A headset lying across an open page of printed instructions.
I have painted this the way the tradition paints an open book, which is to say from slightly above, with the page curling at the outer corner, raking light coming across the paper so that the fibre in it shows and the type sits in its own small shadow. That is how you paint a missal. It is also, as it turns out, how you paint a two-page call script that has been photocopied from a photocopy.
The text is not legible and I have not made it legible. You can see that there are numbered sections. You can see that certain lines are set in a heavier weight, which in the actual document meant they were mandatory and had to be delivered word for word. That is all you need.
I knew the mandatory lines by heart inside a week. I said one of them roughly two hundred times a day for eleven weeks and I will not repeat it here, but I can tell you that after about the fortieth repetition in a shift it stops being language. The words come apart. You are producing a fixed sequence of sounds in the correct order at the correct point in a procedure, and whether you mean it has become a question with no way to ask it.
There is a name for that and it is not a criticism. Liturgy works the same way and it works on purpose. The words are fixed so that the person saying them does not have to invent anything on a bad morning. You can be exhausted or grieving or hungover and the form will carry you, and it will carry you in front of people who need you to be carried. Every institution that has to be reliable in front of strangers arrives at the same solution eventually.
The difference is that the church tells you the words are a form and expects you to know it. Here the words were a form, and everybody on both ends of the line was required to pretend otherwise. That is the strain. Not the repetition, which is survivable. The pretending.
The boom microphone comes forward into the bottom of the frame with its foam cover worn to a grey nub, and it is the closest object to the viewer and the least in focus, and I painted it that way because that is where it sits when you are wearing it. It is permanently at the edge of your vision for eight hours and you stop seeing it entirely.
There is a coffee ring across the lower text. It has taken out about two lines. I never once had a supervisor mention a stained script and I think about that more than is reasonable.