by Henning Koch
“Oh, dear God,” he said, sitting up abruptly. “I’ve been such an idiot.”
“Why?”
He looked at her. “I’m going to tell you the story of my family. Okay? It’s a very sad story so I’ll keep it short. Dwelling on it won’t improve things, I mean. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Suicide. Arsenic. Disinheritance. Obsession with money. Financial ruin. Broken hearts. Mad people spreading unhappiness all round them.”
“Sounds like any other family to me,” said Ariel chirpily. “And? What’s your point?”
“And I want to finish with the whole thing. That’s all.”
Smooth as a snake, she sat up, slowly uncoiling her limbs and eyeing him with an expanding smile as if she meant to swallow him whole. He thought: you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, but you’re mad, mad, mad. And I should have seen it; I should have avoided it!
“I’m not mad,” she said.
Michael got out of bed and started getting dressed.
Ariel was watching him, her face analytical. “As you’re leaving anyway, I’ll tell you.”
His movements grew hasty; he fiddled with his socks, desperate to be gone. She launched into her personal myth. “Because we’ve slept together, you’re going to turn into someone like me. A maggot person.”
He gave her a tense grin. “My God, Ariel,” he said. “What’s a maggot person?”
“It’s someone whose body has been taken over by maggots. Invaded and conquered. The maggots eat your organs, they take over the functions of those organs, and they’re much more efficient than you ever were. They eat everything in your body. The only thing they don’t touch is your brain. You may find this unbelievable, but I’m actually solid maggot.” She stood up in the bed, quite naked, and twirled for him, like a ballerina.
With resignation, Michael said: “Who would ever have thought it?”
“My dear man, you can pity me but later you’ll know I was telling you the truth all along.” She glared, then continued: “There’s even a group of specialized maggots that eat your bones and form a hard core inside the rest of the maggots. The maggots pass oxygen to your brain. The maggots synchronize their movements, they work like muscles so you can walk and do whatever you like. Some of the best athletes in the world are actually maggots. People call it doping, but it’s actually just maggots. Remember that World Cup final when Cristiano Ronaldo went strange? He was just having a few problems with his maggots. You see?”
“Aha.” He was lacing up his shoes now.
“You know when you saw my skin churning?”
“Yes.”
“That’s when the maggots change places so they can all have some of the food a person has eaten.”
“Okay.”
“The maggots control all your bodily functions. Only about once a week will you need to excrete any waste products. And it will be a very small amount. Like bird droppings.”
“Look, Ariel. I’m so sorry. But I’m going now.”
“You’re going to miss me terribly, because from now on you won’t be like other people. In about a week you’ll start realizing the maggots are taking over your body. You’ll be in a lot of pain and no painkillers will be of any use because the maggots will eat the painkillers.”
Panicked, he moved towards the door, but she followed him.
“Just for your sake I will stay here another ten days. Ten days, Michael. But don’t tell anyone, especially not your doctor. If you do, and I think it’s possible you will, you mustn’t mention me at all, or they’ll come here looking for me. In fact, your doctor will call the authorities if he realizes you’re a maggot person.”
He touched her arm. “I’ll come and see you.”
“I’m taking a big risk telling you all this. Most of my kind would just clear off now. But I’m not like them.”
He stepped out of the door into the slanted, early-morning sunlight. The mistral was blowing, and he watched the frothy sea rolling in. He breathed deep, steered his steps back through the sandy, grassy pine woods along the rutted track where people took their four-wheel-drives down to the dunes in summer.
He took one last look at the house, where she was still standing by the gate, her hair blowing in the wind, then shook his head to be rid of her.
6.
A few times in the days that followed he made his way to the dunes and lay in the sand behind a tuft of sea grass, with his binoculars trained on the house—like a regular psychopath. Nothing ever moved there. Just once he saw the Alsatian emerge and flop down on the front step. Minutes later Ariel came out with a morning coffee and sat down beside him. They stared out at the sea, a sort of deep moroseness hanging over them.
At the sight of her face so far away, he found himself missing her; all that caustic wit and energy of hers, wasted on a sourpuss dog when she might have used it to much better effect on him.
A few days later he woke up in the night with an excruciating pain surging through his body. He twisted in the bed, listening to the strange grunts he made when the pulsating pain grew too much to bear, especially in the region of his heart. He seemed to hear the sound of tiny teeth methodically working their way through his edible mass.
Like a succulent plant being stripped of its leaves and flowers.
His thoughts turned to Ariel in her scruffy bungalow, all by herself and struggling with her delusions. Should he not have stayed and helped her?
This pain is psychosomatic, he told himself.
But before long he began to wonder; her predictions came back to him. The pain turned to waves of cramp passing across his skin with a sort of churning effect that he recognized from the evening in the hammock, as if his muscles were being resynchronized by maggots moving in ranks beneath his skin, passing like an infestation of locusts from one organ to another.
His heart—he felt—had already been vanquished, replaced by a tight ring of maggots flexing their tiny bodies to pump the diminishing bloodflow through his disappearing veins. The hours passed in excruciating torment. At first light when he left his bed to go to the bathroom, he was stunned with fear when he filled the toilet bowl half to the rim with thick red blood and unspeakable lumps he dared not even think about.
She was right, he thought, glittering with sharp terror.
He’d read somewhere that when the human body comes to the end of its life, the mind often goes through a moment of light-headed clarity. But if these were his final moments, how could it be that he felt himself trembling with such energy—like a battery fully charged? He felt strong enough to kick the door down and sprint up and down the hills for miles. And how could he explain this sudden raging hunger that drove him into the kitchen, where he methodically worked his way through an entire honey melon and peeled off slice after slice of sticky prosciutto, swallowing almost without chewing?
As he stood there, he felt another spasm of hemorrhaging, as if another major organ had just been consumed. Quickly he reached for the sponge. How much blood was there in a man, he asked himself? At what point did the heart resignedly admit that it was only pumping air?
The blood continued running down his legs, collecting in a pool around his feet. Liters and liters of blood. A rivulet started moving across the kitchen floor towards the cooker. He picked up a mop, and cleaned it up. As he worked, the gush turned to a trickle. Then stopped.
After taking a quick brackish shower beneath the rumbling spout, he pulled on a pair of baggy canvas trousers, laced up his shoes and stood in the kitchen, arrested by the sight of his painting of the cone-shaped mountain. Sunlight, entering through the top half of his kitchen window, was illuminating its high ramparts, where a stratospheric wind seemed to be attempting to clear a few whisks of cloud. He saw the figure of Ariel leaning out to hang a shirt on the washing line. But when he leaned in closer he saw that it was just the top half of a human skin.
What seemed beyond all doubt now was that Ariel had knowingly passed on her parasite. Which me
ant that everything else she’d said was also true. Including her invitation for him to go with them to Switzerland.
He closed the door behind him but left it unlocked and stood on the front step for a moment, listening to the swifts. It was a familiar sound, reminding him of long empty afternoons.
I am not like you, he thought, watching their darting forms. You always come back. But I won’t.
7.
Alain was pretty decent about it. Michael turned up in the middle of the morning news bulletin, but he was invited in and given a syrupy coffee from a blackened pot, topped up with milk that had boiled and formed mucous membranes.
Ceremoniously, Alain turned off the television and sat down with a grave frown.
“Are you troubled, my dear boy? You look troubled.”
Michael thought about it, and oddly enough decided that he wasn’t.
“Actually I just came to say goodbye.”
“Off to England, are you?”
“No. To Switzerland.”
There was a ponderous pause, while Alain turned the bread he was frying in deep oil, cracking a few eggs also and tipping them in. Alain didn’t have much of a notion of healthy eating. He filled two plates and put one of them in front of Michael, nodding at him with a simple, monkish exhortation: “Eat, my son.”
Michael obliged, whilst launching into an explanation. “There’s been a bit of a development. I met a girl.”
“Aha.” Alain’s eyes flashed like a checkered flag. “And she’s broken your heart?”
“No…”
“Taken your tranquility? Involved you in bestial practices?”
“Alain, it’s nothing you could ever understand.”
“Ah, well, that’s true, I’ve spent my life avoiding the tainting influence of women. It’s a question of control, Michael. The minute one lets them in close they start to colonize one. Women have fearsome appetite for territory. They start to till the ground and prepare for the next generation. They’re dynastic and not quite in command of their own desires, poor things.” He stopped with a shrewd glint in his eye. “I saw her, of course, that peripatetic thing. A handsome girl, very likely devilish, I’d say.”
“Certainly devilish, yes. I sort of liked her.”
“Of course you did, you liked her for all the wrong reasons.”
“I was wondering if you might be able to call your friend, the retired doctor.”
“Ah! I might have known…”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Indeed…” Alain went to his telephone. Michael listened to his homely voice echoing comfortably between the seasoned walls.
Ten minutes later the doctor’s knotty hand tapped the window before he pushed the door open and stepped inside, greeting Alain with a meaningful glance and casting his eyes on Michael as if he were an ailing bull in the farmyard. “So here he is,” he murmured through his nicotine-stained moustache. “Nothing that a jab won’t set straight. Not to worry, young man. What are your symptoms?”
“It started this morning, on the toilet,” said Michael, but he thought it best not to tell him how much blood he’d lost.
“Of course it did…” said Alain.
“I’m bleeding.”
“Yes, you are, bleeding for your sins, I’d say,” said the doctor, holding his stethoscope against Michael’s chest; then gave it a puzzled shake. “Strange. I’ve had this thing since 1953, it’s made in France, you know. But now it’s packed up. Not to worry, though, I don’t expect you’re having a cardiac arrest.”
When he took Michael’s blood pressure, his eyebrows shot up and stayed there like a pair of rampant caterpillars. He pumped up his equipment a few more times and tried again, as if to assure himself that he wasn’t mistaken, then asked Alain to come and have a word with him in private.
The two men talked in low voices behind a frosted glass door.
When they came back they looked conspiratorial and ill at ease.
“Am I dying?”
“Not yet, you’re not,” said the doctor, then corrected himself. “We don’t know what’s wrong with you, all we know is your blood pressure’s zero…”
“And when that happens I have to call a church official in Toulouse… it’s regulations,” Alain filled in. “They know about this problem you’re having; they can help you.”
“A church official? What’s the church got to do with this?”
The doctor’s old face softened, as if speaking to a child. “You don’t have a wife, Michael. Have you been seeing putaines? Technically speaking there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as proper precautions are taken.”
“I haven’t seen any putaines,” said Michael defensively.
“And the girl… the one who’s been walking about in the village?”
“I only had an ice cream with her.”
“I’m very sorry.” Alain mopped his forehead and looked, more than anything, thoroughly frightened.
Michael noticed that they both kept themselves on the other side of the kitchen table, as if they were afraid he might at any minute attack them. Though he tried to be unobtrusive about it, the doctor busied himself putting things back in his doctor’s case and did not stop until he had surreptitiously laid his hand on a scalpel.
Twenty minutes later two security men came to take him away. One was tall and thin in a tight-fitting brown suit, a classic pedophile type with a receding chin, simpering eyes and trousers finishing halfway up his ankles. The other was short and squat, in a cream-colored suit, his face hidden behind steel-rim aviator sunglasses, like a cocaine dealer from Grand Theft Auto.
“Where are we going?” Michael asked as he was led away. Oddly enough he was not afraid of them, though he felt he probably should be.
The short one turned round and gave him a look of unmistakable brutality. “You go where we go, kiddo. And we go wherever we want. Now zip it! We’re not here to listen to the likes of you.”
They’d parked a black vintage Citroën outside. A few kids were standing there admiring it as Michael emerged with the men, who’d handcuffed him.
After an hour’s drive they rolled up outside a secure psychiatric unit with guards at the gates. The car door opened; he was dragged out and jostled into a gray corridor with a highly polished floor squeaking under his sneakers.
“Where are you taking me? What’s the matter with you?” he cried at the nurses, but to his surprise one of them got out a rubber baton and walloped him a few times. Unceremoniously he was dumped in a small, blank cell. He lay on the floor as he listened to the fading squeaks of their gym shoes.
Humanoid waste, piece of shit, deserves to die and will…
After he’d calmed himself down, he sat up against the door, staring at his shoelaces for an hour. Occasionally the waves of pain inside returned, but all in all he was clearer than he’d been in years; in fact, although he was in a cell, he felt he’d started on his road to Damascus. Thank God.
He thought of Ariel, how he had to find her, had to get back to her. Everything she said had turned out to be true. What slaves we are, he said to himself. What slaves to convention. Our lives are lies.
Night fell and as he lay on his bunk he seemed to hear thousands of tiny voices inside his body, all reciting together as they worked tirelessly to ensure their survival.
There was something intrinsically gentle about maggots: the way they rubbed softly against their neighbors without chafing. Their black, tiny eyes, devoid of expression or feeling. A multitude of maggots was almost like a body of water, modest in all its demands, always finding the lowest, simplest, and most direct path.
He imagined Ariel in front him. “Through meeting you I have become like you,” he whispered into the darkness. “For good or ill you have transformed me.”
But he knew he was in trouble, because he was prettifying the words.
8.
In spite of his predicament, the mere idea of being with Ariel again as an equal filled Michael with energy. Now that the
y were both maggot people, would it be different when they were together? Would he also become telepathic?
As night set in and the hospital lay steeped in thunderous silence, he seemed to hear Ariel’s voice quite clearly in his head.
“Michael, there’ll be time later to think about love and telepathy and a lot of other overrated things. But now you have to escape. There’s an incinerator in the hospital grounds. Tomorrow they’ll take you there and burn you. It’s the only sure way of killing the maggots without any of them getting away.”
“They must really hate the maggots.”
“Yes, they say they’re a threat to democracy and civilization. But when you think about it, in a maggot world there’d be no war, there’d be no inequality or cruelty. Maggots ask for very little, just food and oxygen… that’s the bargain between the maggot and the human. Do you understand?”
Her voice faded.
He looked up and found himself staring at the padded corners of the cell, the heavy-duty polyurethane window frames, reinforced panes and a small air vent in the wall. With some difficulty he broke the grille with his shoe and elbow, then reached into the cavity, removed the plastic grille on the other side, and, for no particular reason he could think of, pushed out his shoes and clothes.
For an hour or more he sat naked and cross-legged on the floor like a long-suffering Buddha, unsure of what to do next.
Until he felt a tickling sensation along his arm.
He looked down. His skin was literally splitting down the inside of his wrist. White maggots in their thousands were spilling out. He watched his body deflating until he lay like a hand-puppet on the floor. Soon the “bone maggots” were collapsing his cranium. Everything grew silent and dark.
Had he been able to see himself, it would have been a strange sight: his most delicate parts such as his inner ears were being picked up like weird flesh trumpets and furtively passed along ranks of squirming maggots. Michael was only conscious of a gray world, like a flickering television screen without a signal, no physical sensation at all, no awareness of what was happening. But there was consciousness.
