The Maggot People (24 page)

A crisis meeting of the G8 was convened. The gold standard was reintroduced about one hundred years after it had been phased out. The banking system was reformed. Letters of conveyance would henceforth be used rather than electronic transfer, which no longer worked. Hundreds of thousands of clerks were employed to write out balance sheets, copy documents, and manually post all correspondence.

The whole notion of trading in shares had to be abandoned.

In spite of enormous efforts to underpin the system, money lost its value. In the newspapers there was a lot of clever talk about “the new Weimar Republic.” People would rather have a bag of potatoes than a pile of money.

Meanwhile, in silos all over the world, missile systems lay moldering, and tanks, aircraft and rifles were mothballed.

The “travel industry,” as it had once politely been named, was disbanded overnight. No one was willing to take the risk of going on holiday, in case they were unable to come home again. The available modes of transportation were also so limited that from then on, a “holiday” was usually something one undertook with a tent on one's back and a pair of walking boots on one's feet.

“Out of service” became a commonplace sign, posted here, there, and everywhere.

Armies, called out on the streets to maintain order, found themselves impotent to stop looting and fighting—although such tendencies were almost nonexistent. Before long, even elite regiments had been disbanded. There was nothing to pay them with anyway. And besides, their guns and missiles were so cranky that it was pointless pretending that they had a use on the battlefield. Even that word, “battlefield,” became quaint and archaic.

National newspapers were no longer published as there was no effective way of distributing them. Only local newspapers were printed in small editions, and then delivered by urchins on bicycles.

Credit card companies, lending institutions and other financial bodies simply disappeared overnight. Records no longer existed, and governments everywhere discovered the awful truth: it was not possible to maintain control over the populace without recourse to the silicon chip.

These changes were global, immediate and universal.

About a week after they had arrived, Michael found one morning that neither his radio nor his television worked.

Jesus watched as Michael stood there cursing, flicking the buttons of his remote. Eventually he commented with a slight note of hilarity: “Do you miss it, Michael? Can't you use your own eyes and ears?”

Michael stared at Jesus, his long, unkempt locks framing his face, his long lean arms with the sinewy biceps and triceps, and, on his left inside forearm, the tattooed symbol of a fish. “Did you do this, Jesus?”

But Jesus never answered direct questions. They seemed to amuse him, as if they were somehow off the point. “It's not what I do that matters,” he said. “The world has changed, it is true. But do you really have time to wonder why? Do you not have enough troubles of your own? The question is, what are you going to do today?”

He went outside and waved at a group of peasants coming up the hill with a horse. Soon they were at work, plowing.

As Michael stood there watching their plowshare opening a long gash in the ground, it occurred to him that this—the plow, the sweat of labor—was the only thing there had ever been. Everything else had been an illusion, and the illusion had passed.

While he and Ariel had been agonizing and theorizing, Jesus had enlisted groups of loyal followers. Men built hundreds of shelters or prepared the soil for planting. Women sheared sheep, spun wool, picked fruit, baked and slaughtered and brewed enormous quantities of beer. Jesus liked to sit in the evenings sharing a tipple with the hundreds of people who seemed to be living with them.

Michael did not enjoy his own skepticism, nor could he deny his conclusion: that Jesus had somehow dismantled all the apparatus of the modern world, and now that it had all gone, they would henceforth have to live like peasants intent only on the simplest of tasks—and the reality of wind and rain.

The other weird thing was that the maggots had grown rather sedate. They were content to vegetate, it seemed.

Both Michael and Ariel felt themselves settling into torpid, bloodless indifference; they asked themselves if Jesus had increased their happiness or merely blunted their appetite for life?

Their question did not go unanswered.

Jesus was aware of their predicament. Even as they began to enjoy a certain preeminence, as the hundreds of people turning up in the valley began to treat them with a deference apparently due to His closest people, even as they were recognized as the ones who shared His camper van and might therefore be party to special insights and wisdom, and even as Jesus's fame began to grow in a world where news no longer travelled so speedily, Michael and Ariel were caught up in disaffection.

Ariel, watching Jesus at work with the peasants, commented once to Michael, “So, what will the Vatican do now? The Messiah has a Protestant work ethic.”

Jesus, who seemed to know everything, referred to Michael and Ariel as “my brooding friends,” and one evening he deepened his definition, when he turned to Ariel over the fire and said, “Ariel, my dear woman, joy is a flower for your windowsill, not a nettle to be grasped.”

She replied, “To me it's always been a nettle.”

Jesus smiled quixotically and with his bare hand picked a burning log out of the fire and held it firmly in his hand. “Do I blame the log for the pain I feel?” he said, as the flames licked up his arm. “Or do I let it go? Do I give up on my hopeless expectations?”

He stood up and flung it as far as he could; in the night it traced a long, glowing arc across the sky.

“It sounds so easy when you put it like that.”

“Ah,” Jesus said rhetorically, “she wallows in malcontent while tacitly admitting the ease with which she might let go of her fears.”

“I'm not happy here, not even with you, Master. I never wanted to live like a farmer. I'm a modern woman; I like home design and shopping and…” she added slightly idiotically, “I always wanted children.”

Jesus seemed in a mood for preaching tonight. His jaws moved in a well-oiled and frothing manner. In the corner of her eye she noticed the shadowy figures of peasants quietly creeping up to the edge of the firelight, sitting there with their shining, magnetized eyes, their calloused hands and sprouting, greasy beards. Jesus included them in his conversation. His eyes scanned their faces and he raised his voice so that they could all hear. “Yet her worries are not as she imagines. She confuses the physical with the mental and does not realize that she is a creature of ash, wood, and earth… a creature whose corruptions can only be expelled through will. She is a shepherd of rats. She minds her flock while lamenting the fact that rats are no good to her; their fur is useless for wool and their meat is diseased. So why does the shepherdess not go to market and fetch a ram and a ewe for herself. Why does the shepherdess not create the thing she requires?”

Jesus's eyes seemed to have grown, and the silence of the night bent around them like a huge bell, amplifying the sound of his voice.

From his pocket the Master took a pack of colorful balloons, bought some weeks earlier in a service station. Solemnly he gave one of the balloons to Ariel and indicated she should blow.

As she did so, a stream of charred, dead maggots came out of her mouth and filled the balloon.

Jesus took it from her and released the heavy balloon into the air. Amazingly, in spite of its weight it seemed impervious to gravity, floating up until caught in a high breeze. As it rose above the ridge across the valley, the unseen sun illuminated it, and it became a tiny globule of fire as it disappeared into the west.

“If you want children, go and have children,” he said. “Open the door that waits for you. Enter your house.”

42
.

Soon Ariel began to note something changing in her body, and she realized she was pregnant. How this was actually possible she did not know. Had she really expelled the maggots from her body? Or were they sustaining the child in some sort of subcutaneous pocket?

Michael also went through revolutionary changes. He grew fitter and leaner, and as autumn set in he spent his days picking olives with the others. Michael and Ariel and others spread nets under the trees. After harvesting, they pruned errant branches and prepared for next year's harvest. Slowly, week by week, they picked all the olives in the valley and watched the rich oil dribbling out of the presses into twenty-liter glass bottles.

It occurred to Michael that now that they had oil, wine, and grain all earned from the hard-won ground, they were rich.

In the evenings, Michael and Ariel lay by their fire, resting after their long days. They longed for this child growing inside her. Often they sat with Jesus, relishing his silence.

The camper bus had become almost iconic. In the night it seemed to tower there at the top of the hill, like some many-tiered keep of stone, surrounded by hundreds of smoking fires.

One evening Jesus looked at them, his bearded leonine chin outlined against the flames as he spoke: “Soon your friends will come… more malcontents…”

“Who?” asked Michael.

“Oh, Romans, concerned with their position, as always; heavy laden with badges and laurels,” said Jesus. “Here they will only find work, no feather beds.”

“Do we know them?”

“Yes. One of them was once a friend of yours. He dug holes in the ground and made a resting place for the dead. I once slept there myself.”

“Giacomo?”

“The same.”

“What do they want?”

“They are Pharisees. They believe in gods of their own making, make rules for others to follow, harness the power and keep it for themselves.”

Jesus placed a raw hen's egg in the fire and watched it with a half-smile. When it exploded, scattering egg white in all directions, he looked up and smiled. “The rooster sits on the egg, and a chick emerges. Without her soft breast, fire consumes all things and makes them worthless.”

Ariel touched her stomach and Michael put his hand there, too.

Jesus continued. “Soon I must leave. But this is of little consequence to you or anyone else. You will remember me no less than our other friends who have lived with us here, in our home.”

They were shocked by his words. Why this sudden departure, and what would they do without him, their Master?

“My work was not so much with you,” said Jesus. “Not with Man. I will judge neither Man nor Woman. Let the truth speak for itself… if it has tongue to speak.” His craggy face stared into the fire, weary. “I came to stop the juggernaut, and now I have. People have stopped moving and the fumes and poisons of their lives and minds are no longer killing their gardens. Now they must work to keep themselves alive.”

“What about the sick and dying? Without all the medicines and hospitals, how will they be helped?”

“Have no fear, they will be helped.”

After that, he would say nothing else. The night passed in a heavy, semi-conscious silence bursting with unanswered questions.

In the morning there were three distant figures coming up the hill: Giacomo, Paolo, and Günter. Jesus was cutting wood. He didn't even look up, merely glanced down the valley and wiped his brow.

Michael took Ariel's hand and muttered to her: “Here they come, I suppose they were always going to catch up with us.”

She kissed him. “We'll keep away from them and mind our own business. We've come too far now for them; they can't touch us.”

Jesus straightened up and called out to them: “The web is already upon you, if you look.” He turned to Ariel and added succinctly: “There is no way of separating yourself from other men's business when they make it their business to include you in theirs. Two of these fellows come with good intentions but the third is a darkling thrush. He flatters himself with his struggle; he thinks himself a man of words and learning and he pins honors to his own chest. But he fights for nothing. He fights for the hollowed air where his body stands. He is a mere skin held up by his gaseous existence.”

Ariel looked up. “Will you heal him?”

“If he asks to be healed… he will be healed.”

43
.

Giacomo and Paolo were shown to a vacant hut, where they put their packs down at the foot of the bunks and rested their aching limbs. Only Günter was unaffected by the long hike through the mountains. He sat in the doorway, looking with interest at the bustling settlement all about them: the carts passing by, the donkeys and goats, the digging of drainage ditches and laying of pipes, groups of elderly women on wooden chairs in the thoroughfares carding wool or embroidering cloth. Most of the men and some of the women were down in the valley on the fields, while gangs of carpenters put up more huts farther down the hill.

Steady streams of people were arriving all the time, carrying their belongings on their backs. Before long, this hilltop would be a town and, within a few years, a walled city.

Giacomo lay on his back, reading out aloud from Dr. Brun-ton's
The Spiritual Crisis of Man
. “Listen to this,” he said: “‘The human entity's inordinate clinging to its combative animality and selfish personality is being challenged and attacked by world forces and turned into a cause of its own psychic suffering…' What are these supposed world forces, then?” He yawned.

Günter turned round in the doorway. “The Devil, you dumb shit. And by this I mean the absence of anything worthwhile, which quickly grows a nose, eyes, and ears. The Devil is just a name we give it.”

“Günter, do me a favor,” said Giacomo. “Make yourself scarce. Go lay a cable or something.”

“Some people shouldn't read books. It goes to their heads.”

The three friends lay down and rested, each of them seething in his own, private universe.