Headsets on hooks along the end of a partition, hung up for the night.
These are vestments. I am not going to argue the point at length because the painting does it faster than I can. A garment that is worn only inside one building, only during the performance of one duty, hung each night on a designated hook in the same place it was hung yesterday, in a row with the others.
The hooks were not designed for this. They are cheap steel over-partition hangers meant for coats, and somebody discovered that a headband sits on them well, and within a year it was simply the rule, and by the time I arrived nobody could tell me who had started it. That is how these customs form. Nobody writes them down.
Look at the wear on them. Each headband has a bright patch on the outside of the arc where it has been gripped by the same hand in the same place every day for years. The foam on the ear cups has gone from black to a used grey and on two of them it has split at the fold and been left split. One of the boom arms has been taped at the joint with electrical tape by somebody who did it well, wrapping in a tight spiral and finishing the end clean, and that piece of tape is the most careful workmanship anywhere in this series.
The light comes from the left, low and warm, off a lamp somebody left on at the far end of the floor. It rakes along the partition fabric, which is that carpet-like nylon in a colour I can only describe as institutional, and it catches the top curve of each headband so the three of them read as a rhythm.
There is a fourth hook at the right of the frame and it is empty.
I have been asked about the empty hook twice already and both times the person asking assumed it meant somebody had been let go. It might. Turnover on that floor ran about forty percent and there was an empty hook most weeks. But it is also possible that somebody simply took theirs home, or dropped it, or that the hook was never used, and I have decided I prefer not knowing. An empty hook in a row of full ones is a strong enough object without me deciding what it is about.