April 4th, 3:40 AM. It was gone.
I had come down with a full palette and a folding stool, and there was nothing on the curb at all, only the wet setts of Dunning Street running up toward the lamp and the lamp laying its usual column of gold along the right side of the road. Where the mattress had lain for a year there was a rectangle. Darker than the stone around it. Rust at the center, a bloom of oxide where the coils had bled into the pavement across eleven months of rain. The exact footprint, corners and all. Three things had been left behind: the braided cord handle, torn loose and lying in a small loop; a scatter of dead grass stalks, the same ones that came up out of the springs in September, brown now and pulled out by the root; and one shred of the municipal plastic caught on the granite curb, still catching the light because that is all plastic knows how to do.
I painted the absence. There is no version of this series that ends with the object still present, and I understood that in April of last year when I set the first canvas against that wall. What I did not understand is that the stone would keep a record. The city removes the mattress. The city does not remove the year. The viewer standing before the tenth station is looking at a portrait, and the sitter is not there, and it is still a likeness. Nihil manet nisi macula.
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