The disc is gone and the ceiling has kept a picture of it.
A pale circle, slightly wider than a saucer, sitting in the middle of a ceiling that is otherwise breaking up into flakes. Inside the circle the paint is intact. Outside it, within a few centimetres, the crust begins and then goes on across the whole upper right of the canvas in lifted plates. The boundary is soft but you could trace it with a finger. Two small holes are set opposite each other, level, at nine and three o’clock, about four inches apart, and both are empty and dark.
The web is still there. It comes off the lower left of the circle in the same slack cone it has had since the first painting and drops away into shadow.
I have painted a pale shape where an object used to be three times now in this cycle. A patch of supermarket floor. A wall of name windows. This ceiling. I know what I am doing and so does anybody who has been following, and I am not going to end this series on it, because that ending has been made twice already and a third time would be a mannerism rather than a finding.
So let me use this one for something else, which is the two holes.
They are four inches apart, centre to centre, level with each other, and that spacing is not a decision anybody in this building made. It is the mounting spread that comes moulded into the backplate of the device, and it is the same spread in every unit of that pattern ever sold. What the ceiling has recorded is not a memory of this particular alarm in this particular room. It is a specification. Somebody stood on a chair with a plate against the plaster and marked through two moulded holes with a pencil, and the pencil was following a form settled in a factory before that person was born.
The pale circle is the same. It is not a portrait. It is a disc of paint that stayed cleaner than its neighbours because a lid was over it, and it is exactly as wide as the lid, and it would look identical under any of the several million lids of that diameter.
That is what these rooms actually retain. Not who slept here. Not how many times they woke. The dimensions of the standard part.
The one personal mark in the picture is the web, which was made by a spider, without reference to any drawing, and which is still attached to a ceiling that has nothing left to hang from. It was anchored on the rim of the housing at one end. The housing is off. Whatever the far anchor was, it is holding.
Two holes, one circle, one thread. Nobody has swept.