there, right? We could knock a few down and leave him. Tit for tat. What do you say, Nick?”

  “What if they don’t sting him?” said Nick.

  “They’ll sting him.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “They stung you, didn’t they?”

  Nick said nothing. I imagine he touched his face.

  “All right,” said Anders. “I think it’s a fine plan. He’ll get the message and wear the scars as reminders, won’t he? It seems even.”

  “I already understand,” I said to the floor, “and I will remember.”

  “You see?” said Nick. “It hardly matters to him.”

  “He deserves to suffer,” said one of the twins.

  “That’s the point of punishment,” said the other.

  “You misunderstand me,” I said. “I’m sure it will hurt a great deal. I’m sure I will suffer, and it will matter to me. I’m not without fear. I have simply accepted my fate. This is a turning of the tides. You will leave me in the gazebo and I will be stung and it will hurt. I’ll be decorated with bloody wounds, just like poor Nick. The punishment is poetic in its echo of the crime. It won’t matter to you to know that I didn’t intend to hurt Nick at the beginning. That I never misrepresented myself to him, except in saying that I had a good plan for our escape. It’s true that I didn’t have a good plan; I only knew that we needed to escape. I have discovered a number of corpses around the property. We are each of us in mortal danger, I assure you. But I have had a change of heart in my approach. I am accepting things as they are, embracing my fate and whatever turns may come. Take me to the gazebo. Leave me if you like. I will rise again and go on with my plan. It doesn’t matter what you do to me now, unless you throw me in the lake and leave me to die. But I can tell from the way we’ve just been talking that you aren’t murderers. At least not the majority of you. You don’t want me dead. You want me to pay for what I’ve done, and I accept that. I understand that you want to avenge your friend, to ease his mental anguish at having been bested in battle. I can’t talk you out of it. I won’t ask for mercy. Your plan will go exactly as you planned it. I will not interfere. And then the next thing will happen.”

  “Is that a threat?” said Anders.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I only mean to say that I am leaving this place. It might take longer than I’d like, but unless I’m in the ground before I do so, I am leaving. We aren’t safe here, as I’ve said. We won’t be until the larger matter is put to bed, and the only way I see that happening is to leave, so I accept whatever terms are necessary for that to happen. This isn’t ultimately about Nick’s wasp stings but the corpses gathering upon the grounds of our facility. I can only imagine what is behind the Headmaster’s locked door, waiting to be discovered. Did you hear that fluttering? Did you hear that muffled and ungodly sound coming from the office? Why was the door locked? Why is no one coming to answer it? Something has to be done. All of this must come to an end.”

  They carried me through the rain to the gazebo, where they set me on the floorboards and knocked each of the wasps’ nests down with a long branch. Anders was stung on the cheek, and the boy whose glasses were giving him trouble was stung on the leg during the process. They left me there, the wasps swarming above me, and headed back into the dormitories. It was a tragically innocent act. They were young boys doing all that was in their power to take control of their lives. The wasps hovered above me loudly and angrily. I could see the bright angles of their eyes, the curves of their pointed ends. They flew almost drunkenly, zigging and zagging, dipping down to my tied-up body. They crawled the lengths of my legs and arms, explored the caverns of my nostrils. The beaches of my ear. I could hear them clicking, as if they were talking to one another in some alien language. I watched the nests on the ground as more and more wasps poured out, rising up to the eaves in search of another place to rest.

  I felt pity for them. There was no home left for them to reach. No place to which they could return. They would have to start fresh or die trying. But at least they had that option. It was my understanding that they built their nests from spit, though it’s possible I was wrong. Either way, they’d done it once and they would do it again. Their homes were objects built, not things inherited. We orphans weren’t so lucky. If our nest was knocked down by a murderous Headmaster, where was there left for us to go? Who would care for us? Who would take us in? I imagined that the wasps walking the edges of my body were simply looking for food or warmth. They weren’t there to sting me. They weren’t even angry any longer, it seemed to me. The other boys had left me, and though some wasps returned to the busy work of piecing together what was left of their lives right away, others abandoned hope momentarily to this warm lump on the gazebo floor, as a boy might collapse on a hillside under the baking sun or bang his head against a concrete wall.

  I listened to the rain, which was beautiful in its unceasing assault.

  “Thank you,” I said, lifting myself from the gazebo floor.

  The ropes fell away as the wasps on my body lifted. It broke my heart, how tragically fragile were the knots of my cohort. If they’d been there to hear me sigh, they might have known some part of my true feelings for them. I watched the wasps as they left me. Some brave souls rose to meet their brothers in the hunt for a new home, while others dropped to the floor, where they continued their pathetic crawl. Others yet landed in the curls of my hair. I brushed them out with my palm and sent them on their way. Somehow, incredibly, the wasps and I had reached an understanding. I meant them no harm, that first nest aside, and they knew it. They weren’t interested in me other than as a surface. Something along which to move in their pursuit of safety for themselves and the rest of the hive. They were finding their way back to the life they knew and understood. I realized then that, though the other boys were predisposed to dislike me, and some of them were under the thumb of our murderous Headmaster, what they had been trying to do all along was this very job, the job of the wasps. I had disturbed the equilibrium of the facility, and they had been trying to set things right, just as Anders and his cronies had done by leaving me here to get stung. They were after their home again.

  I left the gazebo and traveled through the rain back to the dormitories, where the power was still off. Candles had been lit, casting pools of golden light onto several low tables and desks that had been dragged into the hall. Several of the boys were sitting together in the dim light, talking or playing cards on the floor. They seemed almost peaceful, though they still startled when the thunder struck, and when the door slammed shut behind me.

  revolt

  “

  Boys,” I said. “Brothers. Please listen to me.”

  A few of them turned away from their games. I realized I didn’t know a single face of those in the hall. I made a vow to myself to be more attentive. To ask more questions. To try to listen. To write down names if I had to. Imagine the kind of man you could be, I thought. Imagine all you could accomplish.

  “I have a confession to make,” I said.

  “You finished off the butter?” said one of the two boys playing cards.

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t stop masturbating?” said the other.

  Anders stepped out of my room then, and into the hallway. His face was pale. His lips were moving.

  “I haven’t allowed myself to become one of you,” I said. “I haven’t opened myself up to the use in our numbers, to the sheer force of a group of determined individuals, regardless of their names or history. I have carried myself as a loner, and you have all treated me as such.”

  “Who are you again?” said one of the other boys.

  “I am your brother,” I said. “We are brothers.”

  “My brother lives in an orphanage in the village,” said the s
ame boy. “You’re just a fat kid I’ve never met.”

  “Listen,” I commanded.

  Anders was trying to say something, but the words were not traveling the length of the hall. I tried to hurry.

  “We are in danger,” I told them.

  “Tell me something we don’t know,” said a boy who’d set up a pallet on the floor of the hall and was not getting up.

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Nick, emerging from his room. The stings on his face and arms were still bleeding. “His stomach is full of our food and his mouth is full of his own lies.” He dabbed his face with the rag he had in his hand.

  “Hours ago,” I said, “the Headmaster instructed me to tell you all that we were headed into a lockdown.”

  A collective groan.

  “He was to remain in his office,” I said. “But now he isn’t answering the door, and my fear is that something has happened to him, or is about to happen to us.”

  I held up my hands to show I meant them no harm, but they did not stop eyeing me with suspicion. I had to accept the fact that they might never fully trust me, which did not mean we couldn’t work together. As soon as I accepted their suspicion as one of the terms of our arrangement, it might become possible for them to actually hear what I was saying and act according to my suggestion. Whereas if I battled their suspicion, I would never reach them. I would only reinforce the necessity of their lesser instincts.

  I knelt before them. “Something terrible is happening,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have any stings at all,” said the boy whose glasses would not stay on his face, stepping into the hall from Nick’s room.

  “I was lucky,” I said.

  Nick went as pale as Anders, who was still making his slow way down the hall, mumbling. He seemed lost, as if his memory had been wiped clean.

  “It’s the ghost,” said Nick.

  “No,” I said.

  “He’s killed Hannan,” said Anders, finally audible. “I’ve just found him.”

  “I only killed Thomas,” I said.

  Now the other boys were listening.

  They tied me to a chair so I could not hurt anyone else. The knots were poor, of course, and I could have pulled my arms loose without much trouble, but my plan at this point was to deescalate things between me and the other boys, not to escape. It was important that we all get on the same page, and it was clear they needed to take this simple action against me to regain their sense of security and control.

  The boys were pouring out of their rooms now. The hall was crowded with little faces, some rubbing their eyes, some quizzically taking in the scene, some excited by the sight of me bound and submissive without fully understanding the reasons behind it.

  “All is not lost,” I told them. “If we act as a group, nothing can overwhelm us.”

  “We should put him back in the gazebo,” said Nick. “Let the wasps have a fair go at him before we do anything else.” He dabbed his face, as I’d imagined he would.

  “We should put him in the lake and be done with him,” said Anders. “Hannan could never have hurt anyone. He was a pacifist. He collected string.”

  “I had nothing to do with what happened to Hannan,” I said.

  “We second the lake idea,” said the twins.

  “Why should we believe you?” said Anders.

  “You don’t have to,” I said, “for it to be true. I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking that we act as one. That we work together. Which we can’t do if you put me in the

  lake.”

  “What would you have us do,” said the boy whose glasses would not stay on, “as one?”

  “There are two possibilities for what is happening to us,” I explained. “But whatever the situation is, we can only overcome it together. We have to put all our cards on the table and begin to play our hand as a team. As a family.”

  Someone in the hall blew his nose.

  “Explain your theories,” said Nick.

  “For whatever reason, a group of us has done considerable wrong, and we have found ourselves in a difficult position,” I said. “But having done wrong doesn’t change the fact that we are brothers, that our situation here is unique. If we band together, we will grow stronger than the force of our mistakes, or any other force out there acting upon us.”

  “We understand that part,” said a voice. “You want us to join together. Now get on with it.”

  “For days now,” I said, “I have been trying to wrap my head around the situation as it has presented itself, and I have come up with two theories, as I said. First: The Headmaster, I fear, is a murderer. I found the corpse of Ms. Klein in the garden, where Thomas had his accident.”

  Someone in the hall snorted.

  “Where Thomas fell,” I said. “Later, I discovered Hannan in my closet. Dead, but not by my hand. Then I was assaulted by three boys I haven’t seen since. And Fry is still missing.”

  “Jesus,” said one boy.

  “Get to the point,” said another.

  “Thomas?” said the boy whose glasses would not stay on.

  “There is a murderous force working its way through our ranks,” I said. “If it is the Headmaster, he is staging an elaborate plot to ensure someone else takes the fall. And I believe some of us, though I will not say who as I am not entirely sure, have been working with him. Now, I don’t blame those who have done so. I understand you were only trying to bring things back to normal. You were only trying to protect yourself and the ones you care about here at the facility. It’s an understandable position to take. I am here to say, though, that you do not have to serve a murderous Headmaster in order to ensure your survival. As one, we can restore the safety of the group. We can take back the power the Headmaster has made us believe he holds.”

  “What’s the other theory?” said a boy whose face I could not see from my chair.

  “It’s something I never wanted to think, that I wouldn’t let myself believe,” I said. “But when I pounded on the Headmaster’s door and got no answer, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened to him. I was interrupted in my attempt to establish that he was still alive, perhaps in hiding, which would confirm the first theory, that the blame was still squarely with him. If, however, my fears are confirmed by opening that door, instead of my suspicions, then it is possible that the murderous force is here among us. It’s possible it wasn’t the Headmaster at all but a handful of devilish boys, who, either by accident or as malicious acts of rebellion, are responsible for the death of that man, as well as several members of our cohort and one innocent teacher.”

  “Ms. Klein?” said the boy whose glasses would not stay on.

  “I say,” I said, “that the storm is a blessing. Here to wash away our wrongdoings and let us start anew. A facility like this is a powder keg. We are provided the bare minimum in life and expected to act in a civilized and synchronous manner at all times. A single boy on his own is like a firework, endlessly crackling. A handful of boys bound together is a stick of TNT. We are explosively forceful, and they were fools to think we could be contained. It’s only natural that if they put pressure on us, we would pop. It was unavoidable. Which of us can truly be blamed for what we’ve done so far? None. What choices did we have? Very few. But we aren’t trapped by the past. We can change our behavior. We can alter our relationships and claim the results. Look to the wasps. Home is where you make it. We have lived on the street. We have lived in boarding houses and other orphanages. We’ve known a variety of pillows. We have been victims of circumstance from birth until this very day. But together, working as one, we can take back our lives and decide for ourselves what our home will look like. What we don’t have to do is sit around here and wait for the worst to come. Something is in the air, brothers. Something is on its way. Will we get our hands around it, or will we let it overtake us?”

&
nbsp; “Lift him up,” said Anders.

  The boys surrounded me, lifting the chair from the floor.

  They carried me down the hall and through the courtyard, into the facility’s main building, where the Headmaster’s office sat locked. They set me across from the door and went to work on it. Together, they were a battering ram. A tidal wave. A moon dislocating the oceans of the world. The Headmaster’s door came apart in splinters and the boys poured through like smoke.

  The window behind the Headmaster’s desk was cracked open and the many pages of paper in his office were caught in a whirl of wind at the room’s center. They curved toward the ceiling then fell to the floor, curling each time over the Headmaster’s shoulders and horrified face, which was frozen where he sat in his rolling chair. Across from him, the fire in the fireplace roared, snatching pages every so often from the air.

  “Oh no,” said the boys.

  Blood tapped the carpet, dripping from the Headmaster’s opened wrists, and his chair was still turning, creaking as

  it did.

  One of the twins plucked a sheet of paper from the air.

  “It’s Ms. Klein,” he said.

  “They were involved,” I yelled from the hall. “Romantically.”

  “She’s naked,” said the other twin.

  “Let me see,” said the boy whose glasses would not stay put.

  “I didn’t draw them,” I yelled. “I was only blamed. Please come out so we can talk about this.”

  “I can confirm it,” said Nick. “These ones are good. His drawings are awful.”

  “Get them out of my face,” said Anders.

  I was carried to the dining hall after that. Anders fetched the remaining stragglers from the dormitory, some of whom had been sleeping peacefully, ignorant to the horrors of our situation. I watched them rub the sleep from their eyes, envious at first of those few peaceful moments they’d had, and then decidedly happy to be as I was. Unlike them, I knew what there was to know. Regardless of how this next scene would unfold, I was aware of our situation and I could fittingly absorb any new information. The other boys, still pulling themselves from whatever emotional state their dreams had rendered, would be playing catch-up for the next few hours or even days, and possibly to their demise.