The dream all old men have

 He'd gone to bed with too much on his mind, as usual, had slept a bit, and was now awake again: it was awkwardly the middle of the night, the wrong time to be awake, but he soon realized he wasn't going to fix that easily. It took him a few minutes to realise that the dream he'd just had was the dream all old men have, with only a few minor details to individualise it.

In the dream, it was generally known (at least by the scruffy layabouts who hung around the landings in his tenement building) that his wife was sleeping with his son. Everyone seemed OK with this, and expected him to be, but there was something about the arrangement he didn't particularly care for. He couldn't feel any animosity towards his son - given that the boy, or young man, was pretty much a copy of him, only with the genetic defects and limitations more openly on display, less plastered-over - or towards his wife, naturally, but he felt sad and discontented all the same. He decided to approach her in order to clarify his current status, as he had once done with his first girlfriend.  

"Wife?"

It took her a while to wake up, and longer to concentrate. "What do you want?"

He hesitated, wondering how best to put it. "I was just wondering... is there some time, some situation - is there any moment in the day or in the year, any at all, where you would rather be having sex with me than with him?" Just one odd moment would do for a yes, he thought.

She considered, sleepily. "No," she said finally. "No, sorry."

It felt momentarily like a relief to be, at least, sure. "OK then." He wondered what to do.

The next thing he remembered of the dream was a feeling of mingled fear and shame, a familiar emotional landscape. For some reason that didn't seem to require explanation, he was actively despised by all, and some people were out to get him. He tiptoed out of whatever room he was in like a thief, and hunted around on the landing for some stairs to escape down. What appeared to be a staircase was stuffed with pillows and awkward objects, no doubt to prevent his escape. Then he noticed the staircase was beside, not behind, this accumulation of obstinate textiles. He almost ran down those stairs. At the end of one of the landings, a cheerful-looking young woman looked up at him. "Did you get the dogs vaccinated?" she asked. He assured her that he had done so, and then fled, but not before having to step over two sleeping men in the corridor, who he expected to kick him viciously and was quite surprised when they didn't. Finally he was outside, and it was a mainline station with trains that went to Victoria. That was enough, and that was that.

Lying awake, he distracted himself by thinking about the database he had offered to create, and which now nobody wanted, though they were too polite to say so. He rehearsed various passive-agressive ways of publicly giving up pursuing this particular albatross. "It seems people prefer Excel to Access". Cutting words indeed!  Of course he realised it didn't much matter what he did or didn't say or do. Nobody minded or cared, because he was old and sitting hunched and alone in death's waiting room. And that was what the dream was about.

 All old men end up having a dream about being replaced, because that is what old age is, the age when you can see how replaced you have been. And as in the dream, you wonder what to do in response to this, and realise that nothing you do will actually make any difference to anyone, and that this situation of supreme irrelevance can somehow coexist with your being the object of a limitless, generalised contempt.