A padlock hangs on the door handle. Look at which handle.
There are two doors and two handles, and the lock is closed through the left one only. It joins nothing to anything. You could pull that door open right now with the lock swinging on it. I stood on the pavement for a long time working out whether I was seeing a building that had been shut for the night or a building that had not, and the answer is that the lock is being stored. Somebody put it through the handle so it would be findable at closing, and then closing did not happen, or has not happened yet, or does not happen here.
I have painted it exactly as it is because the alternative is a lie in the first panel of a series about how a room admits people.
The rest is what you can see from outside at midnight in the rain. One fluorescent tube in a steel channel along the ceiling, burning greenish-white. Under it, receding to the right, a row of machines with their doors shut and their glass gone black. The floor tiles are lit in a long trapezoid where the tube reaches them and then give up. The glass of the doors is old and slightly wavy and has been cleaned with something that left a haze, so the interior arrives to the viewer through a film.
Everything in the picture is a barrier that is not actually barring anything. The lock secures one handle. The glass is transparent. The doors are shut and unlatched.
There is no sign. I want that recorded here at the front, because I only understood how strange it was after I had painted all ten. No hours on the glass. No name over the door. No price list, no notice about not leaving your clothes unattended, no plaque with a phone number for the owner. A room that is open all night, that takes money from strangers, and that does not say one word to them anywhere on its walls.
The light is on because it is always on. That is the only reading the rest of the series will support. It is not on for a person, because there is no person in this panel and no person on the street either. It is a tube that was switched on at some point in the past and has not been switched off since, doing what fluorescent tubes do, which is to burn steadily and cheaply and go slightly green at the ends over the years.
Outside the frame, behind the viewer, is the rest of the city with its doors locked properly. Inside, three metres away through the glass, is a room with heat and light in it, unattended, unclaimed, unadvertised.
That is a vigil. Somebody keeps a light burning through the night in an empty place, and in the morning it has been kept.