It is on a hand truck, tilted back at about twenty degrees, held by one blue ratchet strap across the middle.
There is a way of painting a body being taken down and carried, and every painter who has worked in this tradition has had a go at it. The weight goes diagonally across the canvas. The thing being carried is longer than it is wide and it does not support itself. Somebody has put a strap around the middle of it because that is where you have to put a strap.
I am not going to pretend I found that comparison accidentally. I saw the strap and I knew what I was going to do all evening.
But I want to be honest about the difference, because the difference is the point. In a deposition there are people. There are six or seven of them, holding the weight, arranged around it, and the entire composition is about the distribution of grief across a group. Here there is a hand truck. The man who wheeled it in went to get the door and has not come back yet, and for this particular half minute the machine is standing in the dark, strapped and tilted, entirely unattended.
The light is my work lamp. The caged one, on the floor, cable running off to the left.
I should say plainly that this lamp is the reason I no longer have a municipal job. A supervisor found me at 3:40 in the morning with this lamp set up on the lip of a dumpster on Rue Sainte-Foy, adjusting the angle, and I was dismissed for it eleven days later. I have carried it to every site since. I am aware that lighting a supermarket terminal with the lamp that ended my employment is the sort of thing that gets called heavy-handed. I have decided I do not care. It is the lamp I own and it makes the light I know how to paint.
What it shows here is not much. A steel housing with a scuffed lower panel. The screen dark. Four rubber feet lifted about an inch off the tile. Casters under the truck, one of them turned sideways.
Nobody is standing vigil. That is the whole of it. A machine that eleven thousand people obeyed without ever once being asked to is going out of the building on a dolly, and the only witness is a lamp that was fired from a garbage route.