Chapter Thirty-three
Somehow he muddled his way through until the late morning, when Amanda Ramussienne called. She was still in New York.
“Joe, hi darling,” she crooned. “Look, I hate to do this, but I’m gonna have to break your heart. Something’s come up that I can’t do anything about, which means I’m stuck in town and can’t make it down there today. Promise you won’t hold it against me for the rest of time.”
So it appeared that lots of things were free to change: Here was one less complication to deal with. Corrigan decided he could live with that. He forced a resigned grin. “Well, too bad. Life happens, I guess.”
“And I was so looking forward to it! You still have that promise to keep.”
“We’ll get by.” Corrigan had no idea what she meant. “I appreciate your letting me know.”
“You’re so understanding. I’ll make it up with interest.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Well, it’s all a panic here. Have to go. You’ll do great on the interview with Ed. I wanted to be there. So sorry again, Joe.” She winked a promise; blew him a kiss, and vanished.
Corrigan sat, staring at the blank screen, wondering what had possessed him. Looking back from where he saw things now, the whole business with Amanda felt grubby and sordid. Had the phoniness and gaudiness always been that transparent? And then the full realization dawned on him that it hadn’t all happened then; it was now. It was possible that he could straighten things out with Evelyn.
Then Judy came through to remind him that he was due to have lunch with somebody from another F & F client. The name meant nothing. “What’s it about?” Corrigan asked.
“He’s the one who thinks Oz could be used to try out an idea he’s had for using media superheroes to promote products to adults the way they do already with juveniles,” Judy said.
Corrigan remembered him. A complete flake. He had talked without stopping all through lunch, without telling Corrigan anything he didn’t already know. Corrigan couldn’t face the prospect of repeating it. “You know, maybe you’re right,” he told Judy. “Maybe I’m not feeling myself today. Can you fob him off for me? Tell him something vital has come up on the project—anything.”
“Leave it to me,” Judy said.
Corrigan went off to a coffee shop in Station Square to think and be alone.
For he was unable to avoid a conviction that had been steadily growing inside him all morning that the impressions that he had woken up with that morning of having lived years past today were not the result of some extraordinarily vivid dream or fabrication, but that it had happened, somehow, and now he was back at the age of thirty-two again and had lived this day before. But how could that be? Things like that simply didn’t happen.
All he could think of was that the life he remembered living after having the breakdown and Oz being canceled had, in fact, been real, but distorted in the process of his gradual recovery—in other words, exactly what he had been told it was. In that case, everything he was experiencing now was an illusion, perhaps taking place in the course of some kind of catastrophic relapse manufactured out of his stored experiences from long ago. So was he really back in Mercy Hospital or somewhere in 2022, thinking that he was back in 2010, before he had the breakdown? But if everything he was experiencing was the product of a deranged mind, then anything was possible and his situation was a total solipsism, with no possibility of his being able to prove or disprove anything by any form of investigation or experiment, one way or the other.
But then, on the other hand, would a deranged mind be capable of thinking it through this logically? In which case it was real. But since time travel didn’t happen, if it was true, it followed logically that it had to be a delusion. Unless, of course, he was only thinking that he was being logical. . . .
At that point he gave it up as hopeless and went back to the office.