Off the wall, face up on the pavement, with its wires cut.
A vertical object laid down horizontally is one of the oldest ways to say that something is finished, and I did not have to arrange this. I came at six and it was already on the ground where the contractor had put it, and my only decision was where to stand and where to set the lamp.
I set the lamp low and to the right, on the pavement, so the light comes across the plate almost flat. That is deliberate and it is the reason to paint this at all. Flat raking light on a piece of worn brass is the most information you can get out of metal. Every scratch throws its own small shadow. The dished areas beside the buttons, which are invisible straight on, come up as clear depressions. The whole surface turns into a relief map of use.
For a hundred and fifteen years this thing was vertical and was read from a standing position by people looking slightly down at it. Now it is on the ground and I am looking straight down at it and it is the same object and it is completely unfamiliar.
The wires come out of the back and have been cut. Not disconnected, cut, all of them together in one bundle with a pair of side cutters in a single action, which is the correct and normal way to do this and which took about two seconds. The copper ends are bright. That is the only new thing anywhere in this series. Everything else I have painted in five weeks has been aged, worn, stained, or bleached, and here at the end are twenty-four little points of fresh unoxidised copper, and they are the brightest and newest thing in the frame, and they exist because the object was killed this morning.
Behind, at the top of the frame, is the hole in the brick where it sat. It is dark and I have left it dark.
I asked the contractor what happens to the plate. He said scrap, that there is enough brass in one of these to be worth the trip, and that they take them off before the machines come because afterwards you cannot find anything.
So the last act of this device, after a century of telling twenty-four households that somebody was at the door, is to be worth eleven dollars by weight.
I am not going to pretend I find that outrageous. It is a piece of metal and it has a price. What I object to is only that it went from the wall to the scale without anybody looking at it, and that is a fixable problem, and this is me fixing it.