He has just blasted a wasp nest with insecticide and is standing at the window examining a single wasp that somehow endured the ordeal; a single wasp he dubs the Lone Survivor, standing astride the flange of the window (some kind of factory defect in the way the window meets the frame, he thinks), fiddling his leg in his jaw, cleaning himself judiciously, seemingly ignorant of the plight of his fellows, who are mostly dead, falling to the windowsill below or writhing into themselves with a tremendous fury, performing twisty dances, smearing themselves with Knockdown. Those who weren’t struck directly by the Knockdown flew wildly for a few seconds in the mist. He sends another blast into the nest and mutters: That should do it. Then he goes downstairs to refill his coffee mug and comes back up to find the Lone Survivor still poking around the top of the nest. For several days he has observed their habits and the way they organize themselves around the required tasks of keeping the hive alive, going out into the yard—it’s been one hell of a hot summer—to forage for food, bringing back tidbits of stuff, bits of protein food matter and leaves and even, in one case, a piece of something that looked very much like a potato chip. He’s been up there for hours at a time, going only to use the bathroom or to eat or, in one case, to drive into town to pick up a few packets of shingles—relishing the butcher paper wrapping, the heavy feel of the tar slabs as he threw them down into the trunk—because from his vantage at her window he noticed that the shed across the yard, which he built for Lydia’s gardening tools, needs to be reshingled. The wild intricacy of their work fascinates him; the solitude and silence of the nest, too, and the way there seems embedded in their frenzy, in the briskness of their movement during the apex of the hot afternoon, a deeper significance, turning the nest into a kind of mandala. At the window he tries to pin words to it. He’s weary from lack of sleep and has already, a day ago, done something astonishingly strange, shoving his hand up there and trying to grab it and instead, of course, getting stung up and down his arm, and on his belly. He feels a sinking sensation in his chest. He feels deprived of air. His rib bones are aching with a desire to weep. The Lone Survivor searches the yard—the high cirrus clouds sweeping in from the Atlantic. A milky sky holds a single gull swooping over the three pines and the maple. The maple is deep green and out of place, trying to stay firmly rooted in the soft soil, moated by poison ivy. The Lone Survivor is mulling the vista, jittering his wings tight to his beautiful thorax, his glistening black body, adorned with a single red stripe, quivering. A soft inland breeze has worked through the dune head. He flutters lightly, gives a twitch with his feelers, and then—while the doctor mutters, Please wait, hold it right there, don’t move, my little friend, I have something to say to you—launches skillfully into the air, dipping slightly until he becomes just one more bit of fuzz lost in a sea of chaff, even as the doctor tries the best he can to keep an eye on it, saying softly to himself, I don’t know what to do with all of this, and then hearing, down below, the crunch of gravel as the minibus from camp pulls up, the mutter of a diesel engine, and then the slap of the screen door downstairs as Andrea enters the kitchen.