by Matt Haig
As we touched her bare neck, we gained the reading. It was all we needed. She was asleep, and all we had to do was stop her heart from beating. It was really very easy. We moved our hand slightly lower, felt the heart beating through her ribs. The movement of our hand woke her slightly, and she turned, sleepily, and said with her eyes still closed, ‘I love you.’
The ‘you’ was a singular one, and it was a call to me or the me-Andrew she thought I was, and it was then that I managed to defeat them, become a me and not a we, and the thought that she had just escaped death by such a narrow margin made me realise the intensity of my feelings towards her.
‘What’s the matter?’
I couldn’t tell her, so I kissed her instead. Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war. You can’t touch us, is what the kiss said.
‘I love you,’ I told her, and as I smelt her skin, I knew I had never wanted anyone or anything more than I wanted her, but the craving for her was a terrifying one now. And I needed to keep underlining my point.
‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’
And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.
Afterwards, I held her and she held me and I gently kissed her forehead as the wind beat against the window.
She fell asleep.
I watched her, in the dark. I wanted to protect her and keep her safe. Then I got out of bed.
I had something to do.
I am staying here.
You can’t. You have gifts not made for that planet. Humans will become suspicious.
Well then, I want to be disconnected.
We cannot allow that.
Yes, you can. You have to. The gifts are not compulsory. That is the point. I cannot allow my mind to be interfered with.
We were not the ones interfering with your mind. We were trying to restore it.
Isobel doesn’t know anything about the proof. She doesn’t know. Just leave her. Leave us. Leave us all. Please. Nothing will happen.
You do not want immortality? You do not want the chance to return home or to visit anywhere else in the universe other than the lonely planet on which you now reside?
That is right.
You do not want the chance to take other forms? To return to your own original nature?
No. I want to be a human. Or as close to being a human as it is possible for me to be.
No one in all our histories has ever asked to lose the gifts.
Well, it is a fact you must now update.
You do realise what this means?
Yes.
You will be trapped in a body that cannot regenerate itself. You will grow old. You will get diseases. You will feel pain, and for ever know – unlike the rest of the ignorant species you want to belong to – that you have chosen that suffering. You have brought it on yourself.
Yes. I know that.
Very well. You have been given the ultimate punishment. And it makes it no less a punishment for having been asked for. You have now been disconnected. The gifts are gone. You are now human. If you declare you are from another planet you will never have proof. They will believe you are insane. And it makes no difference to us. It is easy to fill your place.
You won’t fill my place. It is a waste of resources. There is no point to the mission. Hello? Are you listening? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello?
The rhythm of life
Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.
All I know is that it’s a frightening thing. And humans are very frightened of it, which is why they have quiz shows. To take their mind off it and think of something else.
Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.
It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic. The opting for anguish over calm, for mortality over eternity, and for Earth over home.
I awoke feeling terrible. My eyes itched with tiredness. My back was stiff. There was a pain in my knee, and I could hear a mild ringing. Noises that belonged below a planet’s surface were coming from my stomach. Overall, the sensation I was feeling was one of conscious decay.
In short, I felt human. I felt forty-three years old. And now I had made the decision to stay I was full of anxiety.
This anxiety was not just about my physical fate. It was the knowledge that at some point in the future the hosts were going to send someone else. And what would I be able to do, now that I had no more gifts than the average human?
It was a worry, at first. But that gradually faded as time went by and nothing happened. Lesser worries began to occupy my mind. For instance, would I be able to cope with this life? What had once seemed exotic began to feel rather monotonous as things settled into a rhythm. It was the archetypal human one which went: wash, breakfast, check the Internet, work, lunch, work, dinner, talk, watch television, read a book, go to bed, pretend to be asleep, then actually sleep.
Belonging as I did to a species which had only ever really known one day, there was initially something quite exciting about having any kind of rhythm at all. But now I was stuck here for good I began to resent humans’ lack of imagination. I believed they should have tried to add a little more variety into proceedings. I mean, this was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was ‘if only I had more time’. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have had to write ‘the day after’ thirty thousand times before a final ‘tomorrow’ in order to illustrate the amount of time on a human’s hands.
The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfilment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it, and repeated it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn’t work for them – as was usually the case – they stuck to it anyway. Then they’d alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.
One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way – call me a mathematical genius – they would have more fun. But as things stood, there weren’t even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday’s liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week’s solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren’t very good, and five of those were roughly the same day stuck on repeat.
The real difficulty, for me, was mornings.
Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.
A human, typically, has to do the following things. He or she will get out of bed, sigh, stretch, go to the toilet, shower, shampoo their hair, condition their hair, wash their face, shave, deodorise, brush their teeth (with fluoride!), dry their hair, brush their hair, put on face cream, apply make-up, check everything in the mirror, choose clothes based on the weather and the
situation, put on those clothes, check everything again in the mirror – and that’s just what happens before breakfast. It’s a wonder they ever get out of bed at all. But they do, repeatedly, thousands of times each. And not only that – they do it by themselves, with no technology to help them. Maybe a little electrical activity in their toothbrushes and hairdryers, but nothing more than that. And all to reduce body odour, and hairs, and halitosis, and shame.
Teenagers
Another thing adding force to the relentless gravity dogging this planet was all the worry that Isobel still had for Gulliver. She was pinching her bottom lip quite a lot, and staring vacantly out of windows. I had bought Gulliver a bass guitar, but the music he played was so gloomy it gave the house an unceasing soundtrack of despair.
‘I just keep thinking of things,’ said Isobel, when I told her that all this worry was unhealthy. ‘When he got expelled from school. He wanted it. He wanted to be expelled. It was a sort of academic suicide. I just worry, you know. He’s always been so bad at connecting with people. I can remember the first ever report he had at nursery school. It said he had resisted making any attachments. I mean, I know he’s had friends, but he’s always found it difficult. Shouldn’t there be girlfriends by now? He’s a good-looking boy.’
‘Are friends so important? What’s the point of them?’
‘Connections, Andrew. Think of Ari. Friends are how we connect to the world. I just worry, sometimes, that he’s not fixed here. To the world. To life. He reminds me of Angus.’
Angus, apparently, was her brother. He had ended his own life in his early thirties because of financial worries. I felt sad when she told me that. Sad for all the humans who find it easy to feel ashamed about things. They were not the only life form in the universe to have suicide, but they were one of the most enthusiastic about it. I wondered if I should tell her that he wasn’t going to school. I decided I should.
‘What?’ Isobel asked. But she had heard. ‘Oh God. So what’s he been doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just walking around, I think.’
‘Walking around?’
‘When I saw him he was walking.’
She was angry now, and the music Gulliver was playing (quite loudly, by this point) wasn’t helping.
And Newton was making me feel guilty with his eyes.
‘Listen, Isobel, let’s just—’
It was too late. Isobel raced up the stairs. The inevitable row ensued. I could only hear Isobel’s voice. Gulliver’s was too quiet and low, deeper than the bass guitar. ‘Why haven’t you been to school?’ his mother shouted. I followed, with nausea in my stomach, and a dull ache in my heart.
I was a traitor.
He shouted at his mother, and his mother shouted back. He mentioned something about me getting him into fights but fortunately Isobel had no clue what he was talking about.
‘Dad, you bastard,’ he said to me at one point.
‘But the guitar. That was my idea.’
‘So you’re buying me now?’
Teenagers, I realised, were really quite difficult. In the same way the south-eastern corner of the Derridean galaxy was difficult.
His door slammed. I used the right tone of voice. ‘Gulliver, calm down. I am sorry. I am only trying to do what is best for you. I am learning here. Every day is a lesson, and some lessons I fail.’
It didn’t work. Unless working meant Gulliver kicking his own door with rage. Isobel eventually went downstairs, but I stayed there. An hour and thirty-eight minutes sitting on the beige wool carpet on the other side of the door.
Newton came to join me. I stroked him. He licked my wrist with his rough tongue. I stayed right there, tilted my head towards the door.
‘I am sorry, Gulliver,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. And I am sorry I embarrassed you.’
Sometimes the only power you need is persistence. Eventually, he came out. He just looked at me, hands in pockets. He leant against the door-frame. ‘Did you do something on Facebook?’
‘I might have done.’
He tried not to smile.
He didn’t say much after that but he came downstairs and we all watched television together. It was a quiz show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (As the show was aimed at humans, the question was rhetorical.)
Then, shortly after, Gulliver went to the kitchen to see how much cereal and milk would fit into a bowl (more than you could imagine) and then he disappeared back to the attic. There was a feeling of something having been accomplished. Isobel told me she had booked us tickets to see an avant-garde production of Hamlet at the Arts Theatre. It was apparently about a suicidal young prince who wants to kill the man who has replaced his father.
‘Gulliver is staying at home,’ said Isobel.
‘That might be wise.’
Australian wine
‘I’ve forgotten to take my tablets today.’
Isobel smiled. ‘Well, one evening off won’t hurt. Do you want a glass of wine?’
I hadn’t tried wine before so I said yes, as it really did seem to be a very revered substance. It was a mild night so Isobel poured me a glass and we sat outside in the garden. Newton decided to stay indoors. I looked at the transparent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.
Then I considered the glass. The glass had been distilled from rock and so it knew things. It knew the age of the universe because it was the universe.
I took another sip.
After the third sip, I was really beginning to see the point, and it did something rather pleasant to the brain. I was forgetting the dull aches of my body and the sharp worries of my mind. By the end of the third glass I was very, very drunk. I was so drunk I looked to the sky and believed I could see two moons.
‘You do realise you’re drinking Australian wine, don’t you?’ she said.
To which I may have replied ‘Oh.’
‘You hate Australian wine.’
‘Do I? Why?’ I said.
‘Because you’re a snob.’
‘What’s a snob?’
She laughed, looked at me sideways. ‘Someone who didn’t used to sit down with his family to watch TV,’ she said. ‘Ever.’
‘Oh.’
I drank some more. So did she. ‘Maybe I am becoming less of one,’ I said.
‘Anything is possible.’ She smiled. She was still exotic to me. That was obvious, but it was a pleasant exoticism now. Beyond pleasant, in fact.
‘Actually, anything is possible,’ I told her, but didn’t go into the maths.
She put her arm around me. I did not know the etiquette. Was this the moment I was meant to recite poetry written by dead people or was I meant to massage her anatomy? I did nothing. I just let her stroke my back as I stared upwards, beyond the thermosphere, and watched the two moons slide together and become one.
The watcher
The next day I had a hangover.
I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered. I woke with a headache, a dry mouth, and a bad stomach. I left Isobel in bed and went downstairs for a glass of water, then I had a shower. I got dressed and went into the living room to read poetry.
I had the strange but real sense that I was being watched. The sense grew and grew. I stood up, went to the window. Outside the street was empty. The large, static redbrick houses just stood there, like decharged crafts on a landing strip. But still I stayed looking. I thought I could see something reflected in one of the windows, a shape beside a car. A human shape, maybe. My eyes might have been playing tricks. I was hungover, after all.
Newton pressed his nose into my knee. He released a curious high-pitched whine.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I stared out of the glass again, away from reflections, to direct reality. A
nd then I saw it. Dark, hovering just above that same parked car. I realised what it was. It was the top of a human head. I had been right. Someone was hiding from my stare.
‘Wait there,’ I told Newton. ‘Guard the house.’
I ran outside, across the drive and onto the street, just in time to see someone sprinting away around the next corner. A man, wearing jeans and a black top. Even from behind, and at a distance, the man struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t think where I had seen him.
I turned the corner, but there was no one there. It was just another empty suburban street, and a long one. Too long for the person to have run down. Well, it wasn’t quite empty. There was an old human female, walking towards me, dragging a shopping trolley. I stopped running.
‘Hello,’ she said, smiling. Her skin was creased with age, in the way typical of the species. (The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.)
I think she knew me. ‘Hello,’ I said back.
‘How are you now?’
I was looking around, trying to assess the possible escape routes. If they had slid down one of the passageways then they could have been anywhere. There were about two hundred obvious possibilities.
‘I’m, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’
My eyes darted around but were unrewarded. Who was this man? I wondered. And where was he from?
Occasionally, in the days that followed, I would have that feeling again, of being watched. But I never caught a glimpse of my watcher, which was strange, and led me to only two possibilities. Either I was becoming too dull-witted and human, or the person I was looking for, the one who I could sometimes feel watching me in university corridors and in supermarkets, was too sharp-witted to be caught.
