Capture

by Smith, Roger

  She grabs her Nokia from beside the bed and dials her husband and gets his voicemail, delivered in that bizarre mid-Atlantic mélange he calls an accent, and the only message she can think of leaving is a scream of terror, so she ends the call and throws the phone onto the duvet.

  Caroline walks through to the bathroom—a marble mausoleum with a terrifyingly large mirror—and stares at her reflection. Horrified by what stares back at her, she tears herself away, the light in the bathroom streaking and lagging like bad video, the molecules in the air thick and heavy, pressing down on her, resisting her as she goes back into the bedroom and sees her computer, a folded clam lying on the bed.

  Her own voice, almost lost now in the psycho-billy chorus, tells her to leave it unopened. But she doesn’t hear or she doesn’t listen and she sits down on the bed, the comforter a living thing, slick and fleshy, ready to suck her down and suffocate her. She escapes its clutches and sits cross-legged on the carpet and lifts the computer onto her lap.

  Her hands shake, palsied tremors that make opening the Mac almost impossible, her thumb finding the little slider that releases the lid—the serrations painful to her skin—but losing purchase and skidding off onto the cool plastic. She has to use both her thumbs, one on top of the other, to release the catch. She lifts the lid and her index finger taps wild Morse code on the power button before she stills it long enough to apply enough pressure to boot up the Mac.

  The computer hums to life, the whine of its electrics at a pitch too high for Caroline to tolerate, and she dumps it onto the carpet and stands, hugging herself, as the machine grunts and moans its way to alertness.

  When it trills its frantic little greeting she returns to it and opens the document file that contains her work-in-progress, the only thing that has sustained her, given her hope these last days.

  Miraculously, the voices recede as her eyes fix on the familiar black Times New Roman script against the blue-whiteness of the monitor. She hears a backwash of churning and sucking, and then nothing. Quiet. Allowing her to concentrate fully, to weigh each word for meaning.

  To face the truth.

  Christ knows it is puerile crap. The most god-awful, adolescent shite she has ever written. The lowest form of chick lit. She is stunned almost to sanity and then the voices are back, delighted, whooping and laughing and jeering at her.

  She grabs the indigo and crème computer and stands and swings it in a wide arc, repeatedly smashing it against the wall, gouging chunks of white plaster, brick red as flesh beneath, until at last the case of the iBook splinters and its innards are revealed: stippled little boards festooned with silver solder and M&M-sized doodads, colored wires like braided hair held in check by cable ties.

  The battery flies loose and lands on the instep of her bare left foot and the pain only spurs her on to greater efforts as she swings and smashes, not even noticing when the torn plastic cuts into the palm of her left hand. At last Caroline stands with blood dripping from her, surrounded by computer body parts.

  Leaving a trail of blood, she goes back into the bathroom and kills the light. Then she finds the basin in the gloom and opens the cold faucet, letting the water sluice the blood away. She is not sure how long she stands there but when she lifts her hand it stings as the lacerations make contact with the air.

  But the bleeding has stopped and the voices tell her what she must do next. And who she must see.

  The whole dog and pony show, billed as “a motion-capture master class with the creator of Life in a Box,” is the brainchild of Billy Chalmers, the tanned South African hustler who grins at Exley from the front row of the audience. Exley, placed before a display of artfully stacked brown boxes, the open laptop his only shield, stands at a podium facing two hundred people seated on folding chairs in the vast, windowless, climate-controlled space.

  Exley, on autopilot, pedals his digital snake oil, convinced that if he stops talking and allows reality in, he’ll fall apart.

  In the morning a car driven by a silent black man met him at O.R. Tambo airport. As the Beemer carved a path through the rush hour on the freeway, Exley, brain fogged by anguish, watched without seeing the rash of condo developments en route to Sandton, Johannesburg’s money belt, far from the post-apocalyptic inner city and the endless sprawl of ghetto townships he’d glimpsed from the air.

  When the ugliness softened and blurred through tears, he was sure he’d have to be poured from the car, a messy puddle of snot. The driver’s eyes, skewering him in the rearview before sliding back to the road, shamed him into pulling himself together.

  Once inside the movie studio that hosted the presentation, Exley could have been anywhere from Sydney to Stockholm. The usual mix of accents and ethnicities, members of the digital diaspora, united like Freemasons by geek-speak unintelligible to a civilian.

  Exley fell back on the safety of his rituals: fussing with the laptop, trotting out his mantras. Digging into his usual bag of tricks, sending mo-cap sequences through to the big-brother bank of flat screens that floated in the gloom.

  Now there is a break for a late lunch and Exley dodges Chalmers and the money men who want him to eat with them, and finds a room to hide in. He sets his phone alarm for an hour hence and crawls under a plastic table, ignoring the foot-rot stink of the curling carpet tiles.

  Drawing his knees into a fetal position, he falls asleep and tumbles down some rabbit hole and emerges on the beach, getting baked with Shane Porter, feeling Sunny tugging at his boardshorts, ignoring her, fobbing her off, seeing her floating underwater, a chain of bubbles escaping her open mouth.

  Exley battles his way out of the nightmare, banging his head on the underside of the table, awake now. Reality is worse. His daughter is dead.

  His phone’s red eye winks and he sees he has a missed call and a voicemail message from Caroline. But when he plays it he hears only the hiss of her breath and a muttered curse. He considers calling her but he’s feeling too fragile for the inevitable confrontation.

  Exley gathers his belongings and finds a bathroom and washes his face and straightens his clothes. Then he stands in the darkness at the side of the studio, like a performer waiting in the wings, as the audience of strangers drifts back to its seats.

  Driving is almost beyond Caroline. The Landy’s absurd gearstick, rearing up out of the floor between the front seats, is a difficult beast at the best of times but with Caroline’s tremors hitting the upper limits of the Richter scale controlling this wobbling, spindly-thing is impossible and metal grates and tears as Caroline forces the car into gear. She is still barefoot, the soles of her feet protesting at the painful contact with the rubber-sheathed pedals.

  The heat is suffocating and the smell of gasoline fills the car, burning her eyes and nose. The side windows are open but there is no breeze to stir the air. Her brain feels swollen, pressing up against the backs of her eyes, and even though she drives slowly the passing houses are a pointillist blur of swirling color.

  The voices continue, one minute screaming obscenities at her, the next falling to hissy sibilance. These whispers are the most dangerous, inviting her to stop fighting, to surrender to her madness. But she fights on. Holds onto some last shred of herself as she battles the Land Rover up the hill to Vlad’s house.

  If she sees him, she tells herself, then she’ll be okay. He’ll fix her. He’ll still the voices. All he has to do is hold her, envelop her, and the madness will recede.

  She bangs the Land Rover into the curb outside his house and falls from the high car, leaving the door hanging open as she rushes toward the front gate. Like all the other houses in this suburb of riches, Vlad’s is a castle keep surrounded by looming brick walls, strands of electric fencing singing at the top. The barred gate towers above her, topped by a cross-hatching of ornate spikes. A burnished metal plate is recessed into the masonry beside the gate, with a white button and a compound-eye oval of speaker holes.

  She presses the button, the plastic sticky to the touch, knowing that so
mewhere in the house she has triggered a buzzer. Peering through the bars, she sees slices of the nouveau riche monstrosity: blank windows firing the sun at her, patio furniture, palm trees, the huge oak door like a closed mouth at the top of a flight of wide stairs. No movement.

  The voices kick in at a pitch so loud she feels something has clobbered her behind her knees and her legs almost give in and she has to grab the bars of the gate for support, her face pressed up against the hot metal.

  She breathes. Curses. Begs. Gets hold of that bloody button again.

  Static crackles beside her ear, dispersing the chorus. A sexless voice comes through the speaker, a tinny echo. “Yes, yes? What is it?”

  Caroline surrenders the button and moves her mouth close to the metal plate. “Vlad?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I must see Vlad.”

  “Mr. Stankovic is not home.”

  “I must see him.”

  “Go away.”

  A dismissive clunk and silence.

  Caroline gathers all of her concentration to send her skittish finger to the buzzer and once she finds it, she knows she won’t release it until somebody comes.

  Eventually the door yawns open and a pale figure stands revealed. There is a blur and the scratch of nails on cement and a whining enquiry and she realizes that Sneg has run down the stairs to the gate, trying to force his snout and tongue through the bars. Oh God, he knows me, she thinks. He knows me.

  She slides two fingers between the bars and feels the animal’s hot, sandpapery tongue on her skin.

  “Sneg!” At the curt command the wolf’s tail curls around his balls and he retreats and slinks back up the stairs, watching Caroline from behind a woman’s long legs.

  The woman is halfway down the stairs now. She stops. “What do you want with my husband?”

  Caroline’s sight clears enough to see that this is not the dumpy babushka of her imagination. The wife is tall, elegant—chic is the only word—with straight blonde hair streaked with gray, coiled into a loose chignon. She is dressed in a beige and white pantsuit, her manicured toes emerging from a pair of designer sandals, nails painted a muted pearl.

  When she speaks it is in plummy tones not unlike Caroline’s, with just a hint of Eastern Europe in the vowels. “I ask again: what do you want?”

  “I must see him.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Caroline Exley.”

  There is a bark, but it is too polite for Sneg and Caroline realizes the woman has laughed. “Ah, yes, the latest bit of crumpet.” An eyebrow arches. “A little frumpy even for my husband.”

  “Where is he? Please.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, go away. Can’t you see he is finished with you, you little idiot? Do you think you are the first? Or will be the last?”

  The woman is turning away, hissing at Sneg.

  Caroline grabs the bars of the gate and shakes it but it is too sturdy to rattle. She hears a wild scream and it takes a moment to realize it is hers. The woman retreats toward the front door.

  A hand grabs Caroline’s upper arm. Vlad. Thank Christ.

  She spins, ready to embrace him, but it is the rent-a-cop, khaki-faced in his absurd action figure outfit.

  “Mrs. Exley,” he says. “Let me take you home.”

  Caroline is momentarily shocked into silence and so are the voices.

  The security man half-bows to the wife, who hovers on the stairs.

  “Mrs. Stankovic.”

  “Officer.” Like a baroness greeting a serf.

  Sneg bares his teeth and growls at Vernon, the first time Caroline has seen him behave this way.

  I’m right, she screams inside her head, drowning the voices for just a moment. I’m right about this fucker.

  But she’s given voice to the thoughts—bellowed them—and he tightens his grip on her arm and she can feel her pale flesh bruising beneath his fingertips.

  “Mrs. Exley, please.”

  She fights loose. “Take your hands off me, you fucking brown bastard!”

  “Mrs. Exley.”

  “You fucking savage. You knew she was dead, didn’t you? You knew she was dead, knew my child was dead, yet you lay on her and filled her with your breath like she was a blow-up doll?”

  He tries to take her arm again and she slaps him, screaming, hits out, her fists bouncing off his body armor. A car pulls up at the house next door and a pale woman mother-hens her gawking kids into the garage as the roller door closes.

  The rent-a-cop has got behind Caroline, trying to wrap his arms around her, her skirt riding high on her thighs, her pale, freckled legs pedaling the air. “What? Did you want to fuck her?”

  Two sturdy black maids, dressed in pinafores and caps, walking fluffy lapdogs, stop and stare and Caroline can feel their Xhosa clicks like slaps to her face.

  Somehow she breaks free of Vernon Saul’s grip, still screaming, landing on all fours. She is drooling and weeping and snot dangles from her nose. She finds her feet and rushes for the Land Rover, dragging herself aboard, fighting the wheel and the pedals and the gears, and sets off lurching and veering down the hill.

  Down toward the suck of the sea and that vapid soulless house.

  Down toward total fucking toys-in-the-attic madness.

  Chapter 23

  On the two-hour flight back to Cape Town, as Exley sits with his laptop open, tweaking his model of Sunny, a sense of dislocation nags at him, screwing with his concentration. He closes his eyes and reaches for a memory of his daughter on the morning of her birthday, desperate to have her close. But he can’t find Sunny’s face—her real face. He can only conjure up the digital version that he’s built.

  A stewardess brings him a Scotch, his second—or maybe third—and he shuts down the laptop and puts it aside, feeling the pleasant burn of the booze on his tongue, trying to reassemble the timeline of his afternoon. The best he can do is a series of frame grabs. He must have spoken with enough conviction and dazzled the faithful with enough wizardry because he stepped down from the podium to loud applause, and young bum-fluffy geeks mobbed him, firing questions.

  Exley, limp with fatigue, disappeared into the darkness, leaving Chalmers to run interference, shepherding the punters and their credit cards toward a cocktail bar that somehow manifested at the side of the studio, complete with lounge music and a barman in a bowtie.

  On impulse Exley, before he slipped out to the waiting car, triggered a loop of Sunny dancing and sent it through to the bank of monitors.

  The loop started with a wireframe model, stark white lattice-work against black, then transitioned through to his child fully rendered and textured.

  A few people, drinks and snacks in their hands, paused in mid-conversation and turned to the screens. More followed their cue. A reverential silence fell as conversations fragmented and stopped.

  This should have pleased Exley, flying into a sunset mauve with pollution, this proof that his reclaiming of his daughter is transcending the gap between the imaginary and the real, pixel by pixel. But he is unsettled by the understanding that Sunny has been replaced forever in his memory by what he has conjured from zeros and ones, and when he thinks of returning home and facing his wife he feels nothing but despair. Sunny was the glue that kept them together and now that she’s gone, he and Caroline stand revealed for what they are: antagonistic strangers. Not even united by grief. Driven farther apart, if anything.

  The drinks trolley, pushed by a black stewardess with cruelly straightened hair, appears at his side again and Exley asks for another double Scotch straight up. The woman hands him the drink in a small plastic container, like a urine sample.

  He throws it back in two swallows, desperate to escape this place where every thought and memory cuts like a blade.

  Chapter 24

  This is Dawn’s worst fucken nightmare. Okay, not the worst—that’s all about some sick filth doing to Brittany what was done to her way back—but, still, this is bad. Really bad.

&n
bsp; Dawn, already late for work, took Brittany down the cabbage-stinking corridor to the old Porra woman’s apartment. Banging loud and long enough to get another neighbor—fat Boer loser, dressed only in his underpants—out his door, moaning. Dawn flipping him the finger with her left hand, right hand still banging away.

  He muttered something like “bushman bitch” and then he was gone back to his beaver books and his Kleenexes. Finally, after the sound of many locks and bolts being worked free, the door opened to reveal Mrs. de Pontes, small as a child, dressed like always in her widow’s black.

  “I sick,” the old woman said.

  “What you mean?”

  “I sick.” To prove it she let rip with a cough that sounded like a power saw attacking metal, Brittany staring up in awe.

  “Jesus, Mrs. de Pontes, you can’t drop me like this. I gotta work.”

  The coughing spasm ended with the old woman hacking up something into a tissue and slamming the door in Dawn’s face. Locks were locked and bolts were thrown.

  Dawn, with her kid down on Voortrekker—the familiar perfume of exhaust fumes and KFC and dust and poverty—takes a gap in the evening traffic to get them across safely, the neon of Lips blowing them kisses.

  The wall-eyed doorwoman with the mustache checks Brittany out like she’s trash. “Ja? And what is this?”

  Dawn bites back a curse, taking Brittany inside. Fortunately the stage is empty, nothing that Dawn has to shield the kid’s eyes from. She gives Cliffie a wave and he nods, setting out bottles on the bar top. Dawn heads into the back, leading Britt up a short flight of stairs covered by a gum-tacky carpet. A steel door painted the color of flesh blocks the top of the stairs and Dawn knocks. Soft and polite.

  “Ja?” The muffled voice of Costa, locked inside with his money.

  “It’s Dawn.”

  Just one lock is turned—a serious one, Dawn knows—and there’s Costa with a cigarette married to his lip, squinting at her through the smoke.