An Application to License the Sun: Edward Hopper and Paul Klee

The narrator goes to City Hall to request a window for a room sunlight cannot reach, carrying plans, wall calculations and a photograph of a man who spends his days beneath a lamp, and the clerk says the file lacks only the light's approval, on a form titled Application to License the Sun. Sent down a long corridor, he finds Edward Hopper before a painting of a solitary man in a fall of light, and after sitting with it he feels how long a day becomes when it leaves no trace on the wall; Hopper paints him a rectangle of light, and the clerk stamps it rejected because the light lies outside the designated box. At the Department of Boundaries Paul Klee places his pencil inside that box, and the line climbs over its edge to become a staircase, a street and a façade where the window appears, with the man from the photograph leaning forward to see outside. The clerk, seated before a wide window where sunlight enters without a stamp, closes the blind and writes that the beneficiary's existence cannot be established, and the narrator understands he has been proving a person's need for the sun to a man who shut it out to finish his work. He returns to the room, hangs the painting and the drawing beside the man, lets him point to where he wants the real window, and writes on the form that the man exists and has chosen where his window will be.