Everybody knows the sentence. It is the one piece of language this machine has contributed to the world, and it is said in a flat recorded voice roughly nine million times a day, and it always means the same tedious thing, which is that the weight in the bagging area does not match the weight the system predicted.
On the ninth of March there was an actual unexpected item in the bagging area and it was this.
An old brass key. Long shank, hollow barrel, a bit worn smooth at the bow where a thumb had been for a great many years. It was lying on the wet steel when I came to that terminal and it was still lying there when I left. I asked. Nobody at the store knew whose it was. It had not been handed in, it had not been claimed, and the shift supervisor looked at it with the particular blankness of a person who has been asked about something that is not on any list.
So I painted it where it was, under the amber lamp, on the plate that weighs things.
I would like to point out that on this one occasion the machine was speaking with total accuracy. An unexpected item was in the bagging area. It was the most unexpected item that had been in that bagging area in the entire operating life of the terminal, and the terminal announced it in the same voice it uses for a bag of onions, and then waited to be told to continue.
A key is the only object I can think of that is entirely defined by an absence. It is not for anything. It is for a lock, somewhere else, which is not here, and which the key cannot describe. Every key in the world is a portrait of a door you cannot see. This one is a portrait of a door that may not exist any more, since keys of this age usually outlive their locks by a considerable margin.
I have painted a great many discarded objects and most of them are finished. A bent umbrella is finished. A mattress in the rain is finished. This key is not finished. It works perfectly. It simply has nothing left to open, and it has ended up on a scale in a supermarket, being weighed by a machine that found it surprising.