The lamp on the pole has come on and it is amber and it is rotating slowly, and I am looking up at it with my hands open.
I am aware of what this composition is. A figure below, light above, the head tilted back, the palms turned out and empty. Four hundred years of painting have used that arrangement for one purpose, and the purpose is not a supermarket. I did it anyway and I am not going to apologise for it, because the arrangement was not my idea. The store put the lamp above head height and pointed it at the ceiling, and the person waiting beneath it always ends up in that position, every time, without being told.
Something has gone wrong that I am not permitted to fix. That is the actual content of the panel. Not the waiting. The prohibition. There is a screen in front of me displaying my error and there is nothing on it I am allowed to touch. The transaction has been suspended and will remain suspended until a person with a card on a lanyard walks over and performs a gesture that takes under two seconds.
My hands are the part I worked on longest. They are open and turned slightly outward and they are doing nothing at all, which is difficult to paint without it looking like pleading. I did not want pleading. I wanted the specific emptiness of hands that have been told to stop.
Assistance is coming. It says so on the screen. It has said so for three minutes.
The beacon is the second light source to enter this series and the first one that is not white. I want to note that the store chose amber, which is the colour of caution rather than alarm. Nobody is in danger. A man is simply being held in place in a bright box until he can be released, and the light chosen to mark this is the one used on tow trucks and floor polishers.