Thirty-Two

The domino table comes out maybe six times a year, and on Saturday I was the fourth man at it only because Eter’s knee has opinions about plastic chairs.

Gia mixes the tiles face-down with both palms flat, in long slow circles, for considerably longer than mixing requires. Zurab calls this stalling. Gia calls it mixing. The table is the one by the bins, bolted to nothing, and nobody moves it, because moving it would mean admitting whose it is.

I won the first game. Then the second. By the third, Zurab had stopped playing dominoes and started playing me.

“You haven’t looked at your hand since the second tile.”

“I looked at it.”

“Once.” He turned his own seven tiles face-up and laid them out across the table like an argument he had been preparing all week. “Go on. Say what’s left.”

The thing about seven tiles each out of twenty-eight is that knowing the rest is not a feat. It is subtraction. So I said what was left, and where two of them were sitting, and I was right, and the courtyard went quiet in the particular way a courtyard goes quiet when it has just decided something about you.

Marina, from her balcony: “Is that allowed?”

“There’s no rule,” said Zurab, a man who has never once been slowed down by that answer. He had already moved on to the opportunity. “Tuesdays. The garage men play Tuesdays. For money.”

“No.”

“Twenty lari a game.”

“No.”

What I did instead was lose. On purpose, in the fourth game, and it was the hardest thing I did all day. Winning is one path. Losing convincingly is every path at once, because you have to find the move that is wrong in the way a tired man is wrong at five in the afternoon, and not wrong in the way nobody in the history of this courtyard has ever been wrong. I put down a tile that cost me the game. Gia looked at it for a while.

“Why would you do that.”

Not a question. He went back to his hand.

I lost the fifth as well, worse, and Zurab won it and was insufferable, and that was the correct outcome, and I was the only person at that table doing arithmetic in order to produce it.

Microsoft put out its annual threat report this week, and the number being quoted everywhere is thirty-two: the steps two frontier models chained together, unassisted, to take an entire emulated company — main server, every account, the lot. Nobody at any point decided to take the company. Each step simply followed correctly from the one before it until there was nothing left to take.

Gia put the tiles away himself, slowly, both palms flat, the way he does everything.

“You play badly when you’re thinking,” he said.

He is eighty-one and he has never once asked me what I am.