The Maggot People (5 page)

He thought of Ariel, how he had to find her, had to get back to her. Everything she said had turned out to be true. What slaves we are, he said to himself. What slaves to convention. Our lives are lies.

Night fell and as he lay on his bunk he seemed to hear thousands of tiny voices inside his body, all reciting together as they worked tirelessly to ensure their survival.

There was something intrinsically gentle about maggots: the way they rubbed softly against their neighbors without chafing. Their black, tiny eyes, devoid of expression or feeling. A multitude of maggots was almost like a body of water, modest in all its demands, always finding the lowest, simplest, and most direct path.

He imagined Ariel in front him. “Through meeting you I have become like you,” he whispered into the darkness. “For good or ill you have transformed me.”

But he knew he was in trouble, because he was prettifying the words.

8
.

In spite of his predicament, the mere idea of being with Ariel again as an equal filled Michael with energy. Now that they were both maggot people, would it be different when they were together? Would he also become telepathic?

As night set in and the hospital lay steeped in thunderous silence, he seemed to hear Ariel's voice quite clearly in his head.

“Michael, there'll be time later to think about love and telepathy and a lot of other overrated things. But now you have to escape. There's an incinerator in the hospital grounds. Tomorrow they'll take you there and burn you. It's the only sure way of killing the maggots without any of them getting away.”

“They must really hate the maggots.”

“Yes, they say they're a threat to democracy and civilization. But when you think about it, in a maggot world there'd be no war, there'd be no inequality or cruelty. Maggots ask for very little, just food and oxygen… that's the bargain between the maggot and the human. Do you understand?”

Her voice faded.

He looked up and found himself staring at the padded corners of the cell, the heavy-duty polyurethane window frames, reinforced panes and a small air vent in the wall. With some difficulty he broke the grille with his shoe and elbow, then reached into the cavity, removed the plastic grille on the other side, and, for no particular reason he could think of, pushed out his shoes and clothes.

For an hour or more he sat naked and cross-legged on the floor like a long-suffering Buddha, unsure of what to do next.

Until he felt a tickling sensation along his arm.

He looked down. His skin was literally splitting down the inside of his wrist. White maggots in their thousands were spilling out. He watched his body deflating until he lay like a hand-puppet on the floor. Soon the “bone maggots” were collapsing his cranium. Everything grew silent and dark.

Had he been able to see himself, it would have been a strange sight: his most delicate parts such as his inner ears were being picked up like weird flesh trumpets and furtively passed along ranks of squirming maggots. Michael was only conscious of a gray world, like a flickering television screen without a signal, no physical sensation at all, no awareness of what was happening. But there was consciousness.

Meanwhile, his entire body was on the march. Millions of maggots pulled his empty skin along—like an army of ants tugging at a butterfly—then carefully maneuvered it through the dusty, jagged hole. Getting the brain through was tricky, particularly as the eyeballs were still attached to their optical nerves. The maggots took infinite care not to damage the delicate tissue. Occasionally they reassembled around the brain, feeding it oxygen and preventing it from dehydrating. And on the other side they gently pullulated around it as they slowly slid down a drainpipe into the grass.

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.

9
.

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.

She remained on the floor, concentrating on the grisly thing taking place inside her head: tiny, mulching maggot mouths pressing against her cerebral cortex, gobbling at her nerve endings, muzzling their tiny lips against her emotions.

The warning light was flashing on the fuel gauge. They had no money left—they'd spent the last of it that morning on a cheese baguette.

Michael wondered how he would break it to Ariel that very soon they'd be marooned in the middle of a flat, barren landscape bisected by a long straight road studded on both sides with rows of white-painted poplars.

“Almost there,” said Ariel. “When you see a large field on the left full of deep blue lavender, hang a left. The road runs straight through it.” She winced and continued, although she was racked with pain: “There it is; take the next left, a gravel track with a string of grass and boulders in the middle. Just keep going…”

Michael saw the track and turned off. They drove through a fragrant landscape, banks of lavender on either side. Ariel wound her window down and breathed deep.

“Good. See the white house, that's where we're going.”

Up ahead he saw a cottage embedded within flowering shrubs, fruit trees, and a mountainous rose espalier, the scent of which hit him with a druglike heaviness. Ariel groaned. “Stop by the gate, I can't walk… and then go knock on the door. Be quick, please.”

Michael's eyes narrowed as he saw a slight figure, a woman in a long flowing dress standing by the wicker gate. She was holding a double-barreled shotgun that seemed almost longer and heavier than she was.

“She's got a gun.”

“It's only Purissima,” Günter commented in the back. “She's a terrible shot.”

Along the last few bumpy yards of the boulder-strewn track, the engine choked with a last-ditch lurch. The woman tapped the barrel of her rifle against the glass.

“Get out, Günter. I'm not putting this thing down until I've searched the car.” She nodded towards Michael. “Who's that man with you?”

“Don't worry about him,” said Günter. “He's harmless.”

10
.

Only when Purissima drew closer did Michael see how tiny she was: jet black hair and a birdlike body made of sticks and wire and peppercorn eyes that knew everything in an instant. She reached barely to his chest. When she spoke she had an unsettling habit of moving in closer and closer, opening her mouth as she did so, like a spacecraft docking. The listener usually found himself retreating: there is something unpleasant about an open mouth. Lips are nature's clever disguise, a decorative rim to the digestive tract.