One wire is coming out of a hole in the ceiling and it is not attached to anything.
The opening is a rough circle cut through the plaster with a mounting ring set in behind it, and the ring has two screw seats at nine and three o’clock, one of them still holding a stub of thread. The plaster around the cut has crumbled outward in a low ridge, the way plaster does when a hole saw goes through old lime and lifts it. Inside the hole there is only black. The housing itself has been swung aside to the right and hangs half out of frame, its underside grille catching a little light.
The wire is red and it drops about a hand’s length, curved, the insulation glossy where the work lamp hits it. At the end, four centimetres of the sheath have been stripped back and the copper strands are splayed open in a splash, untwisted, uncapped, going nowhere. Not one of them is in a connector.
I painted the strands one at a time and there are more than thirty of them.
Here is the part that changed what this series is. In a hardwired smoke alarm there are three conductors. Black for line, white for neutral, and red for interconnect. The red one carries no power. Its only job is to tell the other alarms in the building that this alarm has gone off, so that if the fire starts in the basement the alarm outside your bedroom four floors up sounds at the same instant. It is the wire that turns a set of separate devices into a single system. It is, in the most literal sense available, the wire that makes them a congregation.
That is the wire hanging out of the ceiling with its end open. And the black and the white are not in the picture at all. They are back up in the box, capped, minding the power. This one has been pulled down and cut and left.
I do not know when it was cut. There is no bright copper anywhere on those strands. The whole splay has gone the dull brown of oxidised wire, which takes a long time indoors and a great deal longer than any renovation lasts. That cut is old. It is entirely possible it was never terminated in the first place, that somebody ran the cable, mounted the device, wired the two that make it work, and left the third because the building had nothing else to connect it to.
So the object I have been painting has been alone this whole time. It sat above a sleeping person, lit, blocked with cobweb, asking once a minute for a battery, and its one channel for speaking to anything beyond that room was hanging open in the dark six inches from its back.
I should also say plainly that this hole is not the hole from the paintings that follow. That ceiling has an unbroken surface and two small screw holes and no opening in it at all. There is more than one of these in the building. I painted them where I found them and I am not going to tidy that up.