“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said finally in a tone that could have meant anything.
Horace, after deciding that a short, respectful silence was appropriate, had evidently checked up on how humans were likely to react in situations like this. “Don’t do anything rash, Joe,” it cautioned. “I understand that these things can be a strain. Breaking the place up would only make everything worse in the long run.”
“Thanks, but I have no intention of doing anything of the kind,” Corrigan told it.
“Do you want to sit down for a minute?”
“What for?”
“There are tranquilizers in the cabinet. Or shall I mix you a drink, even if it is early? If you like, I could get Sarah Bewley on the line.” Then, via its optical sensors around the room, the machine discerned that Corrigan wasn’t behaving in any of the ways categorized in its data retrievals. “Don’t you feel rage, remorse, guilt, confusion?” it inquired. “An impulse to get even, to have revenge? Compulsions to commit physical assault or battery? Homicide?”
“I feel fine.”
But of course, Horace realized: it had been presuming in terms of normal humans. With a deviant like Corrigan, anything was possible. “What are you going to do?” it asked warily.
Corrigan moved back to his own closet and took out a pastel-blue wool-acrylic jacket. “I think I’ll go for a walk and eat out,” he replied. “So don’t worry about breakfast.”
“But . . . that’s it?” Simulated or not, Horace sounded genuinely befuddled—even, perhaps, with a hint of mild disappointment.
“Reality rejection,” Corrigan explained, slipping on the jacket as he went through the doorway to the hall. “Look it up with the experts, Horace. I’m sure they’ll tell you all about it.
On the table by the front door was a figurine of a grinning Irish leprechaun in a battered hat, clutching a curly-stemmed pipe. It had been a wedding present from Corrigan’s marriage to his first wife, Evelyn—long ago now, before his breakdown.
“And the top o’ the mornin’ to yerself, too, Mick,” he said as he let himself out the door.
The figurine had been among the personal things kept for him after the house that he and Evelyn had shared was sold. Apart from being a reminder of home, it had always held a strange fascination that Corrigan had never really understood.
Chapter Two
For breakfast, Corrigan went to a place called The Bagatelle that he used occasionally, a short walk from the apartment, just off Forbes Avenue in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh’s East End. It was close enough to the way that he thought restaurants ought to be to still have seats at a counter, and booths for customers to sit at, and to look as if it was staying in the same place. Some of the experiments in progressive marketing that he’d come across, which seemed to be affecting everything these days, included eating reclined on couches, Roman style; a steakhouse fitted out as a train, with graphics-generated moving landscapes outside the windows; and a seafood restaurant housed in a transparent dome on the bed of the Allegheny River.
One of the peculiarities of being crazy—or still recovering from being crazy, anyway—was that it made the rest of the world look odd instead. Corrigan’s therapists told him that a side effect of his condition inhibited his ability to respond to the socializing influences that gave normal individuals their sense of identity, purpose, belonging, and direction.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE, a flashing sign in the window of an outfitter’s store a block from the restaurant proclaimed, with a display featuring a life-size Long John Silver, complete with parrot and chest overflowing with gleaming plastic florins. The city’s chamber of commerce was sponsoring a promotional drive on the theme of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and most businesses were offering discounts to anyone sporting pirate garb. The stores had stocked up with imitation flintlocks and cutlasses. Video banks were downloading pirate movies for half price.
The Bagatelle’s staff were turned out in an assortment of striped jerseys, braided coats, and three-corner hats when Corrigan arrived, and the customers included a complement of eye-patched ruffians and baggy-britched buccaneers. Also scattered around were a trio of cowboys in Western gear, a Beau Brummel in silks and wig, and two girls wearing silver pants with scarlet, metal-trimmed vests, recognizable as uniforms of female engineering crew in Starship Command. All of them were adorned with the panoply of hip purse, camera and accessories, walkaround music player, and medication pouch that the role models on TV had elevated practically to the level of mandatory for proper dress. They greeted Corrigan’s jacket and tie with curious, suspicious looks of the kind he was used to, and he consigned himself to a booth in an empty corner. The screen at the end of the table showed a menu and voiced the morning’s special, adding a commercial for an insurance agency along the street. Corrigan entered his order via the touchpad, then sat back and let his mind turn idly to the prospect of life without Muriel. Snatches of conversation reached him from the nearest occupied table about what the celebrities were doing in some popular drama or other. The cowboys were making sure that everyone could see their boots, which must have cost a hundred dollars a pair.