They wrapped it. Sometime in the last week of March the city came down Dunning Street with clear polyethylene sheeting and two black strapping bands, and they did to the mattress what is done to anything that must be moved and must not touch anything on the way, and when I found it at 2:07 in the morning on the thirtieth it was lying on the curb, bound, waiting.
I did not expect the plastic to be the most beautiful thing in the series. It is. Every fold of it takes the sodium lamp up the street and gives it back broken, so the entire surface is a field of small hard highlights, and underneath, softened and grey and unmistakable, you can still read the blue rosettes. The strapping crosses the body twice. The braided cord handle has been wrapped in along with everything else, which means it can never be used again, which means it was finally understood to be part of the object rather than a way of carrying it. Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, which hangs in Rome, is one third armor. The lantern light comes off the plates of it in exactly this way, hard and cold and busy, while the faces underneath stay soft and unlit. He understood that the covering is where the light lives and the covered thing is where the picture lives. The ninth station is a wrapped object on a curb at two in the morning. It has never looked so cared for, and it was never cared for less.
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