Free Capture by Roger Smith

like he’s shot a load in his pants.
    Then he gets Vernon to pump his arm and make a fist, and a nice vein rises blue and knotted from his forearm. Doc’s hand is suddenly still, like he’s received some miracle cure, and he eases the needle into the vein, and Vernon feels that beautiful nothingness and goes deep under, way too deep for even his father’s ghost to find him.
     
     
    Sunny watches Exley from the monitor. He took the photograph only last week, a full-face portrait, and remembers how hard it was to get her to stay still.
    He is modeling his daughter’s face in 3D software and has constructed an intricate mesh, a latticework that follows the contours of her bones. Exley could have made a career as a computer artist—he has the chops—but his motion-capture device, developed when he was a young animator too poor to buy one of the extortionately expensive systems sold by the people who would become his pissed-off competitors, set him on another course.
    But he has never lost his love of 3D modeling, creating life from a digital wire mesh, finding nodal points with cursor arrows and using the subtlest of wrist and finger movements on his mouse (a tool that is an extension of his hand) to drag and warp the mesh until it takes human form and seems to transcend the two-dimensional plane of his monitor. Not for nothing is this animation software called Maya, Sanskrit for illusion.
    Or delusion.
    When he renders, skins and textures this face, it will be the focal point of a photo-realistic representation of his child. He’ll graft the head onto a model of her body and give it life by marrying the figure to the motion-capture data he has stored.
    Almost like bringing her back.
    Exley rejects this notion. Blocks out the voice of Gladys on the beach earlier, telling him that his daughter is still out there, reachable, in some limbo between life and afterlife.
    There is no fucking afterlife.
    What he is doing here is a father’s expression of love for his dead child. Nothing more. If he were a painter, he’d paint her. If he were a musician, he’d record something like Eric Clapton did after his four-year-old son plunged to his death from that apartment building in New York City. He is using his talent to create a memorial to his dead daughter and he’ll screen it on the day of her funeral.
    When an imaginary Caroline—at her schoolmarmish best—appears in his head to tell Exley that this digital evocation of Sunny is merely his way of sublimating his guilt, an act of penance disguised as obsessive love, he rolls his chair away from the workstation, closes his eyes and slides his fingers under his glasses, massaging his sinuses. He needs food and sleep and comfort.
    With a couple of mouse-clicks he saves the information on the computer and leaves the studio, stepping out of the air-conditioned room into the heat. Somehow it has become afternoon and the wind is roaring in, turning the sea choppy, white heads of spume blowing up onto the beach.
    Exley goes into the kitchen, spotless now that Gladys has done her magic. He opens the fridge and contemplates the leftovers. He’s been a vegetarian since his days on the ashram, so he looks past the cold cuts and caviar, opens the foil on a wheel of Brie, but the ripe stink rises in his nostrils and he is overtaken by nausea. He crosses to the sink and drinks forever from the faucet, wiping his face.
    When he opens his eyes he sees Caroline through the beads of water, soundless in her bare feet, still dressed in the tights and sweater, smoking, thin lines radiating out from her lips as she inhales.
    “That horrible little undertaker left a message on the answerphone. He wants you to call him.”
    “Sure, okay.”
    She turns to go.
    “Caro?”
    “Yes?”
    “I was thinking that we should hold the service here, on the beach, not in some God-awful crematorium.”
    She laughs. “What are we going to do? Bury her at sea?”
    Exley doesn’t react, just watches his wife,