01 Nov Paper Wasps

It started off with a cry every parent has heard a hundred times before.

“Daaad! There’s someone in my room!”

It was one AM, maybe 2 AM? There was certainly not anyone in Des’s room. The house was locked, his bedroom was on the second story. But I went to look anyway, because even though obviously there was no one there, obviously it was a nightmare—what if it wasn’t?

That’s the real nightmare for every parent. What if this one time your child was screaming and you didn’t hurry over, but it turned out to finally be important? There are always stories of accidents and abductions. All the logic in the world wouldn’t fix the guilt if something was truly wrong and you didn’t go check.

So I hauled myself out of bed, waving my wife Petra back to sleep. I stumbled down the hall in my pajama bottoms and swung Des’s door open. The hallway light fell on his his bed, where he was huddled under the covers.

“Dude. What?” I wasn’t at my most articulate.

“He’s in the corner! A giant!”

I turned to look. “There’s noth—holy chemise!”

Parental reflexes are funny things. In about a half a second, the situation unfolded like this: first, I saw a huge, swollen face leering down from me from the corner of the room, just like Des had said. Second, I ran—not for the hallway, but for the bed, where I grabbed Desmond in a giant fabric bundle. Only then did I sprint for the hallway.

And third, I somehow corrected myself from swearing in the middle of that so that my seven year old wouldn’t learn a word that he’d probably already heard at school and had definitely heard from my brother.

The blankets in my arms were screaming.

“Daddy! It’s got me! Help meee!”

I’d like to say that I said something comforting or smart, but apparently I’d burned through my store of good parental choices in that first maneuver. Instead, I rolled the entire bundle as far down the hallway toward my room as I could and barked, “Go get your mother!”

I had no weapon. I didn’t even have a shirt on. I was going to have to face this thing alone.

I took a deep breath and kicked the door all the way open.

“All right, creep—”

Only there wasn’t a creep. As the door slammed back into the wall, the light fully illuminated the corner of the room. There was nobody in the corner, literally no body. What I had thought was a head was a large papery mass stuck up against the ceiling, an oblong maybe a foot across and almost two feet long.

I let out a short laugh as I realized how silly I’d been. In the light, it didn’t look anything like a person. It was probably just—

All the adrenaline flooded back in. I grabbed the door handle and yanked it shut. I heard it tear free from where it had smashed through the drywall, and splinter as I slammed it into its frame. I staggered back against the far wall.

“What? What is it?” My wife was at the end of the hall, untangling our son from his involuntary cocoon. She looked as panicked as I felt.

“Give me those blankets!” I demanded. “Wasp nest!”

She blinked in confusion, but at least she lifted Desmond out of the way as I grabbed frantically for his comforter and stuffed it against the crack beneath his bedroom door.

“What? How?” she asked.

“I don’t know! I don’t know.” My adrenaline crashed for a second time in a single minute. I suddenly felt lightheaded, like I might pass out. The blankets were in place. The door was sealed. As long as I didn’t fall into it and knock it open, it would be okay. “Open window, I guess.”

“It’s December!”

I didn’t have the wherewithal to argue. “Look, I don’t know. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

“What about Desi?”

“He’s gonna have to sleep with us. I’m not fighting wasps in the middle of the night.” I steadied myself with a hand on the wall as I walked back down the hallway. “Babe, you should’ve seen this thing. Twice the size of my head, taking up half the wall.”

“Maybe more,” said Des.

Petra looked at both of us skeptically. “Well, we’ll see in the morning, I guess. Come on, everybody into bed.”

As I laid back down, I wondered if Petra was right not to believe us. That nest certainly hadn’t been there when I put Des to bed last night. Were wasps even active at night?

My last thought before I fell asleep was that if they were, we’d better hope that they didn’t realize my barrier under the door was only cloth.

I dreamed of wings and stingers. When my phone alarm went off in the morning, I flinched awake at the very first buzz. I crept cautiously into the hallway, ready to retreat, but the blanket was still tucked against Des’s door and there were no wasps to be seen.

I peeled a corner of the blanket away and crouched down to listen carefully beneath the door. The room was silent. A hive that size would have some sort of noise if it were active, surely. If the wasps were all out foraging or whatever wasps did, it might be safe to knock the nest down and seal up whatever window or vent had allowed them inside.

“What are you doing?”

I jumped in surprise, with enough force to crack my head on the door. The hollow thunk elicited a laugh from my wife, who had apparently also woken up and was now standing above me, amused at the reaction to her simple question.

“I’m trying to decide if it’s safe to go in there,” I said. “Do we have any sort of full body suit? Like a beekeeper getup?”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” said Petra. She reached over me and before I could stop her, she swung the door open.

I heard her gasp and I scrambled to my feet, scrabbling to slam the door .

“It’s fine, it’s fine, there’s no wasps!” said Petra, grabbing my wrists. Her eyes were fixed on the far wall. “I’ve never seen anything like that nest, though. Wow!”

It was somehow more ominous in the daytime. It still gave the vague impression of a face, a papier mache death mask for a giant. Its rough construction was more obvious now. The imperfections made it more threatening. It did not look like art. It looked like a curse.

As Petra had said, there were no wasps anywhere to be seen. That at least was a relief.

“How do you think they made it so quickly?” she asked.

“All I care about is how quickly I can get rid of it,” I told her. “I’m thinking fire might be necessary.”

“What? Absolutely not. Be careful when you take it down.”

“We can repaint! It’ll be fine.”

“I’m not worried about the walls! I want that nest.”

“You’re crazy! I’m not risking my life because you want some creepy bug house.”

“Fine, then I’ll get it down.”

“No!” I heaved a sigh as Petra stared me down challengingly. “Just—hang out for a few minutes. We have a bug bomb in the garage, I think.”

Several minutes of fruitless searching let me know that we did not have a bug bomb in the garage. I came back to let Petra know the bad news.

“Babe, I’m gonna have to—what are you doing?!”

She was coming out of the doorway of Des’s room, the hideous nest cradled in her arms. She gave me a look that was half guilty, half triumphant.

“I got it down. It was empty!” She gave it a little shake to prove this.

“Well, that’s pretty lucky, isn’t it? You know what could have happened if you’d been swarmed by that many wasps?”

“We couldn’t have thrown that poison in there anyway. All of Des’s stuff is in there. All of his toys would have had to be thrown out. Anyway, look at this!”

“I’d really rather not.”

“No, look what it’s made out of! It’s got newsprint in it! Look, you can read words!”

She was right. The nest was covered in printed type and bits of black-and-white pictures. The words were stuck on at all sorts of angles, little scraps glued together with no rhyme or reason. There were columns and headline fragments jammed over top of each other.

“Great, so we’ve got literate wasps. I’ll put up a sign that says NO TRESPASSING so they don’t come back.”

“I don’t know how you don’t think this is amazing.”

“I think we need to get Des ready for school before I have to go to work, and I want to find how those things got in before they come back.”

Petra gave me a brief pout, but she put the nest aside and went back to our room to wake Desmond up. For my part, I checked the windows and vents in his room, but could find no sign that anything was open to the outside. I wasn’t comfortable leaving it at that, but I didn’t have time for a more thorough search around the exterior of the house. I made a plan to check after work, and if I still couldn’t find anything, we could just seal up his room again until we had time to call an exterminator.

All of the extra activity put me slightly behind schedule, so I wasn’t happy to enter the kitchen and hear Des arguing about whether or not he had to eat breakfast.

“You gotta eat something, bud,” I told him, pouring myself a mug of coffee. “Come on, we’re gonna be late.”

“I don’t want to!” he complained. I sighed and grabbed a breakfast bar to feed him in the car. It would be better than nothing.

I thought he ate it on the way to school, but after I dropped him off, I saw it sliding around the back seat of the car, still wrapped. He must have hidden it under his car seat. Kids can find the most amazing ways to cause problems for themselves.

It wasn’t a total surprise when I got a call from the school to come pick him up around lunchtime. Between the sleep interruption and skipping breakfast, I’d have been more surprised if he had made it through the school day. They said he had a slight fever, but mainly he just wanted to lie down. I made my excuses to my boss and ducked out to go retrieve Des.

“Rough day?” I asked him as we walked from the nurse’s office.

“I don’t feel very good.”

“Well, that’s why you need to eat breakfast like your mom was telling you this morning. That breakfast bar’s still in the car if you want it now.”

“I don’t want it. I want a nap.”

I thought about the unsolved problem of the wasps. “Hey, how about we put you in mommy and daddy’s bed for that nap?”

“No! I want my room.” He looked uncharacteristically on the verge of a tantrum, so I let it drop. I figured there was a decent chance he’d be asleep by the time we got back anyway, and if he wasn’t, we could have that argument then.

Unfortunately, Des was still awake when we pulled into the garage. I was mentally gearing up for a fight with a tired seven year old when we walked into the kitchen and I totally lost my train of thought.

Petra was sitting at the table. The wasp nest was in a large bowl next to her, glistening wet. It looked more like a leering face than ever.

“Look!” said Petra.

Scraps of wet paper covered the kitchen table. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle made out of trash.

“Have you been…peeling that nest?”

Behind me, Des dropped his book bag on the floor and trundled off to his room to lie down. Neither of us noticed him go.

“Look at this! It’s a newspaper,” said Petra.

“Yeah, you said that this morning.”

“But look at the date!”

She had found a piece of the header. It had today’s date on it.

“So? We found it toda—wait, how early do they deliver the papers? That thing was fully formed by like 2 AM.”

“That isn’t today’s date. It’s TOMORROW’S.”

“Oh.” I lost interest. “From like last year? So they just got into some old papers somewhere.”

“It says the right day of the week,” she insisted. “So unless that paper is like thirty years old, it’s from tomorrow.”

“That doesn’t make any sen—”

“I’ve got part of the sports page. Are these two teams playing tonight?”

“Yeah, bu—”

“And look, here’s half a paragraph about a town council meeting. I looked it up. It’s happening this afternoon.”

“But—it can’t—” I sputtered, looking for words. “What does this mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it means.” Petra pointed to a specific cluster of newsprint, her eyes shining. “It means we’re going to be rich.”

The paper was crumpled, torn in inconvenient places and translucent from the water. Still, the header was clear enough: POWERBALL.

Below, assembled from various scraps, were four two-digit numbers.

“The other two are in here somewhere,” Petra said. “All we have to do is find them. Hundreds of millions of dollars. But we have to do it today.”

It was crazy. It made no sense.

“I can’t believe this,” I told her.

“Thought you might say that. Here, look at this one.”

It was a larger scrap, a nearly complete paragraph describing a hit-and-run on a pedestrian. It listed the intersection and the time.

“Hasn’t happened yet, right?” said Petra. “Go see. You’ll see that I’m right.”

“You’re nuts,” I said, but I went.

As I approached the intersection, I kept my eyes peeled. I still didn’t believe Petra, but if somehow she was right, I knew how this stuff worked in movies. I’d be the guy who caused the hit and run. Or the pedestrian who got hit. Either way, it would only have happened because I’d seen the prediction. I wasn’t interested in getting involved in any time loop shenanigans.

I parked carefully. I turned off my car. I stayed inside.

It wasn’t a busy intersection, but every time someone crossed the road, I tensed up. Was this it? Each time they crossed safely, I let out the breath I’d been holding, and then checked my watch. The minutes were creeping by. It was always too early.

I was checking my watch again, certain that the time had passed without incident, when I suddenly heard squealing brakes and a hard crunch. I leapt out of my car to see a person crumpled against the side of a parked car and a green Nissan speeding off. I should have paid attention to the license plate, but I was too shocked by the fact that the accident had happened at all. It was exactly as the newspaper fragment had described.

People were already running over to help. No one needed me there. I was afraid of getting involved, of changing anything. My hands were shaking as I started the car. Petra was right. Somewhere in the layers of that nest were the other two numbers. More than half a billion dollars, and all we had to do was uncover it.

I had to get home to help. We had less than eight hours until the entries closed.

I burst back into the house with a breathless, “Have you found any more?”

“So it happened, huh? Believe me now?”

“Yes.” I pulled up a chair next to her. “Intangible wasps built a nest in our son’s room using a paper that hasn’t been printed yet. And somehow I believe that. Did you find any more of the numbers?”

“Not yet. I was thinking though, even if we can’t find any more, that’s only like five thousand options for the two we don’t know. We could buy one of each to make sure.”

“Only five thousand? That’s ten thousand dollars. We don’t have that on hand.”

“We can figure it out!” Her eyes blazed as she looked at me. “We can borrow it at 100% interest per day and still come out so far ahead that we’ll never even notice it. I’m not saying I want to. There are probably systems in place that flag that sort of buying behavior. But if it comes down to it, we’ll risk it.”

She was right, of course. Still, it would be much better if we could just find those other numbers.

“Okay, how do I peel pieces off of this?” I asked.

“Let me do it, I’ve got nails. You sort through the pieces over there. Make sure you check both sides.”

We rapidly fell into a rhythm. She gently bathed the nest in warm water, loosening the scraps that had been used to make it, then teased off the individual scraps to pass to me. I checked them over for numbers, discarding anything that was just words or pictures. The numbers got set aside to dry, waiting for Petra to check through them while the next level of scraps was slowly soaking free of the nest.

I heard Des call out for me at one point, but as I rose from the table to see how he was doing, a scrap caught my eye. It had a partial circle near the top with the bottom part of a W. Below it, at the bottom of the fragment, was the number 39.

“Daddy?” Des called again.

“Be right there, bud,” I said. I moved the scrap slowly toward the others, as if I thought sudden movements might scare the numbers away. The circled W at the top fit into the Powerball logo. The number at the bottom was one of the two we were missing.

“Got one!” I shouted. Petra threw her arms around me in a wet hug. Small pieces of newsprint clung to her nails. I hugged her back, but I watched those scraps anxiously. If any fell on the floor, I wanted to know where they had gone.

Hours passed. The nest shrank and shrank. It no longer resembled a head. Now it looked like a misshapen heart. I could hear how hollow it was under Petra’s gentle handling. We were getting close to the final layers.

“What if there are eggs in there?” I asked. “Or larva, or whatever wasps have. What if we open it up and there’s a queen?”

“I don’t think wasps have queens.”

“Don’t act like that’s the part of this that doesn’t make sense! What if there’s something horrible in the center and we let it out?”

As I said that, one of Petra’s nails pierced the final layer. She jerked her hand back and tore away a thick strip of newsprint with it. I flinched back instinctively, but although the internal cavity was large enough for a small dog, it was completely empty. There was nothing at all inside.

Petra let out a shaky breath. “Well! Answered that question, I guess.”

I wasn’t listening to her anymore. My gaze was fixed on the piece of paper dangling from her hand. It bore the circled P of Powerball. If it was a large enough scrap, it might have the final number at the bottom. I couldn’t see the number on it, but it looked like it might be big enough.

“Give me your hand,” I said. Petra watched as I peeled the wet newsprint away like sunburnt skin. I put it on the table almost reverently.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“That’s all six,” I said. “Tonight’s Powerball numbers. That’s all of them.”

We stared at them for a moment. I felt a mix of awe and fear. This didn’t feel real. I’d seen the accident, though. This was future information. This was going to change everything.

“We have to go buy a ticket,” Petra whispered. “There’s only a couple of hours left.”

We both went. I think we both had the feeling that if we let the other one out of our sight, the whole impossible idea might collapse. We checked the numbers a dozen times as we put them into the machine. Two dollars was such an insanely small amount to exchange for a slip of paper that was going to be worth so much.

I half-expected the nest to be gone when we got home, but it was still there, torn apart and spread all over our kitchen table.

“You’d better clean this up if you want to have dinner,” Petra said. Her mouth suddenly opened into an O of shock. “Desmond! Poor baby hasn’t eaten anything all day, and we let him sleep through dinner!”

“I’ll go see if he wants anything,” I said. I shuffled down the hall and knocked gently on his door. “Des? Buddy? You awake?”

There was no answer, though I did hear a quiet drone like a sustained snore.

I eased the door open. The light fell across the bed.

Desmond’s eyes were closed. His mouth was hanging open. The purple sheets were bunched up over his body and moving strangely, as if he was running his hands up and down underneath.

Des’s sheets are blue, I thought. My mind would go no further, though I already knew the truth. I could see where the sheets were blue at the bottom, could see where the purple was thickest and shining its true red in the light from the hallway.

I stepped robotically inside the room. Desmond did not move. The sheets continue to writhe and pulse.

I reached down. I took hold of a corner. I pulled them aside.

Wasps. Thousands, tens of thousands. They flew up in a cloud, boiling out of the red ruin of Des’s belly. Their wingbeats droned frantically as they escaped the confines of the blankets and flew—neither at me nor away, but rather, away from everything. They grew smaller and smaller, disappearing down a long hallway without changing position at all.

I heard Petra scream behind me as the last of the wasps vanished. I saw the Powerball ticket fall from her hand as she rushed across the floor to the torn and chewed body of our son. I heard her sobs, great racking cries of loss and guilt.

I looked at the blood on my hands. I looked at the ticket on the floor. The numbers would be valid, I knew. Just as I knew that tomorrow’s newspaper would be chewed to pieces to make a nest.

I intended to keep that newspaper as close to me as possible. Whenever the wasps came for it, however they arrived, I would kill as many of them as I could.

I couldn’t change anything. The Powerball numbers would win. But the wasp nest had been hollow.

Maybe I would be able to deny them something.