A hand has come out from under the window with six coins in it.
It comes from the dark on the far side, below a fluorescent tube fixed along the underside of the sill, so the light falls straight down onto the back of the wrist and the knuckles and leaves the sleeve in shadow. The palm is open and turned up. The fingers are curled slightly, not gripping, just making a shallow dish out of the hand. In the dish, six coins lying loose across each other.
Under the hand, close enough to touch, is a steel tray with a dented lip.
The tray is the whole subject of this painting.
That tray exists so that two people do not have to touch. It is a good piece of design and there is a version of it in every place in the world where money changes sides across a barrier, and it removes an entire category of awkwardness and dispute at a stroke. Coins go in, coins get taken out, no contact, no fumble, nobody’s fingers in anybody’s hand. It is also the single most reasonable object in the building.
He did not use it.
He put his arm out under the glass and held the coins in an open palm above the tray and waited for me to take them off him. It cost him effort. He had to come further forward than the design required, hold the weight steady, and stay there while a stranger’s fingers came down onto his skin. Nothing asked him to do that. The tray was right there, four inches under his wrist, catching the light.
I have painted the hand at the moment before, with the coins still in it and mine not yet in the frame, because that is the part I want kept.
I never saw his face. The window is set at chest height and the tube blinds you if you stoop, so what I have of him is a forearm, a hand, and a habit. He is the only person in ten paintings who came out to meet anybody, and he did it in the one building I know of that was carefully built so that he would not have to.
Now the coins. Six of them, and I have counted them in the picture and in life. They are worn past reading. Whatever heads or years or numerals were struck into them have been rubbed off by decades of pockets and tills, and what is left is six discs of grey metal with a bright rim where the light gets on the edge.
So the exchange runs like this. You bring in glass that was specifically yours, off your windowsill, and the building gives you back metal with the faces gone. Anonymous in, anonymous out, exact in both directions, and the sum is correct to the cent.
And then, above the tray, a hand that would not use it.