by Matt Haig
Sloping roofs
(and other ways to deal with the rain)
and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I couldn’t sleep.
Of course I couldn’t. I had a whole universe to worry about.
And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet.
On top of that, it was raining.
I decided to leave Isobel in bed and go and talk with Newton. I headed slowly downstairs, with my hands over my ears, trying to cancel out the sound of falling cloud water drumming against the windows. To my disappointment Newton was sleeping soundly in his basket.
On my return upstairs I noticed something else. The air was cooler than it should have been, and the coolness was coming from above rather than below. This went against the order of things. I thought of his bruised eye, and I thought further back.
I headed up towards the attic and noticed that everything there was exactly as it should be. The computer, the Dark Matter posters, the random array of socks – everything, that was, except Gulliver himself.
A piece of paper floated towards me, carried on the breeze from the open window. On it were two words.
I’m sorry.
I looked at the window. Outside was the night and the shivering stars of this most alien, yet most familiar galaxy.
Somewhere beyond this sky was home. I realised I could now get back there if I wanted. I could just finish my task and be back in my painless world. The window sloped in line with the roof, which like so many roofs here was designed to usher away the rain. It was easy enough for me to climb out of but for Gulliver it must have been quite an exertion.
The difficult thing for me was the rain itself.
It was relentless.
Skin-soaking.
I saw him sitting on the edge, next to the gutter rail, with his knees pulled into his chest. He looked cold and bedraggled. And seeing him there I saw him not as a special entity, an exotic collection of protons, electrons and neutrons, but as a – using the human term – as a person. And I felt, I don’t know, connected with him. Not in the quantum sense in which everything was connected to everything else, and in which every atom spoke to and negotiated with every other atom. No. This was on another level. A level far, far harder to understand.
Can I end his life?
I started walking towards him. Not easy, given the human feet and 45-degree angle and the wet slate – sleek quartz and muscovite – on which I was relying.
When I was getting close he turned around and saw me.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He was frightened. That was the main thing I noticed.
‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’
‘Dad, just go away.’
What he was saying made sense. I mean, I could have just left him there. I could have escaped the rain, the terrible sensation of that falling water on my thin non-vascular skin, and gone inside. It was then I had to face why I was really out there.
‘No,’ I said, to my own confusion. ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go away.’
I slipped a little. A tile came unstuck, slid, fell and smashed to the ground. The smash woke Newton, who started barking.
Gulliver’s eyes widened, then his head jerked away. His whole body seemed full of nervous intention.
‘Don’t do it,’ I said.
He let go of something. It landed in the gutter. The small plastic cylinder that had contained the twenty-eight diazepam tablets. Now empty.
I stepped closer. I had read enough human literature to realise that suicide was a real option, here, on Earth. Yet again I wondered why this should have bothered me.
I was becoming mad.
Losing my rationality.
If Gulliver wanted to kill himself then, logically, that solved a major problem. And I should just stand back and let it happen.
‘Gulliver, listen to me. Don’t jump. Trust me, you’re nowhere near high enough to guarantee that you’ll kill yourself.’ This was true, but as far as I could calculate there was still a very good chance of him falling and dying on impact. In which instance, there would be nothing I could do to help him. Injuries could always be healed. Death meant death. A zero squared was still a zero.
‘I remember swimming with you,’ he said, ‘when I was eight. When we were in France. Can you remember, that night you taught me how to play dominoes?’
He looked back at me, wanting to see a recognition I couldn’t give him. It was hard to see his bruised eye in this light; there was so much darkness across his face he might as well have been all bruise.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I remember that.’
‘Liar! You don’t remember.’
‘Listen, Gulliver, let’s go inside. Let’s talk about this indoors. If you still want to kill yourself I’ll take you to a higher building.’
Gulliver didn’t seem to be listening, as I kept stepping on the slippery slate towards him.
‘That’s the last good memory I have,’ he said. It sounded sincere.
‘Come on, that can’t be true.’
‘Do you have any idea what it’s like? To be your son?’
‘No. I don’t.’
He pointed to his eye. ‘This. This is what it’s like.’
‘Gulliver, I’m sorry.’
‘Do you know what it’s like to feel stupid all the time?’
‘You’re not stupid.’ I was still standing. The human way would have been to shuffle down on my backside, but that would have taken too much time. So I kept taking tentative steps on the slate, leaning back just enough, in continuous negotiation with gravity.
‘I’m stupid. I’m nothing.’
‘No, Gulliver, you’re not. You’re something. You’re—’
He wasn’t listening.
The diazepam was taking hold of him.
‘How many tablets did you take?’ I asked. ‘All of them?’
I was nearly at him, my hand was almost within grasping distance of his shoulder as his eyes closed and he disappeared into sleep, or prayer.
Another tile came loose. I slipped on to my side, losing my footing on the rain-greased tiles until I was left hanging on to the gutter rail. I could have easily climbed back up. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Gulliver was now tilting forward.
‘Gulliver, wait! Wake up! Wake up, Gulliver!’
The tilt gained momentum.
‘No!’
He fell, and I fell with him. First internally, a kind of emotional falling, a silent howl into an abyss, and then physically. I sped through the air with a dreadful velocity.
I broke my legs.
So that was my intention. Let the legs take the pain, and not the head, because I would need my head. But the pain was immense. For a moment I worried they wouldn’t reheal. It was only the sight of Gulliver lying totally unconscious on the ground a few metres away that gave me focus. Blood leaked from his ear. To heal him I knew I would first of all need to heal myself. And it happened. Simply wishing was enough, if you wished hard enough, with the right kind of intelligence.
That said, cell regeneration and bone reconstruction still took a lot of energy, especially as I was losing a lot of blood and had multiple fractures. But the pain diminished as a strange, intense fatigue took over me and gravity tried to grip me to the ground. My head hurt, but not as a result of the fall; from the exertion involved in my physical restoration.
I stood up dizzily. I managed to move towards where Gulliver lay, the horizontal ground now sloping more than the roof.
‘Gulliver. Come on. Can you hear me? Gulliver?’
I could have called for help, I knew that. But help meant an ambulance and a hospital. Help meant humans grasping around in the dark of their own medical ignorance. Help meant delay and a death I was meant to approve of, but couldn’t.
‘Gullive
r?’
There was no pulse. He was dead. I must have been seconds too late. I could already detect the first tiny descent in his body temperature.
Rationally, I should have resigned myself to this fact.
And yet.
I had read a lot of Isobel’s work and so I knew that the whole of human history was full of people who tried against the odds. Some succeeded, most failed, but that hadn’t stopped them. Whatever else you could say about these particular primates, they could be determined. And they could hope. Oh yes, they could hope.
And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort. At home, nothing had been an effort. That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence. Yet there I was. Hoping. Not that I was standing there, passively, just wishing him better from a distance. Of course not. I placed my left hand – my gift hand – to his heart, and I began to work.
The thing with feathers
It was exhausting.
I thought of binary stars. A red giant and a white dwarf, side by side, the life force of one being sucked into that of the other.
His death was a fact I was convinced I could disprove, or dissuade.
But death wasn’t a white dwarf. It was a good bit beyond that. It was a black hole. And once you stepped past that event horizon, you were in very difficult territory.
You are not dead. Gulliver, you are not dead.
I kept at it, because I knew what life was, I understood its nature, its character, its stubborn insistence.
Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.
There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities.
A chair could stop being a chair at any moment. That was quantum physics. And you could manipulate atoms if you knew how to talk to them.
You are not dead, you are not dead.
I felt terrible. Waves of deep-level pained, bone-scorching effort tore through me like solar flares. And yet he still lay there. His face, I noticed for the first time, looking like his mother. Serene, egg-fragile, precious.
A light came on inside the house. Isobel must have woken, from the sound of Newton’s barking if nothing else, but I wasn’t conscious of that. I was just aware that Gulliver was suddenly illuminated and, shortly after, there was the faintest flicker of a pulse beneath my hand.
Hope.
‘Gulliver, Gulliver, Gulliver—’
Another pulse.
Stronger.
A defiant drumbeat of life. A back-beat, waiting for melody.
Duh-dum.
And again, and again, and again.
He was alive. His lips twitched, his bruised eyes moved like an egg about to hatch. One opened. So did the other. It was the eyes, on Earth, that mattered. You saw the person, and the life inside them, if you saw the eyes. And I saw him, this messed-up, sensitive boy and felt, for a moment, the exhausted wonder of a father. It should have been a moment to savour, but it wasn’t. I was being flooded with pain, and violet.
I could feel myself about to collapse on to the glossy wet ground.
Footsteps behind me. And that was the last thing I heard before the darkness arrived to make its claim, along with remembered poetry, as Emily Dickinson shyly came towards me through the violet and whispered in my ear.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
I was back at home, on Vonnadoria, and it was exactly how it had always been. And I was exactly how I had always been, among them, the hosts, feeling no pain and no fear.
Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity.
.Any human who arrived here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they had entered Heaven
But what happened in Heaven?
What did you do there?
After a while, didn’t you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn’t light need shade? Didn’t it? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I was missing the point. Maybe the point was to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. It certainly had been, but what happened if you’d never required that aim because you were born after that goal had been met? I was younger than the hosts. I did not share their appreciation of just how lucky I was. Not any more. Not even in a dream.
In-between
I woke up.
On Earth.
But I was so weak I was returning to my original state. I had heard about this. Indeed, I had swallowed a word capsule about it. Rather than allow you to die your body would return to its original state, because the amount of extra energy deployed to be someone else would more usefully serve to preserve your life. And that was all the gifts were there for, really. Self-preservation. The protection of eternity.
Which was fine, in theory. In theory, it was a great idea. But the only problem was that this was Earth. And my original state wasn’t equipped for the air here, or the gravity, or the face-to-face contact. I didn’t want Isobel to see me. It just could not happen.
And so, as soon as I felt my atoms itch and tingle, warm and shift, I told Isobel to do what she was already doing: looking after Gulliver.
And as she crouched down, with her back to me, I got to my feet, which at this point were recognisably human-shaped. Then I shifted myself – midway between two contrasting forms – across the back garden. Luckily the garden was large and dark, with lots of flowers and shrubs and trees to hide behind. So I did. I hid among the beautiful flowers. And I saw Isobel looking around, even as she was calling for an ambulance for Gulliver.
‘Andrew!’ she said at one point, as Gulliver got to his feet.
She even ran into the garden to have a look. But I stayed still.
‘Where have you disappeared to?’
My lungs began to burn. I needed more nitrogen.
It would have taken only one word in my native tongue. Home. The one the hosts were primed to hear, and I would be back there. So why didn’t I say it? Because I hadn’t finished my task? No. It wasn’t that. I was never going to finish my task. That was the education this night had brought me. So why? Why was I choosing risk and pain over their opposites? What had happened to me? What was wrong?
Newton, now, came out into the garden. He trotted along, sniffing the plants and flowers until he sensed me standing there. I expected him to bark and draw attention, but he didn’t. He just stared at me, his eyes shining blank circles, and seemed to know exactly who it was, standing behind the juniper bushes. But he stayed quiet.
He was a good dog.
And I loved him.
I can’t do it.
We know.
There is no point in doing it anyway.
There is every point.
I don’t believe Isobel and Gulliver should be harmed.
We believe you have been corrupted.
I haven’t. I have gained more knowledge. That is all that has happened.
No. You have been infected by them.
Infected? Infected? With what?
With emotion.
No. I haven’t. That is not true.
It is true.
Listen, emotions have a logic. Without emotions humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you.
You are speaking like one of them. You are not a hum
an. You are one of us. We are one.
I know I am not a human.
We think you need to come home.
No.
You must come home.
I never had a family.
We are your family.
No. It isn’t the same.
We want you home.
I have to ask to come home and I am not going to. You can interfere with my mind but you can’t control it.
We will see.
Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes
The next day we were in the living room. Me and Isobel. Newton was upstairs with Gulliver, who was now asleep. We had checked on him but Newton was staying there, on guard.
‘How are you?’ asked Isobel.
‘It was not death,’ I said. ‘For I stood up.’
‘You saved his life,’ said Isobel.
‘I don’t think so. I didn’t even have to do CPR. The doctor said he had very minor injuries.’
‘I don’t care what the doctor says. He jumped from the roof. That could have killed him. Why didn’t you shout for me?’
‘I did.’ It was a lie, obviously, but the whole framework was a lie. The belief that I was her husband. It was all fiction. ‘I did shout for you.’
‘You could have killed yourself.’
(I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time – almost all of it – with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.) ‘But I didn’t kill myself. I am alive. Let’s concentrate on that.’
‘What happened to your tablets? They were in the cupboard.’
‘I threw them away.’ This was a lie, obviously. The unclear thing was who I was protecting? Isobel? Gulliver? Myself?
‘Why? Why would you throw them away?’
‘I didn’t think it was a good idea, to have them lying around. You know, given his condition.’
