The Job of the Wasp Read online

  also by colin winnette

  Haints Stay

  Coyote

  Fondly

  Animal Collection

  Revelation

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Colin Winnette

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Winnette, Colin, author.

  Title: The job of the wasp : a novel / Colin Winnette.

  Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017038215 | ISBN 9781593766801 (pbk. : alk.

  paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I66345 J63 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038215

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Ashley

  I am—yet what I am none cares or knows.

  —john clare

  The Chapters in This Novel

  chapter 1:One In, One Out

  chapter 2:Pornography

  chapter 3: The Ghost

  chapter 4:The Ghosts

  chapter 5:The Ghosts as They Were Known to Nick

  chapter 6:Preparing for Prison

  chapter 7:Revolt

  chapter 8:Illumination

  chapter 9:The Widow and Death

  Acknowledgments

  one in, one out

  Upon my arrival at the facility, I was asked what I hoped to get out of my time there and how I planned to make myself useful. The sign out front described the building as a school for orphaned boys, so I said my hope was to get a good education, three square meals a day, a place to lay my head, and, in return, I was happy to help out in any way I could.

  “This is not a school,” said the Headmaster, whose nose was like a mushroom, somehow both silly and threatening. “It is a temporary holding facility with mandatory educational elements. You will be held until you are far enough along to care for yourself. No longer, no less. You will work, along with the other boys, to earn your room and board. You will be provided for, but you will not be comforted. Even if I wanted to comfort you, we have been forced by the economic realities of our situation to live simply. Add to that the fact that, by taking you on, we are now at a whopping thirty-one students, one beyond our maximum capacity as stated in the materials I’ve presented to the state every semester for more than ten years running. And yet here we are, facing what will likely prove to be one of our most difficult terms in all respects, I am sure of it. Run a facility as long as I have, and you start to develop a nose for these things.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and tore it in half. “Regardless, we will clothe you, feed you, and provide you a bed. You’ll receive a standard education. Nothing fancy. Enough to get by within these doors. But as far as things go out there”—he pointed toward the heavy oaken doors that had been barred behind me when I walked in—“as far as that goes, you will be on your own.”

  He pulled a pen from a jar at his right and set to drawing something on the bottom half of the torn paper.

  “You’ll have various duties,” he said. “You’ll like some of them and you won’t like others. You’ll do all of them equally well, because if you stop, or start doing the job carelessly, we will find something else to do with you. And every time we have to reassign you, you will like your new job less—that I can promise you. So do your first job well and you will be as happy as you can possibly be. Do you understand everything I’ve told you so far?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. He rose. “It’s possible you’ll like it here. It’s also possible you’ll hate it. We’re not in the business of guarding memories, only of keeping you from sliding into a lesser existence. You’ll have everything you need and a few things more. You will get by. What do you say; will that suffice?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Have you always been so agreeable?” he said.

  “I’m sure I haven’t,” I said. “But I know when it’s time to fight and when it’s time to say ‘Thank you’ and ‘I understand’ and ‘Yes.’”

  He eyed me for a moment, then waved me on. It was my belief that our first meeting went well.

  At dinner, we were served pork and spinach. It was simple but sat well together on the plate and had a pleasant smell. I nodded as another boy told me that the pork was so tender because the pigs were fattened on the flesh of new boys who could not fit in. His speech was practiced. He had heard it from someone before him, or he had given it many times. He was handsome, I decided. He had little else to say that wasn’t about the book he was carrying with him. I hadn’t read it, or any of the books he compared it to, because I have no taste for fiction, so I found it harder and harder to listen to him.

  “I’d like to focus on my tender pork, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  The boys around us flinched. They seemed to hiss through their teeth.

  “You should focus on having a shower,” said the book-

  ish boy.

  I was in damp and muddy clothes, it was true, and my trouser leg was torn. But I’d been instructed to report directly to the dining hall where dinner was being served and so hadn’t been able to tidy up or bathe.

  “Did you know,” I told the boy, “that we are now one person beyond capacity? The Headmaster instructed me to report back if I had any thoughts on who we might be able to send packing. Anyone who might fare better on the streets than in a civilized facility. There are only so many beds, and there is only so much you can teach a person.”

  “You are a liar,” said the other boy, “and a faggot.”

  I accepted what he had to say, and he added nothing more.

  We were not given salt, only a fork and a napkin. When I was given the fork and the napkin, I was instructed not to lose them. The napkin, I was told, was to keep my uniform clean of pork and spinach once it had arrived. Outside of their providing the napkin, any spills or stains were mine to deal with, and stained uniforms were unacceptable. My measurements would be taken in the morning and I would receive a uniform within a week. Most of the other boys did look sharp. I was looking forward to the uniform, and to blending in.

  An aging wooden frame draped in ivy, or some reaching plant like ivy, arched over a brick path that led us from the dining hall after dinner. The ivy held small buds that would blossom in spring, I guessed. I didn’t know much about plants, their names or behaviors, but I still enjoyed them.

  We had half an hour for recess, and we were to spend it on a rectangle of muddy yard that sat behind the dormitory. A row of saplings articulated the border of our scrappy plot, and at the far end sat a faded blue gazebo.

  I inspected the ivy and its buds on the trellis while the other boys played a running game in the dirt. Something put a boy on the sidelines and something else would draw him back in. I was unfamiliar with the rules and was not invited to play, but I did not feel excluded. The game had fallen habitually into place, as a matter of course, and I wasn’t yet part of their world.

  After recess, we were instructed to study in our rooms. Mine was s
mall but serviceable. It featured a window, a dresser, and a desk. A small bed. A lamp with a green glass shade. I felt like a young professional. A young man setting out to make something of himself in the world. I felt suddenly heartened and hopeful. There was a stack of paper in the desk drawer, along with two pencils. I’d been given nothing to study yet, so I drew pictures. Everything that came to me was violent or bloody. I drew ghosts and soldiers and some things I did not know. I tore up the pages when I was done and put them in a waste bin by the bed.

  Before lights-out, the boys all stood in the hall and sang a song together. I did not know the words. Those I could decipher had little meaning to me. From what I could tell, it was a song about loyalty and pride. I thought about this and realized that at that point in my life I was loyal to no one and felt pride for nothing. It was something I hoped to change.

  I did not sleep well that first night. In the dark, the room felt like a grave. I heard laughter from outside the window, but only for a moment. I looked and saw nothing out of the ordinary. For the rest of the night, I sat up, waiting for it to happen again.

  In the morning, I was called to the Headmaster’s office. A small man in suspenders and a striped white shirt was there, and I was made to stand on a stool. He brought up my arms and spread my legs. He gripped each and every part of me, grumbling to himself. The Headmaster was at his desk, drawing on two halves of a torn sheet of paper. When he was finished, he placed one half in a drawer by his right knee and crumpled the other half in his left hand. He held the crumpled paper in a fist, which he gently pulsed as he watched the small man grip me.

  “You’re fatter than boys your height should be,” said the small man.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I thought you were an orphan,” he said. He stepped away from me, inspected my feet, then stepped back in to grip some more.

  “Do you have what you need?” said the Headmaster.

  “The pants will have to be large in the waist, so they will look baggy around the legs,” said the small man. “There’s nothing I can do about it. I have too much to do to take on customized work for every fattened orphan sent your way.”

  “I don’t mind if they’re baggy around the legs,” I said.

  “Depending on how baggy they are,” said the Headmaster, “it will be fine.”

  “I don’t know how baggy they will be just yet,” said the small man. He had drawn a notepad from his back pocket and was sketching something.

  “I don’t mind if they’re baggy,” I said again. I brought down my arms.

  The small man stepped forward and raised my arms once more.

  “If they’re too baggy,” said the Headmaster, still pulsing the crumpled paper, “we will send them back.”

  “You have to understand that they are going to be baggy,” said the small man, lowering his notepad. “If you don’t understand that, then there’s going to be trouble.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I understand that the pants will be somewhat baggy,” said the Headmaster, “but if they are excessively baggy, we are going to send them back.”

  “You’re not getting it,” said the small man. “The boy is fat. He needs a special waist. It’s a grown man’s waist. He does not have the legs of a grown man. The pants are going to be baggy, and they will be too long. I’ve never seen an orphan so well fed.”

  “Send the pants,” said the Headmaster. “Send pants that he can wear.”

  The small man left in a huff, leaving the door ajar.

  “He’s a pervert,” said the Headmaster. “Don’t pay him any mind at all.”

  Before class, I was given a long pencil and a dull blade to keep the tip sharp.

  “There is a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to violence, threat, or accidental harm,” said the teacher. “If you use the blade for anything other than the pencil, you’ll be released from the classroom. You’ll spend the day working outside, and you will not like the work.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t look so grave,” she said. “Our goal is to keep you safe, not to mete out unwarranted punishment. If you use the blade as intended, your day will go fine.”

  Only a few minutes into class, the boy behind me poked his blade into the node between my ear and the back of my skull. I yelled out, swung at him, and I was asked to leave the classroom.

  “I was told my day would go fine,” I said in the hall, where the teacher had angrily planted me on a low bench.

  “I saw what I saw,” she said. “We haven’t time for a trial.”

  “It isn’t fair,” I said. “I didn’t start it.”

  “Did you swing at him?” she said. “Did you intend to hit him?”

  I said nothing. I crossed my arms at my chest.

  “You’ll have a job assigned to you as soon as I’ve settled the other boys,” she said.

  I waited on the bench until we were all released for lunch.

  At lunch, I sat with a group of boys I did not recognize, and we were served spaghetti. The boy to my left asked if I enjoyed marbles.

  “Not the game,” he said, “but the toy itself.”

  “How does the game work?” I said.

  “I’m not asking about the game,” said the boy. “You don’t listen.”

  The boy who’d stuck me with the blade was in the far corner of the room. I could hear him eating from all the way over there, slurping up spaghetti as it unwound from the nest on his plate.

  “What’s his name?” I asked the boy with the marbles.

  “Whose?”

  “The boy in the corner there. The blond.” I pointed with my fork, dropping a bit of red sauce on the table.

  The boy shrugged and dug a sliver of meatball onto his spoon. “You should be more careful,” he said.

  “You don’t know him?” I said.

  The boy shrugged again. “I keep to myself,” he said.

  When I finally received my uniform, it was an ill fit. The pants were baggy from the knees down, and the legs dragged. The Headmaster, who had delivered the brown paper package to my room himself, watched as I tried them on.

  “Every boy is to display his hem,” he said, as I tried to cuff the overlong legs. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but I do trust you can manage.”

  “Is there anything we can do to them?” I said, imagining my heel coming down on the hem at the precise moment my body lurched forward, tearing the pants along the seam and shredding them up to the waist.

  “New uniforms are provided once every other year,” said the Headmaster. “You can trade yours in early, but it will mean a missed opportunity down the line. The traded-for uniform will have to last even longer than the original, and that is a dangerous game to play. I suggest accepting the pants as they are and focusing on losing some weight in the coming year so that when you are fitted with a fresh pair, they will not be too baggy and the legs will not drag.”

  Though I could accept them, these were stressful terms to accommodate. I would have to put a great deal of effort into not shredding the pants under a clumsy heel. I practiced, walking a few small circles in my room and wincing whenever the hem found its way under my foot. The overall effect was that I appeared much weaker than I actually was, and seemed to be walking with a limp.

  “If we could just talk to the tailor,” I said.

  “The tailor’s time with us has ended,” said the Headmaster. “The matter is now yours to deal with on your own.”

  The ivy on the wooden frame did eventually blossom. The petals of each flower crinkled like a receipt in the sun after only a few days, but they had a strong smell, which was made stronger when I rubbed the fallen petals between two fingers. I plucked six or seven of the flowers and brought them into my room, where I imagined they would fare better. I set them in a dish on the windowsill, and a strange yellow oil ran from th
em, staining the water. I washed and refreshed the dish three times, but there was always more oil. The water was never clear. Still, the petals stayed purple and scented for days before going brown and sinking to the bottom of the dish.

  The other boys were not drawn to me, nor was I drawn to them, but I was comfortable on the edges of most social interactions. I didn’t involve myself in gossip or trouble. I didn’t participate in casual play or study groups. If I wasn’t motivated, I stared at the desk or the window until I felt ready to work. I didn’t reward laziness. I didn’t look to others to solve my problems for me. I was focused and observant when I could be, and patient when I could not.

  I was now acutely aware of the boy who sat behind me in class. When he lifted open his desk, I braced myself. When his chair squawked, I pictured him leaning in. I imagined the prick of the blade against the node between my ear and the back of my head, a pain I could recall with unsettling ease. I prepared myself, every time he shifted, for the inevitable prick, coaching myself to accept it and move past it as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to invite any more trouble than was already being delivered upon me. When the blow came, I would not react. I would swallow up the blade with the back of my head, and class would continue uninterrupted.

  But later, after lights-out, when he was comfortable in his bed and satisfied with all the cruelties he’d managed to deliver upon the innocent members of his cohort without punishment, I would visit him. I would move fast and hard, and make contact with something vital.

  That the boy never bothered me again with his blade did not stop me from harboring violent feelings toward him. If anything, those feelings grew in direct relation to the time I spent thinking about them without acting on them. I understood that it was its own form of torture, not pricking me a second time. He had evolved his cruelty into its subsequent phase, which involved my imagining the wound over and over again without the release of its ever actually being delivered. Although I had done nothing to provoke his animosity, it was clear that ignoring it would only make things worse, and that it would have to be dealt with in kind.