A man is carrying more glass than he weighs.
The bag comes off his right shoulder and hangs down past his knee, twice the width of his body, clear plastic gone milky where it has been dragged. Inside it the bottles have found the position bottles find, all lying across each other at angles, necks into hollows, the whole mass shifting a little every time he takes a step. He is going up onto a stone step toward a door with a lamp on a bracket above it. The lamp is lit. The sky is not.
He has his back to me because he had his back to me. He was ahead of me on the street and we were going to the same place, and I did not overtake him and I did not speak to him, because there is nothing to say at that hour and the glass says most of it anyway. I never saw his face. I have painted a knit cap, a dark coat, a pair of boots with the heels worn to a slope, and I would not recognise him if he sat down next to me tomorrow.
Look at his right side and you will find the crates. Wooden and plastic both, stacked against the wall, already full, already sorted. He is not first. Somebody has been here before the man who arrived before dawn.
Nobody has paid him yet. That is the mechanical fact of this panel and I want it stated plainly, without any weeping about it. He gathered these over weeks. He knotted the bag. He worked out how to hold it so the weight sits on the collarbone instead of the shoulder joint, which is a skill, and which nobody taught him. He has carried it here in the dark. The building has not yet said what any of it is worth, and it will not say until he is inside and the count is made, and the count will be correct.
That is the arrangement he agreed to, and he agreed to it fairly, and it will treat him precisely as well as it treats everyone.
The lamp does the only dramatic thing in the picture. It puts a hard warm edge along the top of the bag and turns the plastic into something with light inside it, so that the largest and brightest object in the composition is a sack of empties on a stranger’s back. I have looked at a great many paintings of men carrying loads up steps toward doorways and I know exactly what I am doing. I am not going to pretend it is a coincidence and I am not going to explain it either. He was carrying it. The lamp was there. I painted what the lamp did.
Then he went in through the door, and the door closed, and I stood on the step for a while with my hands empty.