Two days after graduate student Roger Froehlich fails his thesis exam and resigns from Berkeley, he finds himself dividing his worldly goods-including his young son-with his wife. Left with nothing but his shattered dreams, Roger escapes to his hometown and to the only person who means anything to him-his aunt Alicia. Terminally ill, Alicia's last wish is to reconcile with her estranged son, Fritz, a graduate student at Cornell who has suddenly disappeared. Despite his disdain for his cousin, Roger agrees to travel to Ithaca to look for him. After failing to find Fritz, Roger soon learns more than he ever wanted to know about the subject of his cousin's perverse thesis project-the sexual nature of men who contact women whose names are scrawled on bathroom walls-and how it has led to extortion, suicide, and murder. Suddenly in the midst of a driving desire to serve his aunt and his cousin's sinister secrets, Roger is forced to do things he never could have imagined. In this suspenseful tale driven by the unscrupulous intentions of a graduate student, Roger finally confronts evil under horrifying circumstances and soon discovers how quickly hate can transform into revenge.

Gorging Out

a novelBy Robert MacNeill

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Robert MacNeill
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-3683-7

Chapter One

In my spare time—and I've got a lot of it right now—I've decided to set down, as precisely as I can, the events of the last month: February 1988. Should the police ever come looking for me, it will serve as a justification for my actions and should perhaps even free me from the threat of criminal prosecution. The key and the tape that accompany this account will confirm my version of events.

It all started with the collapse of my graduate career as a student in literature at Berkeley. Two days after I failed my thesis exam and resigned from the university, my wife, Nora, and I discussed the division of our worldly goods. It was all quite dispassionate and reasonable. She would take the car, the furniture, the books, the dishes, the sheets, the towels, the curtains, the rugs, the bank account, and our three-year-old son, Howling Gomez, named for the penetrating shrieks he delivered on the very first night he was home from the hospital. Nora would also keep my clothes, on the grounds that she'd paid for them. I was to receive my last fellowship check and what I happened to be wearing that day, plus a few toiletries, provided I had them out of the house by noon. She sat on the sofa, totally cold, like an oracle, saying those things to me, while I said almost nothing. But I'm the sort of person who thinks ahead. Fortunately I'd had the bank book and both sets of keys to the car in my pocket since early that morning. On the way to the bank, I parked in a tow-away zone and dropped the keys down a sewer; then I emptied the account, over $5,000, and put the money in a daypack. That done, I left Berkeley, I hoped forever, and took the bus to my hometown, Milwaukee, to get my head together, as they used to say. It was February, and it was cold.

Milwaukee is a factory town, with lots of cheap furnished rooms for single men. I took one near the Oakland Avenue bus line and looked around for something to pass the time until I calmed down. Somehow I knew that was going to take a while. I really felt low. The split-up had changed me in ways I hadn't expected. It had made me morose and evil-minded. It had made me think of nothing but death and revenge. It had made me ready to do things I'd never done or even thought of before. It had left me with only one character trait: extreme irritability. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed to me that I'd been a better person once. In fact, it seemed that everything good about me had slipped away. I'd been a good father, and, for a while, I'd even tried to be a good husband. But it all hit the wall, and now the anger welling up inside me had flipped me into the pit.

As for taking my mind off it, nothing quite worked. Reading was a complete bust. Everything I picked up seemed like meaningless crap. Alcohol makes me sick, so that was out too. I spent a lot of time in bed—probably ten hours a day. The weather was bitter, way below zero at night; I had to tape up the windows in that crummy room to keep from freezing to the sheets. To drive away dark thoughts, I spent at least four hours a day at the movies. Money was no problem—after my little visit to the bank, I had plenty. I saw every shitty show in town, the more blood and gore the better. I ate every day in the same cafeteria. Just to fill the time, I bought no more than one or two items at a time, so I had to go through the line three or four times every meal. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. Everywhere I went, I took my daypack, with some underwear and socks on top of the money. I spent part of every afternoon in the public library, looking at picture books about famous murderers and the rise of Nazi Germany. Soon, even these little entertainments began to break down. I decided to do what I'd gone there to do. I decided to go see my Aunt Alicia.

Aunt Alicia was about the only person in my life who had lasted. My father, for example, popped his aorta one summer when I was at Boy Scout camp. My mother got cancer and barely held on until I got into high school. It was all very painful for me, and I dealt with it the only way I knew how; I did my best to forget them. I try not to think of them even now. There are pictures of them, of course, but I haven't looked at them in years. I always deflect any questions about them by saying they died when I was very young. During the three years until I went off to college, I lived with Aunt Alicia and my two cousins. Things hadn't been so great for her either. Her husband had died in the basement of some fancy rest home, a hopeless drunk. Her daughter had married some poisonous academic; according to a letter I'd gotten from my aunt a few months before, the marriage had bombed out, and she'd come home.

My cousin Fritz hadn't done so badly considering what he was like. He was in the East somewhere, a graduate student in psychology or some such nonsense, and supposedly doing all right. What a prick he was. We'd loathed each other since earliest childhood. He'd welcomed me, the destitute orphan, into his house by putting shit in my bed. While my aunt had generally made a fuss over me insofar as her nature would allow, he had put me at ease with remarks like "You should have croaked along with your parents." His childhood nickname for me was "the tapeworm." I'd had one card from him in the past year, with a typically shitty message. "Hi, Tapeworm," it said. "I hear you're in graduate school. Probably fucking it up, right? Not so here. Life couldn't be better. I'm dicking my advisor's daughter, and I'm the star of the department. Let me know next time you'll be in Milwaukee. That way I'll be sure to stay here."

One other thing I ought to mention: Aunt Alicia's family had lots and lots of money.

If you know Milwaukee, which you probably don't, you'll remember that all the rich Germans built big stone houses on the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan, far away from their factories. Lake Drive looks like a succession of public buildings from the Duchy of Hanover. Some of them are pretty grotesque, with lots of stained glass and arched, barred front doors, like mausoleums. Aunt Alicia lived in one of those.

The day I went over there, the temperature had gone up a few degrees, and a cold mist was coming up from the lake. From the front, the whole place looked so blank you couldn't even tell if anyone lived there. The garage doors were pulled down, as they always were in winter, to keep the housekeeper, whose apartment was above them, from freezing. The yard was barren and soggy. The elms had all died off and been dragged away years before, and the few saplings adrift in the slush didn't even reach the tops of the windows on the first floor. They'd put up a lean-to of wooden planks over the shrubbery on either side of the front door to keep the snow sliding off the roof from smashing the plants to pieces.

I wiped my shoes on the mat and rang the bell. I could hear it sounding far back in the house. No one answered. Monday was the maid's day off. I tried a couple more times and then took out a quarter and began to rap on the glass. After a minute, someone came to the door and let me in. It was my cousin Lila. She was close to thirty and had long, streaked blonde hair. She looked worn-out and a little sick. From earliest childhood she'd had a smirk on her face, and it was still there. I smiled, but I was hardly glad to see her.

"Well, well," she said, "if it isn't Fritz's little playmate. And what brings you to the...