A Bigger Sleep

Giorgio de Chirico — Piazza d'Italia

I woke up in the cool blue shadows of a Monet Haystack, with no idea how I got there and only the vaguest recollections of the previous evening — a nude descending a staircase, a woman lying on the floor with her throat cut, and a screaming pope.

I thought of the girl in the red dress, the taste of her lips, and the way her hair spilled over her shoulders like a waterfall of cool liquid copper, and then, almost as an afterthought, the sensuous curves of her back, and the violin holes I found there.

As I entered the city its perspective started playing tricks with my eyes. It was entirely deserted except for two men in the middle of the square shaking hands. There was a white marble statue of a reclining woman in the classical style, and in the distance a puff of white smoke hung motionless in the air above the silhouette of a small toy-like train. The shadows were long and black, and the sky was green.

I went into a nearby hotel to use the bathroom. Washing my hands I glanced in the mirror, but curiously I could only see the back of my own head. In the foyer there was a man clutching an outsized tube of toothpaste to his chest.

When I came out night had already descended and the city had taken on the muffled silence of a recent snowfall. Shadows moved silently in the shadows, and occasionally stepped into the cones of yellow cast by the street lamps.

It had gone midnight when I stopped off at the Diner on the corner. I was not surprised to see the girl there, along with some guy she'd just picked up. They sat across to counter from me and looked like they might have just been to the theatre, if this was a respectable story. From a distance the man could have been me, though he obviously went to a better tailor. Red-head wore the same tight-fitting shiny red dress that accentuated her slim white arms and delicate curve of her collar bones. I wondered how far they'd got already, if he knew about the violin holes yet. They didn't seem to have much to say to each other, and the waiter's cheerful attempts at conversation were met with monosyllabic replies until he gave up trying all together. She stared at her fingernails, and he stared into the empty recesses of the neon-lit interior as if it might contain clues to his own existence. Somehow the two of them made me feel even more depressed than if the place had been completely empty.

Back in my room I thought about the girl. The feel of her magnificent cool red hair flowing down over her shoulders. I wondered about the violin holes in her back. I wondered about a lot of things.

I looked around my room and it felt small. It wasn't a mansion with wall space enough to hang art on, even if I had the dough to buy it, but it was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.

(with apologies to Claude Monet, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Hopper and especially Raymond Chandler)