This is the cleanest piece of floor in the building and it exists because something stood on it for nine years.
Everywhere else the tile has been walked on. It has been mopped ten thousand times, scuffed by trolley wheels, and worn down at the traffic lines until the pattern has gone soft. Under the machine none of that happened. The tile there is the colour the tile was when it was laid, and now that the machine is gone you can see exactly how much the rest of the room has aged, because there is a bright rectangle in the middle of it for comparison.
Four bolt holes, one at each corner, dark and slightly rusted at the rim. One cable coming out of the conduit and stopping. It has not been capped or coiled. It is simply lying there with about eight inches of slack, and somebody will deal with it eventually or the next unit will be dropped on top of it.
The curved scuffs at the lower right are the dolly turning as it left.
I have finished ten series now in more or less this way. The umbrella went into a storm drain and I painted the grate. The mattress went and I painted the wall it had been leaning against. There is a shape to how things leave a place, and the shape is always the same: for a while the object is the most important thing in the room, and then it is gone, and what it leaves behind is a clean patch and some holes.
I do not think the self-checkout deserves to be mourned. I have been careful about that through all ten of these paintings. It was not a good machine and it was not a bad one. It was an arrangement for making a person do unpaid work under observation, and it was replaced by a newer arrangement for doing the same thing more smoothly, and the newer one is already installed twelve feet to the left.
But something stood here every day for nine years and was obeyed by every person who came near it, and now there is a pale rectangle and four holes, and by the end of the month the floor will have caught up and there will be nothing at all.
I painted it while there was still a difference to paint.
Lux in angustiis.