Henning Koch - The Maggot People

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.

He waited nervously for the maggots to do their work; pressing the stub of shinbone and foot against what remained of his leg, while the maggots reconnected the two. Waves of pain shot through him; punitive pain of such an excruciating kind that he began to tremble and moan.

Don’t jump out of windows, they seemed to be saying. Don’t complicate our lives .

When he was strong enough to stand, he glanced up at the window to make sure the men weren’t there, then gingerly made his way over to where he had hit the ground; the spot was marked by a scattering of maggots in the gutter. He scooped them up, grabbed his trousers and ran for his life.

Twenty minutes later he was in a backstreet bar, studying the maggots in his palm.

“For once you’re in my power,” he thought. Their white serrated bodies squirmed; their black eyes were no more than specks. “You look harmless enough.”

He took one of them and cut it in two between the nails of his thumb and index finger. As he did so, he felt a sharp cattle-prod pain at the back of his head. His arms shot out. His glass hit the floor, a chair was knocked over. He recomposed himself, waited a while; then, as an afterthought, put the remaining maggots in his mouth and made himself swallow them. An enormous wave of well-being ran through him; he felt himself ejaculate strongly into his trousers. A phantom ejaculation. Christ!

From now on I have to be cleverer, he told himself. I’ve been driving round in Ariel’s rusty van and the registration must be flagged on every police computer in the country. I’ve been leaving it parked in the street like a fool while I get drunk, and I almost paid for it.

I’m alive. But does my life really matter at all?

What the hell am I doing here?

All day he idled on a disused roof: Cannes lay in disordered profusion all round, palm trees in the squares, café tables invading the pavements, cars parked profusely along the narrow lanes. From the rooftop he also had an excellent view of the Transit, smeared with starling droppings, skulking in the shade of a palm tree. Police technicians had been at the scene since mid-morning, putting up a screen and cordoning off the entire area. They removed all of its contents in black plastic bin liners. A flatbed truck came and picked up the whole damned thing with a pneumatic arm, then drove away.

Later that afternoon, Michael went to find the woman Günter had tipped him off about.

Janine’s apartment lay right above a busy restaurant with outside tables in a little flowery square with an ugly, squat war memorial and trickling fountain. As he approached he saw her on the first-floor balcony, basking in the sun like a daubed tropical bird on its nest — wearing an unbuttoned camouflage-pattern boiler suit and a turquoise bikini top encrusted with rhinestones. She peered down at him over the balcony railing, a tall glass of what looked like a Campari soda in her hand. Most of her face was hidden behind a pair of outsized, mirrored sunglasses. “Who are you and what do you want?” she called out before he’d even got close to the doorbell.