The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  One morning as they lay in their bunks like sailors becalmed in the middle of some ocean, Jesus opened his eyes and sat bolt upright in his bunk.

  “Enough of this,” he said. “Time to go south.”

  His words brought immense relief. Immediately the trade winds seemed to stir among their idle sails. They were parked in a truckers’ lay-by just west of Strasbourg, close enough to the nearside motorway lane to feel a slight tremor every time a roaring juggernaut passed on the other side of a narrow skirt of what looked like plastic trees. The landscape on both sides of the motorway was more or less flat to the edge of the horizon and seemed productive only in so far as it was covered in short, green blades of chemically enhanced growth.

  Over their heads hung an indistinct gray sky too inert even to produce rain. Its sole purpose was to bathe the planet in a murky, wearisome light.

  Michael turned the ignition and hoped there would not be too many detours on the way.

  As they headed south, Jesus did not often move from his upholstered sofa by the window. By now he’d amassed a great pile of books and magazines which he flicked through, occasionally looking up and analyzing the scenery outside. Or asking impossible questions. He tended not to be moralistic, but occasionally his sensibilities were hurt by something he saw or read.

  Once, while flicking through a copy of Vogue, his face contorted with pain and he said, “So a supermodel is considered more beautiful than other women, is she?” Then frowning, added, “Young women always have beauty because they are loaded with physical destiny. But this beauty cannot be captured on a photographic plate; everybody knows this. The makers—so many makers you have in this world of yours—persevere with the impossible task because they can’t think of anything else to do with their weary hands.”

  Another time he commented on some lyrics by Bob Dylan:

  “But he just smoked my eyelids

  And punched my cigarette…”

  “This Bob is correct in his thinking,” said Jesus, smiling with recognition as if he had come across a kindred spirit. “Sometimes the thing that is can only be described by saying exactly what it is not.”

  “Actually, that’s just the Chicago School of Disembodied Poetics. There’s nothing very profound about it,” said Ariel. Jesus told her she was mistaken. Most so-called profundity was about as illuminating as a cowpat in the grass. And yet, he added, when one actually considered a cowpat in the grass it was not as simple as it seemed. Who would have thought that, in some obscure corner of the universe, a large hairy four-legged beast would lift its tail and deposit a lump of digested organic material on the ground?

  Frequently his words were obscure or there seemed to be very little method in his ramblings. “Well, what did you expect?” Ariel whispered to Michael one night after the Master had gone to sleep. “I mean nobody actually knows what he was like. The people who told his story were basically poets or mystics—may-be they just liked a decent yarn and they jazzed it up a bit? Whatever happened in Palestine two thousand years ago has been mythologized.”

  The days passed and still Jesus did not reveal his intentions, thus prompting the question: was this just an extended sightseeing trip?

  One day in the south of France, Jesus spent the afternoon walking, singing, and watching clouds while Ariel and Michael sat in the camper bus playing cards. When Michael articulated his disquiet, Jesus looked at him sternly and for the first time Michael felt directly challenged by his words:

  “How can I give you purpose, a thing you will not give yourself nor even ask for?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Michael. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I just want to know if there’s a plan.”

  “Plans are for fools.”

  Later that night, when Michael and Ariel lay in their double-bunk, Michael wondered about his purpose in life. He tried to explain his hopes and dreams to Ariel, but he found to his own surprise that he had none—although he didn’t admit so much to her. Ariel listened with interest although it was abundantly clear to her that Michael was a typical twenty-first century man with an ethos of materialism as the oxygen of his blood.

  Besides, the very notion of “a dream” had something plasti-cized about it. Dreams were mostly actions involving a purchase: an airline ticket, a house, a horse, some land. Michael’s generation did not say, “I am a player of the drums; hear me.” Michael’s generation said, “I want to buy a drum kit.” Having acquired the physical, defining object, there was the whole problem of turning oneself into someone else, a rock star, film director, deep-sea diver, astrophysicist, martial arts expert, poker player, tycoon.

  In practice, ideas were far more interesting and accessible as nuggets of speculation than the grind of their attainment.

  After listening to Ariel’s arguments, Michael told her he wanted to live on a farm, grow vegetables, keep animals, and learn some carpentry. She found herself slightly disheartened.

  “What you’re describing is nothing. It’s not a dream.”

  He sat up on his elbow and stared at her. “What is it, then?”

  “A description.”

  “Well, in that case I don’t have any dreams.”

  “Good. Be honest. Spit it out. Life is bloody meaningless. The only things people actually like, and I agree with them, is dancing and making love. That only works while you’re young. Everything else is a bore from beginning to end.” She sighed deeply, glancing towards Jesus’s cabin, where the lights were still on.

  Since that luminous day outside the Master’s tomb in the catacombs, their sexual intimacy had once again died a slow death. A feeling of ennui had begun to permeate their hurried lovemaking whenever Jesus left the camper bus for one of his meandering walks.

  That night, Michael had nightmares about Ariel dying all over again.

  In the morning when they woke up, Jesus was standing over them, squinting down at them with a slightly bemused expression on his face. “You’re only here for the struggle to live,” he said. “Not to mystify or complicate.”

  He put his hands on Ariel’s temples and looked into her eyes. “Busy yourself,” he said. “Accept my gift.”

  And to Michael he said “Rise into the light, my umbrageous son. Go forth.”

  That same evening they crossed the frontier and made their way down tiny roads into the Pyrenean massif, until they found a remote valley with a crumbling, semi-abandoned village at one end. The road climbed to the top of a steep hill covered in scree.

  “Park it here,” said Jesus. “Park it straight and well, for it shall never move again.”

  Michael was puzzled, but he did as he was told.

  Over the next few days he followed with growing interest the news bulletins on their radio and television, brought to them courtesy of the satellite dish on the roof of their vehicle. The world had started picking itself apart while they had been loafing about in Europe. Stock exchanges everywhere were in meltdown because of malfunctioning computers. Scientists were being hired to solve the problem, but the problem was not in the programming or the hardware. The problem, in the words of one fascinated Nobel laureate, was that “the logos has changed; the laws of the universe have scrambled themselves so that we have to reinvent mathematics, physics, and chemistry using a new set of rules.” It seemed beyond their capacities and they admitted as much.

  Banks were having problems establishing what monies were held in their deposits. Customers didn’t know from one day to another whether they were millionaires or paupers.

  Cars wouldn’t start.

  Aircraft had turned into dinosaur-proportioned lumps of metal no more likely to fly than stones.

  Even power stations refused to generate electricity. In effect they had become very large, wasteful log fires pumping heat into the night, and there seemed little point in turning them on at all.

  Everywhere there was a run on candles and paraffin. Junk shops were raided for brass lamps and candlesticks.

  Gardens were ploughed up and turned int
o vegetable patches.

  A crisis meeting of the G8 was convened. The gold standard was reintroduced about one hundred years after it had been phased out. The banking system was reformed. Letters of conveyance would henceforth be used rather than electronic transfer, which no longer worked. Hundreds of thousands of clerks were employed to write out balance sheets, copy documents, and manually post all correspondence.

  The whole notion of trading in shares had to be abandoned.

  In spite of enormous efforts to underpin the system, money lost its value. In the newspapers there was a lot of clever talk about “the new Weimar Republic.” People would rather have a bag of potatoes than a pile of money.

  Meanwhile, in silos all over the world, missile systems lay moldering, and tanks, aircraft and rifles were mothballed.

  The “travel industry,” as it had once politely been named, was disbanded overnight. No one was willing to take the risk of going on holiday, in case they were unable to come home again. The available modes of transportation were also so limited that from then on, a “holiday” was usually something one undertook with a tent on one’s back and a pair of walking boots on one’s feet.

  “Out of service” became a commonplace sign, posted here, there, and everywhere.

  Armies, called out on the streets to maintain order, found themselves impotent to stop looting and fighting—although such tendencies were almost nonexistent. Before long, even elite regiments had been disbanded. There was nothing to pay them with anyway. And besides, their guns and missiles were so cranky that it was pointless pretending that they had a use on the battlefield. Even that word, “battlefield,” became quaint and archaic.

  National newspapers were no longer published as there was no effective way of distributing them. Only local newspapers were printed in small editions, and then delivered by urchins on bicycles.

  Credit card companies, lending institutions and other financial bodies simply disappeared overnight. Records no longer existed, and governments everywhere discovered the awful truth: it was not possible to maintain control over the populace without recourse to the silicon chip.

  These changes were global, immediate and universal.

  About a week after they had arrived, Michael found one morning that neither his radio nor his television worked.

  Jesus watched as Michael stood there cursing, flicking the buttons of his remote. Eventually he commented with a slight note of hilarity: “Do you miss it, Michael? Can’t you use your own eyes and ears?”

  Michael stared at Jesus, his long, unkempt locks framing his face, his long lean arms with the sinewy biceps and triceps, and, on his left inside forearm, the tattooed symbol of a fish. “Did you do this, Jesus?”

  But Jesus never answered direct questions. They seemed to amuse him, as if they were somehow off the point. “It’s not what I do that matters,” he said. “The world has changed, it is true. But do you really have time to wonder why? Do you not have enough troubles of your own? The question is, what are you going to do today?”

  He went outside and waved at a group of peasants coming up the hill with a horse. Soon they were at work, plowing.

  As Michael stood there watching their plowshare opening a long gash in the ground, it occurred to him that this—the plow, the sweat of labor—was the only thing there had ever been. Everything else had been an illusion, and the illusion had passed.

  While he and Ariel had been agonizing and theorizing, Jesus had enlisted groups of loyal followers. Men built hundreds of shelters or prepared the soil for planting. Women sheared sheep, spun wool, picked fruit, baked and slaughtered and brewed enormous quantities of beer. Jesus liked to sit in the evenings sharing a tipple with the hundreds of people who seemed to be living with them.

  Michael did not enjoy his own skepticism, nor could he deny his conclusion: that Jesus had somehow dismantled all the apparatus of the modern world, and now that it had all gone, they would henceforth have to live like peasants intent only on the simplest of tasks—and the reality of wind and rain.

  The other weird thing was that the maggots had grown rather sedate. They were content to vegetate, it seemed.

  Both Michael and Ariel felt themselves settling into torpid, bloodless indifference; they asked themselves if Jesus had increased their happiness or merely blunted their appetite for life?

  Their question did not go unanswered.

  Jesus was aware of their predicament. Even as they began to enjoy a certain preeminence, as the hundreds of people turning up in the valley began to treat them with a deference apparently due to His closest people, even as they were recognized as the ones who shared His camper van and might therefore be party to special insights and wisdom, and even as Jesus’s fame began to grow in a world where news no longer travelled so speedily, Michael and Ariel were caught up in disaffection.

  Ariel, watching Jesus at work with the peasants, commented once to Michael, “So, what will the Vatican do now? The Messiah has a Protestant work ethic.”

  Jesus, who seemed to know everything, referred to Michael and Ariel as “my brooding friends,” and one evening he deepened his definition, when he turned to Ariel over the fire and said, “Ariel, my dear woman, joy is a flower for your windowsill, not a nettle to be grasped.”

  She replied, “To me it’s always been a nettle.”

  Jesus smiled quixotically and with his bare hand picked a burning log out of the fire and held it firmly in his hand. “Do I blame the log for the pain I feel?” he said, as the flames licked up his arm. “Or do I let it go? Do I give up on my hopeless expectations?”

  He stood up and flung it as far as he could; in the night it traced a long, glowing arc across the sky.

  “It sounds so easy when you put it like that.”

  “Ah,” Jesus said rhetorically, “she wallows in malcontent while tacitly admitting the ease with which she might let go of her fears.”

  “I’m not happy here, not even with you, Master. I never wanted to live like a farmer. I’m a modern woman; I like home design and shopping and…” she added slightly idiotically, “I always wanted children.”

  Jesus seemed in a mood for preaching tonight. His jaws moved in a well-oiled and frothing manner. In the corner of her eye she noticed the shadowy figures of peasants quietly creeping up to the edge of the firelight, sitting there with their shining, magnetized eyes, their calloused hands and sprouting, greasy beards. Jesus included them in his conversation. His eyes scanned their faces and he raised his voice so that they could all hear. “Yet her worries are not as she imagines. She confuses the physical with the mental and does not realize that she is a creature of ash, wood, and earth… a creature whose corruptions can only be expelled through will. She is a shepherd of rats. She minds her flock while lamenting the fact that rats are no good to her; their fur is useless for wool and their meat is diseased. So why does the shepherdess not go to market and fetch a ram and a ewe for herself. Why does the shepherdess not create the thing she requires?”

  Jesus’s eyes seemed to have grown, and the silence of the night bent around them like a huge bell, amplifying the sound of his voice.

  From his pocket the Master took a pack of colorful balloons, bought some weeks earlier in a service station. Solemnly he gave one of the balloons to Ariel and indicated she should blow.

  As she did so, a stream of charred, dead maggots came out of her mouth and filled the balloon.

  Jesus took it from her and released the heavy balloon into the air. Amazingly, in spite of its weight it seemed impervious to gravity, floating up until caught in a high breeze. As it rose above the ridge across the valley, the unseen sun illuminated it, and it became a tiny globule of fire as it disappeared into the west.

  “If you want children, go and have children,” he said. “Open the door that waits for you. Enter your house.”

  42.

  Soon Ariel began to note something changing in her body, and she realized she was pregnant. How this was actually possible she did not kno
w. Had she really expelled the maggots from her body? Or were they sustaining the child in some sort of subcutaneous pocket?

  Michael also went through revolutionary changes. He grew fitter and leaner, and as autumn set in he spent his days picking olives with the others. Michael and Ariel and others spread nets under the trees. After harvesting, they pruned errant branches and prepared for next year’s harvest. Slowly, week by week, they picked all the olives in the valley and watched the rich oil dribbling out of the presses into twenty-liter glass bottles.

  It occurred to Michael that now that they had oil, wine, and grain all earned from the hard-won ground, they were rich.

  In the evenings, Michael and Ariel lay by their fire, resting after their long days. They longed for this child growing inside her. Often they sat with Jesus, relishing his silence.

  The camper bus had become almost iconic. In the night it seemed to tower there at the top of the hill, like some many-tiered keep of stone, surrounded by hundreds of smoking fires.

  One evening Jesus looked at them, his bearded leonine chin outlined against the flames as he spoke: “Soon your friends will come… more malcontents…”

  “Who?” asked Michael.

  “Oh, Romans, concerned with their position, as always; heavy laden with badges and laurels,” said Jesus. “Here they will only find work, no feather beds.”

  “Do we know them?”

  “Yes. One of them was once a friend of yours. He dug holes in the ground and made a resting place for the dead. I once slept there myself.”

  “Giacomo?”

  “The same.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They are Pharisees. They believe in gods of their own making, make rules for others to follow, harness the power and keep it for themselves.”

  Jesus placed a raw hen’s egg in the fire and watched it with a half-smile. When it exploded, scattering egg white in all directions, he looked up and smiled. “The rooster sits on the egg, and a chick emerges. Without her soft breast, fire consumes all things and makes them worthless.”