Aaron Simon

The Wasp

 

 

David Lewis, a short, broad-shouldered, burly man with dark curly hair and a habitual stoop, walked into the office at 8:01am, Pacific Time, on Tuesday, August 9th. He nodded and passed Hannah, the receptionist, and continued on. The fluorescent lights seemed stronger today, but he couldn't figure out why. Buzzing filled the air, but that was normal on a weekday. David made his way down the aisles of cubicles, just as he had precisely one thousand and four times before. He arrived at his cube to find seven folders piled on top of his black Amazon Basics keyboard, a couple of "While You Were Out" post-it notes covered in lewd drawings on his black Acer monitor, and, dead center of his office chair, a rancid puddle-pile of yellow viscous liquid. The smell, acrid. The sight, disgusting.

 

David fought back a retch and looked up. There, hovering over his cube wall, was Teague, a six-foot in height, seven-foot in wingspan, black-bodied, yellow-faced wasp wearing a red Hugo Boss tie. Teague shot David a malevolent look from his compound eyes, buzzed at him, clicked his mandibles, and leisurely flew down the cube wall back toward his cube in Sales, his yellow legs dangling in front of him in a way that David had, in the past, described as "pure fucking malevolence."

 

"Son of a bitch," David said. He sighed. This was the third chair this quarter that Teague had ruined, and before David took a small vacation, his manager said it was unlikely that she'd be able to order another replacement. David took a deep breath, walked behind the chair, and scooted it down the aisles toward his manager's cube.

 

"What in God's holy name is that smell?" she asked. Anna was a woman in her late 40s who'd been with AcroFile for twenty years. Today, she wore her bright red librarian glasses and a black blouse, black trousers combo. Her cube was filled with Cure posters and drawings of Edgar Allen Poe.

 

"Fucking Teague, Anna," said David.

 

"Hey, watch it. Just—oh God, get that fucking chair away."

 

"Where the hell am I supposed to sit, Anna?"

 

"Fuck, take my chair. I'm getting a standing desk, anyway. Just get that fucking thing away."

 

*

 

A few hours later, David sat in an uncomfortable chair against the wall in the Marketing team sync, centered around AcroFile's new initiative to try and astroturf social media in attempt to generate buzz to take down WinZip. Niles Merit, head of Marketing and a tall, trim man who took every opportunity to remind people of his Ivy League pedigree, droned on about compression rates and how this would revolutionize the way files were transferred online. David heard a series of thumps on the door next to him. He looked over and there, butting against the door, was Teague.

 

David shrugged, and pointed to the front of the room. Teague resumed thumping against the door.

 

David gestured again.

 

Teague shook his head incredibly quickly, his two long upper legs pointing to his right.

 

David sighed and stood up. He opened the door just long enough for for Teague to smack him in the face five times with his wings and zoom off down the hall, buzzing and clicking as he went.

 

"Is there a problem, Lewis?" asked the head of marketing.

 

"No, sir. Teague just hit me in the face with his wings."

 

"That doesn't sound like something Teague would do," Merit said. "Teague in Sales?"

 

"Teague in Sales, yes."

 

"I sincerely doubt that. I know Teague. I know Teague's parents, Lewis. Teague is an upright man. A serious and dedicated employee. I'd kindly suggest, Lewis, that you learn some things from Teague." He scanned the room, his cold blue eyes landing on Anna. "Pendleton, you're Lewis's manager, correct?"

 

"Yes, sir."

 

"I suggest that you coordinate some shadowing time between Lewis and Teague for this week. Perhaps some of Teague's work ethic can rub off on Lewis."

 

"We can set something up."

 

"Good. Now, if Mr. Lewis allows it, I would like to move on to our analytics methodology and work on determining potential audiences. Would that be okay, Mr. Lewis?"

 

David sat back down and cleared his throat.

 

Merit thanked him for his cooperation and continued on.

 

David looked back out the small window of the door and saw as Teague hovered by, glancing in with what looked like a mischievous look in his eyes.

 

*

 

At 11:45, David and Anna sat in a small conference room on the other end of the building. Their meeting turned out to be an angst-filled conversation about David's future in the company; quite different from the Twitter strategy session it was originally supposed to be. Anna started off the conversation by reiterating that David could not blame Teague every time something negative happened. David replied that the only reason he continued to do that was because, in every instance, Teague was the catalyst to something negative happening. David stated, firmly, that Teague was only being defended because his parents seemingly knew every executive in the company.

 

"So you're accusing the leadership of AccuFile of nepotism," Anna said.

 

David paused. He knew that he'd probably gone a bit too far. "What I'm saying," he said, "is that Teague has shit on three of my chairs in the past quarter. Prior to that, Teague stung me at a work picnic, leading to me being hospitalized for two months. Prior to that, Teague purposely sabotaged the Johnson & Johnson account by shooting venom at our contact's corgi's eyes and then eating the thing whole during the meeting. And who was the account manager at that time? Me. And who took the fall for Teague eating a fucking dog? Me."

 

"Teague has to eat, David."

 

David's jaw dropped. “If I went and killed a lamb in the middle of a client meeting because I wanted a gyro, you sure as hell wouldn't be defending me."

 

Anna cleared her throat. "Are you accusing us of discrimination?"

 

David took a deep breath. "No. I'm not. I'm saying that someone needs to acknowledge that Teague is a malevolent force in this company."

 

Anna checked her watch. "Look. I'm sympathetic." She looked back up at David. "I am. I've had difficulties with coworkers before—"

 

"Have any of them shit on your chairs?"

 

"—and the only thing you can do about it is to talk to them. We're getting that shadowing session scheduled for tomorrow, so maybe you and Teague can have a heart-to-heart."

 

"The hell am I supposed to say to him, Anna? I can't understand a goddamn word he says. It's just clicks and buzzes."

 

Anna took a sharp breath. "I'm going to pretend that I did not hear that." She stood up and gathered her laptop, notebook, and pen. "David, I like you. You're a big asset to this company, a great team member, and a friend, so when I say this, it's out of respect: Get your shit together with Teague."

 

*

 

The lunch rush hit the cafeteria. David skirted around the microwave queue, heading toward the black Whirlpool refrigerator. He opened it and grabbed his deli sandwich. As he did, someone knocked into him, bumping him just enough to send him just off-balance and knock his head into the fridge, momentarily blinding him with pain as his temple caught the corner. "Son of a bitch, man," David said. He turned around and had just enough time to see Teague float by with a Coke in one of his upper legs, shoot him a gesture with one of his other upper legs that could have either been conciliatory or mocking, and move on. David cleared his throat, looked around, saw that no one paid any attention to what just happened, and grabbed a plate from the nearby cabinet.

 

He walked over to the usual round table, three rows back from the back entrance to the building, on the left, next to the window, where Robert and Janie sat across from each other. Robert and Janie were platonic friends, but David thought there was probably something cosmically wrong about the whole setup; something that ultimately resulted in skirmishes along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, due to the effects espoused by chaos theory. They both had the same look: Pale, dark hair, tall, lanky, but oddly attractive in a sort of Bela Lugosi way. They shared the same interests, lived and moved in the same metaphorical key, and in all other respects complemented each other. They and David usually ate lunch together since they were the only board game fans in the office.

 

"Hey David," the two said at once. They stared into their food. Robert had a Mexican mishmash of rice, corn, beef, and salsa that was compacted into a small, rectangular, clear Pyrex container, and Janie had tomato soup.

 

"Hey guys," David said, sitting down. He unwrapped his Reuben.

 

"Teague knock you into the fridge again?" asked Robert.

 

"You saw that?"

 

"Heard it, more like, " Janie said, taking a sip from her soup. "Your voice carries, dude."

 

David grunted. He looked around. The sales team had decided to eat lunch in the building today and the noise was deafening. They took up one of the longer tables, with the manager on one end and Teague on the other. In between them, twelve men who could have been extras from a Frat Pack comedy. Teague was eating his usual: a pile of insects and rotting vegetative matter, alternating between tearing into it with his mandibles and then clicking and buzzing in what could have been laughter, sending food flying across the table.

 

"I can't believe the shit he gets away with," David said.

 

"Don't think about it, man," Robert said. "That's the way of the world. People like Teague just skate through it and the rest of us have to work our asses off."

 

"Goddamn wasps," David said.

 

Robert and Janie stopped eating for a moment, looked at each other, and cleared their throats.

 

"Speaking of, what's the new game?" asked Janie.

 

"Monopoly," said Robert.

 

"You're kidding."

 

"Nope." Robert ducked beneath the table and brought out a Monopoly box. "Do you remember a couple of years ago, when we talked about Monopoly, and then you came over and we started playing, along with that one guy—"

 

"Tim, yeah," Janie said."

 

"Yeah, that's him. Well, we never finished that game for some reason—"

 

"Tim and I broke up that night."

 

"Sure," said Robert. "Well, after you two left I took a picture of the board and counted the money everyone at the board still had. And thus, my friend, we have a game frozen in time."

 

David said, "So that makes me…"

 

"You get to be the iron."

 

*

 

Just over an hour later, after helping Robert meticulously organize the game pieces and note what happened over the lunch break, David passed the sales team on his way out of the lunchroom and noticed that Teague was watching him. David raised an eyebrow and Teague silently clicked his mandibles. David ignored it and walked on.

 

He navigated his way through the cubes and back to his desk, where he saw a new stack of reports covered in post-it notes from his manager. He moved them around on his desk and organized them. As he did, one of the other men on the marketing team, Wade, walked over. Wade was a very enthusiastic guy who was three years younger than David and wore Marvel superhero ties that, without fail, clashed with every other bit of clothing he wore. "Hey, David," he said, leaning against David's cube wall.

 

"Hey, Wade. What's up? How's the SEO farm treating you these days?"

 

Wade shrugged. "You know, it's a joy. Not everyone gets to spend their days analyzing the frequency with which words appear on a page and run that against a report generated by a proprietary, internally-developed software that tells you what sort of words you should be using on the page." David didn't know much about him, but he did know that at one point, Wade was on track to become a writing professor before his university embraced the ethos that higher education should be job training. "Anyway, that kind of brings me to why I came over. A few of us are going over to McNeilly's Pub after work. Figured you'd want to come along. You know, especially after the thing that went down during the meeting. What was that, man?"

 

"Fuckin Teague scared the shit out of me is what it was, Wade."

 

"Yeah, that's what you said. You alright, man? Teague's always been pretty solid to me."

 

"Yeah, well, I don't know. There's something there that makes him hate me, I guess."

 

"Nah, dude. I'm sure he's just razzing you. You know, it's like a frat. You get hazed a bit, but it's not like they do any lasting damage."

 

"Three freshmen died of hazing in my sophomore year," said David.

 

"Shit."

 

"Yeah."

 

"Well not hazing then. More like brotherly, uh, you know. Stuff."

 

"Yeah. Stuff," David said.

 

"Fuck it," said Wade. "Come on out tonight, man. You could use it, and Rebecca will be there. You can work that Lewis charm."

 

David took a deep breath and exhaled. "Yeah, all right."

 

"Good man," said Wade. "Eight o’clock."

 

*

 

McNeilly's Pub was located in a row of brick-red townhouses built to look Victorian while still upholding the standards and cheap construction material of 2014.

 

David walked into the pub, located in the Alphabet District and scanned the inside for his coworkers. The walls of the bar were covered in IRA recruitment posters, slogans about how the English were the worst people on the face of the planet, and Irish insults that centered around the English. The music was The Pogues.

 

His coworkers were off in the corner, near the two dart boards that had, tacked in their centers, pictures of Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II. At the moment, it seemed to be the marketing team, minus the managers and a few others. Wade caught sight of him and waved him over.

 

David walked through the bar and said, "Hey guys."

 

A gentle murmur of greeting briefly interrupted the conversation about Game of Thrones, and Wade said, "Here. Got a Jameson for you." He pushed over a double shot of whiskey.

 

Wade took it in hand and said, "You're too kind."

 

"Rebecca's going to be here in twenty. Need to get you that liquid courage."

 

"I don't need liquid courage," David said.

 

"Bullshit. Last time you spoke to a woman at a bar, you threw out a line about Plato."

 

David cleared his throat. "I was five gin and tonics in and the line was that she was the Platonic ideal of a woman."

 

"I know exactly what you were doing, but no one's—fuck it, just drink."

 

David drank.

 

Others trickled in over the next half hour, including Rebecca. She was from Accounting, taller than David, with long black hair and looked a little bit like Xena, Warrior Princess. Of course, she acted nothing like that character, being in Accounting and having as her favorite hobbies cross-stitching, paying the harp, and the occasional wild night of book club with women from her church. Further, if David had the power of his omniscient narrator, he would have known that she was one of the most approachable people in the office, and had he bothered to have a conversation with her, they would have gotten along fantastically.

 

However, he instead found himself near-paralyzed and instead ordered another Jameson. The whiskey arrived and he started to drink, finding that the anxiety he had felt not five minutes ago had started to subside. Picking himself up off the table he was leaning against, David started in Rebecca's direction when a large, hovering shape cut between him and her, making its own malevolent path in her direction. Teague had arrived.

 

David stopped in his tracks as Teague clicked and buzzed in front of him, and Rebecca played with her hair and laughed. "Damn," David said. Teague looked briefly back and David thought he saw a smile on the wasp's face, but he wasn't sure. Could wasps smile? Was that what the mandibles expanding just a little bit signified, or was it something more primal?

 

David was caught out of this train of thought when Wade clapped him on the shoulder and led him over to the dart board. "Sorry, buddy," he whispered. "If it's any consolation, I don't think there's any physical way he can fuck her without killing her."

 

"Fuck off," David said, shaking free and walking toward the exit of the bar.

 

"Hey, David, dude, come on," Wade called after him.

 

David, though, was fixed on the door. Wade continued calling after him that he didn't mean anything by it, but David had made a decision. One that had always been lurking there, deep in the recesses of his brain, since the day he first laid eyes on Teague: Teague had to die, and David was the only one could kill him.

 

*

 

"Hey man," said Wade, hovering at the entrance to David's cubicle.

 

David looked up from the analytics report he was working on, tailored for a small appliance repair shop in Des Moines. "Hey."

 

"You kind of left in a huff last night, man." Wade leaned up against the cube. "Everything okay?"

 

"Yeah, it's fine. Just got a little drunk, you know?" David nudged the bag containing the WD-40 and a large industrial lighter under his desk.

 

"All right, just wanted to make sure that it wasn't about Teague. You know, I get it, cause he is kind of a prick, but don't let him get you down, dude. At the end of the day, you only see the guy at work, and there's nothing he can really do to mess with you."

 

"He's shit on my chair three times this year, almost sabotaged me in front of the head of Marketing, and then there was the time that he left an eviscerated and half-eaten cat on my desk."

 

"When did that happen?

 

"March, Wade. You don't remember that? We had the all-hands meeting about keeping your workplace tidy and the head of facilities went up in front of everyone with a picture of my desk, and then said, outright, 'David Lewis is the filthiest human being in this company, and should be arrested for the murder of another man's pet.' You don't remember that?"

 

Wade squinted. "I might have been on vacation." He drummed the cube wall and said, "Well still, man. Don't sweat it." With that, he walked away.

 

David took a deep breath and turned back to his monitor. He pulled up Outlook and saw an email from Teague that had come in while he and Wade had been talking. The subject line was "Today." David pulled it up. The email was a long. It was about how excited Teague was to bring David into the fold of Sales and really get him dialed into what makes Sales a vital operation for the company. He said that he always admired the work Marketing did in order to enable Sales, and especially admired David's work in spinning up web-based analytics to drive sales and sales leads. He ended the email with a warm wish that by linking up later today, he hoped to better ingrain the Sales Department drive to always be growing the business within Marketing, and ingrain Marketing's creative ethos within Sales.

 

David read through the letter twice. He was shocked. It was, in fact, the most polite and optimistic email David had ever received. He looked at the recipients field again and noticed that in addition to him, Teague's manager and David's manager were included in the CC line.

 

David rolled back in his chair for a moment, creased his brow, folded his arms across his chest, and began reconsidering his plan to burn Teague alive. Perhaps all of this had been a massive misunderstanding. Perhaps this was a case of brotherly ribbing that David had misconstrued because the other party was a giant wasp.

 

Then, two emails came in in rapid succession: The first was a company-wide message from the head of HR. It stated that Rebecca Downing was missing, and that a missing-person's report had been filed. The note mentioned that Teague Willoughby was the last person to have seen Rebecca, and that Teague stated that Rebecca had hopped into an Uber at midnight after the two went for late-night gyros. Teague further mentioned that if anyone knew where Rebecca was, they should let him know too, because he was concerned.

 

The second email was another email from Teague, subject line: Today, v2. The content was simple: It was the word "Fucker" followed by a late-night selfie of Teague and Rebecca, with Teague wrapping his mandibles around Rebecca's head and Rebecca laughing. The timestamp put the email coming in after the one from HR.

 

David reaffirmed his choice that Teague had to die.

 

*

 

The security footage reviewed by the police that night showed a sudden burst of flames erupting out of conference room 1B, Teague breaking down the door, engulfed in fire, struggling to find any way to put the flames out--mostly by knocking into the walls and rubbing furiously against them. Now, due to an oversight by the contracting company that had built most of the building, the walls had been handled by a subcontractor who coated them with what had been marketed as a flame retardant paint but, thanks to a mistranslation from the Chinese company that made the paint, turned out to a highly flammable substance. This resulted in the building catching fire almost immediately. The flooring, too, caught fire once the flames hit the carpet, which itself was made from a highly flammable substance that another subcontractor used to cut costs. In-building witnesses described the scene as "like the end of The Thing.”

 

The security footage also showed one more interesting thing: David, without apparent regard for his own life, ran into the hallway after Teague and continued spraying WD-40 on the giant wasp. The security camera footage did not contain audio, but detailed analysis showed David shouting a string of obscenities as he kicked Teague as he lay on the ground.

 

Soon after the fire, and as the investigation into the fire and Teague’s murder continued, Rebecca Downing called the company's head office to note that she had taken a couple of days off to go camping and had let her manager know, and asked why there were several concerned messages from the company and the police department on her phone. The Human Resources department discussed the case and determined that their policy of "Assume murder on the first day of absence" was a bit on the zealous side and should be dialed back.

 

As for David, he spent a few weeks in the hospital being treated for burn wounds under police guard. Following his hospital stay, he remained in police lockup for three months while his case went through the system. When, finally, it did, the judge heard all arguments, reviewed the evidence, received the jury's guilty verdict, handed down the sentence for life imprisonment without parole, and solemnly stated, "Sir, like Teague, I went to Yale. And further, I knew Teague's parents. You have ruined three lives and caused immeasurable grief. May God have mercy on your soul." The gavel came down and all David heard was, somehow, the sound of the Yale fight song as the two bailiffs marched him out of the courtroom.

 

 

Aaron Simon lives in Portland, Oregon. His apartment is nestled right in between a cemetery and a swanky apartment building, with a nearby homeless encampment to add a certain spice to the neighborhood. He spends his days taking notes on meetings and his evenings exploring how much whisky he can drink. He occasionally co-hosts readings with the Hodgepodge readers group and makes board games.