Maggot House

The Link brothers lived under rain-rotted clay shingles in a wonderfully fetid house that scorned cable-ready notions of modern complacency. Like Wilton Tifft's evocative photographs of decaying Ellis Island, or the deteriorating beauty of deserted midwestern farmhouses, this Victorian in Yonkers blazoned its faded, terrible loveliness with pathological stoicism.

Ascending sharp, cracked steps to a pale-blue splintered front door, the structure's haunting magnificence was slowly revealed behind twisted, overgrown oaks and tangled shrubs. Every detail of Queen Anne architecture survived for decades, from fluted brick chimneys to multicolored turned spindles, with an overwhelming reality that almost none of this wonderful design had been touched since its original construction. In a strange mixing of natural forms, Adam and Michael Link mirrored the glorious decay of their home as they harmoniously fused with the slow rot of lumber, stone, and glass- a simultaneous descent of skeletal and wooden structures.

On a warm Sunday night in August when most people are alternatively contemplating new employment and suicide, Adam called emergency workers when his brother had difficulty breathing. Medical technicians discovered Michael lying in his own feces among sticky piles of junk mail and chipped peanut butter jars. According to Yonkers Fire Department surgeon Roger Chirurgi, Michael "had open wounds with maggots eating on the flesh." Firefighters donned hazardous materials suits while investigating the house after both brothers were taken out. The sensory onslaught of swarming flies, maggots crawling in blue-molded salami, and sharp smells of human waste sickened even veteran firefighters. At a Yonkers hospital, Michael died the next day. Adam is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Adam and Michael Link remained isolated from coffee break gossip, unbearable traffic jams, and petty office politics, choosing instead a different type of insanity. Whenever hazmat suits and yellow police tape appears among the living, wherever rescue workers are nauseated, you know that someone lived a poetic existence. The maggots spare no one.