Every bottle on these shelves is capped, and every bottle is empty.
Three tiers of galvanized steel, scarred and pitted along the front edges from decades of glass being dragged across them. On the top shelf, dark green bottles standing shoulder to shoulder, two ranks deep. On the middle shelf, clear ones, catching the light down one side of each body. On the bottom shelf, dark green again, going back into the shadow under the room. Crown caps on all of them, crimped, seated, the fluting sharp and unbent. At the left edge of the canvas, a window frame and a slab of grey daylight coming in flat across the racks.
This is the return, and it is complete, and it was delivered exactly as promised.
The bottle went into this building filthy and specific. It came from a kitchen. It stood in a bag against a locked door in the dark. It was carried on somebody’s shoulder up a step, counted through wired glass, spaced on a belt at an interval it did not choose, taken through a hatch, and washed. Now it is here, sound, clean, sealed, standing in a row with a hundred others of its kind, waiting for a truck and a filling line and a stranger.
That is what the nickel bought. Somebody paid five cents over the counter years ago against the day the glass came back, and the glass has come back, on time, in full, in better condition than most promises are kept in.
Take the crown caps seriously. They are on. Every one of them is closed. And under every one of them there is nothing at all.
The deposit was never placed against the beer. Nobody in the history of the arrangement has paid a cent toward the return of what was in the bottle, and if you sat down and drew up the terms honestly you would find they say exactly what these shelves say: the container is refundable, the contents are yours, drink them, they are gone. Everything in the ten paintings before this one is a machine for getting the vessel back and it works flawlessly. It has never once been asked to bring back anything else. It could not, and nobody expected it to, and no one has ever complained.
So the resurrection in this building is real. It is just that what is raised is the glass.
One more thing, and it took me the better part of a week to see it. The light on the middle row is daylight. Not a tube, not a sodium bulb over a locked door, not a strip screwed to the underside of a service window. There is a window at the left of this room and the morning comes in through it and lies along the clear bottles and finds the inside of every one.
Eight paintings of fluorescent light and one of a bulb, and then the sun gets in, at the end, on rows of sealed empty glass. It is the only warmth the building ever offered, and it is offered to the containers, and I stood in front of it with my hands in my pockets until somebody wheeled a cage past me and I moved.