March 30th, 4:41 AM, at the storm drain on the corner of Marne and the rail cut, forty feet from the ninth station. This is where the sequence ends because this is where the city ends it. The frame had arrived at the grate. It lay across the bars with its ribs gone down into the openings, the shaft up on the curb stone, the hooked handle on dry concrete and the only dry thing in the painting. Meltwater ran over it and through it and took nothing.
I understood immediately that the object was not going any further and also not going in. A grate is a sieve that admits water and refuses everything that ever had a shape. Caravaggio’s Entombment is composed like a stone. The whole group of figures leans one way and the slab leans the other, and the weight of the picture is carried by a corner of rock at the bottom edge that nobody ever looks at. You feel that corner without seeing it. My grate is that corner. Iron bars, a municipal casting from 1958 by the numbers on the rim, and the entire passion of this object comes to rest on the fact that its ribs are a few millimeters too wide. The viewer will note the last surviving panel of red lining caught in the frame, still holding its color after six months of weather, the same red that appeared in the first station leaning whole against a curb on Ravel Street in September. It is the only pigment that survived the sequence intact. Nothing about this ending is dignified, and nothing about it is undignified either. In April a man in a vest will lift the grate, pull the frame out with a hook, and put it in the back of a truck, and I know exactly how that is done because I did it for nine years. Requiescit in craticula.
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