My eyes are glued shut from sleeping so much. I get up and go to the bar without even washing my face or taking a swig of coffee. I just pee, or I think I pee, and zip up, or I think I zip up, and slowly move towards the Buccaneers’ bar. There, I will begin to navigate this part of the dream, hoping to ultimately shipwreck.

I dream that I am drunk at a bar, talking with an anonymous bartender about the case I’m working on when I’m on the other side, sleeping. I am a private detective in exile, solving the case of a visionary Carmelite nun and some scammer brothers, nicknamed the Maracucho brothers. The place where I conduct these investigations is very cold and inhospitable, even though it’s not as far north as Umea.

One-eyed Luis comes and sits next to me. He says that Lieutenant Colonel Roque was killed by alcohol, exactly how it’s going to kill me. “You’ll drown in your own shit,” he says. I reply that I’ve already learned to drown in my own shit, so they’ll have to invent another method.

He asks me about the case. He also has a case he’s solving right now in Moscow, but with very little chance of resolution. “A political assassination, you know,” he says. “Everyone knows, but no one condemns,” I respond. “There is an absence of justice in the world.” He orders a large glass of pure anise, as big as a water glass, purposely to stir up my thirst.

“Do you think it’s a lack of justice?” he asks. “Isn’t it more likely a lack of a transcendent principle to which we submit or fear because it transcends and imposes on us?”

“Well, well, how the Carmelite nuns contaminate,” he responds sarcastically. “Now Rubén Tenorio seeks God,” he adds.

We both lose our gaze in the bottles of sweet liquors in front of us. “Well, yes, the nun has her points, and one of them is that man has stopped believing in evil.”

“What do you say?” my friend asks. “The sea is so obvious that a man without a nose can smell it,” I respond.

We continue biting our nails and drinking sweet liquors to hasten delirium tremens. “In that, I am Catholic,” my companion says, “in the Latin we speak when we see pink elephants dancing in a funeral home.”

“Have you really seen elephants in your delusions?”

Later, we star to do crosswords, a little bored, because there’s not much action in the bar, people don’t smoke anymore, nor are the drunks slobbering harassers of young girls. They just drink waiting for sleep to solve their cases, and the bar is empty today.

I ask Paco, the bartender, how the previous night was. He replies, “Lots of whores!” That’s been Paco’s response for about 40 years, whether in Venezuela, Pittsburgh, or Moscow. I say, “And who went with them?” He answers, “The demons.”

“Oh,” says my friend, “the red devils, like the Underwood devils.”

Then the three of us, without much enthusiasm, let out fake laughs and start reciting poems by the revolutionaries of the 70s. We believe ourselves to be young and beachy for a few seconds, but then it’s time to clock in and return to our cases, in Pittsburgh and Moscow.

I say to Paco, “So, Paco, greet the whores for me if they come back tonight.”

He picks his nose, using his hand as a screen, and we hurry our drink and return to our niches, waking up to the harsh reality.