A red belt drawn across the front of the terminal, and the red of it on the floor.
This is the smallest gesture in the series and I think it is the cruellest. It is a strip of woven nylon on a spring, hooked to a weighted post, at a height that would stop nobody. A child could go under it. I could step over it without breaking stride. It has no power of any kind and it closes the lane completely.
We agree to it. That is the thing worth painting. Every person who comes around that corner tonight will see a red strap at knee height and will turn around and go to another lane, and not one of them will test it, and the strap knows this.
I have painted a great many barriers that were serious. Chain-link with the top wire rolled. A dumpster enclosure with a padlock the size of a fist. This is not that. This is a suggestion made in red, and it works better than the padlock does, because the padlock only stops your body.
The colour is doing all the labour. Red at knee height in a dark room reads as prohibition in every country on earth, and it does so faster than reading does. I have kept the red saturated and let it stain the tile beneath, because that pooled light on the floor is the only part of the barrier that is actually large. The strap itself is a thin line. Its shadow is the size of the lane.
The machine behind it is unlit for the first time in this series. Nothing is glowing. Whatever was wrong with it this evening was not fixed, or was fixed and then something else went wrong, or the shift ended. I did not ask. By this point in the sequence I had stopped asking staff about the terminal, because the answer was always some version of the same answer, which is that it is not their machine and they do not know.
Nobody owns it. Everybody obeys it. Then a strap closes it and everybody obeys that instead.