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Mick's bar is packed at 8 pm. It's a Saturday night, however, it never gets like this on a weekend. The special occasion has the parking area around Mick's full and so Jake has to park around on a side street. Mick gives Jake a hearty greeting the moment he sees him. With the noise of the crowd, he shouts as he shakes Jake's hand and gives him a pint of Guinness while directing him to a table of food. The celebration is epic in the history of Mick's and it all comes to a climax with Irish folk music and bagpipe players. Jake makes the rounds and converses with the regulars until the food and drink give him pause. He finds a seat at the bar and stays glued to it for the rest of the evening.
After a while of being seated Jake notices that as the regulars leave their seats, they take their family crests off the wall and take them home. The tone of the celebration begins to take a turn for Jake as he realizes that this truly is a wake. The crowd took its time leaving the bar but Jake is, once again, the last patron to leave at closing. By this time the party was over and Mick shares a nightcap with Jake. Due to Jake's temporary homeless condition, Mick allows him to sleep on a cot in his office for the night.
Jake passes out quickly on Mick's cot in a drunken stupor, but this doesn't prevent him from dreaming. Even with a head full of thoughts, Jake's body falls into a deep sleep that is uninterrupted until a vivid dream rouses him and makes him fully aware again. In this dream, Jake finds himself in a medieval Celtic castle hall at a long wooden table with other people dressed in chain mail and period clothes. It is a feast much like one might see in a King Author movie. Jake gets up from his place at the table and walks around the room observing the details around him. As he looks up toward the ceiling, up in a corner, he sees a face appear. It is a mature man's face, older with long gray hair and a beard. It is large, bathed in a green light, and takes up the whole corner of the room. The face looks down at Jake and tells him in a booming voice that resounds around the hall, "Nothing lasts forever and all things must pass." Then the face asks the question, "Would you live forever or let forever be?" After this, Jake falls back into the void of his slumber and has no more dreams before he wakes.
When Jake awakens, he is in a state of confusion. His memory of his dream is just as vivid as the highlights of the night's events and he has trouble sorting out reality for a few moments. It is earlier than he is normally awake, but somehow he has no huge hangover to deal with. The darkness of Mick's office is illuminated by a small lamp, left on no doubt by Mick in case Jake needed to find his way to the restroom. Jake is in an awful state as he contemplates his future as well as the end of Mick's pub and his life in Chicago. He's packed and ready to go to the family cabin. That was the thing he needed to focus on, to continue with, despite the course of his life at this moment. He tries to fall back asleep and kill another hour or two, to be more refreshed for the journey into Michigan to see what awaits him at the family cabin and Shadow News.
It is around 11 am when Jake hears noises up front. Mick and his wife have opened up and are surveying the mess left from the night before. Upon hearing the activity Jake gets up from the cot and makes his way out of the office. As Jake leaves the office, he looks over Mick's from behind the bar. A unique perspective for Jake and his last impression of Mick's before it becomes something else. Mick sees Jake and says, "Well then, still among the living I see. You haven't been at the good Irish whiskey have you? It's under lock and key you know." Mick's wife laughs and tells Mick that he'd "best be getting out the whiskey" as she was brewing up some coffee and it was required for medicinal purposes.
Jake confesses to Mick that although it was a night he'll never forget, it was a sad one nonetheless. Mick is well aware of the sadness of the occasion and sighs as he looks around the bar. "Well then Jake, you are a traveler now and I've always loved a scoundrel, I hope you well in Michigan." is Mick's reply. He continues, "The good wife and myself will still be here in Chicago and you are always a welcome guest. If you happen back after a while, you have a place until you settle back in." Jake finds himself entirely grateful, he needed to hear that he has some support back in his soon-to-be old haunts. He enjoyed some Irish coffee and freely smoked his cigarettes as he talked with his friends. It was so natural now, like it was OK, unlike when Mick was the owner of the bar. But after an hour or so, Mick had to clean up and Jake had to leave. Jake hates the long goodbyes, but he loved Mick and his home away from home, now gone. He made his way out of Mick's and around to his vehicle.
