I am holding one bottle off the line.
You are looking at the back of a boiler suit that was navy in about 1998, over-washed to grey at the shoulder blades, with a long pale mark down the left hip where I leaned on something I should not have leaned on. My right hand is around the neck of a green bottle at waist height. The belt beside me is running and it is empty. Ahead of me the hatch is lit by a tube and hung with rubber strips, and to my left, out of the light, the floor is piled with glass in the loose way glass piles.
I do not know why I took it.
I have been asked. I have asked myself in front of the canvas for weeks. The best account I can give is that the tube caught the shoulder of that one bottle as it came past and made a green that I have spent a good part of my life trying to mix, and my hand went out before any part of me had a view on the matter. That is not a reason. It is a description of a reflex. I offer it because the alternative is to invent something dignified, and I have painted my own back precisely so that nobody has to watch me do that.
Here is what the room did about it. Nothing.
The belt went on at the same speed. No alarm. No shout from anywhere. The line simply carried a gap where my bottle should have been, and the gap travelled up to the hatch at the same rate as everything else, and went in, and that was the end of it. A gap in a line of bottles is the only mark a person can make in that room. It is not a protest and it does not register. It is an absence moving along a belt at a fixed rate toward a door.
I have been removed from one workplace before for stopping to look at something instead of moving it. So I know what I am when I am standing at a machine with my hands doing something the machine has no category for.
The composition is the plainest in the series and I fought with it. Everything runs away to the right in perspective, the belt, the rail, the hatch, and I am a dark blue mass on the left with my back turned, taking up a third of the canvas and giving you nothing. No face. No profile. A hand and a bottle.
Which is correct. In this building nobody’s face is available. Not the man on the step, not the hand at the window, not mine. I am not going to be the one exception in a series about a place that has quietly and reasonably arranged to do without them.
The bottle went back on the belt about a minute later. I put it down myself.