Your One & Only(30)

He smiled. It was what Althea had wanted, to see his smile, and it was supposed to make these strange feelings go away, but they didn’t. She was only left frustrated and wanting more.

“You didn’t have to like the book,” he said. “And the Tunnels have lots of guitars.” They stood for several moments, at a loss for what to say or do next, until Jack startled Althea by abruptly turning around. “Hold on,” he said.

He rifled through his bookshelf, scanning several before he found the one he wanted. He didn’t hand her the book, however, but instead a piece of paper tucked inside. It was a page of words written in a precise script.

“It’s not a story,” he said. “It’s a poem. You might like it better.”

She held the paper, then twisted her mouth skeptically. “Did a human write it?”

“Sure,” he said. “A woman wrote it. I know you didn’t like the story because it was made up. This is different.”

Althea felt Jack watching her as she read the words of the thing he called a poem. It was about losing things, how it was easy to lose things—keys and watches and such. It said that losing things was an art, which made Althea more puzzled than ever about what the humans thought art meant. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, it said, over and over, as if the human writing it was trying to convince herself more than anyone else. Why didn’t she simply say what she meant straight out?

She talked about losing names and places, although how could you lose a place? Althea’s irritation almost made her put it down, just as she had with the book about the dog. She didn’t, because Jack was watching her, and perhaps, she thought after a moment, the loss of a place could mean losing a memory, like forgetting. Though it was such a peculiar way to say it, and anyway, Althea had a very good memory and certainly couldn’t relate to the idea. She kept on:



I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.



I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.



—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.



She read it all the way through twice, and then turned to Jack. “You called it a poem?”

Jack nodded. “My mother—Inga-296—she loved it. She found it in the Tunnels and wrote it down so she could keep it with her.” He waited patiently for her to say something. This was a gift he was giving her, a sort of thank-you. He wanted her to like it, to understand it, but she didn’t.

“In the words, there’s a pattern,” she said, struggling for something to say.

“It rhymes.”

“I guess so.” She studied it further. Althea saw a mathematical rhythm to the words beyond the rhyming Jack meant. “There’s a pattern, like math.” She wasn’t explaining it well, but it was the best she could do.

Jack seemed to grasp what she was saying, however. “Sam could never see the patterns,” he said. “So you don’t want to throw it across the room?” He was teasing her now, but she didn’t mind because the smile was back again.

“Is it real?” she asked.

“It was real for the woman who wrote it. And real for my mother. It’s more than real. It’s true.”

Althea had no idea what he meant when he talked about something being more than real. If something was real, of course it was true. The idea of what was true seemed important to him, though. Was that why he’d given her this poem? Was it true for him?

Althea’s gaze followed the walls of the room. It was small, made smaller for being cluttered with the remnants of a world that no longer existed. Jack had spent his childhood here, with no brothers, no Gen. For the first time, Althea considered that the Council had made a mistake when they created Jack. A poster on the wall and a stack of books wasn’t enough. In the end, it must be wrong to bring someone into being who had nothing to connect him to the world he was thrust into.

The poem was about loss, and it occurred to her that he had lost so much. The people he came from had lost everything—like the poem said, realms and continents, a whole civilization. And he had lost them, too. Not in the sense that he’d had them to lose, but that he’d never been given the chance to know them, to know others like him and the world they’d built. It must have made him sad. He would always be alone, the only one of his kind. That was why Inga-296 had tried to give him a human existence, so he would have something that was his, something to connect to. Even tonight, a sense of loss lingered over him like the night circling the glow of the candle.

Looking back at the last few words of the poem, she wondered also if something in it had spoken to the Inga because she’d already started to fracture. With fracturing, you would lose everything.

Althea stood and pulled the window curtain aside. Jack didn’t notice her shivering in wet clothes.

Like Sam had said, Jack was here, living with them now. He might not be one of them, but they’d made him, and whether they wanted it or not, he was their responsibility. The Council would have to see that.