The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  “I thought we were talking about you?”

  “Yes. We were. I was a kid as well, a long time ago. After the war, after all the shits in uniforms were rounded up by the Americans and the Russians and either shot or packed into trains and taken away, I went into the hills and threw away my uniform and learned about cows and milking and making cheese. They were good years. I rarely went to the bottom of the valley; I stayed around the high pastures and hardly spoke to anyone except the farmer I was working for. It was at this time that I first got interested in religion. I suppose the paraphernalia interested me, the cloaks and vestments and candles and rituals and crossing oneself at every opportunity; it was more or less the same as the army, except in the spiritual world all the killing would be done by a higher power.” He raised his paw, to make a distinction: “And interestingly one would not be killed until after one had already died. I am speaking of damnation, of course. God would fling one into a burning pit if one had not done one’s duty. I liked this, it freed humans from the awful necessity of butchering each other; at least that’s what I thought at the time. I went for it hook, line and sinker. But before I could act on it I was arrested. They put a gun in my hand and told me to start patrolling and shoot anyone I saw. It seemed reasonable for a while.”

  “Maybe you should write a book about your life, Günter.”

  “I can see you are laughing at me, Michael. In fact I did write a book. It didn’t do very well. I think it was banned, either by the Russians or the East Germans. My theories were no crazier than theirs, but humans always get murderous if anyone comes up with a different theory, especially if it involves any sort of religious ideas. God help the man who expresses any kind of opinion about the color of God’s beard. Wake up, fuckers, God does not have a beard and beards do not have a God to attach themselves to; they float around aimlessly in space. Most wars have been fought over details, Michael. What sort of trousers you should wear? Should you eat cow hocks or boiled fish? Is it correct to play a mandolin? Should you wear your hair long or shave your head?” He growled. “It makes my teeth itch; it makes me want to sink them into a larded, pompous ass.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, after I took holy orders in Rome I had even more problems, most of them because I wouldn’t respect some shit because of his cloak. You know my name should not be Günter at all. It should be ‘Will You Excuse Me If I’m Fucking Unimpressed?’ Because that’s been the theme of my life. Always.” He lay down his head. “And now I don’t care anymore. I’ve seen the progression of the human race, I remember those beautiful mountains when I was a young man. A few years after the war, a lot of shits with skis started showing up in the winters. The landowner cut long swaths through the trees and put up ski lifts. More and more shits started coming for the skiing, crowding the bars, eating cheese fondue and drinking copious amounts of beer. The amount of fucking going on was mind-boggling; they were worse than hogs. Maggots were hatching like locusts, spilling out everywhere.” He rolled onto his back and sighed pleasurably. “I wish people could try and appreciate how lovely it is to lie still and smell the grass.”

  “I guess they want to be a bit more dynamic.”

  “You know,” said Günter, “I knew a guy once; he was a filthy guy covered in tattoos and he lived in a cave and he only had two brown teeth left in his mouth. Do you want to know what he did for a living? He made soap, that’s what. And he scented it with flowers.”

  “I don’t get the connection.”

  “That’s what we are, that’s who I am… and you too. We’re the filthy ones who make soap, but we never wash ourselves…”

  12.

  In the morning when Michael woke up he vaguely remembered having been massaged in the night with essential oils, rose and something like lavender and sandalwood.

  “For protection,” whispered Ariel with a smile, adding, “We are safe here. Purissima knows how to handle them.”

  Michael looked at her. “What happened to you yesterday?”

  “It’s all so unnatural,” said Ariel.

  “What is?”

  “When they want more lebensraum you really don’t have much of a choice. They start to multiply; you feel them pressing against the inside of your skin, and you know you have to start looking for the pressure valve.”

  “The pressure valve?”

  “Sex…” She laughed, tears glittering in her eyes. “We don’t own our bodies anymore. We can’t do what we want with them. The only time they ever let me feel sexual excitement is when I’m with a straight man. I mean a man who’s not been maggotized.”

  “So the first time we slept together…”

  “… was incredible. I must have had twenty-five orgasms that night. Maggot orgasms, you know—simulated orgasms because your body no longer has the ability to… I mean, they just send the impulses up to the brain. I even had an orgasm when I came out to speak with you the first time. That’s why all I could think of to say was that silly thing about ice cream. Who cares about stupid orgasms, anyway? I’m tired of them, personally.” “So it’s just procreation for them?”

  Ariel laughed. “Yes. For them. Go forth and multiply. That old chestnut. They reward sexually aggressive behavior with strangers. That way they find new host bodies.” Her face clouded over. “But they take away a woman’s ability to have a child. They rob her of that. Not maliciously. They don’t think; they don’t do it on purpose. But all the most evil things are senseless mechanisms. A snake, the way it lashes out and bites you without even thinking about it. A tsunami. Are these things evil? I would say they are. Probably even maggots are evil.”

  Michael sat up in shock, the realization striking home. “So when you told me that thing about how good the maggots were it was just bullshit!”

  “Ach,” she said, “you were ripe for the taking. Anyway, you had a tumor, you were seriously ill.” She met his accusing stare. “Michael, if I apologized to you now it would be an empty gesture. I knew what I was doing when I picked you up. I’d probably do it again if I had to. I found myself a Provençal backwater, a village full of repressed, sad fuckers with generations of stupefied lunatics behind them. Moldering scar tissue in their attics. I put on my best dress and I walked fresh as a daisy through the village square until some dolt of a peasant came sniffing at me. By that I mean you, of course. I have to admit you were more sophisticated than most peasants I’ve had. Men who pick you flowers in a ditch and come to you with dried sweat in their armpits. With callused, dirty hands… smelling of shit, red wine, and cheap aftershave. They ask you to marry them as soon as you wake up after the first night of fucking… because they want a woman to do the cooking and cleaning, someone they can screw when they come home in the evening.”

  He breathed hard, trying to contain his panic. “How did it first happen? I mean the maggots.”

  “It was this mierda. A German immigrant from the south of Brazil. Tall blond creep. He delivered the gas bottles to my parents’ hotel. My mother used to talk to him, give him coffee in the kitchen. She liked him, or lusted after him, more like. He had very thick arms covered in hair and his face was always very brown and shiny like mahogany. His chest looked like a tree trunk, his legs like two thinner tree trunks bolted together at the top. And his crotch bulged like a mozzarella cheese hung up to dry. My father was always at work… he was a very good worker ant. Convenient for my mother.”

  “Ariel, is there anything you respect?”

  “Yes. People who shut up.” She laughed. “You know, Michael, I actually like you, and that’s bloody rare. Anyway, I think my mother used to suck him off in the kitchen sometimes.”

  “How can you talk about your mother like that?”

  “Oh God, you really are a peasant; you even respect mothers. They’re just women who got knocked up.”

  “Where do you come into it?”

  “I told you. Maggot folk need to fuck real people, or they die. They try to keep it low key, sort of like normal humans going to the to
ilet.” She trembled with revulsion. “Anyway, back to Ricardo. One day he just walked into my bedroom with his tree-trunk legs. I was eighteen years old. His testicles were so full of maggots they looked like drum skins.” She laughed uneasily, but her eyes clouded over. “It was kind of a fantasy of mine that he would come into my room, see me on the bed… and then nature would take its course. Except I hadn’t thought about what it would really be like having an ugly shit like that pumping away at my ovaries. So you see,” she sighed resignedly, “my whole family was transformed into maggot folk, all in the aid of Ricardo getting his rocks off. Eventually their doctor sent them off to a hospital… where they were incinerated… for the benefit of the human race.”

  “Christ, it’s barbaric,” said Michael.

  “The only good part,” she said, “is that maggots get old, too. They quieten down, eat their beans, and shut up.”

  She was interrupted by the sound of a creaking door.

  Purissima came barefooted across the grass, a secretive smile on her face as if pleased to have these two visitants lying like pods between her flowering roses. She dipped her hands in rose oil. “Off with your nightshirts,” she chimed. “Time for massage, then aloe berries.”

  “I hate aloe berries,” said Ariel.

  “So do maggots; aloe makes them less randy and rather docile,” said Purissima. “Remember, you are passengers…”

  13.

  Venus passed overhead and faded with morning. When Michael woke, Ariel had also faded. He spent the morning digging a trench for her in a walled cemetery at the bottom of the garden, whilst Purissima’s wailing from the house occasionally wafted down to him. He listened to the sound his spade made, and the soil piling up. By the time he’d finished, Purissima had anointed the body and placed it in a small casket.

  When he saw Michael’s devastation, Günter licked his nostrils clean and said, “You know you mustn’t take cessation of life so seriously. It’s only emotion, and emotion passes. Plus, when you think about it, nothing actually exists anyway. Everything… absolutely everything… is just one big illusion. A crock of shit, you might say.”

  “Only a moment ago she was right here. Now she’s gone.”

  “She was never here in the first place,” said Günter. “And neither are you.”

  When Michael stroked her cheek, he sensed an enormously distant response: a faint rustling of wind through the leaves of a forest. But he knew that Ariel was now in that world he had experienced once, the gray flickering world of the dead television screen.

  “Let her go,” said Günter. “She’s happier there than she ever was here.”

  Before they lowered her into the earth, Purissima screwed an air intake into a purpose-made duct in the coffin. They scooped back the soil and stood there looking at the grave. The small metal chimney was equipped with a tiny fan, turning in the wind. He let his eyes sweep across the little cemetery, and he realized there was a slightly discordant feeling about the graves around him: they all had the same metal pipes poking out of the ground, and the same glittering, spinning air intakes.

  Günter cleared his throat. “Where will you go now?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Some would say it does matter. You must go to Cannes, you must find a woman called Janine. Can you memorize an address?” He gave him a house number and a street name.

  After Purissima had gone, Michael sat there pushing his hand into the dry, warm loam and wondering how Ariel felt, lying down there in the darkness. As he dug his hand deeper he felt the moisture; he saw insects crawling; worms, centipedes and even hundreds of squirming maggots working their way up towards light. They had abandoned Ariel like rats. Crawling things, blind things, mindless scrabbling, churning things.

  At the close of that first endless day, Michael felt long languid convolutions running through his body, and it sank home that his spirit was now entirely in conflict with his physical self. He felt a slithering under his skin, listened to the moist rustling of their tiny, waxed bodies, those dumb black heads and jaws chewing endless wormholes through everything that stood in their way.

  He hated his limbs, his torso. He thought: “God rot this fucking bag of shit.”

  That evening he sat in the rose garden until the sun went down, then waited for the moon to rise. Mosquitoes swarmed around him, attracted by his heat but confused by his bloodless body.

  Early in the morning he tapped on Purissima’s door to ask for money; then tramped off with a petrol can down the long lane with its two chalky ruts and grass string in the middle. He returned an hour later with ten liters of fuel, which he emptied into the tank of the old Transit and fired her up.

  Günter was nowhere to be seen. There were no farewells. Purissima’s white knuckles parted a curtain in a window and her tremulous face hovered there momentarily. Already spent, like a memory.

  14.

  By the time Michael got to Cannes, there was a cool evening breeze, and people were sitting in bars, enjoying liquid refreshments. He sat in the fading light, watching a parade of humanity: men like puffed-up balloons of self-importance clutching colorful women with painted, surgically manipulated faces.

  Loneliness blew like a cool wind round his heart. The feeling of agitation grew until he wanted to beat his fists against the table and cry out for help.

  Who in this world cared about him?

  He went into a grocery shop and bought himself a cheap bottle of vodka. The alcohol seemed to deaden his system without affecting his clarity of mind. The slight dulling effect was just what he was looking for. He bought another bottle and drained that, too, standing in the street.

  Twenty meters down the road just as he turned the corner, he was hit by a wave of alcohol that almost knocked him off his feet. As he crawled into an empty alley, he understood that the maggots must finally have absorbed more than they could take. His hosts were evidently trying to decipher this strange energy running through their primitive systems. His skin churned, throwing up crests and ripples. He lay back, blind drunk, no longer caring what happened to him. Next to his head a bag of refuse had disgorged its fish-stinking contents.

  But the maggots reasserted control. There was a moment of extreme discomfort, then he felt his skin sweating profusely. A trickle of vodka came pushing out through his pores, until he lay there sober and foolish, smelling like a distillery. Sensation returned to his body: a jagged edge was digging into his hip, his hand was glued to a sticky patch on the ground.

  The maggots seemed angry now, and rather turbulent. You’ve had your fun, they seemed to be saying. Now we want ours.

  Michael got up and felt his limbs surging with energy.

  Ten minutes later he was sitting on a lumpy bed in a cheap hostel, staring at a tin ashtray and plywood cupboard whose doors kept yawning open every few minutes until he wedged them with a folded bit of paper. Sleep did not seem possible. The walls reeked of mold; the cracked sink in a corner stank of urine. But the shower cubicle beckoned and, although there was a slimy feeling about the rubber mat, he threw down his dirty clothes and trod soap suds into them under the tepid drizzle.

  The night was pleasantly cool. He kept the window wide open and hung his clothes from the curtain rail, letting the breeze waft them dry. Lying on the bed with the lights off, he smoked one cigarette after another. There was no need to worry about his lungs anymore. The maggots expanded and contracted inside him to simulate breathing. As they drew the smoke in, they worked to rid themselves of the nicotine.

  Poisons seemed to keep the maggot busy. Maybe a maggot person even needed copious amounts of alcohol, drugs, and nicotine to stay healthy? It also occurred to him that if one absorbed too much poison, the maggots might falter and die off? Surely they were normal organisms susceptible to disease?

  For a while he thought about Ariel and how he missed her. He remembered how once she had told him that every time one lost something, one gained something else in its place, which one wouldn’t otherwise have found.


  He wondered what he could possibly gain by the loss of Ariel.

  It seemed an inconceivable question.

  That first morning in Cannes wasn’t really a morning at all, just a sort of half-lit dawn beneath a sky of ragged-tail clouds, hounded by the mistral. His trousers had blown out of the window in the night, ending up in the narrow cul-de-sac below. For a moment he lay there wondering why he had woken so early. Then realized they must have roused him for some reason. Quickly he pulled on his damp boxer shorts and T-shirt, then carefully opened the door and listened to the murmur of voices from the reception desk.

  Tiptoeing over the corridor’s dirty tiles, he peered into the reception at two lanky, straw-haired Germans with backpacks and walking boots. They looked harmless enough, but they were showing their police badges and telling the proprietor to check the register for recent arrivals.

  Back in his room, he scrabbled together his few belongings and went to the window. It was the third floor: a jump would certainly be fatal to any normal person.

  The only important thing was to protect his brain; he must hit the ground feet-first, so that the full length of his body acted as a shock absorber.

  It was a curious feeling, casually taking a step into the empty air, as if going for a leisurely walk.

  He hit the ground with enormous force and, as if in slow-motion, watched his body compress itself into the ground. For a while he lay disfigured and broken on the cobbles. His left leg had snapped clean off against the side of a bin, and the maggots lay in piles all round it, frantically tugging at flaps of skin.

  Grabbing his severed leg, he crawled out of sight, hiding himself in a pile of refuse sacks.

  In the window overhead he saw the backpackers rifling through his room, then peering down over the windowsill. One of them waved a pistol about.