Every machine in this painting is off, and that is why you can see the hands.
The tube above the counter is on. It comes on when the drums stop. I have watched this happen four nights running and I still cannot decide whether it is a circuit or a coincidence, but the two lights in this building have never once been on together, and this is the panel where the cold one has the room to itself. Greenish, from a steel channel, straight down. It lands on the enamel and on the backs of two hands and on a folded stack of pale cotton, and it does not travel more than a metre past any of them.
The hands are the same hands that pushed the dark load into the drum on the second night. Same enlarged knuckles, same short nails. They are laying the final flap of a towel down onto three already-folded layers, and the left hand is holding the near edge square while the right brings the far edge over and sets it. Both are doing the small pressing motion at the end, the one that flattens the fold with the heel of the hand.
Nobody teaches this. I have asked people and they cannot say where they learned it. It is transmitted the way a prayer is transmitted, by having been beside somebody doing it, and it is performed identically by people who have never met, and it produces an object of no religious character whatsoever, which is a towel.
I will say the obvious thing once and then leave it. A cloth is taken from a vessel, held at two corners, brought together, laid flat, and set down on a stack, at an hour when nobody is watching, in a room with a light burning in it. If a man in a chasuble did that at an altar there would be a name for each motion in three languages.
What I actually want to point at is the counter.
It is the only horizontal surface in the building that belongs to people. The machines are the machines. The chairs are set back against the wall. This slab of chipped enamel at hip height, crazed all over, is where the work that requires a person happens, and it is the only place in the room that is lit for human use. The drum lights the load. The tube lights the counter. Between them there is no third light, and the whole night sorts itself into those two jurisdictions.
Two in the morning is in the painting as temperature rather than as a clock. There is no clock in this building. There is no way to know the hour in there from inside except by the traffic on the street outside the glass, which at this hour is one car every few minutes and then nothing.
The stack is small. Three or four items. Somebody is folding a very little laundry in the middle of the night, carefully, in the good light, alone, and will carry it out in a basket and go home.