The basket is on the threshold and nobody has a hand on it.
It has been set down in the doorway, half inside and half out, on the metal sill strip. Whoever carried it this far put it down to open the door, or to change grip, or because a full basket at the end of a night is heavier than it was at the start. They are out of frame. There is only the basket, the snow beyond it, and the room behind.
The basket is white plastic gone the colour of old teeth, with a crack running from the rim down through four rows of the lattice, the kind of crack that opens a little further every cold night and will eventually take a corner off. In it: a folded stack, pale on top, then navy, then pale again, then a red bundle showing through the holes lower down. The same clothes that made a rose window three panels ago, stopped, cooled, sorted, squared off.
Steam is coming off the top of the stack in a column. That is the heat leaving. A dryer puts about sixty degrees into a load and the load gives it back to the first cold air it meets, which here is the air over a doorstep in November with sleet frozen along the paving joints. What you are looking at is warmth being spent into a street. It is the most beautiful thing in the painting and it is a loss.
Behind the basket, the dryer door stands open. The drum is empty. The bulb is still on.
I have looked at that corner of the canvas more than at anything else in this series. There is nothing in the cylinder. The load has been taken out, folded, packed, and set down at the door, and the small unshielded bulb at the back of the drum is still burning, lighting a curved gold wall of perforated steel with nothing in front of it, because a door standing open holds the lamp switch down and there is nobody to close it.
I said in the essay that I could not find a pale unweathered rectangle in this building, and this is the reason. That is not what this room leaves behind. What this room leaves behind is a lit empty drum and a column of warm air going into the snow.
The light gets out through the basket, too. The lattice of the plastic is a grid of oblong holes, and the gold from the open door comes through it and lands on the folded clothes inside, so the basket is a small perforated vessel full of light standing in front of a large perforated vessel full of light. I did not arrange that. It is what a laundry basket is: a drum you can carry.
The street lamp at the top right is the only other light in the world of this picture, and it is a long way off, and there is a strip of its reflection on the wet road.
The clothes are warm now. They will be cold before they are home.