Then, later that afternoon, after a short nap, he shoves his hand up into a wasp nest. The windows in the summerhouse are low to the floor, so he has to hunch down to get his arm up between the two panes of glass, and by the time he touches the nest—a wild fuzz of movement—he’s been stung on the hand, along the length of his arm, and on his belly. Some possible reasons behind his actions might be:

(A) basic sadomasochistic tendencies/to inflict pain as a way into his soul;

(B) deeper sympathetic urgencies/to connect physically with the efficiencies of the nest;

(C) a Christian salvation paradigm/to use the pain to find a way into rebirth;

(D)direct correlation between his occasional failing as a surgeon and his desire to inflict acute pain on his right hand, his suturing hand (see A);

(E) a state of general exhaustion and boredom that brings him to attempt something stupid just for the hell of it, because he’s been calculating and thinking about the fact that when he taps the glass there is a moment when most of them freeze like rabbits, and maybe he can get his hand up there and feel the nest before they bite; he’s just sick of thinking about it and therefore does it.

He thinks, before he shoves his hand up: it is strange to be a man, alone in a summerhouse with my daughter, spending two whole days staring at a wasp nest, and maybe by taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, I can at least find the courage to destroy them with insecticide. He does feel something up there, a soft warmth from their bodies; the crisp, thin delicacy of the gray paper and, inside the cells, because he gets his fingers around the nest for a second, a soft nubile protean life-form. He yanks his hand back against the storm window, cracks the glass (a sharp crescent moon), and then pulls it down and out, swatting at the ones who have entered the room, groping for the top of the window, shoving it closed, still swatting, dancing, doing a jig around the carpet, trying to find some way past the sublime agony—pinpoint-sharp stings—and to avoid the one little bugger who seems to be coming back for the counterattack. He shuts the door to her bedroom and crosses the hall and balls himself on his bed, where, for a moment, he makes small grunting noises, high-pitched, strange, maniacal. If you were to happen upon this man, curled on the bed, you’d conclude that he was mad. His grunts are tight in the throat, growing higher in pitch. Spooning into himself, embracing his knees, making noises, heaving with agony, he’d remind you of those patients you saw at the Michigan mental hospital, haunted vestal figures of complete isolation and loneliness who because of some snap in brain function had been reduced to vestiges of so-called functioning humans. You’d think of them immediately, seeing him, and you’d say to yourself, This is one fucked-up man, in one strange situation, who has just reached up and attempted to grasp a wasp nest.