The plate swings open on a hinge and this is what has been behind the names the whole time.
I hung my work lamp inside the cavity to paint it. That lamp is in the picture, cage and all, and anybody who has followed this project for a while knows why it matters to me and I am not going to tell the story again except to say that it cost me a job and got me a life.
What it is lighting is about forty years of wiring.
Twenty-four circuits go into that wall and they were not installed at one time by one person. You can read the campaigns. There is a bottom layer of cloth-insulated stuff that is probably original and is certainly older than anybody now living in the building. Above that a run of red and white in modern plastic sheath, done properly, terminated neatly at the strip. Above that a repair in black, twisted and taped rather than terminated, done by somebody in a hurry who did not have the right parts and made the thing work anyway. And on top of everything, a splice that has been made with a wire nut and left hanging in free air.
None of it is labelled. There is a brass tag on a string at the bottom of the cavity, hanging, and it is blank on both sides. Somebody meant to write on it. It has been hanging there blank for long enough to go the same brown as everything else.
I have painted the wires with the care I would give to drapery, because that is what they are. They fall. They gather. They have weight and they hang in catenaries and they take the light on their upper curves and go black underneath, and any painter who has done a robe knows exactly how to handle a cable bundle and will enjoy it.
Here is the thing that kept me in that doorway until two in the morning.
Every one of those wires is a name. That was the whole design. Slot one connects to apartment one, and the card in slot one says who lives in apartment one, and the correspondence between the label on the front and the copper at the back is the entire idea. Front of the plate: a list of households. Back of the plate: the same list, in copper, going up into the building.
The front has been emptied. The back is intact. There are twenty-four working circuits in that wall right now, each one still terminating in somebody’s kitchen, and not one of them can be identified from either end without a tester and a great deal of shouting up a stairwell.
The information was never in the wire. It was in a piece of paper behind a small pane of glass, and paper is what a building loses first.