The device has come down off the wall and been stood on the table like a plate on a rack.
The cover is hinged wide open. You are looking straight into the inside of a smoke detector, which is a thing designed to be seen once, by an installer, in daylight, and never again. There is a moulded rectangular bay with a hinged retaining flap above it, a small embossed polarity symbol pressed into the plastic at the upper left, and a row of four slots at the bottom of the dish where the sounder sits. On the wall behind, still screwed up, the backplate, hollow, with its own empty rectangle in it.
In front, lying flat with its terminals toward us, the nine-volt from yesterday’s painting.
I set this up as the moment of the exchange. The old battery out, the compartment open, the silence beginning. And then I got close and I could not make the parts agree with each other.
The bay is not shaped for that battery. Along its left wall there are coil springs, stacked, two of them clearly and I believe a third below in shadow, of the kind that press against the flat negative end of a round cell. The channels are cylindrical. That compartment takes AA cells, side by side, and the battery on the table in front of it is a rectangular nine-volt with a snap connector and it will not go in.
I painted them both from life, on the same afternoon, on the same table, and I have checked the drawing four times.
So the battery in these two paintings never came out of this device. It cannot have. Somebody carried a nine-volt into that bedroom, set it under the alarm on the nightstand, and left it there as a promise, and the promise was wrong. It was wrong at the moment it was made. The gesture was correct in every respect that a gesture is judged by. It was in the right room, aimed at the right object, positioned so it could not be missed. It simply was not the part.
I do not know where that battery came from. A smoke detector in another apartment. A radio. A drawer somebody emptied. Nobody could tell me and there was nobody left to ask.
What the picture ends up being, then, is not an exchange. It is an autopsy with the wrong organ laid out beside the body. The compartment is empty, the springs are visible and uncompressed, and the housing has been opened at last, months late, by somebody who came prepared for a different machine.
The title says silence after removal. There is silence, and the removal happened. The two facts are less connected than I assumed when I named it.