Five vessels have been set out on the tray, and there is nobody behind the glass.
The window is a rectangle of wired glass in a frame that has been repainted so many times the corners have gone round. The wire runs in diamonds through the pane, which is a fire-safety measure and also, incidentally, the reason you cannot see anything in that booth clearly, ever, on any morning. Below the glass is a steel tray with a lip turned up on three sides, galvanized once, now the colour of a wet coin. Inside, along the top, a single fluorescent tube.
On the tray, from the left: a tall clear bottle, a small clear bottle, a dark green bottle, a wide-mouthed jar, and one more clear bottle lying on its side with its mouth pointing out at the room.
Somebody arranged those. Nothing in the building required it. You could put five bottles on that tray in any heap and they would count the same and pay the same, and instead they have been stood up in a line by height with the jar in behind, the way you would set a table. I do not know who did it. I have thought about it more than is reasonable. It is the only decorative act I found in the entire operation and it was performed by someone who was not being watched and will never be credited, and I have painted it at the exact centre of the canvas because that is what it deserves.
The one lying down I cannot account for. It may have fallen. It may have been laid there. I have painted it lying down.
Behind the pane the booth is unlit and there is no one in it. I can make out two wooden chairs, one to the left and one to the right, and between them a pale lit doorway that goes somewhere I never went. I want to be honest about those chairs. I stood at that window for a long time and I could not decide whether they are inside the booth or whether they are the waiting side reflected back at me off the glass. Wired glass at that angle will hand you your own room and call it the other one. I have painted them at the value I saw and I have not resolved it, because I could not resolve it.
What the window is for is this. The count has to be visible and it has to be out of reach. Wire in the glass, a tray with a lip, a sill at the height of a chest. Everything about the design is a promise that you will see the number arrived at and that you will not be able to put your hand in.
It is a good design. It settles every argument it was built to settle. And on the morning I painted it there was nobody on the other side to argue with.