Nine empty frames on nine pallets, in the wet, at sunrise.
They are out of the bay and standing in three rows of three on the asphalt behind the tire shop. Doors off, side panels off, filler plates off, castors off. What is left of each cabinet is the welded frame and its punched uprights, and you can see straight through all nine of them to the lot behind, to the chain link, to the bare tree and the firs, to the sky coming up orange behind the fog. Some still carry the perforated top cap. Each frame is strapped down to its pallet with a single blue polypropylene band, tensioned by hand, and the pallets are the ordinary heat treated ones with the stencil half worn off.
There is ground fog and it is rising off the asphalt in the low sun, which is the only reason the air is visible. The whole surface is standing water and every frame has a soft double underneath it.
The camera behaviour here is the thing I want on record, because it breaks with the other nine pictures. One sixtieth at f/11, handheld, no lamp, no tripod, no exposure I had to stand still through. For ten weeks this series has been thirty second exposures in a black bay off a caged bulb on the floor. This one took a sixtieth of a second in ordinary daylight, and I made it with cold hands in about four minutes, standing on the wet, before the truck came at nine.
That is what happens to a machine room at the end. It goes out into the weather, where anything can be seen without arrangement, and it turns out to have been a set of rectangles the whole time.
A frame is what is left when you take away the doors, the equipment, the wiring, the air, and the reason for any of it. It stacks. It weighs about sixty kilos. It is worth the price of its steel and no more, and the yard will not care what ran in it.
I counted them on the screen that night, out of habit, the way you count anything arranged in a grid.
There are nine.
I built ten. I have gone back through the frames from the last week in the bay and I cannot find the point where one leaves. Nobody helped me load. The bay was empty when I locked it, I checked, and I have no explanation to offer, and I would rather write that down than invent one. Nine went out on the truck. One did not, and I do not know where it is.