Two years ago the Maneater of the Midwest began to call himself, in his own mind, what he truly was.
A ghoul.
Of course he’d heard of ghouls before that. He knew what they were, that they liked to consume human corpses, often those dug up from graveyards, but the day when he finally began to think of himself in terms of being one, of placing himself in that category, was freeing and, in a way, like coming home.
When you’re this way, you can’t help but want to find someone else like you. It’s inevitable. So, over the years he’d always hoped to meet another actual ghoul. Curiosity mostly-though he hadn’t been sure how he would respond if he truly found one. He had not always worked alone, but he had not yet found anyone else who shared his particular interests.
However, there were a few times when he had met people who gave off hints that perhaps, yes, just perhaps, they would understand, so those were the times when he’d tested the waters, put out feelers, so to speak, to see if he’d found a kindred spirit.
After a few beers, or on a long car ride, or during a period of marijuana-induced honesty, he would say something like, “Did you ever wonder about those soccer players back in the seventies? Up in the Andes Mountains? Remember hearing about that?” And maybe his friend would say yes she had, or maybe she would give him a blank look and shake her head no.
“Yeah,” he would say, “when their plane crashed. Twenty-nine out of the forty-five survived. The mountain was isolated, snow-covered. The survivors had nothing to eat and when some of them started dying, they knew they needed to find something fast. They were all starving.”
And at that point he would pause and study the face of the person he was talking to, study it to see if she was able to jump ahead to the inevitable conclusion.
Finally, it would come. “You don’t mean they…that they ate each other?”
“Well, only the dead ones,” he might joke, depending on the situation. In either case, it was a critical point, the telling moment. “Yes, they had to,” he would say. “If they were going to survive.”
And here came the reaction that would either end the conversation for good, or give him hope that perhaps he’d finally found someone who could understand.
Usually, the reaction was the same: “Ew. That’s horrible!” or “That’s disgusting” or “I’d rather die myself! I would never do that!” or the like, and what could he do? The Maneater wasn’t the type of person to argue. So he would agree with her about how unthinkable such a thing was. “You’re right. It’s disgusting. I can’t imagine how civilized people could ever do that.”
He would say things like that, and then take a long draft of beer or a drag of his joint and never bring up the subject to that person again.
However, there was one woman he’d met who seemed to contemplate the situation a little more clearheadedly. They’d gone out for supper and were walking through downtown Milwaukee when he’d brought up the question. She’d thought about it and said, “The thing is, those guys had to survive, right? I mean, why should all of them die when some of them could live? Why, when there was fresh meat lying there preserved for them in the snow? Should they starve to death, just because of a social stigma, the cultural conventions of Western society?”
“Good point.” He decided to step out on a limb. “In some cultures it’s perfectly acceptable to eat other people. Cannibalism isn’t frowned on in other places as much as it is in America, or, say, Britain. There was a group of Indians who ate their parents’ dead bodies.”
“As a show of respect,” she said. “Yes, I’ve heard of that.”
He stopped walking. Took her hand. “You have?”
“We studied it in this anthropology class I had last year. Herodotus, right? He wrote about it?”
“I guess. I don’t know; I’m not sure.” But it wasn’t a guess and he did know. For sure.
He was nervous to ask the next question, but he had to find out the answer. “And what did you think of that? When you heard about it?”
“What’s wrong in one country might not be wrong in another. That’s the way the world is. I think a person’s morality, her set of values, is determined by what culture she grows up in. We shouldn’t judge other people’s values.”
The politically correct answer, but an obviously untenable moral position.
After all, in the 1940s it was culturally acceptable in Germany to kill Jews by the millions. In some tribes in Africa, raping women is considered normal and acceptable-at least by the men. But nobody who’s being raped or tortured to death just shrugs it off and accepts that the person doing it to him is simply following his or her cultural values, so, oh well, what’s right for him is right for him, no big deal.
No. Nobody who’s on the short end of justice wants to be treated subjectively. Relativism and equity just don’t go hand in hand.
The Maneater had an extraordinary memory. He didn’t like to call attention to it to others and he didn’t take any pride in it himself, but it was there and he couldn’t help but make use of it. And that night he’d thought of the passage this woman had just referred to: Godley’s 1921 translation of The Histories by Herodotus, Book 3:38, an excerpt he’d read twice and remembered word for word:
When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.
Custom is lord of all.
Morality is not etched in stone but written, as it were, on a rubber band.
Simply the result of cultural mores.
What an attractive, attractive idea for those wielding power.
But this wasn’t the time to debate the determinants of ethical action with his date, it was actually his chance to agree with her. “You’re right about that,” he said, “and, well, those dead people up on the slopes of that mountain in the Andes weren’t really people anymore actually. They were only meat that was going to rot eventually or just freeze and lie there indefinitely. I mean, right? And in a situation like that, what choice did the survivors really have? I mean what else could they be expected to do?”
He watched her carefully, searched her eyes to gauge her reaction, to look for hints of what she might say, what she might be thinking. “So, what do you think? Could you have done it?”
“Done it?”
“Yes.”
“You mean eaten someone?”
“To survive. Yes.”
“Well, I suppose, if I was on the brink of death, I guess I might have.”
But really, that begged the question. How close to the brink of death does a person have to be, really, before it would be okay? How much desperation would justify cannibalism? Do you really need to be starving to death? What about famished? What about simply hungry? Or just sitting down for supper? How many hours away from death by starvation do you need to be to justify chewing off the skin or sucking the marrow out of another primate’s bones?
Cultures disagree.
So, really, it was a matter of societal preference.
Pindar’s poem is right: custom is lord of all.
Perhaps morally untenable, but still, a philosophical position that suited the Maneater.
The one wielding power.
He liked this woman and decided on the spot that he would cut out and eat her intestines.
She was the first one, the one he still remembered the most fondly to this day.
Now, tonight he was at a club. Trance music. Psychedelic cycling lights. Sweaty, pumping bodies. He was seated at the bar next to a woman who’d been flirting with him for the last twenty minutes. Even though it was just after ten o’clock, she’d made it clear what she wanted to do, but he hadn’t even gotten her name yet.
He decided to just go ahead, see where that might lead. “I don’t sleep with women I don’t know.”
“Well, then”-there was a breezy, alcohol-induced smile in her voice-“my name is Celeste.”
“Hello, Celeste.”
“And you are?”
He made up a name. “Ashton.”
“Well, Ashton”-she really was too tipsy for her own good, already, at this time of night-“do you need a last name, or is Celeste enough for you?”
“Celeste is plenty.” He smiled and with one hand he took hold of her barstool and pulled it closer to him.
“Mmm,” she cooed. “I like a man who’s got some strength. Do you have endurance too?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I can make things last for a long, long time.”
“Ooh. I like the sound of that.”
She finished her shot, turned the glass upside down and, somewhat unevenly, set it on the bar. “I also like a man who’s not all talk. Are you all talk?”
“I’m not all talk, no.”
She stood and swayed a bit. He rose as well and she put her arm in his.
He led her out of the club.
They went to her apartment. He enjoyed himself with her for a while, and as he did, the Maneater thought back to the events of the night, to the train yards, to killing Hendrich, a man whose identity he and Griffin had decided to use if there was ever a need.
And he thought of why he’d led Hendrich to that car and then killed him there, because of what he’d found in that other train car. Because of the man he’d followed and then identified and because of the phone call from Griffin warning him that the police were following up on Hendrich.
Why was Joshua doing this? Setting up these elaborate schemes? Dahmer? Now Gein?
To get your attention?
Well, if that was the reason, it had worked.
The Maneater thought about what to do about that as he spent time with Celeste who, as it turned out, wasn’t so thankful that he could make things last for a long, long time.
Not thankful about that at all.