“I was wondering if you might be able to call your friend, the retired doctor.”
“Ah! I might have known…”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Indeed…” Alain went to his telephone. Michael listened to his homely voice echoing comfortably between the seasoned walls.
Ten minutes later the doctor’s knotty hand tapped the window before he pushed the door open and stepped inside, greeting Alain with a meaningful glance and casting his eyes on Michael as if he were an ailing bull in the farmyard. “So here he is,” he murmured through his nicotine-stained moustache. “Nothing that a jab won’t set straight. Not to worry, young man. What are your symptoms?”
“It started this morning, on the toilet,” said Michael, but he thought it best not to tell him how much blood he’d lost.
“Of course it did…” said Alain.
“I’m bleeding.”
“Yes, you are, bleeding for your sins, I’d say,” said the doctor, holding his stethoscope against Michael’s chest; then gave it a puzzled shake. “Strange. I’ve had this thing since 1953, it’s made in France, you know. But now it’s packed up. Not to worry, though, I don’t expect you’re having a cardiac arrest.”
When he took Michael’s blood pressure, his eyebrows shot up and stayed there like a pair of rampant caterpillars. He pumped up his equipment a few more times and tried again, as if to assure himself that he wasn’t mistaken, then asked Alain to come and have a word with him in private.
The two men talked in low voices behind a frosted glass door.
When they came back they looked conspiratorial and ill at ease.
“Am I dying?”
“Not yet, you’re not,” said the doctor, then corrected himself. “We don’t know what’s wrong with you, all we know is your blood pressure’s zero…”
“And when that happens I have to call a church official in Toulouse… it’s regulations,” Alain filled in. “They know about this problem you’re having; they can help you.”
“A church official? What’s the church got to do with this?”
The doctor’s old face softened, as if speaking to a child. “You don’t have a wife, Michael. Have you been seeing putaines? Technically speaking there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as proper precautions are taken.”
“I haven’t seen any putaines,” said Michael defensively.
“And the girl… the one who’s been walking about in the village?”
“I only had an ice cream with her.”
“I’m very sorry.” Alain mopped his forehead and looked, more than anything, thoroughly frightened.
Michael noticed that they both kept themselves on the other side of the kitchen table, as if they were afraid he might at any minute attack them. Though he tried to be unobtrusive about it, the doctor busied himself putting things back in his doctor’s case and did not stop until he had surreptitiously laid his hand on a scalpel.
Twenty minutes later two security men came to take him away. One was tall and thin in a tight-fitting brown suit, a classic pedophile type with a receding chin, simpering eyes and trousers finishing halfway up his ankles. The other was short and squat, in a cream-colored suit, his face hidden behind steel-rim aviator sunglasses, like a cocaine dealer from Grand Theft Auto.
“Where are we going?” Michael asked as he was led away. Oddly enough he was not afraid of them, though he felt he probably should be.
The short one turned round and gave him a look of unmistakable brutality. “You go where we go, kiddo. And we go wherever we want. Now zip it! We’re not here to listen to the likes of you.”
They’d parked a black vintage Citroën outside. A few kids were standing there admiring it as Michael emerged with the men, who’d handcuffed him.
After an hour’s drive they rolled up outside a secure psychiatric unit with guards at the gates. The car door opened; he was dragged out and jostled into a gray corridor with a highly polished floor squeaking under his sneakers.
“Where are you taking me? What’s the matter with you?” he cried at the nurses, but to his surprise one of them got out a rubber baton and walloped him a few times. Unceremoniously he was dumped in a small, blank cell. He lay on the floor as he listened to the fading squeaks of their gym shoes.
Humanoid waste, piece of shit, deserves to die and will…
After he’d calmed himself down, he sat up against the door, staring at his shoelaces for an hour. Occasionally the waves of pain inside returned, but all in all he was clearer than he’d been in years; in fact, although he was in a cell, he felt he’d started on his road to Damascus. Thank God.
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.