Cyber Rogues (56 page)

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.

He still wasn’t reacting fully to the situation, he knew. Things might take days to sink in. A potbellied autovendor stopped by the booth and began reciting a spiel on the magazines, candies, pills, and other wares that it was carrying. Corrigan told it to go away.

Then one of the waitresses came across with his coffee. She was about twenty, cute in the face, slightly chubby, with dark ringlets poking out from below a blue-spotted kerchief tied around her head.

“Hi, Mandy,” Corrigan said, looking at her name tag.

“You ordered eggs and corned-beef hash with fries?”

“Right.”

“The special today is German pancakes and sausage.”

“I know. I want eggs and the hash.”

Mandy looked puzzled and glanced away at the other customers, as if double-checking something. “But everybody’s having the special,” she said.

“Well, that’s manifestly untrue, isn’t it? If
everybody
were, then it would include me, wouldn’t it?—by definition. And I’m not.” He watched her patiently, waiting for the pieces to connect. Quite simple, he tried saying with a smile. Just think about it.

Her eyes met his with the vacancy that he saw everywhere. He felt as if he were dealing with a shell whose occupant had departed—or maybe never existed. “Logically, that’s correct, I guess,” she replied. Corrigan was used to things sounding strangely inappropriate. Mandy’s brow creased. She seemed to be having a problem knowing how to continue.

The receptionist at the desk by the door saved her by calling across, “Mandy, is that a Mr. Corrigan there at that booth?” She was holding a phone.

“Are you Mr. Corrigan?” Mandy repeated.

“Yes, I am.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Call for you, Mr. Corrigan,” the receptionist announced.

A beep sounded from the table unit, and the menu vanished to be replaced by a callscreen format. Corrigan tapped the pad to accept and pivoted the unit toward him. The features of Sarah Bewley appeared, looking concerned. Mandy made the best of her opportunity to escape.

“Joe, thank goodness I’ve found you!” Sarah was still the rehabilitation counselor assigned to Corrigan’s case by the psychiatric care section of the city health department. She looked and sounded anxious. “Are you all right?”

Corrigan made a pretense of thinking the question. over; then, knowing that she would miss the point, pronounced, “Probably more what you’d call mostly liberal.” He played the same games with Sarah as he did with Horace. For a psychiatrist, Sarah could be amazingly unperspicacious at times—or so it seemed to Corrigan. Years previously, Dr. Arnold had told him that his condition caused him to see things in peculiar ways and form linkages in his head that made no sense to anyone else.

“I was worried about you,” Sarah said.

“Is that a fact?”

“Horace called and told me the news about Muriel. You know, if you’d only carry a compad like everyone else, it would be a lot easier for people to contact you.”

“I know,” Corrigan agreed. “That’s why I don’t. If I did, I’d have Horace checking up on me all the time. It’s bad enough having to live with a neurotic computer, never mind being hounded all over town by it as well.”

Sarah came back to her reason for calling. “You’re sure you’re all right? You’re not thinking of doing anything silly, are you?”

“I was about to have breakfast, if that’s what you mean.”

“Joe, I’m so sorry! You must be going out of your mind. I know how something like this can affect people, especially somebody in your situation. Now, you’re not to worry, understand? I can probably arrange through the department to have her traced. Then we’ll get her back, and all sit down together and work out what the problem is. In the meantime I want you to carry on just as if nothing happened. Can you manage that for me, Joe?”

Corrigan blinked. What was this? First Horace; now his counselor verging on hysteria. “I’m all right,” he said when he could get a word in. Sarah stopped, seemingly taken by surprise just as he thought she was about to launch off again. “It’s probably for the best,” Corrigan explained. “I don’t think there ever was anything deep between us either way. It was all done for the wrong reasons. To be honest, I feel relieved now that it’s sorted itself out at last.”

“Relieved?” Sarah repeated. It was as if she needed to test the word, to make sure she’d heard it right.

Corrigan shrugged lightly. “Sure. You know: not being shut up in a box anymore with somebody that I really don’t have that much to say to; able to be me without having to try and explain it, knowing that I wouldn’t be understood anyway. Life could be worse.”

Sarah stared out of the screen at him, suddenly calmer now, “Diminished emotional sensitivity index,” she murmured knowingly. “That is one of the symptoms we should expect.”

Corrigan felt himself getting irritated. If he didn’t fit with what their textbooks and case histories said was to be expected, then that was just too bad. He felt fine. “Look,” he said, “if you’re trying to—”

“Careful, Joe,” Sarah cautioned. “Hostility’s natural—you’ve had a big loss. But you have to try to control it.”

Corrigan closed his eyes and forced himself to be patient. “Sarah, really, I’m all right. I don’t especially want to trace her. It wouldn’t work, and anyway, I’m not interested.”

Sarah looked unconvinced but seemed willing to let it go for now. “You and I should still talk about it,” she replied. “I’m at my office this morning. Can you get over here? It would be a good time for us to get together anyway. Dr. Zehl will be stopping by in about an hour. He’d like to see how you’re getting on.” Zehl was Sarah’s clinical supervisor from somewhere in Washington. He had a tendency to show up at irregular intervals, always with little or no warning.

“Is it all right if I have my breakfast first?” Corrigan asked.

“Of course.” Sarah nodded in all seriousness, missing the sarcasm. “I’ll send a cab to pick you up. Make sure you’re ready by, say, ten-fifteen.”

“Thanks. I’ll bring some champagne.”

“What for?” A blank look. She genuinely couldn’t see it. Presumably Corrigan had made another of his erratic connections.

“Never mind,” he said.

Mandy came back to the booth with his order just as Sarah cleared down. She looked pleased with herself. The food looked good, but Corrigan’s breakdown had left him with a disorder of the olfactory system, so that for years nothing had tasted right.

“I get it,” Mandy told him. “I was using ‘everybody’ the way people talk. But you pretended it was an overgeneralization. It was a play on double meanings, right?”

Corrigan had to think for a few seconds before he realized what she was talking about. “Oh, yes . . . right.” He marshaled a smile and winked at her conspiratorially. “But I shouldn’t let on about it if I were you, Mandy,” he whispered. “People might think you’re crazy.”

CHAPTER THREE

Sarah Bewley was short and plump, with a heavyset face cast in a frown that took the world too seriously. She had wispy brown hair and changed its style to reflect how she felt on any given day. When Corrigan arrived at her office, it was tied back in the flare of mane that was the nearest it could be coaxed toward a ponytail, which he knew meant she was logical and analytic today. (Loose and straggly meant speculative/exploratory; high and tied tight, businesslike/clinical.) He also noted that she was wearing a pastel olive-green skirt and matching top. A couple of weeks previously he had remarked that he thought a regular two-piece would be more appropriate for a professional woman than the mauve cat-suit with boots that she had been squeezed into at the time. Strange. He’d always thought that the therapist was supposed to alter the behavior of the patient, not the other way around.

Dr. Zehl, in tie and light-gray suit, was more what Corrigan would have considered conventional. He was tall, probably in his sixties, with a fresh complexion and high brow that encroached on a head of white, crinkly hair. What always struck Corrigan about Zehl was his eyes. Framed in rimless bifocals, they were constantly alert, shifting, silently interrogating, with a depth that Corrigan didn’t find very often. Sarah, by contrast, although technically Corrigan’s mentor, inspired no feeling of real contact in the sense of true, two-way communication of thoughts that mattered; so he amused himself by playing semantic games with her in the same way that he did with Horace.

Since it was Saturday, the receptionist and secretarial staff were out. Sarah let Corrigan in and showed him through to her office, where Zehl was studying the figures on one of the terminal screens. Corrigan sat in an empty chair by the machine opposite. Sarah seemed to get a kick out of showing off her computers. Compared to the kind of machines that he’d used over twelve years before, Corrigan found them quaint.

Unlike Sarah, Zehl didn’t presume that all marriage breakups had to produce feelings of resentment, rejection, and traumatic distress. He understood Corrigan’s position and agreed that if the experiment hadn’t worked out, then it was probably as well to call it a day. Very simple, really. Yet Sarah absorbed the message as if she were witnessing a revelation. If feeling this way instead of turning into what sounded to him like a deranged lunatic was abnormal, then he could live with it, Corrigan decided.

Sarah was unwilling to leave it at that, however, but seemed intrigued by what she saw as his refusal to conform. “Is it simply an inability due to some kind of defect?” she asked him. “Or is it the result of a deliberate process: something you just won’t do? Can you tell us?”

“I thought you were supposed to tell me,” Corrigan answered.

“It doesn’t seem to trouble you at all. You really don’t have any qualms about it? Deep down inside, I mean. You don’t feel out of things, insecure?”

“Yes, I feel out of things. No, I don’t feel insecure. Whether that’s deep down or not, I have no idea.”

“You don’t have a desire to be more a part of the world around you?” Sarah persisted. “To feel integrated, accepted by others?”

“Why should I?”

Sarah flashed Zehl a worried look. “At one time you were a professional, one of the best in your field,” she said to Corrigan. “Don’t you have any of that ambition anymore? Are you happy at the thought of being a bartender indefinitely?” It was like listening to a replay of Muriel and Horace, Corrigan thought.

“Look where the other kind got me,” he said.

Zehl was staring at Corrigan with a different light in his eye: brooding, more reflective. For a moment Corrigan had the odd feeling that it was he and Zehl who shared some common insight that the circumstances precluded discussing openly, and not the two specialists.

“Getting back to the immediate future, Joe, what do you think you might do?” Zehl asked, moving them off the subject. “Any possible plans yet?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Corrigan answered. “Just a thought that crossed my mind while I was having breakfast. Maybe I could use a change of scene and start getting in touch with the rest of the wide world again. We’ve talked about it before, but with Muriel out of the way this might be the right time. I was thinking I could take a vacation back to Ireland.”

Zehl frowned. Clearly he was far from instantly enamored at the idea.

“Ireland?” Sarah repeated. Her voice was quavery. For some reason the suggestion seemed to bewilder her. “Why would you want to go to Ireland?”

“I’m Irish,” Corrigan said. “Sometimes people like to go back and see the place they’re from.” Surely it was obvious.

Sarah was shaking her head, but she seemed to be having to search for a reason. “No, I don’t think so, Joe,” she said. “I don’t think that would be possible at all.”

The abruptness of her response set Corrigan at odds again. “Why not?” he objected. “It’s been twelve years now since the Oz project screwed up. I’m in control of my life again. I’m holding down a job that’s good enough to keep me independent.” He drew a breath and looked at her pointedly. “And it wasn’t me who gave up on the marriage this morning and quit.”