“They’ll put him out to rest till he cools off. And after he pays for what he’s drunk, we’ll send him home because he needs to get some early shut-eye today, don’t you reckon?”

Skinny shook his head, as if he’d understood nothing, and looked at the Count who was still silent, apparently absorbed in the bolero Daniel Santos was singing.

“Did you see that, you rascal?”

“You bet I did, you animal.”

“And do you get it?”

“No. I swear by my mother every day I understand less… Hey, come on, Red, let’s have another beer.”

The worst thing was this sense of the void. As the alarm clock rang, it drilled into the Count’s brain a quarter to seven, a quarter to seven, and his eyelids struggled against lethargy and the recent burden of beer, a quarter to seven, the void started to reclaim its space like an oil slick suddenly released and spreading over the sea of consciousness; but it was a colourless slick, because it was void and nothingness, the end which recommenced, day after day, with an unstinted capacity for self-renewal against which he lacked any defences or valid argument: a quarter to seven was all that was tangible in the depths of that void.

Recently he’d started to imagine death might be somewhat similar: waking to an absence of atmosphere, onerous yet painless, stripped of expectation and surprises because it was only this: a bottomless, empty void, a dark, padded cloud cushioning him definitively. He also tried to recall the time there hadn’t been a sense of void or premonitions of death, when dawn rose like a curtain on a new performance, no matter whether imagined or improvised, at least it seemed right and appealed: a spontaneous desire to live another day. But it was like feeling sick and trying to think what it was like to be well, and he couldn’t, since the ubiquitous quease prevented him from reviving other pleasant sensations.