The Humans - by Matt Haig

Life/death/football

Humans are one of the few intelligent beings in the galaxy who haven’t quite solved the problem of death. And yet they don’t spend their whole lives screeching and howling in terror, clawing at their own bodies, or rolling around on the floor. Some humans do that – I saw them in the hospital – but those humans are considered the mad ones.

Now, consider this.

A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.

But at ground level the humans don’t appear to spend their entire lives in a catatonic state.

No. They do other things. Things like:

– washing

– listening

– gardening

– eating

– driving

– working

– yearning

– earning

– staring

– drinking

– sighing

– reading

– gaming

– sunbathing

– complaining

– jogging

– quibbling

– caring

– mingling

– fantasising

– googling

– parenting

– renovating

– loving

– dancing

– fucking

– regretting

– failing

– striving

– hoping

– sleeping

 

Oh, and sport.

Apparently I, or rather Andrew, liked sport. And the sport he liked was football.

Luckily for Professor Andrew Martin, the football team he supported was Cambridge United, one of those which successfully avoided the perils and existential trauma of victory. To support Cambridge United, I discovered, was to support the idea of failure. To watch a team’s feet consistently avoid the spherical Earth-symbol seemed to frustrate their supporters greatly, but they obviously wouldn’t have it any other way. The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree, humans don’t actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds but if they keep on winning they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

Now, I was there at the game to see Cambridge United play against a team called Kettering. I had asked Gulliver if he wanted to come with me – so I could keep an eye on him – and he had said, with sarcasm, ‘Yeah, Dad, you know me so well.’

So, it was just me and Ari, or to give him his full title Professor Arirumadhi Arasaratham. As I have said, this was Andrew’s closest friend, although I had learnt from Isobel that I didn’t really have friends as such. More acquaintances. Anyway, Ari was an ‘expert’ (human definition) on theoretical physics. He was also quite rotund, as if he didn’t just want to watch football but become one.

‘So,’ he said, during a period when Cambridge United didn’t have the ball (that is to say, any time during the match), ‘how are things?’

‘Things?’

He stuffed some crisps into his mouth and made no attempt to conceal their fate. ‘You know, I was a bit worried about you.’ He laughed. It was the laugh human males do, to hide emotion. ‘Well, I say worry, it was more mild concern. I say mild concern but it was more ‘wonder if he’s done a Nash?’’

‘What do you mean?’

He told me what he meant. Apparently human mathematicians have a habit of going mad. He gave me a list of names – Nash, Cantor, Gödel, Turing – and I nodded along as if they meant something. And then he said ‘Riemann.’

‘Riemann?’

‘I heard you weren’t eating much so I was thinking more Gödel than Riemann, actually,’ he said. By Gödel, I later learnt, he meant Kurt Gödel, another German mathematician. However, this one’s particular psychological quirk was that he had believed everyone was trying to poison his food. So he had stopped eating altogether. By that definition of madness, Ari appeared very sane indeed.

‘No. I haven’t done one of those. I am eating now. Peanut butter sandwiches mainly.’

‘Sounds like more of a Presley,’ he said, laughing. And then he gave me a serious look. I could tell it was serious because he had swallowed and wasn’t putting any more food in his mouth. ‘Because, you know, prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They’re like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit. And when I heard about your naked corpus at Corpus I thought you were cracking up a bit.’

‘No. I am on the rails,’ I said. ‘Like a train. Or a clothes-hanger.’

‘And Isobel? Everything fine with you and Isobel?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is my wife. And I love her. Everything is fine. Fine.’

He frowned at me. Then he took a moment’s glance to see if Cambridge United were anywhere near the ball. He seemed relieved to see they weren’t.

‘Really? Everything’s fine?’

I could see he needed more confirmation. ‘Till I loved I never lived.’

He shook his head and gave a facial expression I can now safely classify as bewilderment.

‘What’s that? Shakespeare? Tennyson? Marvell?’

I shook my head. ‘No. It was Emily Dickinson. I have been reading a lot of her poetry. And also Anne Sexton’s. And Walt Whitman too. Poetry seems to say a lot about us. You know, us humans.’

‘Emily Dickinson? You’re quoting Emily Dickinson at a match?’

‘Yes.’

I sensed, again, I was getting the context wrong. Everything here was about context. There was nothing that was right for every occasion. I didn’t get it. The air always had hydrogen in it wherever you were. But that was pretty much the only consistent thing. What was the big difference that made quoting love poetry inappropriate in this context? I had no idea.

‘Right,’ he said, and paused for the large, communal groan as Kettering scored a goal. I groaned too. Groaning was actually quite diverting, and certainly the most enjoyable aspect of sport spectating. I might have overdone it a little bit though, judging from the looks I was getting. Or maybe they had seen me on the Internet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And what does Isobel feel about everything?’

‘Everything?’

‘You, Andrew. What does she think? Does she know about . . . you know? Is that what triggered it?’

This was my moment. I inhaled. ‘The secret I told you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘About the Riemann hypothesis?’

He scrunched his face in confusion. ‘What? No, man. Unless you’ve been sleeping with a hypothesis on the side?’

‘So what was the secret?’

‘That you’re having it away with a student.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling relief. ‘So I definitely didn’t say anything about work the last time I saw you.’

‘No. For once, you didn’t.’ He turned back to the football. ‘So, are you going to spill the beans about this student?’

‘My memory is a bit hazy, to be honest with you.’

‘That’s convenient. Perfect alibi. If Isobel finds out. Not that you’re exactly man of the match in her eyes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No offence, mate, but you’ve told me what her opinion is.’

‘What is her opinion of’ – I hesitated – ‘of me?’

He pressed one final handful of crisps in his mouth and washed it down with that disgusting phosphoric acid-flavoured drink called Coca-Cola.

‘Her opinion is that you are a selfish bastard.’

‘Why does she think that?’

‘Maybe because you are a selfish bastard. But then, we’re all selfish bastards.’

‘Are we?’

‘Oh yeah. It’s our DNA. Dawkins pointed that out to us, way back. But you, man, your selfish gene is on a different level. With you, I should imagine, your selfish gene is similar to the one that smashed a rock over the head of that penultimate Neanderthal, before turning round and screwing his wife.’

He smiled and carried on watching the match. It was a long match. Elsewhere in the universe, stars formed and others ceased to be. Was this the purpose of human existence? Was the purpose somewhere inside the pleasure, or at least the casual simplicity of a football match? Eventually, the game ended.

‘That was great,’ I lied, as we walked out of the grounds.

‘Was it? We lost four nil.’

‘Yes, but while I watched it I didn’t think once about my mortality, or the various other difficulties our mortal form will bring in later life.’

He looked bewildered again. He was going to say something but he was beaten to it by someone throwing an empty can at my head. Even though it was thrown from behind I had sensed it coming, and ducked quickly out of the way. Ari was stunned by my reflexes. As, I think, was the can-thrower.

‘Oi, wanker,’ the can-thrower said, ‘you’re that freak on the web. The naked one. Bit warm, ain’t you? With all those clothes on.’

‘Piss off, mate,’ Ari said nervously.

The man did the opposite.

The can-thrower was walking over. He had red cheeks and very small eyes and greasy black hair. He was flanked by two friends. All three of them had faces ready for violence. Red Cheeks leaned in close to Ari. ‘What did you say, big man?’

‘There might have been a “piss” in there,’ said Ari, ‘and there was definitely an “off”.’

The man grabbed Ari’s coat. ‘Think you’re smart?’

‘Moderately.’

I held the man’s arm. ‘Get off me, you fucking perv,’ he responded. ‘I was speaking to fat bastard.’

I wanted to hurt him. I had never wanted to hurt anyone – only needed to, and there was a difference. With this person, there was a definite desire to hurt him. I heard the rasp of his breath, and tightened his lungs. Within seconds he was reaching for his inhaler. ‘We’ll be on our way,’ I said, releasing the pressure in his chest. ‘And you three won’t bother us again.’

Ari and I walked home, unfollowed.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ari. ‘What was that?’

I didn’t answer. How could I? What that had been was something Ari could never understand.

Clouds gathered together quickly. The sky darkened.

It looked like rain. I hated rain, as I have told you. I knew Earth rain wasn’t sulphuric acid, but rain, all rain, was something I could not abide. I panicked.

I started running.

‘Wait!’ said Ari, who was running behind me. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Rain!’ I said, wishing for a dome around the whole of Cambridge. ‘I can’t stand rain.’

 

 

Light-bulb

‘Have a nice time?’ Isobel asked on my return. She was standing on top of one form of primitive technology (step-ladder) changing another one (incandescent light-bulb).

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did some good groaning. But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll go again.’

She dropped the new bulb. It smashed. ‘Damn. We don’t have another one.’ She looked, almost, like she might cry about this fact. She stepped down from the ladder, and I stared up at the dead light-bulb still hanging there. I concentrated hard. A moment later it was working again.

‘That was lucky. It didn’t need changing after all.’

Isobel stared at the light. The golden illumination on her skin was quite mesmerising, for some reason. The way it shifted shadow. Made her more distinctly herself. ‘How weird,’ she said. Then she looked down at the broken glass.

‘I’ll see to that,’ I said. And she smiled at me and her hand touched mine and gave it a quick pulse of gratitude. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting at all. She embraced me, gently, with broken glass still at our feet.

I breathed her in. I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realised the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

‘Oh Andrew,’ she said. I didn’t know what she meant by this simple declaration of my name, but when she stroked my back I found myself stroking hers, and saying the words that seemed somehow the most appropriate. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .’

 

 

Shopping

I went to the funeral of Daniel Russell. I watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, and earth being sprinkled over the top of the wood casket. There were lots of people there, most of them wearing black. A few were crying.

Afterwards, Isobel wanted to go over and talk to Tabitha. Tabitha looked different to when I had last seen her. She looked older, even though it had only been a week. She wasn’t crying, but it seemed like an effort not to.

Isobel stroked her arm. ‘Listen, Tabitha, I just want you to know, we’re here. Whatever you need, we’re here.’

‘Thank you, Isobel. That really does mean a lot. It really does.’

‘Just basic stuff. If you don’t feel up to the supermarket. I mean, supermarkets are not the most sympathetic of places.’

‘That’s very kind. I know you can do it online, but I’ve never got the hang of it.’

‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll sort it out.’

And this actually happened. Isobel went to get another human’s shopping, and paid for it, and came home and told me I was looking better.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You’re looking yourself again.’

 

 

The Zeta Function

‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ Isobel asked me, the next Monday morning, as I ate my first peanut butter sandwich of the day.

Newton was asking it, too. Either that, or he was asking about the sandwich. I tore him off a piece. ‘Yes. It will be fine. What could go wrong?’

This was when Gulliver let out a mocking groan sound. The only sound he’d made all morning.

‘What’s up, Gulliver?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ he said. He didn’t expand. Instead, he left his uneaten cereal and stormed upstairs.

‘Should I follow him?’

‘No,’ Isobel said. ‘Give him time.’

I nodded.

I trusted her.

Time was her subject, after all.

An hour later I was in Andrew’s office. It was the first time I had been there since I had deleted the email to Daniel Russell. This time, I wasn’t in a rush and could absorb a few more details. As he was a professor, there were books lining every wall, designed so that from whichever angle you looked at him you would see a book.

I looked at some of the titles. Very primitive-looking in the main. A History of Binary and Other Non-decimal Numeration. Hyperbolic Geometry. The Book of Hexagonal Tessellation. Logarithmic Spirals and the Golden Mean.

There was a book written by Andrew himself. One I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been here. It was a thin book called The Zeta Function. It had the words ‘Uncorrected Proof Copy’ on the cover. I made sure the door was locked and then sat down in his chair and read every word.

And what a depressing read it was, I have to say. It was about the Riemann hypothesis, and what seemed like his futile quest to prove it and explain why the spaces between prime numbers increased the way they did. The tragedy was in realising how desperately he had wanted to solve it – and, of course, after he’d written the book he had solved it, though the benefits he’d imagined would never happen, because I had destroyed the proof. And I began to think of how fundamentally our equivalent mathematical breakthrough – the one which we came to know as the Second Basic Theory of Prime Numbers – had on us. How it enabled us to do all that we can do. Travel the universe. Inhabit other worlds, transform into other bodies. Live as long as we want to live. Search each other’s minds, each other’s dreams. All that.

The Zeta Function did, however, list all the things humans had achieved. The main steps on the road. The developments that had advanced them towards civilisation. Fire, that was a biggie. The plough. The printing press. The steam engine. The microchip. The discovery of DNA. And humans would be the first to congratulate themselves on all this. But the trouble was, for them, they had never made the leap most other intelligent life forms in the universe had made.

Oh, they had built rockets and probes and satellites. A few of them even worked. Yet, really, their mathematics had thus far let them down. They had yet to do the big stuff. The synchronisation of brains. The creation of free-thinking computers. Automation technology. Inter-galactic travel. And as I read, I realised I was stopping all these opportunities. I had killed their future.

The phone rang. It was Isobel.

‘Andrew, what are you doing? Your lecture started ten minutes ago.’

She was cross, but in a concerned way. It still felt strange, and new, having someone be worried about me. I didn’t fully understand this concern, or what she gained by having it, but I must confess I quite liked being the subject of it. ‘Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. I will go. Bye, erm, darling.’

 

 

Be careful. We are listening.

 

 

The problem with equations

I walked into the lecture hall. It was a large room made predominantly of dead trees.

There were a lot of people staring at me. These were students. Some had pens and paper. Others had computers. All were waiting for knowledge. I scanned the room. There were 102 of them, in total. Always an unsettling number, stuck as it is between two primes. I tried to work out the students’ knowledge level. You see, I didn’t want to overshoot. I looked behind me. There was a whiteboard where words and equations were meant to be written but there was nothing on it.

I hesitated. And during that hesitation someone sensed my weakness. Someone on the back row. A male of about twenty, with bushy blond hair and a T-shirt which said ‘What part of N = R x fs x fp x ne x f l x fi x fc x L don’t you understand?’

He giggled at the wit he was about to display and shouted out, ‘You look a bit overdressed today, Professor!’ He giggled some more, and it was contagious; the howling laughter spreading like fire across the whole hall. Within moments, everyone in the hall was laughing. Well, everyone except one person, a female.

The non-laughing female was looking at me intently. She had red curly hair, full lips and wide eyes. She had a startling frankness about her appearance. An openness that reminded me of a death flower. She was wearing a cardigan and coiling strands of her hair around her finger.

‘Calm down,’ I said, to the rest of them. ‘That is very funny. I get it. I am wearing clothes and you are referring to an occasion in which I was not wearing clothes. Very funny. You think it is a joke, like when Georg Cantor said the scientist Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, or when John Nash started seeing men in hats who weren’t really there. That was funny. The human mind is a limited, but high plateau. Spend your life at its outer limits and, oops, you might fall off. That is funny. Yes. But don’t worry, you won’t fall off. Young man, you are right there in the middle of your plateau. Though I appreciate your concern, I have to say I am feeling much better now. I am wearing underpants and socks and trousers and even a shirt.’

People were laughing again, but this time the laughter felt warmer. And it did something to me, inside, this warmth. So then I started laughing, too. Not at what I had just said, because I didn’t see how that was funny. No. I was laughing at myself. The impossible fact that I was there, on that most absurd planet and yet actually liking being there. And I felt an urge to tell someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it and I realised that I didn’t want to tell the hosts. I wanted to tell Isobel.

Anyway, I did the lecture. Apparently I had been meant to be talking about something called ‘post-Euclidean geometry’. But I didn’t want to talk about that, so I talked about the boy’s T-shirt.

The formula written on it was something called Drake’s equation. It was an equation devised to calculate the likelihood of advanced civilisations in Earth’s galaxy, or what the humans called the Milky Way galaxy. (That is how humans came to terms with the vast expanse of space. By saying it looks like a splatter of spilt milk. Something dropped out of the fridge that could be wiped away in a second.)

So, the equation:

N = R x fp x ne x f l x f i x fc x L

N was the number of advanced civilisations in the galaxy with whom communication might be possible. R was the average annual rate at which stars were formed. The f p was the fraction of those stars with planets. The ne was the average number of those planets that have the right eco-systems for life. The f 1 was the fraction of those planets where life would actually develop. The f i was the fraction of the above planets that could develop intelligence. The f c was the fraction of those where a communicative technologically advanced civilisation could develop. And L was the lifetime of the communicative phase.

Various astrophysicists had looked at all the data and decided that there must, in fact, be millions of planets in the galaxy containing life, and even more in the universe at large. And some of these were bound to have advanced life with very good technology. This of course was true. But the humans didn’t just stop there. They came up with a paradox. They said, ‘Hold on, this can’t be right. If there are this many extraterrestrial civilisations with the ability to contact us then we would know about it because they would have contacted us.’

‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ said the male whose T-shirt started this detour.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not. Because the equation should have some other fractions in there. For instance, it should have—’

I turned and wrote on the board behind me:

fcgas

 

 

‘Fraction who could give a shit about visiting or communicating with Earth.’

And then:

fdsbthdr

 

 

‘Fraction who did so but the humans didn’t realise.’

It was not exactly difficult to make human students of mathematics laugh. Indeed, I had never met a sub-category of life form so desperate to laugh – but still, it felt good. For a few brief moments, it even felt slightly more than good.

I felt warmth and, I don’t know, a kind of forgiveness or acceptance from these students.

‘But listen,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. Those aliens up there – they don’t know what they are missing.’

Applause. (When humans really like something they clap their hands together. It makes no sense. But when they do it on behalf of you, it warms your brain.)

And then, at the end of the lecture, the staring woman came up to me.

The open flower.

She stood close to me. Normally, when humans stand and talk to each other they try and leave some air between them, for purposes of breathing and etiquette and claustrophobia limitation. With this one, there was very little air.

‘I phoned,’ she said, with her full mouth, in a voice I had heard before, ‘to ask about you. But you weren’t there. Did you get my message?’

‘Oh. Oh yes. Maggie. I got the message.’

‘You seemed on top form today.’

‘Thank you. I thought I would do something a bit different.’

She laughed. The laughter was fake, but something about its fakeness made me excited for some unfathomable reason. ‘Are we still having our first Tuesdays of the month?’ she asked me.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, utterly confused. ‘First Tuesdays of the month will be left intact.’

‘That’s good.’ Her voice sounded warm and menacing, like the wind that speeds across the southern waste lands of home. ‘And listen, you know that heavy conversation we had, the night before you went la-la?’

‘La-la?’

‘You know. Before your routine at Corpus Christi.’

‘What did I tell you? My mind’s a little hazy about that night, that’s all.’

‘Oh, the kind of things you can’t say in lecture halls.’

‘Mathematical things?’

‘Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but mathematical things are the kind of things you can say in lecture halls.’

I wondered about this woman, this girl, and more specifically I wondered what kind of relationship she’d had with Andrew Martin.

‘Yes. Oh yes. Of course.’

This Maggie knew nothing, I told myself.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you.’

‘Yes. Yes. See you.’

She walked away, and I watched her walk away. For a moment there was no fact in the universe except the one that related to a female human called Maggie walking away from me. I didn’t like her, but I had no idea why.