Henning Koch - The Maggot People

“I don’t know.”

“No. You don’t know. When God looks down at you he sees a little man peering round at not much. Mr. Michael. What a tragedy is Mr. Michael. He meets Ariel, who’s been sent out to capture a fool of his sort to bring back here. Then she dies in shame. And Mr. Michael meets Janine, a stupid little self-propelled cunt tiptoeing about fearing for her pathetic life as if anyone cared whether she lived or died. As if it had any consequence. But at least the self-propelled cunt does as she’s told. She brings Mr. Michael here. And now we are going to teach him. Do you know what we are going to teach him?”

“No.”

“That’s right, you don’t. We are going to teach him to do our bidding. And stay alive until we say he should not be alive. I am responsible for you and many others; I am not autonomous. I must cull the lambs and I must lop the branches of the trees. Not by my own choice, but for the good of my community.”

“Yes,” said Michael, although he didn’t much understand what she was talking about.

“Janine brought you here for a reason. She was told to bring you and she brought you. Now I have you. Do I have you?”

“Yes…”

“You are a fairly competent liar and this bodes well. With time you will improve; we will remove your scruples. Emotion is nothing but self-glorification. You will not suffer from that sort of rubbish; you will be a clean person. You will not be looking for self-advancement or personal power or in other words the workings of the ego which is the twisted impulse at the evil core of corporeal humanity. The world is doomed, you are doomed, even I am doomed; we are doomed by time so we may as well jig our bones about and feed our appetites. Do not come here speaking of goodness or charity. These things are for the lambs; these things are sparks rising from the fire, but the wind scatters them.”

“Yes.”

“The wheat is all chaff; we must eat chaff because there is nothing else. We like you, Michael. We like your puzzlement. You are weightless and empty like cheap white bread. Ariel liked you, too. She was told to find a lost sheep. A simple thing, you might think, but there are not quite as many lost sheep around as one might assume; one does require a little intelligence to go with the confusion. An intelligent human who is lost, that’s an unbeatable combination. And Janine succeeded in this, at least.”

He was silent, resentful.

“Yes.”

“We need broken people to do our work; we need broken beings willing to do bad in the name of good. And if they are not already broken we are quite willing to do that bit for them. That is the name of the game, my little man. The church is about making moral judgments, nothing else. It can hardly ever be easy. And how can we be moral if the very fabric of the world is a blasted shroud in which we wrap ourselves? You must learn to see that all things are evil even if they seem good.”

She pressed a switch. With a humming sound, a large glass tube rose smoothly out of the floor, until she sat entirely encapsulated within. The two pixies at her side had stepped away; there would not have been room for them inside. One of them fetched a bulky silvery gun, which she fitted into Michael’s frozen hand. He could hardly bend his fingers and the metal was so icy to the touch that it stuck to his skin.

The cold had got to him. Not only the cold of the room, but the coldness of her words, the cold realization that Ariel had sought him out, had picked him for all the most unedifying reasons. He had put his foot into the noose she had held up for him with the very same forced smile he was seeing now, plastered extravagantly across Mama Maggot’s face.

“In case you get the measly idea of trying to shoot me, please be informed that this is a bulletproof screen,” said Mama Maggot.

The other girl fetched a Labrador puppy. She patted its golden yellow head and put it down on the floor, where it started flopping about and prancing playfully. Michael looked at Mama Maggot and somehow it did not surprise him that her smile had grown even sweeter.

“This is a very inconsequential exercise, Michael. But I love it more than any other. It is a sort of demonstration. An inversion. In a moment you will kill that thing. You will point your gun at it and you will pull the trigger. Why, you might ask yourself? Why do this to a little innocent thing only just setting off on its journey through life?”

Michael decided that his available list of retorts would not do, so he kept his eyes on the old bag and waited.

“Because this little thing is an illusion, Michael. In fact it is an evil thing, a brutal thing with no morality, no soul. It absolutely must be killed.”

“No.”

“Oh, but you will do it. You will not like doing it, but if you fail to do it I shall instruct one of my little ones to impale your brain…” She nodded to his left and Michael saw that one of the fur-coated children had raised a long spike towards the top of his neck, holding a little bronze mallet in the other with which to drive it home. Her tiny face had taken on a concentrated quality, and he realised this must be one of her special skills, something she had been schooled to do.

The tip of the spike certainly looked sharp enough to penetrate bone and effortlessly slide through a soft sack of membranes.

“Now that your training has begun you will be expected to kill a great many of these cute little things, Michael. You will be surprised at yourself. You will learn to accept it. You will learn to sleep easy in spite of all your disgusting deeds.”

He glanced nervously at the twisted child behind him, worried that she might take the initiative. It probably would not hurt very much, he reflected. There would be a very brief pain that was not really a pain, more like a high-energy particle beam blinding one. Great pain overwhelms the senses, he had read somewhere. The small troubles of life, a grazed knee, a broken tooth, a scratched retina, these were the painful things. But a skewer through the brain might even be pleasurable, if handled expertly.

Michael raised his gun and considered the possibility of disobeying her and giving up the ghost. In the end he listened to a deeper, protesting voice telling him to do what she said. Was this the selfish ego she had spoken of, prompted by fear?

The barrel was equipped with a silencer. It made hardly a noise, only a sort of thud that he recognized from countless American films. It was much easier than he had thought.

The soft-nosed bullet shredded it utterly, leaving a trail of blood and gore. One moment there was a puppy there, jumping about. And then there was no puppy.

As soon as he’d fired the weapon and completed his task, one of the fur-robed girls tottered up to him and took his weapon away.

With a hum, the glass tube sank back into its recess in the floor. Mama Maggot stood up. “And so, Michael, now it is time to ask ourselves the question; is it more painless to die cleanly than it is to live in pain?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, but I think you are beginning to learn. I didn’t know you were such a good boy, Michael. I suspected that I would never see you again outside this room. I suspected it.” She smiled as if she was pleased that she’d be seeing an awful lot more of him. Pursing her lips, she continued: “ I don’t know what you’re repressing, you ought to just feel it and do it… you know? Feel it and do it, in that order. You know why? Because you’re okay, that’s why.”

When he heard his own words repeated to him, he looked up and was properly afraid for the first time.

After a few days of training, Michael was again woken one night at about two or three. Janine was standing over him, insistently shaking his shoulder.