“I dreamt I was riding on a train, first on an express train, and then on a commuter train, and as I got off, I already knew it was the wrong station, but I got off anyway and it was the wrong station, so desolate and run-down, as if no train had stopped there in years. I went through the station building to the square outside, and everything was deserted there too: no taxis, no buses, no people. But then I saw Karl and Peter, both sitting on their suitcases, old-fashioned things without wheels or pull-out handles, as if they were waiting to be picked up. When I went up to them, they didn’t look up or move, and it seemed to me that they had died long ago, and were sitting there, dead, on their suitcases. I felt a shock – but not like something hitting me, more like something cold, slowly creeping up my spine. Then I woke up.”

“I can’t interpret dreams. Dreams are just dreams, as my wife used to say. But when the three of you talked about the end of the world and of art and of alternatives – weren’t you at the station where the last train had left long ago? Weren’t you sitting dead on your suitcases?” I had wanted, but forgotten, to ask her just after the others had left: “Do you really believe what you said?”

She looked around. I brought her pillows so that she could sit up. She arranged herself, and gave me the look I had come to know, and which bespoke tenderness, but also sadness that I didn’t understand what she wanted me to. “My pure fool,” she said. “You go through life fighting your battles like knights fought their tournaments, and like them, you don’t see that it’s the end of an era – that it’s just a game of mirrors now. I love how keen you are to trudge from task to task, dutifully doing yet another merger, yet another acquisition, as if it meant something. It moves me, and it makes me sad.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to justify what I did, to explain that mergers and acquisitions mean something. That the battles I fought were more than a game of mirrors. That nothing had come to an end; that everything went on and on.

“Don’t worry. When people talk about the world, they’re usually talking about themselves. Perhaps it’s just that I can’t bear that I’m coming to an end, without the world ending too. Come here!”