March 19th, 2:20 AM, behind the works depot on Verrier, where the winter’s unused road salt had been dumped in a heap the size of a car and left to go grey in the rain.
They had thrown the cone onto it. Not into it. Onto it, and the salt did the rest, settling and slumping around the sides over some number of nights until it was in up to the collar, upright, facing the road, as though it had walked into the heap under its own power and simply kept going. The base had come off. It lay two feet away, half covered, a black slab at an angle in all that white, and that detail alone cost me a night. Caravaggio’s The Death of the Virgin is no bigger than a door, nine mourners in a space you could carry up a staircase, and it is really a study of which faces the light agrees to find. Here the light agreed to find the salt and nothing else. The crystals took a streetlamp from four hundred metres off and multiplied it into a field of small cold glitters, and the cone standing in the middle of that field was the only warm colour left in the world. The seventh station of the Gospel of the Orange Traffic Cone. I did not move it, and I did not brush the salt back from the collar to improve the silhouette. There is a temptation, this far into a series, to intervene. The painter who intervenes has stopped looking.
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