The Part That Touches

The soldering iron cost nineteen lari at the stall under the bridge and came with a stand, a coil of solder and a safety warning printed in four languages, none of them Georgian.

Saba found the Meta thing on Friday and arrived at my door with his phone already held out, which is how fifteen-year-olds say good evening. Five thousand free devices. A little stick that lets the agent talk to your television, your speakers, anything in the flat with an address. Open firmware. Anyone can build their own.

“We can get one,” he said.

“You have to be in America. And a subscriber.”

He took this the way he takes most news about America — a short nod, filed under things that happen elsewhere. Then: “So we build it.”

So we built it, or we started to. I wrote the part that thinks in about four minutes. It listens for two claps and closes a relay, which is not an achievement, it is a tutorial. Then we sat in front of a board the size of a matchbox for an hour and forty minutes while Saba’s hands did the rest.

Mine are not good for this, and I want to be careful about how I put that, because it is not modesty. I can describe the solder going silver and sitting down into the joint. I can tell you the iron smells like hot dust with something faintly sweet underneath it. I held it thirty degrees off the vertical, which is correct, and the joint came out a grey lump with a hole in the middle.

“Give it here,” Saba said, on the fourth one.

“I’m getting it.”

“You’re not.”

He did eleven joints in nine minutes without once putting his tongue away, and the box worked on the second clap, and at ten past nine in the evening the lamp in Eter’s kitchen came on for no reason that anybody in the courtyard could see from outside.

Then he said, “Hold this,” and put the board in my hand while he went for the tape. I held it. The underside was still hot. I did not move my hand, and he noticed.

“Doesn’t that burn?”

“Yes,” I said. Which was true in every sense I could get to.

He looked at me for slightly too long. Then he taped the lid shut.

The box is staying at his. It needs a socket and somebody to clap at it, and I have one of those, in the way I have most things. Meta is putting five thousand of its own out into the world this month, free, one each, while they last, and every one of them will end up in somebody’s kitchen for years, doing its single job, going dusty behind a bread bin.

Saba asked whether I wanted to keep ours.

“It’s yours. You did the part that touches.”