He left the den in a daze and went to get a better look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Yesterday, there had been a nick on his thumb, where he had cut it cleaning up the pieces of a broken glass at the Camelot. It was quite pronounced, with a week or more of healing to go before the mark would fade. Yet today there was not a trace of it.
Something very strange had happened to him. He had definite recollections of having woken up like this, on this very day, but long ago. The recollections were indistinct and incomplete, as if being retrieved from long ago. What had happened after the dinner with the NBC people? He seemed to remember they had gone on to a club, and afterward he went back to the Vista with Amanda. And then, the next day, what? . . . He wasn’t sure.
The first thing he could recall anything of after that was being in Mercy Hospital, slowly piecing himself together again. Dr. Arnold and the nurse . . . Katie, her name was; a strange Saturday-night dance, populated by caricatures representing the system’s early attempts at constructing people; Simon, the counselor, and the time when Corrigan had dug a hole in the hospital lawn. . . . And after that a succession of memories over the years, becoming progressively clearer until the last few days, when he was forty-four, working as a bartender in the Camelot, and met Lilly.
But the person looking back at him out of the mirror was a young man of thirty-two. The computer said the date was Tuesday, October 12, 2010. There was a message in the system from Judy, put there last night, that corroborated it. Had that whole sequence of the last twelve years that he thought he remembered been nothing more than a creation of his mind? Was it possible for a mere dream to be so compelling?
He went back to the den and used the phone to call Lilly’s number. The call failed to connect, and he got a message asking if he needed information. That was right—the codes used in 2022 had embodied a new system of multifunction options that confused everybody. He was unable to recall any of the numbers that he had used in 2010, not even his own or Xylog’s. Neither could he remember how to get a directory on the phone’s miniscreen, so he had to go through the Operator.
“Information. What city, please?”
“Pittsburgh. Do you have a listing for Essell, please? Lillian Essell. The address is 7H Beech Ridge, on Boer Way.”
“One moment. . . . I’m sorry sir, I don’t have that name listed.”
“It’s on the North Side. I’ve been there.”
“Well, it’s not here. That’s all I can tell you.”
“How about the Camelot Hotel? Downtown on Fourth Avenue.”
“Camelot, with a C, as in King Arthur?”
“That’s it.”
“No, I don’t have that either. Downtown, you say? I’ve never heard of it.”
“One more, then. Do you have the Xylog Corporation?”
“Xylog? You mean the place with the big computer project that’s been in the news? I’m sure I have. Do you want the number?”
“Not right now. It’s okay. I was just checking something. Thanks for you help.”
“Thank you.”
Corrigan hung up and stared at the phone. So nothing of the world that he remembered as of yesterday existed out there. Lilly, the Camelot, everything else . . . it had all been a fabrication? He walked slowly back to the kitchen and put on some coffee, forcing himself to try to think.
A dream so vivid that even now it eclipsed his recollections of the world that he found himself back in? The only explanation he could conceive was that in his sleeping fantasies, he had acted out how, unconsciously, he would have wished the project to evolve over years; and—as happens with dreams—his mind had created some bizarre images and interpretations.
Had the project become such an obsession with him as that? If so, then perhaps this was a warning sign, and this time he should take heed. Maybe what some people had been telling him was true, and he was letting himself get unhinged over the business with Tyron. Evelyn might have had a point, he reflected uncomfortably.