The Humans

by Matt Haig

  A lie. And a gamble that they were tuned to him and not to me. But a necessary one. He told them, yet his pain continued.

  How long were we like this? Seconds? Minutes? It was like Einstein’s conundrum. The hot stove versus the pretty girl. Towards the end of it, Jonathan was on his knees, losing consciousness.

  Tears streamed down my face as I finally pulled that sticky mess of a hand away. I checked his pulse. He was gone. The knife pierced through his chest as he fell back. I looked at the hand, and this face, and it was clear. He was disconnected, not just from the hosts, but from life.

  The reason it was clear was that he was becoming himself – the cellular reconfiguration that automatically followed death. The whole shape of him was changing, curling in, his face flattening, his skull lengthening, his skin mottled shades of purple and violet. Only the knife in his back stayed. It was strange. Within the context of that Earth kitchen this creature, structured precisely as I had been, seemed entirely alien to me.

  A monster. A beast. Something other.

  Gulliver stared, but said nothing. The shock was so profound it was a challenge to breathe, let alone speak.

  I did not want to speak either, but for more practical reasons. Indeed, I worried that I may already have said too much. Maybe the hosts had heard everything I had said in that kitchen. I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had one more thing to do.

  They took your powers away, but they didn’t take theirs.

  But before I could do anything a car pulled up outside. Isobel was home.

  ‘Gulliver, it’s your mother. Keep her away. Warn her.’

  He left the room. I turned back to the heat of that hot plate and positioned my hand next to where his had been, where pieces of his flesh still fizzed. And I pressed down, and felt a pure and total pain which took away space and time and guilt.

  The nature of reality

  Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

  – J.G. Ballard

  What was reality?

  An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A dream? A dream. Well, yes, maybe. But if this had been a dream then it was one from which I hadn’t yet woken.

  But once humans really study things in depth – whether in the artificially divided fields of quantum physics or biology or neuroscience or mathematics or love – they come closer and closer to nonsense, irrationality and anarchy. Everything they know is disproved, over and over again. The Earth is not flat; leeches have no medicinal value; there is no God; progress is a myth; the present is all they have.

  And this doesn’t just happen on the big scale. It happens to each individual human too.

  In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn’t there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

  I was something. And now I am something else.

  I was a monster and now I am a different type of monster. One that will die, and feel pain, but one that will also live, and maybe even find happiness one day. Because happiness is possible for me now. It exists on the other side of the hurt.

  A face as shocked as the moon

  As for Gulliver, he was young, and could accept things better than his mother. His life had never really made sense to him so the final proof of its nonsensical nature was a kind of relief to him. He was someone who had lost a father and also someone who had killed, but the thing he had killed was something he didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to. He could have cried for a dead dog, but a dead Vonnadorian meant nothing to him. On the subject of grief, it was true that Gulliver was worried about his father, and wanted to know that he hadn’t felt any pain. I told him he hadn’t. Was that true? I didn’t know. That was part of being human, I discovered. It was about knowing which lies to tell, and when to tell them. To love someone is to lie to them. But I never saw him cry for his dad. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was hard to feel the loss of someone who had never really been there.

  Anyway, after dark he helped drag the body outside. Newton was awake now. He had woken after Jonathan’s technology had melted away. And now he accepted what he was seeing as dogs seemed to accept everything. There were no canine historians, so that made things easier. Nothing was unexpected. At one point he began digging in the ground, as if trying to help us, but that wasn’t required. No grave needed to be dug as the monster – and that was how I referred to it in my mind, the monster – would in its natural state decompose rapidly in this oxygen-rich atmosphere. It was quite a struggle, dragging him out there, especially given my burnt hand and the fact that Gulliver had to stop to be sick at one point. He looked dreadful. I remember watching him, staring at me from beneath his fringe, his face as shocked as the moon.

  Newton wasn’t our only observer.

  Isobel watched us in disbelief. I hadn’t wanted her to come outside and see but she did so. At that point she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know, for instance, that her husband was dead or that the corpse I was dragging looked, essentially, how I had once looked.

  She learnt these things slowly, but not slowly enough. She would have needed at least a couple of centuries to absorb these facts, maybe even more. It was like taking someone from Regency England to twenty-first century downtown Tokyo. She simply could not come to terms with it. After all, she was a historian. Someone whose job was to find patterns, continuities and causes, and to transform the past into a narrative that walked the same curving path. But on this path someone had now thrown something down from the sky that had landed so hard it had broken the ground, tilted the Earth, made the route impossible to navigate.

  Which is to say, she went to the doctor and asked for some tablets. The pills she was given didn’t help and she ended up staying in bed for three weeks through exhaustion. It was suggested that she might have an illness called ME. She didn’t, of course. She was suffering from grief. A grief for not just the loss of her husband but also the loss of familiar reality.

  She hated me, during that time. I had explained everything to her: that none of this had been my decision, that I had been sent here reluctantly with no task except to halt human progress and to act for the greater good of the entire cosmos. But she couldn’t look at me because she didn’t know what she was looking at. I had lied to her. I’d slept with her. I’d let her tend my wounds. But she hadn’t known who she had been sleeping with. It didn’t matter that I had fallen in love with her, and that it was that act of total defiance that had saved her life and Gulliver’s. No. That didn’t matter at all.

  I was a killer and, to her, an alien.

  My hand slowly healed. I went to the hospital and they gave me a transparent plastic glove to wear, filled with an antiseptic cream. At the hospital they asked me how it had happened and I told them I had been drunk and leant on the hot plate without thinking, and without feeling the pain until it was too late. The burns became blisters and the nurse burst them, and I watched with interest as clear liquid oozed out.

  Selfishly I had hoped at some point that my injured hand might trigger some sympathy from Isobel. I wanted to see those eyes again. Eyes that had gazed worriedly at my face after Gulliver had attacked me in his sleep.

  I briefly toyed with the idea that I should try and convince her that nothing I had told her was true. That we were more magic realism than science fiction, specifically that branch of literary fiction that comes complete with an unreliable narrator. That I wasn’t
really an alien. That I was a human who’d had a breakdown, and there was nothing extraterrestrial or extramarital about me. Gulliver might have known what he had seen, but Gulliver had a fragile mind. I could easily have denied everything. A dog’s health fluctuates. People fall off roofs and survive. After all, humans – especially adult ones – want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.

  But it seemed too disrespectful, somehow, and I couldn’t do it. Lies were everywhere on this planet, but true love had its name for a reason. And if a narrator tells you it was all just a dream you want to tell him he has simply passed from one delusion into another one, and he could wake from this new reality at any time. You had to stay consistent to life’s delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con. And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks. But while I knew I couldn’t correct this version of things with any integrity, living with it was hard.

  You see, before coming to Earth I had never wanted or needed to be cared for, but I hungered now to have that feeling of being looked after, of belonging, of being loved.

  Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe it was more than I deserved to be allowed to stay in the same house, even if I had to sleep on that hideous purple sofa.

  The only reason this was granted, I imagined, was Gulliver. Gulliver wanted me to stay. I had saved his life. I had helped him stand up to bullies. But his forgiveness still came as a surprise.

  Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t Cinema Paradiso, but he seemed to accept me as an extraterrestrial life form far more easily than he had accepted me as a father.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me, one Saturday morning, at five minutes to seven, before his mother was awake.

  ‘Far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far away.’

  ‘How far is far?’

  ‘It’s very hard to explain,’ I said. ‘I mean, you think France is far away.’

  ‘Just try,’ he said.

  I noticed the fruit bowl. Only the day before, I had been to the supermarket buying healthy food the doctor had recommended for Isobel. Bananas, oranges, grapes, a grapefruit.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, grabbing the large grapefruit. ‘This is the sun.’

  I placed the grapefruit on the coffee table. I then looked for the smallest grape I could find. I placed it at the other end of the table.

  ‘That is Earth, so small you can hardly see it.’

  Newton stepped closer to the table, clearly attempting to annihilate Earth in his jaws. ‘No, Newton,’ I said. ‘Let me finish.’

  Newton retreated, tail between his legs.

  Gulliver was frowning as he studied the grapefruit and the fragile little grape. He looked around. ‘So where is your planet?’

  I think he honestly expected me to place the orange I was holding somewhere else in the room. By the television or on one of the bookshelves. Or maybe, at a pinch, upstairs.

  ‘To be accurate, this orange should be placed on a coffee table in New Zealand.’

  He was silent for a moment, trying to understand the level of far-ness I was talking about. Still in a trance he asked, ‘Can I go there?’

  ‘No. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Why? There must have been a spaceship.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I didn’t travel. I may have arrived, but I didn’t travel.’

  He was confused, so I explained, but then he was even more confused.

  ‘Anyway, the point is, there is no more chance of me crossing the universe now than any other human. This is who I am now, and this is where I have to stay.’

  ‘You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?’

  ‘I didn’t realise that at the time.’

  Isobel came downstairs. She was wearing her white dressing gown and her pyjamas. She was pale, but she was always pale in the morning. She looked at me and Gulliver talking, and for a moment, she seemed to greet the scene with a rarely seen fondness. But the expression faded as she remembered everything.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gulliver.

  ‘What is the fruit doing?’ she asked, traces of sleep still evident in her quiet voice.

  ‘I was explaining to Gulliver where I came from. How far away.’

  ‘You came from a grapefruit?’

  ‘No. The grapefruit is the sun. Your sun. Our sun. I lived on the orange. Which should be in New Zealand. Earth is now in Newton’s stomach.’

  I smiled at her. I thought she might find this funny, but she just stared at me the way she had been staring at me for weeks. As if I were light years away from her.

  She left the room.

  ‘Gulliver,’ I said, ‘I think it would be best if I left. I shouldn’t have stayed, really. You see, this isn’t just about all this stuff. You know that argument me and your mother had? The one you never found out about?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I was unfaithful. I had sex with a woman called Maggie. One of my – your father’s – students. I didn’t enjoy it, but that was beside the point. I didn’t realise it would hurt your mother, but it did. I didn’t know the exact rules of fidelity but that isn’t really an excuse, or not one I can use, when I was deliberately lying about so many other things. When I was endangering her life, and yours.’ I sighed. ‘I think, I think I’m going to leave.’

  ‘Why?’

  That question tugged at me. It reached into my stomach, and pulled.

  ‘I just think it will be for the best, right now.’

  ‘Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet. But don’t worry, I’ll tell you when I get there.’

  His mother was back in the doorway.

  ‘I’m going to leave,’ I told her.

  She closed her eyes. She inhaled. ‘Yes,’ she said, with the mouth I had once kissed. ‘Yes. Maybe it is for the best.’ Her whole face crumpled, as if her skin were the emotion she wanted to screw up and throw away.

  My eyes felt a warm, gentle strain. My vision blurred. Then something ran down my cheek, all the way to my lips. A liquid. Like rain, but warmer. Saline.

  I had shed a tear.

  The second type of gravity

  Before I left I went upstairs to the attic. It was dark in there, except for the glow of the computer. Gulliver was lying on his bed, staring out of the window.

  ‘I’m not your dad, Gulliver. I don’t have a right to be here.’

  ‘No. I know.’ Gulliver chewed on his wristband. Hostility glistened in his eyes like broken glass.

  ‘You’re not my dad. But you’re just like him. You don’t give a shit. And you shagged someone behind Mum’s back. He did that too, you know.’

  ‘Listen, Gulliver, I’m not trying to leave you, I’m trying to bring back your mother, okay? She’s a bit lost right now and my presence here isn’t helping.’

  ‘It’s just so fucked up. I feel totally alone.’

  Sun suddenly shone through the window, oblivious to our mood.

  ‘Loneliness, Gulliver, is a fact as universal as hydrogen.’

  He sighed a sigh that should really have belonged to an older human. ‘I just don’t feel cut out sometimes. You know, cut out for life. I mean, people at school, loads of their parents are divorced but they seem to have an okay relationship with their dads. And everyone’s always thought, with me, what excuse did I have to go off the rails? What was wrong with my life? Living in a nice house with rich non-divorced parents. What the fuck could possibly be wrong there?

  ‘But it was all bullshit. Mum and Dad never loved each other, not since I can remember anyway. Mum seemed to change after he had his breakdown – I mean, after you came – but that was just her delusion. I mean, you weren’t even who she thought you were. It’s come t
o something when you relate to ET more than your own dad. He was crap. Seriously, I can’t think of one piece of advice he gave me. Except I shouldn’t become an architect because architecture takes a hundred years to be appreciated.’

  ‘Listen, you don’t need guidance, Gulliver. Everything you need is inside your own head. You have more knowledge about the universe than anyone on your own planet.’ I pointed at the window. ‘You’ve seen what’s out there. And also, I should say, you’ve shown yourself to be really strong.’

  He stared out of the window again. ‘What’s it like up there?’

  ‘Very different. Everything is different.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Well, just existing is different. No one dies. There’s no pain. Everything is beautiful. The only religion is mathematics. There are no families. There are the hosts – they give instructions – and there is everyone else. The advancement of mathematics and the security of the universe are the two concerns. There is no hatred. There are no fathers and sons. There is no clear line between biology and technology. And everything is violet.’

  ‘It sounds awesome.’

  ‘It’s dull. It’s the dullest life you can imagine. Here, you have pain, and loss, that’s the price. But the rewards can be wonderful Gulliver.’

  He looked at me, disbelieving. ‘Yeah. Well, I don’t have a clue how to find them.’

  The phone rang. Isobel answered. Moments later, she was calling up to the attic.

  ‘Gulliver, it’s for you. A girl. Nat.’

  I couldn’t help but notice the faintest of faint smiles on Gulliver’s face, a smile he felt embarrassed about and tried to hide under clouds of discontent as he left the room.

  I sat and breathed, with lungs that would one day stop functioning but which still had a lot of warm clear air to inhale. Then I turned to Gulliver’s primitive Earth computer and began to type, giving as much advice as I could think of to help a human.