by Matt Haig
She came to see me in my room, while a nurse watched. It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
I was dreading her hugging me, or kissing me, or blowing air into my ear or any of those other human things the magazine had told me about, but she didn’t. She didn’t even seem to want to do that. What she wanted to do was sit there and stare at me, as if I were the cubic root of 912,673 and she was trying to work me out. And indeed, I tried very hard to act as harmoniously as that. The indestructible ninety-seven. My favourite prime.
Isobel smiled and nodded at the nurse, but when she sat down and faced me I realised she was exhibiting a few universal signs of fear – tight facial muscles, dilated pupils, fast breathing. I paid special attention to her hair now. She had dark hair growing out of the top and rear of her head which extended to just above her shoulders where it halted abruptly to form a straight horizontal line. This was known as a ‘bob’. She sat tall in her chair with a straight back, and her neck was long, as if her head had fallen out with her body and wanted nothing more to do with it. I would later discover that she was forty-one and had an appearance which passed for beautiful, or at least plainly beautiful, on this planet. But right then she had just another human face. And human faces were the last of the human codes that I would learn.
She inhaled. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember a lot of things. My mind is a little bit scrambled, especially about this morning. Listen, has anyone been to my office? Since yesterday?’
This confused her. ‘I don’t know. How would I know that? I doubt very much they’ll be in at the weekend. And anyway you’re the only one who has the keys. Please, Andrew, what happened? Have you suffered an accident? Have they tested you for amnesia? Why were you out of the house at that time? Tell me what you were doing. I woke up and you weren’t there.’
‘I just needed to get out. That is all. I needed to be outside.’
She was agitated now. ‘I was thinking all sorts of things. I checked the whole house, but there was no sign of you. And the car was still there, and your bike, and you weren’t picking up your phone, and it was three in the morning, Andrew. Three in the morning.’
I nodded. She wanted answers, but I only had questions, ‘Where is our son? Gulliver? Why is he not with you?’
This answer confused her even more. ‘He’s at my mother’s,’ she said. ‘I could hardly bring him here. He’s very upset. After everything else this is, you know, hard for him.’
Nothing she was telling me was information I needed. So I decided to be more direct. ‘Do you know what I did yesterday? Do you know what I achieved while I was at work?’
I knew that however she answered this, the truth remained the same. I would have to kill her. Not then. Not there. But somewhere, and soon. Still I had to know what she knew. Or what she might have said to others.
The nurse wrote something down at this point.
Isobel ignored my question and leant in closer towards me, lowering her voice. ‘They think you have suffered a mental breakdown. They don’t call it that, of course. But that is what they think. I’ve been asked lots of questions. It was like facing the Grand Inquisitor.’
‘That’s all there is around here, isn’t it? Questions.’
I braved another glance at her face and gave her more questions. ‘Why did we get married? What is the point of it? What are the rules involved?’
Certain enquiries, even on a planet designed for questions, go unheard.
‘Andrew, I’ve been telling you for weeks – months – that you need to slow down. You’ve been overdoing it. Your hours have been ridiculous. You’ve been truly burning the candle. Something had to give. But even so, this was so sudden. There were no warning signs. I just want to know what triggered it all. Was it me? What was it? I’m worried about you.’
I tried to come up with a valid explanation. ‘I suppose I just must have forgotten the importance of wearing clothes. That is, the importance of acting the way I was supposed to act. I don’t know. I must have just forgotten how to be a human. It can happen, can’t it? Things can be forgotten sometimes?’
Isobel held my hand. The glabrous under-portion of her thumb stroked my skin. This unnerved me even more. I wondered why she was touching me. A policeman grips an arm to take you somewhere, but why does a wife stroke your hand? What was the purpose? Did it have something to do with love? I stared at the small glistening diamond on her ring.
‘It’s going to be all right, Andrew. This is just a blip. I promise you. You’ll be right as rain soon.’
‘As rain?’ I asked, the worry adding a quiver to my voice.
I tried to read her facial expressions, but it was difficult. She wasn’t terrified any more, but what was she? Was she sad? Confused? Angry? Disappointed? I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. She left me, after a hundred more words of the conversation. Words, words, words. There was a brief kiss on my cheek, and a hug, and I tried not to flinch or tighten up, hard as that was for me. And then she turned away and wiped something from her eye, which had leaked. I felt like I was expected to do something, say something, feel something, but I didn’t know what. ‘I saw your book,’ I said. ‘In the shop. Next to mine.’
‘Some of you still remains then,’ she said. The tone was soft, but slightly scornful, or I think it was. ‘Andrew, just be careful. Do everything they say and it will be all right. Everything will be all right.’
And then she was gone.
Dead cows
I was told to go to the dining hall to eat. This was a terrible experience. For one thing, it was the first time I had been confronted with so many of their species in an enclosed area. Second, the smell. Of boiled carrot. Of pea. Of dead cow.
A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multipurpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.
I didn’t care about cows. If it had been my assignment to kill a cow then I would have happily done so. But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them. So I ate the vegetables. Or rather, I ate a single slice of boiled carrot. Nothing, I realised, could make you feel quite so homesick as eating disgusting, unfamiliar food. One slice was enough. More than enough. It was, in fact, far too much and it took me all my strength and concentration to battle that gag reflex and not throw up.
I sat on my own, at a table in the corner, beside a tall pot plant. The plant had broad, shining, rich green flat vascular organs known as leaves which evidently served a photosynthetic function. It looked exotic to me, but not appallingly so. Indeed, the plant looked rather pretty. For the first time I was looking at something here and not being troubled. But then I looked away from the plant, towards the noise, and all the humans classified as crazy. The ones for whom the ways of this world were beyond them. If I was ever going to relate to anyone on this planet, they were surely going to be in this room. And just as I was thinking this one of them came up to me. A girl with short pink hair, and a circular piece of silver through her nose (as if that region of the face needed more attention given to it), thin orange-pink scars on her arms, and a quiet, low voice that seemed to imply that every thought in her brain was a deadly secret. She was wearing a T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words ‘Everything was beautiful (and nothing hurt)’. Her name was Zoë. She told me that straight away.
The world as will and representation
And then she said, ‘New?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Day?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is. We do appear to be angled towards the sun.�
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She laughed, and her laughter was the opposite of her voice. It was a kind of laugh that made me wish there was no air for those manic waves to travel on and reach my ears.
Once she had calmed down she explained herself. ‘No, I mean, are you here permanently or do you just come in for the day? Like me? A “voluntary commitment” job.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I will be leaving soon. I am not mad, you see. I have just been a little confused about things. I have a lot to get on with. Things to do. Things to finish off.’
‘I recognise you from somewhere,’ said Zoë.
‘Do you? From where?’
I scanned the room. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. There were seventy-six patients and eighteen members of staff. I needed privacy. I needed, really, to get out of there.
‘Have you been on the telly?’
‘I don’t know.’
She laughed. ‘We might be Facebook friends.’
‘Yeah.’
She scratched her horrible face. I wondered what was underneath. It couldn’t have been any worse. And then her eyes widened with a realisation. ‘No. I know. I’ve seen you at uni. You’re Professor Martin, aren’t you? You’re something of a legend. I’m at Fitzwilliam. I’ve seen you around the place. Better food in Hall than here, isn’t it?’
‘Are you one of my students?’
She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’
This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.’
‘Well, I didn’t see it like that. I mean, Pythagoras sounded like a bit of a dude, but, no, I’m not really über-big on numbers. I’m philosophy. That’s probably why I’m in here. OD’d on Schopenhauer.’
‘Schopenhauer?’
‘He wrote a book called The World as Will and Representation. I’m meant to be doing an essay on it. Basically it says that the world is what we recognise in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see we end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.’
‘Do you like it in here?’
She laughed again, but I noticed her kind of laughing somehow made her look sadder. ‘No. This place is a whirlpool. It sucks you deeper. You want out of this place, man. Everyone in here is off the charts, I tell you.’ She pointed at various people in the room, and told me what was wrong with them. She started with an over-sized, red-faced female at the nearest table to us. ‘That’s Fat Anna. She steals everything. Look at her with the fork. Straight up her sleeve . . . Oh, and that’s Scott. He thinks he’s the third in line to the throne . . . And Sarah, who is totally normal for most of the day and then at a quarter past four starts screaming for no reason. Got to have a screamer . . . and that’s Crying Chris . . . and there’s Bridget the Fidget who’s always moving around at the speed of thought . . .’
‘The speed of thought,’ I said. ‘That slow?’
‘. . . and . . . Lying Lisa . . . and Rocking Rajesh. Oh, oh yeah, and you see that guy over there, with the sideburns? The tall one, mumbling to his tray?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s gone the full K-Pax.’
‘What?’
‘He’s so cracked he thinks he’s from another planet.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Trust me. In this canteen we’re just one mute Native American away from a full cuckoo’s nest.’
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She looked at my plate. ‘Are you not eating that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could.’ And then, thinking I might get some information out of her, I asked, ‘If I had done something, achieved something remarkable, do you think I would have told a lot of people? I mean, we humans are proud aren’t we? We like to show off about things.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
I nodded. Felt panic rising as I wondered how many people knew about Professor Andrew Martin’s discovery. Then I decided to broaden my enquiry. To act like a human I would after all need to understand them, so I asked her the biggest question I could think of. ‘What do you think the meaning of life is, then? Did you discover it?’
‘Ha! The meaning of life. The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can’t provide it but is also indifferent to their quest. That’s not really Schopenhauer. That’s more Kierkegaard via Camus. I’m with them. Trouble is, if you study philosophy and stop believing in a meaning you start to need medical help.’
‘What about love? What is love all about? I read about it. In Cosmopolitan.’
Another laugh. ‘Cosmopolitan? Are you joking?’
‘No. Not at all. I want to understand these things.’
‘You’re definitely asking the wrong person here. See, that’s one of my problems.’ She lowered her voice by at least two octaves, stared darkly. ‘I like violent men. I don’t know why. It’s a kind of self-harm thing. I go to Peterborough a lot. Rich pickings.’
‘Oh,’ I said, realising it was right I had been sent here. The humans were as weird as I had been told, and as in love with violence. ‘So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” That was . . . someone.’
There was a silence. I wanted to leave. Not knowing the etiquette, I just stood up and left.
She released a little whine. And then laughed again. Laughter, like madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
I went over optimistically to the man mumbling to his tray. The apparent extraterrestrial. I spoke to him for a while. I asked him, with considerable hope, where he was from. He said Tatooine. A place I had never heard of. He said he lived near the Great Pit of Carkoon, a short drive from Jabba’s Palace. He used to live with the Skywalkers, on their farm, but it burned down.
‘How far away is your planet? From Earth, I mean.’
‘Very far.’
‘How far?’
‘Fifty thousand miles,’ he said, crushing my hope, and making me wish I’d never diverted my attention away from the plant with the lush green leaves.
I looked at him. For a moment, I had thought I wasn’t alone among them but now I knew I was.
So, I thought to myself as I walked away, this is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate. (Someone somewhere else in the room, just as I was thinking this, actually did drop a plate.) Yes, I could see it now – being a human sent you insane. I looked out of a large glass rectangular window and saw trees and buildings, cars and people. Clearly, this was a species not capable of handling the new plate Andrew Martin had just handed them. I really needed to get out of there and do my duty. I thought of Isobel, my wife. She had knowledge, the kind of knowledge I needed. I should have left with her.
‘What am I doing?’
I walked towards the window, expecting it to be like windows on my planet, Vonnadoria, but it wasn’t. It was made of glass. Which was made of rock. And instead of walking through it I banged my nose into it, prompting a few yelps of laughter from other patients. I left the room, quite desperate to escape all the people, and the smell of cow and carrots.
Amnesia
Acting human was one thing, but if Andrew Martin had told people then I really could not afford to waste any more time in this place. Looking at my left hand and the gifts it contained, I knew what I had to do.
After lunch, I visited the nurse who had sat watching me talk to Isobel. I lowered my voice to just the right frequency. I slowed the words to just the right speed. To hypnotise a human was eas
y because, out of any species in the universe, they seemed the one most desperate to believe. ‘I am perfectly sane. I would like to see the doctor who can discharge me. I really need to get back home, to see my wife and child, and to continue my work at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. Plus, I really don’t like the food here. I don’t know what happened this morning, I really don’t. It was an embarrassing public display, but I wholeheartedly assure you that whatever it was I suffered, it was temporary. I am sane, now, and I am happy. I feel very well indeed.’
He nodded. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
The doctor wanted me to have some medical tests. A brain scan. They were worried about possible damage to my cerebral cortex which could have prompted amnesia. I realised whatever else was to occur the one thing that couldn’t possibly happen to me was to have my brain looked at, not while the gifts were active. So, I convinced him I was not suffering from amnesia. I made up a lot of memories. I made up a whole life.
I told him that I had been under a lot of pressure at work and he understood. He then asked me some more questions. But as with all human questions the answers were always there, inside them like protons inside an atom, for me to locate and give as my own independent thoughts.
After half an hour the diagnosis was clear. I hadn’t lost my memory. I had simply suffered a period of temporary insanity. Although he disapproved of the term ‘breakdown’ he said I had suffered a ‘mental collapse’ due to sleep-deprivation and work pressures and a diet which, as Isobel had already informed the doctor, consisted largely of strong black coffee – a drink, of course, I already knew I hated.
The doctor then gave me some prompts, wondering if I’d suffered from panic attacks, low moods, nervous jolts, sudden behavioural swings or feelings of unreality.
‘Unreality?’ I could ponder with conviction. ‘Oh yes, I have definitely been feeling that one. But not any more. I feel fine. I feel very real. I feel as real as the sun.’
