The Maggot People (7 page)

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…”

13
.

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.

14
.

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.

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!

15
.

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.