In the Time of Apple Maggots
by Maxim T. LoskutoffA large white sign stands resolutely against the hot summer wind. WARNING, it reads in red square bureaucratic letters, and then, on the next line, APPLE MAGGOT QUARANTINE ZONE. A myriad of smaller type pocked with bullet holes flashes by.
"Here we go," Deacon says in the forced tones of a man prepared to accept the unacceptable.
Black splotches dot the horizon and a deep droning buzz fills the air. A condom wrapper and part of a bagel vibrate on the dash. My hair floats delicately on the breeze. They are close now. The splotches develop jointed legs and quivering antennae. A bug the size of a football explodes against the windshield. I grip the steering wheel, fighting to keep the car on the road. Eight insect eyes stare through me. Events lose their natural order. Organs slide down the glass. Another bug hits and spiderweb cracks snake across my vision. The stench of apples is overpowering. To our right, a swarm the size and density of the Hindenburg flies past, an entire apple orchard balanced upon them.
Deacon reaches into the backseat for the pesticide, industrial strength DDT with a twist of something called Testacline Nitrate, a substance banned in the '70s for killing over a thousand migrant Mexican farm workers in the summer of '69. Neil Young immortalized it in the song "Testacline Scream." It was one of the many chemicals re-legalized under Section 3, Article VIII of the Keep America Safe and Free of Dangerous Pests Act of 2012. I slide the gas mask down over my trembling nostrils. The swarm is directly overhead. The noise is deafening. I try to remember my mother's face, but it's impossible. I can not.
"Now!" Deacon screams.
I yank the lever down. The roof flies off. Deacon explodes into the air, singeing my right ear. I look up and watch the fiery tail from his rocket pack as he screams toward the swarm. Deacon is a pro. The hose comes up; a stream of thick gas engulfs the insects. Apple Maggots rain from the sky, their wings fluttering limply in the humid air. They burst on impact, spraying light red goop across the snakeskin upholstery and gumming up the dials of the sound system. Thick gray poison gas slowly fills the air.
Deacon floats gently down beside me, personalized Deacon Blue parachute trailing elegantly behind. We drive fast so the poison can't seep through our skin.
Human children are already dying by the side of the road, massive sores breaking out on their porcelain skin like meteors tearing through the hearts of planets. Mothers surround them with their bodies, staring at us with godless eyes. And still the maggots fall.
My foot tingles as it presses down on the accelerator. Deacon shakes his head. I run over a dog. Apple trees stripped of their fruit litter the road. Everything here will be dead before the night is out.
We are the last resort.
A clean white sign marks the end of the quarantine zone. I pull off my gas mask, breathing deeply. Something from the '90s plays on the radio. Deacon taps along on his rocket pack. My cheeks are numb from the pesticides. Tears stream from my eyes. The sky is a dull gray shroud.
It's almost September. Nothing good ever comes of September. Just longer nights and more work.
I can see the city from over 50 miles away. Everything is much clearer since the foliage has been contained. The city fills the horizon. I know the ocean is beyond it, but I know this only in memory. Steel shafts grow taller and taller around the Center for Human Continuation, a light pink building that penetrates the sky, disappearing amid fluffy white clouds. People jokingly call it the Heaven Penetration Center.
Enormous greenhouses line the road. Through the glass I see row on row of fruits and vegetables moving past men and women in white metallic suits. They pluck imperfect specimens from stems and vines and drop them onto a smaller conveyer belt. I imagine the vegetables traveling through steel tunnels to purifying centers for consumption. This is comforting.
Kenneth Coozamano, Kenny the Cooz. It's a good name. Kenny the Cooz and Deacon Blue. Names that jump out and catch in your throat, like they're too damn sexy and powerful to belong to just two people. Wilson, our boss, helped us choose them. "You boys are a little bit like superheroes," he told us. And it's true - we have cool-sounding names, personalized capes, a wide assortment of weapons, and we keep the cities clean.
I pull the car into our driveway and turn it off. Deacon and I live four feet apart, in two identical 10x10s. His has the TV, mine the bathroom. Lots of girls come by. We have pictures to prove it. Not too much junk piled up, either. 10x10s teach you the value of minimalism. On the bookshelves there are books; in the bathroom there is incense.
Deacon plays the bass, I the saxophone. We don't have any dreams about it. We're just a couple of guys who like to jam once in a while.
A third 10x10 sits on the other side of the yard, between the creek and the hole. That's where we keep the poison. A long time ago, before we moved in, someone painted big red X's on the sides, and wrote HAZARDOUS on the roof. Funny how things seem to work out.
Lots of birds fly over the yard. Deacon and I used to shoot at them with old Soviet Kalashnikov machine guns. That got kind of old, though. Now the birds just fly over. Once in a while they shit in the yard, but that's to be expected.
The yard is full of flowers. Deacon loves to garden. We both have well-developed artistic sides. Sometimes people even think we're gay when they're just starting to get to know us, or when we cruise by in our champagne-colored Impala listening to '90s radio. We aren't though. Every six hours, Deacon and I meet in the middle of the garden and take a capsule of Wellness. Nobody's been really down since the government cut Medicare, Social Security, public education, and welfare and funneled the funds into providing the populace with regular doses of Wellness.
Wellness removes the continuity from life: moments take on a jagged quality and stand alone. A friend of ours told us that the key to control is confusion. Our friend is dead now, but his words haunt me. He said that these days the government carefully regulates the chaos. No one understands what happens anymore; it just happens, one thing after another. And Wellness makes us accept that. Something new will happen soon, and we won't question it, even if it involves killing scores of people that we've never seen before with massive quantities of poison. He said that the government created a perpetual state of fear and confusion, and used it to gain absolute control: security checkpoints monitor public restrooms. Retinal scans protect espresso bars. Once in a while a lizard the size of a school bus makes its way inside city limits courtesy of the mutation-inducing chemicals that clog the air of the Wilds. Cameras are mounted on a smart missile that's launched from the city's Liberty Center. The evening news shows its flight down busy streets until it pierces the thick scaly hide of the lizard and blows its innards across bus kiosks and newspaper stands. Our friend said that real life had finally caught up with the movies.
Since our job is so difficult, we get double the normal ration of Wellness. A lot of people are jealous. But going deep into the Wilds to kill Maggots before they reach the cities is the kind of work that requires extra compensation. And we are the best.
Imagine images so sharp they slice through you. Literally divide themselves from you into neat, lifeless sections. You can still interact with them - if I were to reach out and squeeze a flower between my fingertips it would be crushed. But the crushed flower would have the same perfect autonomy from me that the undisturbed flower had. The emotional connection is gone.
Sounds so crisp and self-contained that you watch them go by like so many rocks being thrown across your field of vision. I have heard children scream their last scream without feeling anything. Is that nice? I think so. It's Wellness. It's important to keep your personal life separate from your professional life. Wilson taught us that. By profession, we are violent exterminators. Best in the business. Specially commissioned by the Keep America Safe and Free of Dangerous Pests Act of 2012. But really, when people get to know us outside of work they discover that we're just a couple of young guys with nice clothes and great hair. We play croquet in the afternoon. We frequent authentic sushi bars and nightclubs on the top floors of skyscrapers. Certain maître d's know us simply as Kenny and Deac.
"What the fuck did you do with my gummy-vites, dude?" I ask.
Deacon does not respond. He knows how important vitamins are to me, and how excited I was when I discovered that those chewable shits can be replaced with delicious gummy-vites in the shapes of endangered species. There are lots of shapes for the vitamin-makers to choose from these days. The endangered species market is booming. Vitamins are necessary in our line of work. They balance out all the poison we take in. We start wars inside ourselves, supplying both the enemy and the defenders.
"So this morning I woke up and Benny was going down on me," Sherry says from behind an old Hillary Rodham Clinton mask. Sherry is one of the girls I mentioned before. She likes to come over a lot, and we have pictures of her to prove it. "Like he always does. Like it's every girl's dream to wake up with a sweaty Italian guy flopping around between her legs like a landed fish."
Deacon and I nod sympathetically. It's hard to find peace these days.
Deacon says something and I laugh so long that I forget what I'm laughing about. Kind of frustrating, but not really worth worrying too much about. Like losing at Scrabble.
Sherry just huffed too much of something she found in the shed, and her ears are bleeding. The Hillary Rodham Clinton mask lies twisted in a corner. Deacon is staring at the ceiling.
I chew on a gummy-vite and wonder if it's too late to fuck her. Probably. Maybe not.
You know what's soft? The little crevice beneath a woman's breast. What a glorious place to be skin.
My favorite thing about a woman after sex: the way her breasts relax gently to the sides, forming a shallow canyon. I like to pretend that I'm a dirt biker, cruising up and down the sides of that canyon, howling at the top of my lungs. Girls help us forget who we are, and what we do. The government knows this, so they made us celebrities. This gets us extra girls to compliment our extra rations of Wellness.
There's a large glass cage in the far corner of the yard. It's full of tiny holes to let air in. Inside there's a treadmill and a sleeping bag.
That's where we keep Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Appleseed roamed the Wilds for almost five years after the passage of the Keep America Clean and Free of Dangerous Pests act of 2012. He planted apple orchards wherever he went, and the Apple Maggots and farm workers and other strange animals of the Wilds followed him and grew stronger. Nobody could catch him. He was thin and quick and could smile his way out of a prison cell. Lots of people ask us how we caught him. We tell them that it's a secret of the business. At night he howls. Every once in a while an apple tree starts to grow in the yard. When that happens, we let the spiders into his cage.
I'm not sure why the government is so afraid of the Apple Maggots. All the Maggots are interested in is the apple trees. Maybe it's because they're so big and unnatural-looking.
Our dead friend told us that the government created the Apple Maggots to keep people scared and confused. He said that the government learned from the terrorists that the key to absolute power is fear, and so they purposely released mutation-inducing chemicals into the air of the Wilds in order to create domestic biological terrorists: huge mutant bugs that multiplied at exponential rates and relegated the citizens to well-protected cities. But then he died, and the immediacy of his ideas died with him.
Besides, we are soldiers. We have been trained. Our frivolous edges - curiosity, compassion, independence, conscience - have been honed away, turning our nature into a razor-sharp blade pointed straight at the black heart of the Mother Maggot.
The government doesn't pay us to think.
Sherry and her friend Pacifica are asleep in the garden. I spend a long time watching the flowers grow around them.
I'll admit it: Deacon and I used to have dreams. We called ourselves Monotnafuck and played cool Malthusian blues in shady Western taverns and downscale suburban java joints. Clara Eves often sat in. Her silky voice melted over the music like things falling hard and fast and right into place. Sometimes we really grooved, man. Now we mostly just play out in the yard, late at night, for Johnny Appleseed.
We try not to think much about what we do. Or why we do it. This was a key component in the training, and it's easy to see why. When I was younger I would have let a million Maggots live to preserve the life of one child. But now we are realists. And in reality, Apple Maggots represent a threat to society. We can't have football-sized bugs buzzing around the city. The farmers are mostly Mexican, anyway. The government makes sure of that. Our boss Wilson is round with a soft voice that never sounds angry, but sometimes is. He's worked for the government for a long time and he's very bald. When you ask him what happened to his hair, he says, "It blew away in the breeze."
Deacon and I have eliminated 73 swarms of Apple Maggots in our twelve years with the Bureau of Homeland Cleansing. We were featured on the cover of Time magazine, April 6, 2017, wearing our capes and the metallic blue shades that were in style then. The photographers arranged us with Deacon holding his pesticide hose, and me holding the bodies of two Apple Maggots by their antennas. The Maggots were long dead, but their bodies kept twisting gently in the wind produced by the large fans. The fans were blowing to make our capes billow behind us. I remember trembling as the photographer swore and yelled for me to keep them still.
In the photo, we both look very casual. The headline reads,"Defenders of the Frontier, Keeping America Clean for You."
That year we were also included in People's list of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. Number 38, Most Beautiful Exterminators. We keep a few copies of that in the bathroom.
Lots of girls stopped by in 2017.
Donna is very old. Her face is like a highway map of wrinkles, all leading back to two sharp little eyes. She tells me a lot of things I prefer not to think about. Tonight we're drunk on strawberry wine, sitting beside each other on an old wooden bench in the garden. Deacon is in his 10x10 with her daughter, Ina. Ina is blonde with a long body that coils around you like a serpent. I'm not jealous. Sometimes he's in there with Ina, sometimes she's in the other 10x10 with me.
"Do you want to hear the greatest rock 'n' roll story of all time?" Donna asks me.
"Yes, I do," I reply.
"Perry Farrel was standing in an LA apartment on April 29, 1992, looking out over the riots," she says slowly, speaking around a long thin wooden pipe. Carved lizards crawl along the sides. "And he couldn't take his eyes off of the city on fire. It was like Porno for Pyros." I nod. This is a great rock 'n' roll story. And no new rock 'n' roll stories seem likely to come along to compete with it. Culture, and all the music and stories and art that go along with it, kind of died out after people started taking Wellness. The radio still plays stuff from the '90s like it's new. People still gossip about Michael Jackson. Johnny Appleseed smiles his wide trickster smile in his cage. I don't see him, but we've been together long enough that I know when a story will make him smile.
Lately I have been thinking more: wondering why no one writes new books, why there are no new songs on the radio, and why we exterminate the Apple Maggots. I fear the Wellness is wearing off. I didn't used to think like this. Wellness has never been tested over long periods of time. We are the test group. Perhaps my body is developing immunity to Wellness. I'm starting to see things and feel them at the same time. Events are becoming connected to emotions. I didn't want Pacifica to leave last night. She asked me why. I said I didn't know.
I spend the day working in the garden. The sun warms my neck and shoulders. The air smells like honeysuckle. I leave some fruit in the cage for Johnny Appleseed and almost forget to shut the door when I go.
I sleep on an extra-long twin bed. There are tiny bloodstains on the sheets from when girls have slept there during their periods. I like to listen to old jazz records as I fall asleep.
Howlies - wild dogs that wander in from the Wilds - come into the yard at night. They pick through the trash pile and growl at the poison shed. Johnny Appleseed talks to them. I hope they are planning revolutions.
The night is nice and quiet. I lie awake in bed for a long time, thinking about the girls who might come over tomorrow. Other thoughts are lurking in the depths, but the drugs and the conditioning make it difficult to focus. For this I'm thankful. I'm awakened when the node begins to vibrate behind my temple where it was surgically implanted years ago. Above me the sky is a clean blue sheet. When the government needs me, calls me into active duty, it begins to vibrate violently. It's very difficult to ignore a node vibrating violently behind your temple. The government has really streamlined their operation.
Deacon runs from his room, screaming and clutching his head. He claims that his node feels like someone drilling into his head with a rusty Craftsman. He can be kind of a baby. We run through the yard, past the flowers and the cage, out the back gate, and into the car. Still screaming, Deacon frantically pushes the large red transmit button.
The vibrating stops. The dash screen illuminates a series of coordinates. Today we ride east. The car smells rotten. We always forget to wash it. We try not to think about the car, or the things we do in it, except when we are in it, doing them. Blood of Apple Maggots fills the cracks. Bits of exoskeleton clog the vents. I turn the key and we drive.
We ride in fear. As always. My heart races, not with conscious and beautiful fear taught by long-forgotten parents of love and safety (look both ways before you cross the street, wear your seatbelt, 55 mph saves lives), but manufactured fear. Fear carefully designed to survive, to take up residence in the subconscious and slowly grow there, building and building until you fall to your knees and beg someone to make the giant bugs go away and who cares how they do it. But we are the guys who make them go away. We go out and face the fears that society has created for itself. At times like these, only Apple Maggots remain in my mind. Nothing of the girls who like to stop by, or the birds that fly overhead, or the garden that spills out of the concrete and dirt of the city like maybe the earth is healing itself below and will someday throw off her chains, or Deacon Blue.
I'm afraid that in the end, none of my thoughts matter and only Apple Maggots remain.
Wind-crusted desert signs mark our way. Zzyzzx, Rahab, Dagon, roads that lead to nowhere but more dust and desolation. East and west, north and south, merging into one disgusting desert. Pockmarked signs that no one has bothered to change. NO TRESSPASSING. VIOLATORS SHOT. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. NO EXIT. The air is heavy and dank. The pesticides are forming a false greenhouse that makes the air even hotter and mutates the wildlife. Howlies trot around in mangy packs, picking through the refuse. Their eyes glint yellow in the hot sun. Things have gotten real bad just outside the city in the Wilds.
We can see the Apple Maggots from very far away. The standard-issue bullet-pocked sign flashes by. Where do these signs come from? Perhaps long black cars pull up in the middle of the night. I imagine men in pressed suits uneasily staking them into the ground, then firing at them gleefully with large automatic weapons.
The swarm gets larger and larger until it fills the horizon, beautiful for a moment, like dark hills floating gently across the sky. Their buzz is low and deep and I fear it will rattle open the locks inside me.
I realize it's the largest swarm I've ever seen, and then we're beneath them and everything changes. "Fuck subtlety!" my mind screams. "You've got about a billion Apple Maggots to deal with."
And this time it is different: the swarm is too big, stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions - a force too large to prevent from bringing change. Deacon looks at me for a moment, hopelessly comprehending. I hit the accelerator. The Impala gets up and goes. I'm afraid to look up. All those eyes, all those pincers, unfeeling, shiny black armor, empty insect eyes. Apple juice falls from the sky in sticky drops.
"Let's roll," Deacon says. I nod, staring straight ahead. The road is dark and straight as far as I can see, divided by hard yellow lines running on into nothing. Cutting it all in half. "Now!" he screams.
I yank the lever down. The roof flies off. Deacon explodes into the sky. I see his face for a moment, fixed in agonizing rage and sadness. I feel it too; the Wellness has worn off. I feel like a man who has just been let out of the dark only to find that he can't take the light. Deacon sprays DDT-TN in wide, loathsome arcs, a lone fireman trying to save Sodom from the biblical fire. The manic screams of Deacon Blue rise above the drone of the swarm for a moment, and then he and his sound are engulfed. I do not look up to find out how his story ends, but I know that it ends in Apple Maggots.
My mind cracks and opens, like an appendix bursting and filling the abdominal cavity with bile. I am a killer about to be killed. No mysteries have been unlocked, no truths discovered, just a lot of lessons ignored and beauty destroyed. Maggots eating away the foundation. Enough darkness here to go around, I think. My foot throbs, jammed against the gas pedal. They are all around me now, on this warm lonely planet. Pincers trailing gently across my cheek, a million godless eyes looking through me. The thrum of their wings rustles my hair. The road is obliterated. Filled with shiny black shapes, wings beating too fast to see, long sharp prongs hanging from bloated abdomens, thin hairs quivering in the desert wind.
I jerk the wheel to the left. Maggots crash against windows and crunch beneath the tires. A massive red hand takes hold of my heart and squeezes it, as a child squeezes a dying balloon. All my conditioning tells me I must destroy them while my newly reopened heart tells me it's futile. That the answer lies far from here, far from this destruction; maybe on top of a mountain, under an old forest not yet contained, or in the arms of another - but not here.
Apple Maggots are everywhere. Thin hairs tickle my nose, wings blow my hair around in roiling circles. I can see nothing distinct, just a multitude of insect parts. And then the Maggots take me up on their backs. Air rushes down over my cheeks as we rise. Higher and higher. I let my foot off the accelerator and lean back in the seat. Suddenly the insects part above me. The sky is brilliant. Orange and purple tinted clouds, the last sunlight filtering through the smog and the filth in a kaleidoscope of colors. I breathe deeply. The drone is less powerful up here, where everything loses significance. Eternal sky above me and who cares what beneath, be it Apple Maggots or black pavement or a broken and desiccated earth.
No words are spoken, yet I tell them where to go. Like the queen of a hive, mindlessly directing her drones. I sail through the clouds on the backs of a thousand Apple Maggots the size of footballs. Never before has a breeze felt so strange or wonderful running through my body.
The swarm parts beneath me and I plummet to earth. I slide out of the Impala and watch it explode like a golden flower in the yard. All the other flowers are rushing up to greet me. HAZARD blares red through my mind. Two Apple Maggots, as if in slow motion, fly full speed into the cage. Glass fills, and flies away from, their bodies. Kamikaze pilots suicide bombing the harbor. The glass falls all around Johnny Appleseed. He smiles and looks at me with knowing eyes.
We are both finally free. My gratefulness is interrupted by the hard earth.
©Maxim T. Loskutoff
Maxim T. Loskutoff was born in San Rafael, California, and raised in Missoula, Montana. He is a student of writing and many other things.