The Humans

by Matt Haig

  Idiocy, from slow reading. It could only be idiocy.

  This man, though, didn’t seem to be coping. His eyes were full of sorrow and suffering.

  ‘Jesus,’ the man mumbled. I think he was mistaking me for someone. ‘I’ve seen it all now.’ He smelt of bacterial infection and several other repugnant things I couldn’t identify.

  I thought about asking him for directions, as the map was rendered in only two dimensions and a little vague, but I wasn’t up to it yet. I might have been able to say the words but I didn’t have the confidence to direct them towards such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his eyes were sad? That is an interesting question, especially as we Vonnadorians never really feel sadness. The answer is I don’t know. It was a feeling I had. A ghost inside me, maybe the ghost of the human I had become. I didn’t have all his memories, but did I have other things. Was empathy part-biological? All I know is it unsettled me, more than the sight of pain. Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.) So I walked past him and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I tried to find my own way to somewhere.

  Now, I knew Professor Martin worked at the university but I had no idea what a university looked like. I guessed they wouldn’t be zirconium-clad space stations hovering just beyond the atmosphere, but other than that I didn’t really know. The ability to view two different buildings and say, oh this was that type of building, and that was this, well, that was simply lost on me. So I kept walking, ignoring the gasps and the laughter, and feeling whichever brick or glass façade I was passing by, as though touch held more answers than sight.

  And then the very worst possible thing happened. (Brace yourselves, Vonnadorians.)

  It began to rain.

  The sensation of it on my skin and my hair was horrific, and I needed it to end. I felt so exposed. I began to jog, looking for an entry into somewhere. Anywhere. I passed a vast building with a large gate and sign outside. The sign said ‘The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary’. Having read Cosmopolitan I knew what ‘virgin’ meant in full detail but I had a problem with some of the other words. Corpus and Christi seemed to inhabit a space just beyond the language. Corpus was something to do with body, so maybe Corpus Christi was a tantric full body orgasm. In truth, I didn’t know. There were smaller words too, and a different sign. These words said ‘Cambridge University’. I used my left hand to open the gate and walked through, on to grass, heading towards the building that still had lights on.

  Signs of life and warmth.

  The grass was wet. The soft dampness of it repulsed me and I seriously considered screaming.

  It was very neatly trimmed, this grass. I was later to realise that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier, and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction (as this was) with ‘grand’ architecture. But right then, I was oblivious to both the significance of tidy grass and architectural grandeur and so I kept walking, towards the main building.

  A car stopped somewhere behind me. Again, there were blue lights flashing, sliding across the stone façade of Corpus Christi.

  (Flashing blue lights on Earth = trouble.)

  A man ran towards me. There was a whole crowd of other humans behind him. Where had they come from? They all seemed so sinister, in a pack, with their odd-looking clothed forms. They were aliens to me. That was the obvious part. What was less obvious was the way I seemed like an alien to them. After all, I looked like them. Maybe this was another human trait. Their ability to turn on themselves, to ostracise their own kind. If that was the case, it added weight to my mission. It made me understand it better.

  Anyway, there I was, on the wet grass, with the man running towards me and the crowd further away. I could have run, or fought, but there were too many of them – some with archaic-looking recording equipment. The man grabbed me. ‘Come with me, sir.’ I thought of my purpose. But right then I had to comply. Indeed, I just wanted to get out of the rain.

  ‘I am Professor Andrew Martin,’ I said, having complete confidence that I knew how to say this phrase. And that is when I discovered the truly terrifying power of other people’s laughter.

  ‘I have a wife and a son,’ I said, and I gave their names. ‘I need to see them. Can you take me to see them?’

  ‘No. Not right now. No, we can’t.’

  He held my arm tightly. I wanted, more than anything, for his hideous hand to let go. To be touched by one of them, let alone gripped, was too much. And yet I did not attempt to resist as he led me towards a vehicle.

  I was supposed to draw as little attention to myself as possible while doing my task. In that, I was failing already.

  You must strive to be normal.

  Yes.

  You must try to be like them.

  I know.

  Do not escape prematurely.

  I won’t. But I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.

  You know you can’t do that. Not yet.

  But I will run out of time. I must get to the professor’s office, and to his home.

  You are right. You must. But first you need to stay calm, and do what they tell you. Go where they want you to go. Do what they want you to do. They must never know who sent you. Do not panic. Professor Andrew Martin is not among them now. You are. There will be time. They die, and so they have impatience. Their lives are short. Yours is not. Do not become like them. Use your gifts wisely.

  I will. But I am scared.

  You have every right to be. You are among the humans.

  Human clothes

  They made me put on clothes.

  What humans didn’t know about architecture or non-radioactive isotopic helium-based fuels, they more than made up for with their knowledge of clothes. They were geniuses in the area, and knew all the subtleties. And there were, I promise you, thousands of them.

  The way clothes worked was this: there was an under layer and an outer layer. The under layer consisted of ‘pants’ and ‘socks’ which covered the heavily scented regions of the genitals, bottom and feet. There was also the option of a ‘vest’ which covered the marginally less shameful chest area. This area included the sensitive skin protrusions known as ‘nipples’. I had no idea what purpose nipples served, though I did notice a pleasurable sensation when I tenderly stroked my fingers over them.

  The outer layer of clothing seemed even more important than the under layer. This layer covered ninety-five per cent of the body, leaving only the face, head-hair and hands on show. This outer layer of clothing seemed to be the key to the power structures on this planet. For instance, the two men who took me away in the car with the blue flashing lights were both wearing identical outer layers, consisting of black shoes over their socks, black trousers over their pants, and then, over their upper bodies, there was a white ‘shirt’ and a dark, deep-space blue ‘jumper’. On this jumper, directly over the region of their left nipple, was a rectangular badge made of a slightly finer fabric which had the words ‘Cambridgeshire POLICE’ written on it. Their jackets were the same colour and had the same badge. These were clearly the clothes to wear.

  However, I soon realised what the word ‘police’ meant. It meant police.

  I couldn’t believe it. I had broken the law simply by not wearing clothes. I was pretty sure that most humans must have known what a naked human looked like. It wasn’t as though I had done something wrong while not wearing clothes. At least, not yet.

  They placed me inside a small room that was, in perfect accord with all human rooms, a shrine to the rectangle. The funny thing was that although this room looked precisely no better or worse than anything else in that police station, or indeed that planet, the officers seemed to think it was a particular punishment to be placed in this place – a ‘cell’ – more than any other room. They are in a body that dies, I chuckled to myself, and they worry more about being locked in a room!

  This was where they
told me to get dressed. To ‘cover myself up’. So I picked up those clothes and did my best and then, once I had worked out which limb went through which opening, they said I had to wait for an hour. Which I did. Of course, I could have escaped. But I realised it was more likely that I would find what I needed by staying there, with the police and their computers. Plus, I remembered what I had been told. Use your gifts wisely. You must try and be like them. You must strive to be normal.

  Then the door opened.

  Questions

  There were two men.

  These were different men. These men weren’t wearing the same clothes, but they did have pretty much the same face. Not just the eyes, protruding nose and mouth but also a shared look of complacent misery. In the stark light I felt not a little afraid. They took me to another room for questioning. This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking, and rooms for inquisition.

  They sat down.

  Anxiety prickled my skin. The kind of anxiety you could only feel on this planet. The anxiety that came from the fact that the only beings who knew who I was were a long way away. They were as far away as it was possible to be.

  ‘Professor Andrew Martin,’ said one of the men, leaning back in his chair. ‘We’ve done a bit of research. We googled you. You’re quite a big fish in academic circles.’

  The man stuck out his bottom lip, and displayed the palms of his hands. He wanted me to say something. What would they plan on doing to me if I didn’t? What could they have done?

  I had little idea what ‘googling’ me meant, but whatever it was I couldn’t say I had felt it. I didn’t really understand what being a ‘big fish in academic circles’ meant either though I must say it was a kind of relief – given the dimensions of the room – to realise they knew what a circle was.

  I nodded my head, still a little uneasy about speaking. It involved too much concentration and co-ordination.

  Then the other one spoke. I switched my gaze to his face. The key difference between them, I suppose, was in the lines of hair above their eyes. This one kept his eyebrows permanently raised, causing the skin of his forehead to wrinkle.

  ‘What have you got to tell us?’

  I thought long and hard. It was time to speak. ‘I am the most intelligent human on the planet. I am a mathematical genius. I have made important contributions to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and geometry. My name is Professor Andrew Martin.’

  They gave each other a look, and released a brief air chuckle out of their noses.

  ‘Are you thinking this is funny?’ the first one said, aggressively. ‘Committing a public order offence? Does that amuse you? Yeah?’

  ‘No. I was just telling you who I am.’

  ‘We’ve established that,’ the officer said, who kept his eyebrows low and close, like doona-birds in mating season. ‘The last bit anyway. What we haven’t established is: what were you doing walking around without your clothes on at half past eight in the morning?’

  ‘I am a professor at Cambridge University. I am married to Isobel Martin. I have a son, Gulliver. I would very much like to see them, please. Just let me see them.’

  They looked at their papers. ‘Yes,’ the first one said. ‘We see you are a teaching fellow at Fitzwilliam College. But that doesn’t explain why you were walking naked around the grounds of Corpus Christi College. You are either off your head or a danger to society, or both.’

  ‘I do not like wearing clothes,’ I said, with quite delicate precision. ‘They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals.’ And then, remembering all I had learnt from Cosmopolitan magazine I leant in towards them and added what I thought would be the clincher. ‘They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving tantric full-body orgasm.’

  It was then they made a decision, and the decision was to submit me to a psychiatric test. This essentially meant going to another rectilinear room to have to face looking at another human with another protruding nose. This human was female. She was called Priti, which was pronounced ‘pretty’ and means pretty. Unfortunate, given that she was human and, by her very nature, vomit-provoking.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I would like to start by asking you something very simple. I’m wondering if you’ve been under any pressure recently?’

  I was confused. What kind of pressure was she talking about? Atmospheric? Gravitational? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A lot. Everywhere, there is some kind of pressure.’

  It seemed like the right answer.

  Coffee

  She told me she had been talking to the university. This, alone, made little sense. How, for instance, was that done? But then she told me this: ‘They tell me you’ve been working long hours, even by the standards of your peers. They seem very upset about the whole thing. But they are worried about you. As is your wife.’

  ‘My wife?’

  I knew I had one, and I knew her name, but I didn’t really understand what it actually meant to have a wife. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren’t enough magazines on the planet for me to ever understand it. She explained. I was even more confused. Marriage was a ‘loving union’ which meant two people who loved each other stayed together for ever. But that seemed to suggest that love was quite a weak force and needed marriage to bolster it. Also, the union could be broken with something called ‘divorce’, which meant there was – as far as I could see – very little point to it, in logical terms. But then, I had no real idea what ‘love’ was, even though it had been one of the most frequently used words in the magazine I’d read. It remained a mystery. And so I asked her to explain that too, and by this point I was bewildered, overdosing on all this bad logic. It sounded like delusion.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  So the coffee came and I tasted it – a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid – and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette – apparently, I was meant to swallow it.

  ‘What the—’ She stood up and patted herself dry, showing intense concern for her shirt. After that there were more questions. Impossible stuff like, what was my address? What did I do in my spare time, to relax?

  Of course, I could have fooled her. Her mind was so soft and malleable and its neutral oscillations were so obviously weak that even with my as then still limited command of the language I could have told her I was perfectly fine, and that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had already worked out the rhythm and the optimal frequency I would have needed. But I didn’t.

  Do not escape prematurely. Do not panic. There will be time.

  The truth is, I was quite terrified. My heart had begun racing for no obvious reason. My palms were sweating. Something about the room, and its proportions, coupled with so much contact with this irrational species, was setting me off. Everything here was a test.

  If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.

  Ha!

  Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital, swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used to annihilate bacteria.

  My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had towards single-celled organisms. I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene. But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaki
ng, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.

  Mad people

  Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.

  Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

  The cubic root of 912,673

  After a while, my wife came to visit. Isobel Martin, in person. Author of The Dark Ages. I wanted to be repulsed by her, as that would make everything easier. I wanted to be horrified and, of course, I was, because the whole species was horrific to me. On that first encounter I thought she was hideous. I was frightened of her. I was frightened of everything here, now. It was an undeniable truth. To be on Earth was to be frightened. I was even frightened by the sight of my own hands. But anyway, Isobel. When I first saw her I saw nothing but a few trillion poorly arranged, mediocre cells. She had a pale face and tired eyes and a narrow, but still protruding nose. There was something very poised and upright about her, something very contained. She seemed, even more than most, to be holding something back. My mouth dried just looking at her. I suppose if there was a challenge with this particular human it was that I was meant to know her very well, and also that I was going to be spending more time with her, to glean the information I needed, before doing what I had to do.