I say, I want more for my fifty bucks than just his drooling over a dead body.
‘You’da been drooling, too,’ he says. ‘Damn, she was a looker.’
I ask, were there valuables—watches, wallets, jewellery—left at the scene?
He says, ‘Still warm, too, under the covers. Warm enough. No death agonies. Nothing.’
His big jaw goes around and around, slower now as he stares down at nothing in particular. ‘If you could have any woman you wanted,’ he says, ‘if you could have her any way you wanted, wouldn’t you do it?’
I say, what he’s talking about is rape.
‘Not,’ he says, ‘if she’s dead.’ And he crunches down on a potato chip in his mouth. ‘If I’d been alone, alone and had a rubber…,’ he says through the food. ‘No way would I let the medical examiner find my DNA at the scene.’
Then he’s talking about murder.
‘Not if somebody else kills her,’ Nash says, and looks at me. ‘Or kills him. The husband had a fine-looking ass, if that’s what floats your boat. No leakage. No livor mortis. No skin slippage. Nothing.’
How he can talk this way and still eat, I don’t know.
He says, ‘Both of them naked. A big wet spot on the mattress, right between them. Yeah, they did it. Did it and died.’ Nash chews his sandwich and says, ‘Seeing her there, she was better-looking than any piece of tail I’ve ever had.’[239]
Chuck Palahniuk’s comedic use of situation and opportunity based necrophilia leads us to ask the main questions about the act and those questions are simple. How (as in terms of disgust) can a man or woman have sex with a dead body? And why (in the moral sense) would they want to? In an obsessive game of rock, paper, scissors, in the case of the necrophile, desire always wins out over disgust and morality. In the above example, the paramedic John Nash views sex with a corpse (be it a man or a woman) as neither morally wrong nor disgusting.
Whether the disgust is created by the sight of injuries caused to victims in lust murders, as in the 2005 case of Mark Dixie who stabbed Sally Anne Bowman six or seven times, bit her body and inserted concrete into his victim’s mouth and vagina; or disgust is caused by the sight and smell of a dead body in a funeral home or morgue as in the case of Kenneth Douglas (2007), a morgue attendant suspected of having sex with at least 100 corpses, some of which had been involved in motor-vehicle accidents; or disgust is experienced in the sight, smell and touch of bodies taken from graves and mausoleums as in the case of the Filipino ‘Tomb Raider’ Randy Uro Galvez who disinterred women’s bodies in order to have sex with them in 2009 and 2010; these actions should cause some form of disgust. Looking back at classic necrophilia cases, the homicidal necrophiles—Christie, Bundy and West—showed no signs of disgust for what they did; nor did the situation/opportunistic necrophiles such as Karen Greenlee and Carl von Cosel; and—probably the most extreme cases—nor did the exhumist necrophiles Sergeant Bertrand and Ed Gein. Yet disgust has some universal indicators as Danny Kelly argues. ‘An undeniable affinity holds between disgust and various sorts of organic materials. Hence at the most concrete end of the spectrum of elicitors are what Rozin and others have suggested as the best candidates to be universals: feces, vomit, blood, urine, and sexual fluids (Rozin et al. 2008; see also Angyal 1941). Equally plausible as universals are corpses and signs of organic decay, which are also some of the most potent elicitors of disgust (Haidt et al. 1994). Bodily orifices—and via contamination, things that come in contact with bodily orifices—are likewise powerful and potentially universal elicitors (Rozin et al. 1995). More generally, artificial orifices or breaches of physical bodies such as cuts, gashes, lesions, or open sores (in Rozin’s terms, violations of the ‘ideal body envelope’) are also good candidates for disgust universals. These can trigger disgust if they occur to one’s own body—in which case they probably also cause pain—or in someone else’s. In this sense, disgust appears universally sensitive to the boundaries of organic bodies and in many cases is activated when those boundaries have been, or are in danger of being, breached.’[240]
All necrophiles—from Karen Greenlee to Jeffrey Dahmer transgress disgusts, they go beyond and within the ‘ideal body envelope’, are insensitive to the boundaries of organic bodies and their organic materials. In Cormac McCarthy’s Child Of God, the necrophile Lester Ballard internalizes the disgust and makes it a cathedral of desire, a place in which ‘the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and blood-red mud, had an organic look to them,’[241] and so incorporates his own self-disgust, his own low self-esteem by equating his victims with either animality or piety, ‘like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.’[242] Ballard shows no disgust for the blood, the organs, the decaying dead. Even Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women and attempted to murder seven more from 1975 to 1980, experienced disgust at one of his murder scenes. On the 9th of October 1977, eight days after murdering Jean Jordan in Southern Cemetery, Manchester, Sutcliffe returned to the scene to look for a possibly incriminating £5 note he had handed the prostitute before bludgeoning her across the head eleven times with a hammer. Frustrated at not being able to find the money, Sutcliffe ‘stabbed her repeatedly in the breasts and chest, he snatched up a broken pane from a nearby greenhouse and opened up a wound from her right knee to her left shoulder. The stench as her stomach blew open made him vomit.’[243] But then Peter Sutcliffe considered himself ‘as normal as anyone.’[244] This may be because, (v)iolence toward the actual pulp and mineral and water of such an organism is rare, although, like terrorism directed at a group through various unfortunate victims, violence quite frequently expresses itself by means of the destruction of the flesh. The real aim of violence is to conquer, direct, instruct, mark, warn, punish, injure, suppress, reduce, destroy or obliterate the consciousness within the body.’[245]
Peter Sutcliffe—hammer murderer, screwdriver eviscerator—responded to the eight-day-old corpse’s organic material in a predictable manner, even though minutes later he attempted to behead the corpse. The object being becomes an abject being, the corpse creates disgust in us, the fear of infection, the horror of death, the void of non-being. The corpse reanimated in the vampire, the zombie, the ghoul—the living dead with their blood, their sores, their unstoppable desire to turn the ‘ideal body envelope’ into a corpse. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, the ‘ideal body envelopes’ inhabited by the vampires Angel and Spike (Buffy) and Bill and Eric (True Blood) are skin-deep, encasing the arrested decay and putrescence we see when the vampires are staked or beheaded. In reverse, these vampires, werewolves and zombies mock us because ‘there is a fundamental imbalance, gap, between our psychic energy, called by Freud ‘libido’, this endless undeadenergy which persists beyond life and death, and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies.’[246] If Buffy falls for the bodies of Angel and Spike knowing that they are merely casings for disgust, how did Sergeant Bertrand, Ed Gein and even Karen Greenlee overcome that disgust to desire a body, a decaying corpse which is ‘the emblem of the menace that, in the case of disgust, meets with such a decisive defense, as measured by its extremely potent register on the scale of unpleasureable affects. Every book about disgust is not least a book about the rotting corpse.’[247]
240
Danny Kelly,
246
Slavoj Žižek,
247
Winfried Menninghaus,