Name Games (11 page)

I cracked the screen door open, telling Carrol with an uncertain laugh, “We’d really
like
to come in.” But there was no answer.

So I opened the door wider and looked inside. Gasping at the sight of someone sprawled across the bed, I turned to tell Glee and Grace, “Wait here.”

Entering the room, I rushed to the bed—it was Carrol. Dressed as on the day before in his long bathrobe, he had collapsed near the corner of the bed, as if he’d stumbled there and fallen. The robe was askew, exposing much of his body. His skin had the bluish tinge of suffocation, and his neck was ringed with purple abrasions, suggesting strangulation.

“What’s wrong, Mark?” the ladies called from the porch. “What happened?”

“Stay there,” I warned, hoping to spare them the sight of the apparent murder while trying to analyze what I could of the scene. Although Carrol had obviously met a violent end, there were no signs of struggle, and there was no suggestion of forced entry. The room itself, compared to the previous morning, was immaculate and tidy—no burglary or ransacking. The bed, though slept in, was generally neat, and there was no clutter on the nightstand—no papers, no K-Y, no big ugly pen. His laptop, with its screen folded shut, was still on the dining table. A few orderly piles of paperwork were stacked nearby—no porn magazines. Also on the table was a partially eaten cake, not pretty enough to be store-bought.

By now, of course, Glee and Grace had braved their way into the room. Both proved themselves tougher than I’d have guessed, forgoing the indulgence of shrieks or sobs or hightailing out the door and down the stairs.

Glee stepped boldly forward, surveying the corpse in silence. Carrol’s genitals were exposed, and Glee’s eyes popped—after all, the guy was six foot four. Shame on you, Glee.

More timidly, Grace approached the body on the bed. “Is he…?”

“Yes,” I answered. Given the circumstances, I could not resist adding a wry proclamation:

“The king is dead.”

‘King of miniatures’ found strangled at Lord residence

by CHARLES OAKLAND

Staff Reporter, Dumont Daily Register

S
EPT. 18, DUMONT WI—CARROL CANTRELL, WIDELY RECOGNIZED AS THE WORLD’S REIGNING “KING OF MINIATURES,” WAS FOUND DEAD SUNDAY MORNING IN HIS GUEST QUARTERS BEHIND THE GRACE LORD RESIDENCE ON DUMONT’S QUIET NORTH SIDE. VICTIM OF AN APPARENT STRANGULATION, CANTRELL (50) HAD ARRIVED IN TOWN FROM LOS ANGELES ON THURSDAY, PLANNING TO SERVE AS CELEBRITY JUDGE OF A ROOMBOX COMPETITION TO BE HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH A CONVENTION OF THE MIDWEST MINIATURES SOCIETY.

Sheriff Douglas Pierce was first to arrive on the murder scene after the body was discovered by two
Register
staffers, escorted there by Grace Lord. Pierce estimates that the death occurred sometime between dawn and 10 A.M. yesterday. He added, “A complete postmortem will be performed, allowing us to pinpoint the exact time and cause of death.”

Pierce has pledged the total resources of his department toward solving the crime. “Murder is murder,” he stated, “but this instance is particularly heinous in that it victimized a distinguished visitor to our city. Justice will be served.”

As of late Sunday, detectives assigned to the case had interviewed dozens of locals who had interacted with Cantrell since his arrival. A list of possible suspects was being compiled, but no arrest had yet been made.

Knowledge of Cantrell’s past is currently sketchy. Though outwardly flamboyant, he held his business matters private, and little is known of his finances, except that he appeared highly successful. It is hoped that a probate investigation will clarify whether a motive for murder may reach beyond Dumont.

Grace Lord, who invited Cantrell to Dumont and hosted his brief stay here, mourned the loss of a figure known simply as Carrol to miniatures enthusiasts everywhere. She told a reporter at the scene, “Our little world will never be the same.”

D
REAMS HAVE ALWAYS PERPLEXED
me. I’ve taken pride in building my career on the methodical gathering and rational scrutiny of facts, and I confess to a degree of smugness in judging myself intellectually superior to those who are less objective. Superstition, mysticism, dogma, and the occult are all products of a rankly subjective realm, and I have little respect for the opinions of those who place faith in such illusory nonsense.

Yet, we all dream. Over the ages, attempting to explain our dreams, we have imbued this phenomenon with all manner of ominous powers. From the totems and fetishes of the ancients, to the religious ecstasy of the Middle Ages, to the labyrinth of psychoanalysis, we have struggled to make sense of the images spun by our sleeping minds. Most of us have come to understand that these nocturnal fantasies are not supernatural visitations from the beyond; rather, they are generated from deep within. While this knowledge has helped to unscramble the neurological mechanism of our dreams, it has done little to render them less freaky.

Especially unsettling are those long, rambling dreams that often occupy our last hours of slumber before daybreak. These are the dreams that seem so confoundingly real, that speak to us with the narrative precision of a film loop fluttering behind our closed eyes. These are the dreams that stick.

Early the next morning after Carrol Cantrell’s murder, I had such a dream.

I am behind Grace Lord’s house, looking into the vast backyard with its carpet of lawn and canopy of trees. Music thumps from somewhere—a low-fi disco tune that sounds dated and seedy. The synthetic music doesn’t match the natural simplicity of the scene. I turn my head to search for the source of the sound, but my field of vision is limited to the horizontal rectangle in front of me—I am unable to look up into the sky or beyond the sides of the scene.

A dog barks. It’s a canned sort of bark, synchronized to the disco beat. The dog, a big friendly collie, a dead ringer for Lassie, bounds into view from the right side of the scene. It stops, looking back, wanting someone to follow. Then its head snaps skyward, following a Frisbee that arcs past. The dog leaps after it, barking to the beat. Just as the dog exits to the left, a young man (perhaps twenty, a grown boy, really) enters from the right.

It is Ward Lord. Dressed for summer in cutoffs and T-shirt, he flashes a perfect smile, flexes a perfect body. He gleams in the bright daylight, sweating from his romp with the dog. But he doesn’t follow the dog—their game is finished. Instead, he turns from the scene and fixes me in his stare, grinning seductively, beckoning me.

I have watched all this from some distance and would gladly step forward to meet young Mr. Picture Perfect, but I am powerless to move, unable to walk. Then, responding to
his
will, not mine, I begin drifting toward him, gliding as if propelled along a frictionless track, arriving at some middle distance where his body fills my field of vision.

The music has grown louder, and Ward has caught the rhythm, moving to its pulse. His gyrations aren’t exactly a dance—not one that you could name—but more of a visceral interplay between his body and the beat. His feet barely move from the patch of grass where he stands, but his legs sway to the sound. His torso jerks. His hands explore the fine nap of hair on his thighs. Then his fingers reach up the frayed legs of his cutoffs, feeling his crotch. And all this time, he’s watching me.

Transfixed by this erotic spectacle, I respond with my own arousal. I want to zip open my pants and take hold of myself, stroke myself, but again I am powerless to move. I cannot even glance at myself to see if I am clothed or naked. I can see only Ward Lord—framed in the hard-edged rectangle of my vision.

He’s clearly enjoying himself, judging from the lump in his shorts. Curiously, though, the purpose of this performance seems to be
my
satisfaction, not his. With a wink, he bids me to move closer as he peels the damp T-shirt from his chest and lifts it past his face. Tossing it aside, he shakes his head and swipes a hand through his mussed hair. With his other hand, he unbuttons the waistband of his cutoffs, letting them drop.

Zooming toward him (there is no sense of my own movement, but simply a larger, closer image of him within my view), I absorb every detail of his groin, the bluish ridge of every vein that feeds his penis, the sandy crater of every follicle that peppers his testicles. With my face between his legs, I feel the heat that radiates from him as he writhes to the rhythm of some disco diva. I feel his heat, but I do not feel
him.
Though close enough to lick him, to aid him in his mounting quest for orgasm, I cannot touch him. He is right there in front of me, and yet he is not.

It’s a dream, I remind myself. Just enjoy it.

So I submit to the fantasy being played out around me. I indulge in the sensory treats that are offered, taking in stride the restrictions of my surreal presence, my disembodied participation. Though I cannot see Ward’s hands, I can now feel them between my legs—surely it is he who rolls my balls through his fingers while stretching my cock stiff.

And so it continues, this sensual joyride. I am suspended—neither in space nor in time—adrift upon waves of pure but incomplete ecstasy, rising and falling to the cadence of Ward’s carnal ministrations, both of us lost in some pumped-up, never-ending disco beat. Over and over, measure after measure, the music goes on. Seconds, minutes, hours (who knows?) pass in a long instant of sightless lust.

“Ward,” I warn, “stop.”

But of course he does not. Flashing that perfect smile, he grooves onward, slipping a finger inside me.

And I’m slipping off to some other zone, rushing toward a climax that I couldn’t forestall even if I wanted to.

Ejaculating, I awake.

That morning in the kitchen—it was a Monday—the pace was brisk on Prairie Street, with our household preparing to begin the week. Neil and Thad stood at the counter, talking about something while opening the assortment of bags, boxes, and bottles that would dispense our “continental breakfast.” I was already at the table with my coffee, looking over the morning paper. The big news was of course the story of Carrol’s murder, which even upstaged the rehash of yesterday’s Packers game, at least in the
Dumont Daily Register.

My mind wasn’t on the murder, though. I was still mulling the dream that had launched my morning with such a disconcerting, if pleasurable, bang. Am I, I wondered, so sexually needy that I can find fulfillment only in fantasy? Wet dreams are more properly the amusement of Thad’s generation, at sixteen, not mine, at forty-two. After all, I have Neil, an experienced and eager partner who seems no less attracted to me than when we met three years ago. Granted, the frequency of our intimacy has waned of late. Living apart has put a predictable strain on our relationship, and even now that Neil has been spending more time in Dumont, our sex life has been inhibited by family life with Thad. Is this whole setup a mistake? Should I simply have stayed in Chicago at the
Journal?

Even more rattling was the cast of my dream. Star billing went to Ward Lord, with his dog featured in a walk-on and me as an anonymous, lucky extra. My subconscious was lusting after Grace Lord’s
nephew,
for God’s sake—a “kid” just a few years older than Thad. I wondered, Was Miriam Westerman correct after all? Am I totally unfit for fatherhood? I ought to be ashamed of myself.

I
was
ashamed. When I woke from the dream, sticky with my involuntary orgasm, I felt as embarrassed as a child who’d wet the bed. Neil lay next to me, waking, it seemed, at the same moment. Had I perhaps thrashed or moaned at the climax of my dream, rousing him? It was still early, but the sun had risen and we both anticipated a busy day, so we kissed, deciding it was time to get up. I lingered, waiting for Neil to pad off to the bathroom, then scrambled to my feet and stripped the bed, wadding the soiled sheets. When Neil returned, he stopped at the sight of my feverish housekeeping. I explained, “Monday. Wash day.”

“Who’s Charles Oakland?” asked Neil as he sat next to me in the kitchen, snapping my attention back to the moment. He tapped the front page of the
Register,
which displayed the murder story under Charles Oakland’s byline.

“Staff reporter,” I answered with a shrug. “General assignment.”

“Never heard of him.” Neil slurped some coffee, warming his hands with the mug. Sunday’s change of weather had brought a cold rain overnight, and the morning felt damp and chilly. “How was he lucky enough to land such an important story?”

Again I shrugged. “He happened to be covering the Sunday shift in the newsroom.” I turned the page, landing Charles Oakland’s story facedown on the table. I glanced over the contents of pages two and three.

Thad sidled up behind me. I knew from the heady aroma that followed him that he carried peanut-buttered toast—our pantry had been replenished. He asked, “So this guy got killed, and you like…
saw
him?” From his tone, I expected him to add, Too cool!

“Yes,” I answered dryly, “Mr. Cantrell died yesterday, and by sheer coincidence, I discovered the body.”

“How cool is
that?
” (Okay, I was close.) Setting his milk and the plate of toast on the table, Thad sat next to me, across from Neil.

Leaning toward him, I looked him in the eye and tried to explain, soothingly, “No, Thad, there was nothing cool about it. The murder was a tragedy both for Mr. Cantrell and for the city. Sheriff Pierce is under lots of pressure, and Miss Lord is utterly devastated.” I was tempted to remind him of how he had felt last winter when his mother died too young, but in truth, I felt he had never properly grieved that loss, and I suspected he was still suppressing those feelings with an adolescent veneer of fascination with the morbid.

He nodded, grudgingly conceding my point that murder’s not cool. Then a thought brightened his eyes. “So he was like…
strangled?
”

Lord. There was nothing to be gained by lecturing him on the appropriate tone of this discussion, so I simply answered, “It appears so, yes.”