Henning Koch - The Maggot People

A few hours before dawn, Michael began to take shape again and his vision and hearing returned. Also his physical sense of self — his use of arms and legs. He stood up and dusted himself down, relieved to be back in charge of his faculties and somewhat surprised to find himself in the garden outside the hospital. It seemed to him now (and ever afterwards) that the physical world was a sort of illusion facilitated by his body, a construct of his physical senses.

He climbed the perimeter fence and walked into a tinder-dry forest. His mind was distracted. A part of him was still in that parallel universe he’d temporarily entered.

He walked through the world as if he were experiencing it for the first time. Moonlight had magically transformed the olive groves into billowing seas of silver. Crickets were grinding deafeningly — a host of sewing machines secreted in the trees. The air teemed with insects. Overhead, he heard and saw a bat crunch its microscopic teeth into a moth. From an adjacent field beyond a stone wall came the slightly absurd and almost mythical braying of an ass, exactly like a creaking water-pump. There was a sacred language to all this, a language humans no longer understood.

He followed a dry watercourse to the bottom of the hill, where he rejoined the road and waited for Ariel, whose arrival seemed imminent. He had a sense of her setting off at this very moment from the decrepit bungalow by the sea where the rollers were still breaking with repeating thunder. He saw her pale face through the windscreen. He saw Günter’s lolloping gait as he leapt into the back through the sliding door. Probably the engine started on the third try, after some cursing. And their wheels spun in the deep sand as they climbed the rutted track, leaving wheel marks that the wind would quickly rub out after they had gone.

After they had picked him up, they travelled for hour after hour down the motorway, with the parched hills stretching out on either side. Everything was dry, everything was dreaming of water, but water there was none.

Ariel was more at ease than he had seen her before, no longer nerve-racked. She concentrated on her driving and seemed to have a notion of being on their way and nominally at least going somewhere .

Michael felt strange in their company, like a refugee among an unknown people. All the emotional intensity he had first felt about Ariel seemed utterly ludicrous now. Hindsight is a terrible companion, filled with the “could-have-done” or “should-be.” Sitting in the van, looking out glumly at the passing hills, he felt he was being overrun by conditionals.

Günter was lying on an old rug in the back, peering intently into a copy of Houellebecq’s Platform and awkwardly turning and creasing the pages with his humid nose. From time to time their eyes met in the mirror. Finally, stung by Michael’s glances, the Alsatian looked up and said to him: “In case you’re wondering… my name is Günter. I’m a person; I was even born somewhere, admittedly somewhere not very spectacular. I consider myself an Austrian but I don’t expect the Austrians would agree.”

“I never said you weren’t a person.”

“Sometimes people don’t need to say very much; you can tell what they’re thinking.”

“Well I wish I knew what to think and I wish I knew where we were going.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,” said Günter with a glimmer of a smile and a nod at Ariel: “She may be keeping very quiet but she’s feeling very decisive. Those long weeks in that god-awful cabin with nothing but the sun and that brutal sea. It grilled the truth out of her; she’s begun to understand there’s no choice but to come in. Right, Ariel?”

“Come in where?” said Michael.

Ariel turned her head and looked at him. “We’re going to a place where maggot people go for collection… to be processed, basically.”

Again, Michael felt the churning of hindsight in his stomach, the fierceness of his regret. “You make it sound like a meatpacking plant.”

Ariel was humorless about it. “When people die, Michael, what happens to them? Shall I tell you? They’re cleaned and prepared and wrapped in winding-sheets, then they’re laid out in a box and either buried or incinerated.”

“So what?”

“And we’re no different. The only difference is we don’t take it so seriously.”

There was a silence while Michael tried to work up the courage to say the obvious thing. He was reluctant to do so in case it led to derision. “Why do you keep talking about being dead, Ariel? You’re not dead. Why don’t you think about something more cheerful?”

Günter cracked up in the back. “You hear that, girl? Think about something more cheerful.”

Ariel didn’t bother replying to that one. She kept her hands steadily on the wheel and seemed to enjoy pushing the old van to its maximum speed as they clattered down the motorway, occasionally managing to squeeze past a smoky old lorry.

After those few moments of peace and quiet, Ariel punched the steering wheel and broke into long-winded cursing. “Would you believe it?” she cried, shaking her head at Günter. “They’re starting.”

“Starting what?” said Michael, finding that Ariel was staring at him with a vaguely infuriated expression on her face.

“You waited too long, that’s why,” said Günter. “You waited for Mr. Ferdinand here and now the countdown’s started.”

“I can feel it. They’re starting. What I mean is I can’t feel it. I can’t feel my feet, I can’t feel my legs! They’re sleeping; they’re dying.”

“Is that my fault?” Michael threw in.

For the first time there was something raw about her face, meaning that her emotions were simmering to the surface like volcanic bubbles as she turned to him and with an almost amused expression on her face, as if she were entering the world of absurdity, asked in a very matter-of-fact voice: “Where will you go without me?”

“Why would I go anywhere without you?”

“Poor you, you don’t know anything,” said Ariel. “About your situation. There’s a whole maggot world out there you know nothing about. Meeting me was bad luck for you. I told you from the start… I won’t do as I’m told; that’s my problem. I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Who, for God’s sake?”

She winced again with the effort of explaining. “The maggot survivors, I call them. A bunch of fuck-ups who spend their time in purple robes, prolonging their meaningless lives and inventing a lot of useless shit.”

She grew silent, and Michael decided not to probe her, even though he was thoroughly mystified. Purple robes? Who wore purple robes? Priests? He opened his mouth to speak, but when he looked at Ariel he stopped himself. Her blanched face was wrinkled up like a concertina. She let go of the steering wheel and clutched her forehead with a moan: “They’re eating me, the little bastards.”

From the back of the van he heard Günter’s voice: “Michael, if I were you, I’d grab that wheel.”

He took the Alsatian’s advice. Stunned, Ariel slid to the floor with her fingertips pressed to her temples. He clambered over into the driver’s seat while she dragged herself into the back. The kilometers slid by like slow contractions.

The petrol gauge was almost on zero. Ariel spoke from the floor: “Take the next exit; get off the motorway.”

No sooner had she spoken than he saw a sign, then a slip-road running down a long incline bordered by tall yellow mustard flowers and wild poppies.

“Turn right at the top. Follow the signs to Vegnier-du-Lac.”

Again, he followed her instructions. They drove for another twenty minutes.