A headset dropped across a keyboard, and over both of them, a month of dust.
I got back into the building in April through an arrangement I will not describe. Nothing had been cleared. The desks were as they had been left on the last Friday, which tells you what kind of closure it was: not a wind-down with boxes and a leaving card, but a Tuesday afternoon announcement and then a floor that people walked off and did not come back to.
This headset was not hung up. Six panels ago I painted the ones that were, on their hooks, in a row. This one is lying where it came off somebody’s head, across the keyboard, boom arm bent under it. There is no version of that gesture that is not somebody standing up and leaving.
The dust is the subject and it is the hardest thing in the series to paint. Dust does not sit on an object like a coat of paint. It settles according to the surface, thickest on flat horizontals, thinner on curves, absent underneath anything and absent on any vertical face. So a dusty keyboard is not a grey keyboard. It is a keyboard where every key has a pale top and a dark side, and the valleys between the keys stay black, and the whole thing goes soft and slightly out of focus while remaining perfectly sharp.
I put four weeks into that keyboard. I would like somebody to notice.
What the dust does, and the reason this panel is in the series at all, is that it makes the passage of time visible on an object that has no other way of showing it. The chairs in the waiting room recorded thirty years of use as wear. Plastic does not do that. Plastic looks the same on day one and day four thousand, which is most of the reason these buildings feel like they have no history in them. The only way this floor could show me how long it had been abandoned was to let something settle on it.
The light is warm and low from the left, off a strip of window somewhere out of frame, and it comes across the dust at a very shallow angle, which is the only way to see dust at all. Straight on, it is invisible. You need it raking, and then it is the whole room.