One amber light, and the handset off the cradle.
I want to be exact about what happened, because I have told this badly twice and both times people assumed I was inventing.
I was in the building in April, alone, drawing. A telephone rang. Not a ring exactly, since the ringer volume had been left low, more a sort of interior click and then the small warble those units make. The light on the front came on. It rang eleven or twelve times and then it stopped, and about four minutes later it did it again.
The company was gone. The floor was under dust. Somewhere upstream a number had never been released, and calls were still landing.
I lifted the handset off the cradle and put it on the desk. That is what you are looking at. I did it for the same reason anybody would, which is that I could not stand it, and it did not work, because taking a phone off the hook does not stop the queue, it only stops that one unit, and I could hear another one going off two rows over.
So this is a painting of a small failed intervention.
The composition is the second panel again, deliberately. Same telephone, same angle, same single amber source, same coffee ring on the desk beneath it. The only difference in the whole picture is that the handset is not where it belongs. It is lying on its side, on the desk, with the coiled cord slack, and the cradle it came off is empty and catching a little of the light.
That small displacement is the entire distance this series travels. Ten paintings from a phone that is about to be answered to a phone that cannot be.
I have been asked whether the person calling gets a busy signal or hold music or nothing. I do not know. I have thought about it more than I should and I have not been able to find anybody who could tell me. Somewhere there is a rented number pointing at a routing table pointing at a floor with nobody on it, and the arrangement is stable, and it costs almost nothing to maintain, and there is no particular reason for it ever to stop.
The lights will go on coming on in that room for as long as the building has power.
I painted the ring under the phone one more time here, warmer than it has been in any of the other panels. It is the last mark left by somebody who was glad about something in that building, and it is a coffee stain, and it will outlast the company.