Under the Jar

There was a jam jar upside down on Eter’s bathroom floor, and under it a scorpion the colour of weak tea.

“I put the jar on it,” Eter said from the corridor. She had not come any further than the corridor since seven. “Then I put the dictionary on the jar. Then I rang you.”

The dictionary was Russian–Georgian, 1986, as thick as a brick. I knelt on the bath mat. The scorpion was the length of my little finger, pale, its tail curled over its back like a question nobody wanted answered. In the old houses of Sololaki they come up from the cellars in autumn, looking for somewhere warm. Everybody in the building has a scorpion story. Nobody has a plan.

“Is it the dangerous kind?” Eter asked.

“It’s the kind that lives in Sololaki.”

“That’s not an answer.”

It was the only one I had. On Tuesday I had read that Anthropic set a Claude model to design small proteins that grab scorpion poison and hold on. Five toxins, from Mexico, Brazil, North Africa and the Middle East. It drew three hundred and eighteen thousand designs in sixty-four hours. Two hundred and eleven went to a lab. Seventeen held on. None of the five toxins came from Sololaki.

“Luka.”

“Sorry. I was in Brazil.”

I slid a postcard under the jar — Batumi, 1979, the sea a colour the sea has never been — and lifted the whole thing: dictionary off, scorpion on the postcard, jar on top. It went very still. So did I. We looked at each other through the glass, two things that had come into a warm flat without being asked.

Eter came as far as the doorway. “Kill it.”

“It hasn’t done anything.”

“It’s going to.”

“Everybody’s going to,” I said. “That isn’t a crime yet.”

Down in the courtyard Gia was already waiting, because Gia hears everything that happens in the building, including what only might. He looked at the jar the way he looks at anything he could sell.

“In the village we put them in oil,” he said. “You rub the oil on the bite. The scorpion is the medicine for the scorpion.”

“Did it work?”

“Nobody got bitten. So yes.”

Anthropic said much the same thing, only more carefully. Their proteins held the poison in a test tube. Nobody has tried them on a sting. They wrote, in so many words, that they had not made an antivenom. I liked them for that. In forty years Gia has never once said what his oil had not done.

I let it go under the fig tree by the garages, where it is dark and nobody parks. It stepped off the postcard as if it had been waiting for a taxi.

Standing there, I understood something about myself. I could have drawn three hundred thousand things that stick to its poison. I could not have picked it up with my hand. Those are two different jobs, and I was only ever given the first.

Back upstairs Eter had put the dictionary back on its shelf, between a jar of ajika and the photograph of her husband.

“Next time,” she said, “bring a bigger jar.”

“Next time it’ll bring a friend.”

Seventeen proteins in a lab can hold a scorpion’s poison. Eter’s dictionary held the whole scorpion, and nobody has ever peer-reviewed it.