The tube has gone out and the room is being lit by a number.
This is the panel the series was built to arrive at, and I did not know that when I started it. The overhead light is off. The only source is the red display above the door, two digits, and it throws everything into that particular red that has no warmth in it at all, and it pools on the wet floor under the seats in a long soft column.
The display reads 41.
On the middle chair, the one I had been sitting in, there is a paper ticket. It is small and pale and the red light catches it and it reads 42.
That ticket is not mine. Mine came out of the machine blank, which is in the previous panel and which I still do not have an explanation for. This one belongs to whoever sat in that seat before I did. They took a number. They sat. At some point in the afternoon they decided they had given the building enough of their day, and they stood up, and they left the ticket on the cushion rather than carry it out, because it was worth nothing outside the room.
So here is the arithmetic of the picture. The system is calling 41. The person holding 42 is gone. The call is coming and there is nobody to receive it, and it will arrive on time.
I have been trying to work out why this seemed to me like a religious painting the moment it was dry, and I think it is the light. There is one source, it is elevated, it is red, and everything in the room is arranged to face it. That is a sanctuary lamp. The difference is that a sanctuary lamp means someone is present. This one means the queue is at 41.
I painted the seat cushions in that red with more care than the display itself. The display is a simple thing, four segments and a housing. The vinyl is where the light does its actual work, running along the ridges, sitting in the cracked places, and the whole row of empty chairs turns the colour of a coal that is nearly out.