The whole canvas is one object seen from underneath, close enough to count the vents.
You have to get a ladder to look at a smoke detector properly, which is why almost nobody has. From below it is a shallow cream drum with a bevelled rim, a large circular button in the middle of the face, two arcs of louvred slots set opposite each other, and one small oval window near the edge with the diode behind it. The plastic has gone the colour of an old piano key. Along the top of the rim the raking light picks out a hairline of dust that has settled and stayed.
The diode is what I came for and it is what took the longest. It sits behind a lens no bigger than a grain of rice and it does not read as a point of light. It reads as a point with a soft rose bruise around it, spreading across the moulding for perhaps three centimetres before it gives out, and if you paint that halo too generously the object stops being plastic and starts being a coal.
I called this one the first blink. That was a mistake and I am leaving the title alone so the mistake stays visible.
It is not the first. The light is already burning in the painting before this one, in the wide view of the room with the bed under it. I painted that one first and I put the red in without noticing, and by the time I got up the ladder for the close study the light had been going for I do not know how long. Weeks. Possibly a year. There is no way to date a red light.
The other thing I found up the ladder is what the face does not have on it.
Nothing is written anywhere on this object. No brand. No model number. No date of manufacture. No line telling you when to replace it, no line telling you to press and hold, no arrow, no small raised word TEST inside the circle of the button. Every one of these things is printed on every one of these devices in real life, usually in four languages, and this face carries none of it. The surface that exists to be read has gone completely mute, and it has done so quietly, and I only noticed because I was six inches from it with a brush.
Across the intake slots on the lower arc there is a web. Not a stray filament. A working web, structured, anchored at three points on the rim, hung with the particular sag that means it has been rained on by nothing and repaired by somebody small many times.
So the device is at once lit and blocked and unlabelled. It is signalling in the only language it has, into a room, in the dark, at a person lying eight feet below it with their eyes closed.