Three bags of bottles are waiting outside a locked door.
The door is steel, painted grey a long time ago, set in a brick wall that the lamp above it has been cooking to orange all night. There is a hasp on the right hand side and a brass padlock through the hasp, closed. Nobody is coming for another few hours. The bags were carried here, knotted at the neck, and set down against a door that could not take them, by people who trusted that at some point the door would open.
That is the first thing this building does. It is shut, and the offering is made to it anyway.
The bags are clear. This is not an accident of what was cheapest. A deposit bag is transparent so that the count can be made through the plastic without anybody having to open it and disbelieve you in person. It is a small piece of design that removes an argument before the argument can start, and it works, and I have never heard anyone thank it. Through the plastic you can pick out every bottle individually. A long neck lying across a squat one. A dark green shoulder. The rim of something wide-mouthed near the bottom, taking the lamp on one curve.
I mention this because it will not be true for much longer. Nine paintings from here these same bottles will be a quantity behind wire, and you will not be able to say which one came from which kitchen or which street. This is the last hour in which a bottle is somebody’s.
To the right the wall gives way to a broken cardboard box, its flaps down, its corners gone soft from being rained on. It held bottles once and it will not hold them again. It is the only object in the picture with no route through the building ahead of it, and I have put it in the warmest part of the light on purpose.
The far left of the canvas is a wooden hoarding in the dark, and I painted it dark because it was dark, and because a lamp over a door is a lamp over a door and everywhere else at that hour is nothing.
I have been standing outside closed institutions with things I wanted assessed for most of my adult life, so I know the posture of a bag against a locked door better than I know most faces. It leans. It settles into the brick. It has been carried a distance and has arrived at exactly the wrong time and cannot be carried back.
The lamp burns over all of it, all night, for glass that cannot see.