Henning Koch - The Maggot People

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 toilet.” 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…”

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.

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.