Forty-two.
It came up at some point after the building closed and I was not there to see it happen, which is the correct way for this series to end. I only know it advanced because I came back the next evening and the display had moved on by one.
The room is dark. The tube is off and stays off. The clock is a shape. The seats are a row of red edges with everything between them lost, and the floor is wet and holds one long column of red reflection running toward the viewer, which is the only thing in the picture with any energy in it.
Above the door, two digits.
The person who held 42 left in the middle of the afternoon two panels ago. Their ticket is still on the middle chair in the fifth painting, or it was, before somebody removed the chair. Whether the ticket went with it I do not know and I have decided not to go and look, because there is a version of this project where I spend the rest of my life in that building auditing a queue, and I can feel the pull of it.
I want to say clearly that nothing malfunctioned. The system did what it exists to do. It processed a number, in order, without prejudice, and it announced the result to the room. That the room was empty and the building was locked and the counter was chained is not the system’s department. Nobody is being punished in this picture. There is no villain in this cycle at all, which is what makes these rooms so difficult to paint and so difficult to argue with.
Here is what I think I have been painting for ten panels.
A place was built to receive people. Over thirty years, every part of it that involved recognising a particular person was removed and replaced with something that works better: a number instead of a name, a display instead of a voice, a ticket instead of a queue that people have to remember their place in. Each substitution was an improvement. Every one of them made the room fairer. And at the end of it there is a machine, in a dark room, correctly calling out to nobody.
I sat there eleven hours holding a blank piece of paper. I was never going to be called, and I would like to report that this was somehow different from everyone else’s afternoon, and it was not.