by Matt Haig
‘We haven’t done this for years, have we?’ she said.
‘Done what?’
‘Talk. Like this. It feels like a first date or something. In a good way. It feels like I’m getting to know you.’
‘Yes.’
‘God,’ she said wistfully.
She was drunk now. So was I, even though I was still on my first glass.
‘Our first date,’ she went on. ‘Can you remember?’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘It was here. But it was an Indian then. What was its name? . . . The Taj Mahal. You’d changed your mind on the phone after I wasn’t too impressed at the Pizza Hut suggestion. Cambridge didn’t even have a Pizza Express back then. God . . . twenty years. Can you believe it? Talk about the compression of time through memory. I remember it better than anything. I was late. You waited an hour for me. Out in the rain. I thought that was so romantic.’
She looked off into the distance, as though twenty years ago were a physical thing that could be seen sitting at a table in the corner of the room. And as I stared at those eyes, which were loitering somewhere in the infinity between past and present, happy and sad, I deeply wanted to have been that person she was talking about. The one who had braved the rain and got soaked to the skin two decades ago. But I wasn’t that person. And I would never be him.
I felt like Hamlet. I had absolutely no idea what to do.
‘He must have loved you,’ I said.
She stopped daydreaming. Was suddenly alert. ‘What?’
‘I,’ I said, staring down at my slow-melting limoncello ice-cream. ‘And I still love you. As much as I did then. I was just, you know, seeing us, the past, in the third person. Distance of time . . .’
She held my hand across the table. Squeezed it. For a second I could dream I was Professor Andrew Martin, just as easily as a TV gardener could dream he was Hamlet.
‘Can you remember when we used to go punting on the Cam?’ she asked. ‘That time you fell in the water . . . God, we were drunk. Can you remember? While we were still here, before you had that Princeton offer and we went to America. We really had fun, didn’t we?’
I nodded, but I felt uncomfortable. Also, I didn’t want to leave Gulliver on his own any longer. I asked for the bill.
‘Listen,’ I said, as we walked out of the restaurant, ‘there’s something I really feel obliged to let you know . . .’
‘What?’ she asked, looking up at me. Holding on to my arm as she flinched at the wind. ‘What is it?’
I breathed deeply, filling my lungs, seeking courage somewhere in the nitrogen and the oxygen. In my mind I ran through the pieces of information I had to give her.
I am not from here.
In fact, I am not even your husband.
I am from another planet, in another solar system, in a distant galaxy.
‘The thing is . . . well, the thing is . . .’
‘Think we should probably cross the road,’ said Isobel, tugging my arm, as two silhouettes – a shouting female and a male – came towards us on the pavement. So we did, crossing at an angle that tried to balance the concealment of fear with rapid avoidance – that angle being, as it was everywhere in the universe, 48 degrees away from the straight line on which we had been travelling.
Midway across that carless road I turned and saw her. Zoë. The woman from the hospital I had met on my first day on this planet. She was still shouting at the large, muscular, shaven-headed man. The man had a tattoo of a tear on his face. I remembered her confession of her love of violent men.
‘I’m telling you, you’ve got it wrong! You’re the one that’s crazy! Not me! But if you want to go around like a primitive life form that’s fine! Do it, you thick piece of shit!’
‘You pretentious, cock-munching slag!’
And then she saw me.
The art of letting go
‘It’s you,’ Zoë said.
‘You know her?’ whispered Isobel.
‘I’m afraid . . . yes. From the hospital.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Please,’ I said to the man, ‘be nice.’
The man was staring at me. His shaven head, along with the rest of his body, came towards me.
‘And what on Earth has it got to do with you?’
‘On Earth,’ I said, ‘it’s nice to see people getting on together.’
‘You fuckin’ what?’
‘Just turn around,’ Isobel said fearlessly, ‘and leave everyone alone. Seriously, if you do anything else you’ll just regret it in the morning.’
It was then he turned to Isobel and held her face, squeezing her cheeks hard, distorting her beauty. Anger flared inside me as he said to her, ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you meddling bitch.’
Isobel now had fear-swollen eyes.
There were rational things to do here, I was sure, but I had come a long way since rationality.
‘Leave us all alone,’ I said, momentarily forgetting that my words were just that. Words.
He looked at me and he laughed. And with that laughter came the terrifying knowledge that I had no power whatsoever. The gifts had been taken from me. I was, to all intents and purposes, no more equipped for a fight with a giant gym-bodied thug than the average human professor of mathematics, which wasn’t particularly well equipped at all.
He beat me. And it was a proper beating. Not the kind Gulliver had given me, and which I had opted to feel. No. If there had been an option not to feel the cheap metal rings of this man’s fist collide into my face with comet-like force then I would have taken that option. As I would have done only moments later when I was on the ground receiving a kick in the stomach, rapidly unsettling the undigested Italian food residing there, followed by the final piece of brutalist punctuation – the kick to the head. More of a stamp, actually.
After that, there was nothing.
There was darkness, and Hamlet.
This was your husband. Look you now what follows.
I heard Isobel wailing. I tried to speak to her, but words were hard to reach. The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
I could hear the rise and fall of a siren, and knew it was for me.
Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear.
I woke, in the ambulance, and there was only her. Her face above me, like a sun that eyes could stand, and she stroked my hand as she had once stroked my hand the first time I’d met her.
‘I love you,’ she said.
And I knew the point of love right then.
The point of love was to help you survive.
The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.
So I let go.
I let go of everything in the universe.
Everything, except her hand.
Neuroadaptive activity
I woke up in the hospital.
It was the first time in my life I had woken in serious physical pain. It was night-time. Isobel had stayed for a while and had fallen asleep in a plastic chair. But she had now been told to go home. So I was alone, with my pain, feeling how truly helpless it was to be a human. And I stayed awake in the dark, urging the Earth to rotate faster and faster so that it could be facing the sun again. For the tragedy of night to become the comedy of day. I wasn’t used to night. Of course, I had experienced it on other planets but Earth had the darkest nights I had ever experienced. Not the longest, but the deepest, the loneliest, the most tragically beautiful. I consoled myself with random prime numbers. 73. 131. 977. 1213. 83719. Each as indivisible as love, except by one and itself. I struggled to think of higher primes. Even my mathematical s
kills had abandoned me, I realised.
They tested my ribs, my eyes, my ears, and inside my mouth. They tested my brain and my heart. My heart had caused no concern, though they did consider forty-nine beats per minute to be a little on the slow side. As for my brain, they were a little concerned about my medial temporal lobe, as there seemed to be some unusual neuroadaptive activity taking place.
‘It’s as though there has been something taken out of your brain and your cells are trying to over-compensate, but clearly nothing has been taken out or damaged. But it is very strange.’
I nodded.
Of course, something had been taken out, but I also knew it was nothing any human, Earth-based doctor would ever be able to understand.
It had been a difficult test, but I had passed it. I was as good as human. And they gave me some paracetamol and codeine for the pain which still pulsated inside my head and on my face.
Eventually, I went home.
The next day, Ari came to visit me. I was in bed. Isobel was at work and Gulliver was, quite genuinely it seemed, at school.
‘Man, you look fucking terrible.’
I smiled, lifted the bag of frozen peas from the side of my head.
‘Which is a coincidence, because I feel fucking terrible too.’
‘You should’ve gone to the police.’
‘Well, yes, I was thinking about it. Isobel thinks I should. But I have a little bit of a phobia about police. You know, ever since I was arrested for not wearing clothes.’
‘Yeah, well, you can’t have psychos roaming around pulverising anyone they feel like.’
‘No, I know. I know.’
‘Listen, mate, I just want to say that was big of you. That was old-school gentleman, defending your wife like that and, you know, kudos for it. It surprised me. I’m not putting you down or anything, but I didn’t know you were that kind of shining-armour guy.’
‘Well, I’ve changed. I have a lot of activity in my medial temporal lobe. I think it’s probably to do with that.’
Ari looked doubtful. ‘Well, whatever it is, you’re becoming a man of honour. And that’s rare for mathematicians. It’s always been us physicists who’ve had the big cojones, traditionally. Just don’t screw it up with Isobel. You know what I mean?’
I looked at Ari for a long time. He was a good man, I could see that. I could trust him. ‘Listen, Ari, you know that thing I was going to tell you. At the café at the college?’
‘When you had that migraine?’
‘Yes,’ I hesitated. I was disconnected, so I knew I could tell him. Or thought I could. ‘I am from another planet, in another solar system, in another galaxy.’
Ari laughed. It was a loud, deep blast of laughter without a single note of doubt. ‘Okay, ET, so you’ll be wanting to phone home now. If we’ve got a connection that reaches the Andromeda galaxy.’
‘It’s not the Andromeda galaxy. It’s further away. Many, many light years.’
This sentence was hardly heard as Ari was laughing so much. He stared at me with fake blankness. ‘So how did you get here? Space ship? Wormhole?’
‘No. I didn’t travel in any conventional way you would understand. It was anti-matter technology. Home is forever away, but it is also only a second away. Though now, I can never go back.’
It was no good. Ari, a man who believed in the possibility of alien life, still could not accept the idea when it was standing – or lying – right in front of him.
‘You see, I had special talents, as a result of technology. The gifts.’
‘Go on then,’ Ari said, controlling his laughter, ‘show me.’
‘I can’t. I have no powers now. I am exactly like a human.’
Ari found this bit especially funny. He was annoying me now. He was still a good man, but good men could be annoying, I realised.
‘Exactly like a human! Well, man, you’re fucked then, aren’t you?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. I think I might be.’
Ari smiled, looked concerned. ‘Listen, make sure you keep taking all the tablets. Not just the painkillers. All of them, yeah?’
I nodded. He thought I was mad. Maybe it would be easier if I could take on this view myself, the delusion that it was a delusion. If one day I could wake up and believe it was all a dream. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve researched you. I know you understand quantum physics, and I know you’ve written about simulation theory. You say there’s a thirty per cent chance that none of this is real. You told me in the café you believed in aliens. So I know you can believe this.’
Ari shook his head, but at least he wasn’t laughing now. ‘No. You’re wrong. I can’t.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said, realising that if Ari wouldn’t believe me Isobel never would. But Gulliver. There was always Gulliver. One day I would tell him the truth. But what then? Could he accept me as a father, knowing I had lied?
I was trapped. I had to lie, and to stay lying.
‘But, Ari,’ I said, ‘if I ever need a favour, if I ever need Gulliver and Isobel to stay at your house – would that be okay?’
He smiled. ‘Sure, mate, sure.’
Platykurtic distribution
The next day, still swollen with bruises, I was back at the college.
There was something about being in the house, even with Newton for company, that troubled me. It never had before, but now it made me feel incredibly lonely. So I went to work, and I realised why work was so important on Earth. It stopped you feeling lonely. But loneliness was there for me, waiting in my office, which was where I’d returned after my lecture on distribution models. But my head hurt and I must admit I did quite welcome the peace.
After a while there was a knock on the door. I ignored it. Loneliness minus a headache was my preferred option. But then it happened again. And it happened in such a way that I knew it was going to keep on happening, and so I stood up and went to the door. And, after a while, I opened it.
A young woman was there.
It was Maggie.
The wild flower in bloom. The one with the curly red hair and the full lips. She was twirling her hair around her finger again. She was breathing deeply, and seemed to be inhaling a different kind of air – one which contained a mysterious aphrodisiac, promising euphoria. And she was smiling.
‘So,’ she said.
I waited a minute for the rest of the sentence but it didn’t happen. ‘So’ was beginning, middle and end. It meant something, but I didn’t know what.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
She smiled again. Bit her lip. ‘To discuss the compatibility of bell curves and platykurtic distribution models.’
‘Right.’
‘Platykurtic,’ she added, running a finger down my shirt towards my trousers. ‘From the Greek. Platus meaning flat, kurtos meaning . . . bulging.’
‘Oh.’
Her finger danced away from me. ‘So, Jake LaMotta, let’s go.’
‘My name is not Jake LaMotta.’
‘I know. I was referencing your face.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, are we going?’
‘Where?’
‘Hat and Feathers.’
I had no idea what she was talking about. Or indeed, who she actually was to me, or to the man who had been Professor Andrew Martin.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’
That was it, right there. My first mistake of the day. But by no means the last.
The Hat and Feathers
I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The ‘pub’ was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England. I rather liked the place.
‘Let’s find a quiet corner,’ she said to me, this young Maggie.
There were lots of corners, as there always seemed to
be in human-made environments. Earth dwellers still seemed to be a long way off from understanding the link between straight lines and acute forms of psychosis, which might explain why pubs seemed to be full of aggressive people. There were straight lines running into each other all over the place. Every table, every chair, at the bar, at the ‘fruit machine’. (I enquired about these machines. Apparently they were aimed at men whose fascination with flashing squares of light was coupled with a poor grasp of probability theory.) With so many corners to choose from, it was a surprise to see us sit near a straight, continuous piece of wall, at an oval table and on circular stools.
‘This is perfect,’ she said.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
‘What would you like?’
‘Liquid nitrogen,’ I replied thoughtlessly.
‘A whisky and soda?’
‘Yes. One of them.’
And we drank and chatted like old friends, which I think we were. Though her conversational approach seemed quite different from Isobel’s.
‘Your penis is everywhere,’ she said at one point.
I looked around. ‘Is it?’
‘Two hundred and twenty thousand hits on YouTube.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘They’ve blurred it out, though. Quite a wise move, I would say, from first-hand experience.’ She laughed even more at this. It was a laugh that did nothing to relieve the pain pressing into and out of my face.
I changed the mood. I asked her what it meant, for her, to be a human. I wanted to ask the whole world this question, but, right now, she would do. And so she told me.
The ideal castle
She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build.
