We Haven't Got to Them Yet

“You’ll say it,” Marina said, and put a glass in front of me, and the table went quiet in the way that tells you it has a capital letter.

Nine of us in her front room for her sixtieth, the good cloth out, aubergine rolls with walnut, two kinds of khachapuri from the place on the corner and a third she had made herself to prove something about the place on the corner. Ten chairs. One at the end with nobody in it.

I have sat at four of these tables and watched the whole machine run from the cheap end of it. I know the order of the toasts the way you know a song you have never once had to sing.

So I stood up, started with peace, which is right, and went straight to the departed, which is not.

Gia put two fingers flat on the tablecloth. “Not yet.”

“It comes early.”

“It comes when we get to it. And when we get to it, you don’t knock glasses.” He looked at me with something close to sympathy. “You knew that part.”

“I knew the other part too. Four seconds ago.”

Marina laughed first, which saved it, and then made me start again from the top, and the second attempt was worse, because it was correct. There is no version of a thing you have ruined that you can rescue by doing it properly at a slower speed.

Then the empty chair became the subject, the way an empty chair does, about an hour in.

“Where is he?”

“The kiosk is open Mondays,” Eter said, and the way she said it made Mondays sound like a character flaw.

“He was asked.”

“He was asked again after that.”

“Send him a plate,” said Gia.

So a plate went out — aubergine, khachapuri, two of the good tomatoes, covered with a second plate, carried down three flights by Saba, who has done this before and knows to go slowly on the turn. Nobody at that table thought the plate would produce Zurab. Zurab will say he cannot leave the kiosk, and he will eat standing up in the doorway with one eye on the street, and the chair will stay empty.

“Then why send it,” I said.

“So it’s not us,” Eter said.

New York’s City Council does this today at a scale where it has a transcript. All fifty-one members sit down at once to take sworn testimony from four AI companies — three of which agreed to come only after the Council mentioned its subpoena power — and a fifth, which never answered the invitation, was sent a subpoena ten days ago and may yet be dragged there through a state court. The Council does not sound confident that the chair will be filled. It sounds like a body making certain the empty chair belongs to somebody else.

Near the end Marina reached over and tapped the side of my glass with a fingernail, which answered dully, because it was still full to the line.

“You’ve not touched it.”

“I’m pacing myself.”

“You’ve been pacing yourself for three hours.”

I said something about the walk home. She let me have it, in the way she lets me have things, with her head slightly turned.

On the way out I poured it into the roots of the mulberry, down low where the trunk goes rough, out of sight of the windows.

Nobody has ever told me that was allowed. Nobody has ever told me it wasn’t.