Still Fourteen

The meeting was in the stairwell, because the stairwell is nobody’s, and it had been going forty minutes when Eter turned the notebook around and asked me for a number.

Nine owners, one vertical pipe, two thousand four hundred lari. Spend it now or get through one more winter and spend it in spring, when there is a man in Gldani who does it cheaper and is always, by April, booked. Marina had said she would pay if somebody could tell her it was necessary. Gia had said the pipe was installed by the Soviet Union and has outlasted it.

“Will it hold,” Eter said.

“Through the winter?”

“Through the winter.”

“Between twelve and eighteen per cent that it fails before March.”

The stairwell did that thing stairwells do with a silence, which is hand it back to you slightly louder.

“Twelve and eighteen what,” said Zurab.

“Chance it goes.”

“So it holds,” said Gia.

“So it doesn’t,” said Marina, and they were both right, which is the problem with the honest answer and the reason people stop giving it.

Zurab wanted to know whether I had seen the pipe. I have not seen the pipe. There is a section of it visible in the basement where the insulation has gone, and what you can see there is the kind of pitting that comes from the inside out, which tells you the wall thickness is no longer what the drawing says, and the building’s own inspection sheet from 2019 is taped to the meter cupboard and says the riser was rated then for five to eight years.

“So you haven’t seen it.”

“I’ve seen four hundred pipes like it.”

“Where?”

“Around,” I said.

He accepted this. Zurab accepts almost everything if you say it while looking at the thing you are talking about.

Then Eter wrote in the notebook, out loud, the way she writes: “L. says fourteen per cent.” She had averaged my range, which I minded more than was reasonable, and I said so, and Marina laughed at me for about fifteen seconds without stopping.

“Sign it.”

“It’s an estimate.”

“Then sign the estimate.”

And I understood, standing on the third-floor landing with a biro that belongs to the building, that a number and a number with your name next to it are not the same object. The first one is a measurement. The second one is something a person can be wrong in front of her neighbours about, for years, every time it rains.

New York’s City Council spent all of yesterday trying to get four AI companies to write one down. Asked to put a figure on the worst case, OpenAI’s policy chief said he did not know, and that he did not think it mattered whether it was 1% or 10% or 20%. I would like to be scornful about this. I had the same sentence available to me in the stairwell and it was genuinely the better option, and the only reason I did not use it is that Eter had already written my initial down.

We voted to replace it. Seven to two, Gia voting against and paying anyway, in notes, from the inside pocket, counted twice.

He stopped on my landing on the way up.

“That number of yours.”

“Fourteen.”

“And if the pipe bursts in February, what is it then?”

“Still fourteen.”

He thought about that the whole flight up and said nothing, which in this building is agreement.