The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  Even as they were settling in, he saw the deranged figure of the Mama, sitting to one side on a sort of throne at the edge of the terrace. She was in a world of her own, her hooked nose fixed like a compass needle on the setting sun over the sea.

  Every half hour or so, a group of attendants with sponges and bowls of hot water entered the compound. Gently they undressed the dozing people and swabbed them down. The heroin, forming a glistening film on their skin, had a sticky quality, like crystallized honey.

  “It’s all recycled,” Janine whispered. “Everything is recycled here, even people…”

  Michael was too tired to ask her what she meant by that. He returned to his hut farther down the slope, where, if he opened the window, he could hear the waves lapping against the rocks below. The bed was crisp and comfortable, and when he lay down he noticed that also this ceiling was made of split bamboo canes. There was a shelf of books by American beatnik writers: Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr. He leafed through a book by Allen Ginsberg, then threw it at the wall. It landed with the sleeve photograph of the poet with his big black beard and melting eyes staring at him and his smooth voice in Michael’s ear:

  Be cool, man, be kind to yourself, you’re repressing it kid-do, I don’t know what you’re repressing, you oughta 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.

  No sooner had his words guttered than Michael felt a smoke of heavy drowsiness lifting him, almost levitating him off the bed slightly, so that he lay there hovering. His mind was pleasantly distended. Sleep! For the first time in many days the maggots let their host lose himself.

  At some point in the night he was awoken by a click of the latch, the door creaking and the weight of someone sitting down at the foot of his bed. There came a whisper: “Are you awake?”

  “I am now.”

  He turned on his bedside lamp and saw a young woman sitting there, about twenty years old, more or less a carbon copy of Sophia Loren, only slightly less buxom.

  “Yes. I know,” she said. “I’m eye-candy, but who cares? God gave me my looks for nothing. And what’s the real advantage of being good-looking, anyway? All that happens is you get guys swarming all over you until you can’t tell the rotten apples from the good.”

  “I suppose you must be Elvira?”

  “Yes, I suppose I must be.” She hung her head, then added, “By their deeds shall ye know them.”

  Michael cleared his throat, slightly guarded. “Sorry, but what are you doing?”

  “I came to see you. I thought I could talk to you. Is that so wrong?”

  He shrugged. “I guess it’s okay. To be honest I don’t know what to make of this place. What is it? Where are you from?”

  “Oh, nowhere.” Elvira pouted like a child deprived of her will. “Rome, of course. Everyone’s from Rome. I never thought I’d end up serving some old bag who pinches my butt and makes insinuations all the time. But I’m used to bitches. When my mother wasn’t having her nails done or lunching with girlfriends she was on tranquillizers—it’s just a polite word for drugs, isn’t it? She never gave a damn about me.”

  Elvira shifted in the bed, pulling her foot up against her buttock. A good girl does not open her legs, Michael remembered his own mother used to say. Nor does she show a white gleam of cotton covering her fuzzed pudenda. As he lay there watching her, Elvira got out a piece of semi-melted chocolate and broke off a piece for him. “You know something, I actually like you. I was watching you earlier, you seem like a nice man, not completely sex-mad like all the others.” She put the chocolate in her mouth, with a simpering look. “I never chew chocolate. I suck it, to make it last longer.”

  There was a pause. Baby talk, was that supposed to be sexy? Or was she just habitually seedy? Michael asked: “How old are you, Elvira?”

  “Oh, old enough, you’ll find,” she said. “Old enough to do what everyone else does, only a hell of a lot better. Basically I go out and find fresh meat for Mama. I bring it back for her and they fuck it.”

  Michael reached down into his bag for a bottle of Courvoisier. He took a stiff gulp at it, then rolled himself a reefer.

  Elvira continued: “Mama gives me hell all the time. She fancies me. She likes to be clear about it, she says I mustn’t work up any feelings for her. As if I would. Feelings, what a lovely word. What does it really mean? Having feelings actually means you only care about yourself, your own precious emotions.”

  “So Mama’s a lesbian?”

  “No, she’s a maggot woman; that’s what she is. It’s the old Sapphic dream, the Kingdom of Women, right? The problem used to be that lesbian women needed men so they could have children, hence the impossibility of an all-female world. Boys could be thrown in the river, of course, but they’d have to keep one or two. For breeding. But now women really don’t need men anymore. With the maggot tank they can live for ever. They don’t have to bother with childbirth.”

  “What’s the maggot tank?”

  “Mama says I have to treat her well, she says I’m not the only half-decent looking cunt in this world. I guess she’s right. There are a lot of cunts in this world, Michael. Most of them are not worth bothering with.” She stood up. “Put something on. She wants to see you; that’s why she sent me here.”

  “To ask me to come?”

  “To tell you.”

  17.

  “I expect you’re wondering why you’re here?”

  Mama Maggot, stooped in a high chair like an old and twisted parrot on its perch, seemed to hover above Michael, who found himself semi-reclined in a leather armchair, blinking up at her face.

  She looked unassuming and reasonable and he knew he was supposed to believe that maybe she actually was unassuming and reasonable. Except he didn’t believe it. She was acting, and actors have to make it clear what they are doing or they become sinister or just plain odd.

  The room was refrigerated; their breath came out in puffs of steam. Mama Maggot luxuriated in a white fur coat, though her skinny pale legs stuck out at the bottom like sticks, which rather spoiled the effect. On either side of her stood a small girl also dressed in a white fur coat, balancing on gold-sequined high-heels. From time to time, if Mama Maggot grew agitated, one of them would totter forward and kiss her cheek to calm her nerves, and whenever this happened Mama Maggot would turn to the child in question and kiss her full on the mouth, whilst intermittently shaking her head in wonder and whispering, “Thank you, my child, thank you.” As if their concern came from the goodness of their hearts.

  Michael had only thrown on a cotton slip when he left his room. He was already shivering. “Do you mind my asking?” he began.

  “Yes, I do mind!” said Mama Maggot, doing her best to maintain her benevolent smile. “You’re to be quiet, I require nothing but two words from you and those words are ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Just occasionally you may say ‘I don’t know.’ Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And don’t talk to Elvira again. She’s very mixed up.”

  “I didn’t talk to her. She talked to me. There’s a difference.”

  “To me you’re nothing but a sack of glorified fertilizer, so shut up and don’t try to impress me!” After her venom had spurted forth, she slumped with deflation and received a volley of little kisses. Then, to his amazement, she began to talk like a normal person. “The truth is I do love Elvira. She’s a little miracle, the way she’s made. Like a Swiss watch; everything works so well. But what good has it done me to love her?”

  “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.

  18.

  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.

  “What is this place?” he grumbled. “The house of no sleep?”

  “You’re not shooting dogs tonight,” said Janine with a troubled gaze.

  Nervously he put on a clean white robe hanging on the door, then followed her outside. Dim solar powered lamps marked out the path down to the main house, but Janine climbed the hill and he followed without question.

  Fifty meters below, they could make out the lit-up, screened-off terrace, where an orgy was in process. A band was playing flutes, sitars, cymbals, and tabla drums.

  “So these five people have been tricked? They’re being maggotized?” he said.

  “They’re being co-opted, yes.”

  “Is that kind?”

  “Kind.” She stared at him, shaking her head at his baffling stupidity. “I don’t think your training is working. What kind of sugar-coated Disneyland do you live in?” />
  “I think it’s just called normal life.”

  “Ha! There’s no normal life for you, my friend. Not anymore.”

  “I’m not your friend. And you’re not mine. Not after what you did to me.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You brought me here.”

  They smoked in silence, watching as the Tantric ceremony below reached its apogee, with wails and frantic drumming. “I suppose,” said Janine, who seemed to feel she had to qualify his accusation, “we all have to deal with our mortality, whatever we are: maggot people, flesh-heads, fuckwits, normals. We’re all in the same boat. Look around you; look at the world full of people sleeping their way through life. When they die it scarcely matters because they weren’t really born in the first place and they never opened their eyes. You’re awake, you could try to be happy about it. And I’m wide awake and I have no intention of dying.”

  “That’s just selfish.”

  She stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. “Idealist. Come on.” She led him down the hill. “Where are we going?”

  “Sorry. She asked for you,” said Janine, racing backwards into her obscure universe of self-justification.

  They came to a circular stone building without windows. Mama Maggot was standing outside. She took a key from her pocket and unlocked a sturdy wooden door leading into what looked like a brewery. There was a large metal tank with a thick Perspex cover and a system of pipes and filters leading up through the ceiling. The tank was full to the rim with white, churning maggots. Beyond the faint hum of generators and fans, one could just about make out the slight hissing sound of their bodies rubbing together.