“Bonjour, Wick,” Jack said. His eyes were bloodshot and he stumbled as he stepped down from the pad—but it was due to teleportation, I knew. Jack was too perfect to drink past his limit.

     I ignored his use of my nickname—because I’m a bigger man—and said, “Welcome to my humble warship, Jack. Classification: Galaxy; maximum speed: oh-four-two; maximum firepower level: Planet-Destruction.”

     “Impressionnant,” he said, but didn’t look like he really thought so.

     I grimaced—my crew and I had spent the last week on hands and knees and ladders, scrubbing floors, bulkheads, and ceilings in anticipation of his arrival. We’d been so busy cleaning, we’d even ignored three distress signals—and spent hours wiping all traces of the calls from our logs. But it was wasted effort, it seemed. If Jack noticed how everything around us was sparkling clean, he didn’t seem to care. Maybe if we’d spent our time painting the complete works of Guy de Maupassant on the walls of my ship instead; maybe then he’d notice.

     Taking his briefcase, I said, “So how’s the family, Jack?”

     “Très bien,” he said. Then, as if for my benefit: “Very well.” Then, for his distinct benefit: “Marie says ‘Allo’.”

     The way God had planned the universe, Marie was supposed to marry me. The first time I laid eyes on her—she had come to pick up Jack for their date—I knew she was the one for me.

     “I’m Jack,” I told her at the time. “I’ll be ready to go in just a few moments.”

     She smiled and told me I was cute. Then, just as I had warmed her up and was about to move in for the kill, here comes Jack in his tweed jumpsuit and carrying his book of French poetry. And there I go, pushed aside like a doorstop that’s no longer needed; and there they go, to their date, to their marriage, to their happy life together.

     “‘Allo’ right back,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t make it to the wedding.”

     Jack shrugged. “That was ten years ago.”

     “Has it been that long?”

     He nodded.

     Now that the bloodshot was fading from his eyes, I saw that Jack had had his eyes surgically altered: little tiny words were printed on each eyeball. The letters were a translucent bluish in colour, hard to see the first time around but impossible to miss once you’d noticed them. Looking into Jack’s eyes, one literally saw poetry.

     “Nice eyes,” I said, my voice full of sarcasm and disdain.

     “Merci, Jim,” he said, with a little smile. “Marie likes them a lot.” After a brief pause, he said, “It’s a piece I wrote myself, intitulé ‘The Lost Word of the Lifelong Lover.’”

     I read the poem while Jack tried to stand still and not blink.

     “So what is it?” I said, when I was done reading.

     “What?”

     “The lost word. What is it?”

     “It’s whatever you think it is, as the reader. That’s the beauty of it. In reading the poem, and coming up with an answer to what the lost word might be, you learn as much about yourself as you do about the author. You in fact become co-author of the poem.”

     “Fascinating,” I said.

     We stepped into the chute and elevated to the top floor. Once in my ready room, I offered Jack the seat in front of my desk.

     Jack looked at it questioningly; the chair was very low to the ground. Gently I reminded him that there were species in this universe who weren’t blessed—like him—with legs.

     He took the seat quietly and opened his briefcase on his lap. I walked around the table and sat at my regular-sized captain’s chair.

     Jack tried to place some papers on the desk between us. His head barely reached above the edge of the table. He looked so ridiculous sitting in that tiny chair, I was glad I was having the whole thing videotaped. My first officer, Winston, had made the chair, and he’d made it the perfect size—not too low, not too high. Winston was back in my good column.

     It was all I could do to stop myself from bursting out in laughter. Jack was so ridiculous and so gullible—as if I’d let any legless species enter my ready room!

     I wasn’t laughing when Jack finally managed to push the papers across the table.

     “What’s this, a book?” I said.

     “Just read it, s’il vous plait,” he said.

     After thoroughly reading the first paragraph, I said, “It’s all like this? All seventy pages?” It was the most boring, driest writing I’d read since Jack used to show me his poetry in high school.

     “Oui.”

     “Then no,” I said. “I refuse.” Pushing the papers away from me, I said, “I didn’t want to sell the house anyway, especially not to these people, for whom a good old electronic signature is not good enough. Besides, that home is not only filled with our own personal childhood memories, but with centuries of family history. It’s a monument and it should stay within our family, with us, in the custodianship into which it was entrusted, to be treasured by our descendants for ages to come.”

     “Your take is on the last page,” Jack said.

     My take was the last page.

     After I’d signed the papers, I said, half-heartedly, “You sure you can’t stay longer, Jack?”

     “Non,” Jack said, putting the papers into his briefcase and—tragically—getting up from the hilariously tiny chair. “Marie awaits.”

     Jack couldn’t say three words without mentioning her name, it seemed. I walked him back to the teleporter room and waited long enough to hear the confirmation from his ship. That was twice he’d teleported now, but no jackpot.

     After he’d gone, Winston and I watched the tape I’d made and howled over how ridiculous Jack looked. The tape only got funnier the more beers we had. But then Winston said something stupid and jumped right back into my bad column, undoing all the good he’d done in building that tiny chair.

     We’d been laughing at Jack and I mentioned the translucent letters in his eyes and his stupid poem. But Winston stopped laughing and told me, in his tongue-loosened, artificially-brave drunken state, that my poems weren’t much better.

     “So?” I said, trying to focus my eyes on him, in case I chose to punch him eventually.

     “So,” Winston said, slurring his words a little. “You should get yourself fixed up—you know?—before you look cri-hic!-tically at the mots in your brother’s eye.”