The Humans - by Matt Haig

The violet

A little while later I was in the college café, with Ari, having a grapefruit juice while he had a sugar-laden coffee and a packet of beef-flavoured crisps.

‘How’d it go, mate?’

I tried not to catch his cow-scented breath. ‘Good. Good. I educated them about alien life. Drake’s Equation.’

‘Bit out of your territory?’

‘Out of my territory? What do you mean?’

‘Subject-wise.’

‘Mathematics is every subject.’

He screwed up his face. ‘Tell ’em about Fermi’s Paradox?’

‘They told me, actually.’

‘All bollocks.’

‘You think?’

‘Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?’

‘That is pretty much what I said.’

‘I mean, personally, I think physics tells us there is an exo-planet out there with life on it. But I don’t think we understand what we’re looking for or what form it will take. Though I think this will be the century we find it. Course, most people don’t want to find it. Even the ones who pretend they do. They don’t want to really.’

‘Don’t they? Why not?’

He held up his hand. A signal for me to have patience while he completed the important task of chewing and then swallowing the crisps that were in his mouth. ‘’Cause it troubles people. They turn it into a joke. You’ve got the brightest physicists in the world these days, saying over and over and over, as plainly as physicists can manage, that there has to be other life out there. And other people too – and I mean thick people, mainly – you know, star sign people, the kind of people whose ancestors used to find omens in ox shit. But not just them, other people too, people who should know a lot better – you’ve got those people saying aliens are obviously made up because War of the Worlds was made up and Close Encounters of The Third Kind was made up and though they liked those things they kind of formed a prejudice in their head that aliens can only be enjoyed as fiction. Because if you believe in them as fact you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said.’

‘Which is what?

‘That humans are not at the centre of things. You know, the planet is in orbit around the sun. That was a fucking hilarious joke in the 1500s, but Copernicus wasn’t a comedian. He was, apparently, the least funny man of the whole Renaissance. He made Raphael look like Richard Pryor. But he was telling the fucking truth. The planet is in orbit around the sun. But that was out there, I’m telling you. Course, he made sure he was dead by the time it was published. Let Galileo take the heat.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

As I listened, I noticed a pain begin behind my eyes, getting sharper. On the fringes of my vision there was a blur of violet.

‘Oh, and animals have nervous systems,’ Ari went on, between swigs of coffee. ‘And could feel pain. That annoyed a few people at the time, too. And some people still don’t want to believe the world is as old as it is because that would mean having to accept the truth that humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.’

‘Right,’ I said, massaging my eyelids.

‘Recorded history is just the length it takes to the flush. And now we know we don’t have free will, people are getting pissed off about that, too. So, if and when they discover aliens they’d be really pretty unsettled because then we’d have to know, once and for all, that there is nothing really unique or special about us at all.’ He sighed, and gazed intently at the interior of his empty packet of crisps. ‘So I can see why it’s easy to dismiss alien life as a joke, one for teenage boys with overactive wrists and imaginations.’

‘What would happen,’ I asked him, ‘if an actual alien were found on Earth?’

‘What do you think would happen?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’

‘Well, I think if they had the brains to get here they’d have the brains to not reveal they were alien. They could have been here. They could have arrived in things that weren’t anything like sci-fi ‘ships’. They might not have UFOs. There might be no flying involved, and no object to fail to identify. Who the fuck knows? Maybe they were just you.’

I sat upright in my chair. Alert. ‘What?’

‘U. As in: no FO. Unidentified. Unidentified.’

‘Okay. But what if, somehow, they were identified. They were “I”. What if humans knew an alien was living among them?’

After asking this, all around the café appeared little wisps of violet in the air, which no one seemed to notice.

Ari downed the last of his coffee, and then considered for a moment. Scratched his face with his meaty fingers. ‘Well, put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be that poor bastard.’

‘Ari,’ I said. ‘Ari, I am that—’

Poor bastard, was what I was going to say. But I didn’t because right then, at that precise moment, there was a noise inside my head. It was a sound of the highest possible frequency and it was extremely loud. Accompanying it, and matching it for intensity, was the pain behind my eyes, which became infinitely worse. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, and it was a pain I had no control over.

Wishing it not to be there wasn’t the same thing as it not being there, and that confused me. Or it would have done, if I’d had the capacity to think beyond the pain. And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet. But this sharp, throbbing heat pressing behind my eyes was too much.

‘Mate, what’s up?’

I was holding my head by this point, trying to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.

I looked at Ari’s unshaven face, then at the few other people in the café, and the girl with glasses who was standing behind the counter. Something was happening to them, and to the whole place. Everything was dissolving into a rich, varied violet, a colour more familiar to me than any other. ‘The hosts,’ I said, aloud and almost simultaneously the pain increased further. ‘Stop, oh stop, oh stop.’

‘Man, I’m calling an ambulance,’ he said, because I was on the floor now. A swirling violet sea.

‘No.’

I fought against it. I got to my feet.

The pain lessened.

The ringing became a low hum.

The violet faded. ‘It was nothing,’ I said.

Ari laughed, nervous. ‘I’m no expert but that honestly looked like something.’

‘It was just a headache. A flash of pain. I’ll go to the doctor and check it out.’

‘You should. You really should.’

‘Yes. I will.’

I sat down. An ache remained, as a reminder, for a while, along with a few ethereal wisps in the air only I could see.

‘You were going to say something. About other life.’

‘No,’ I said quietly.

‘Pretty sure you were, man.’

‘Yeah, well. I think I’ve forgotten.’

And after that the pain disappeared altogether, and the air lost its final trace of violet.

 

 

The possibility of pain

I didn’t mention anything to Isobel or Gulliver. I knew it was unwise, because I knew the pain had been a warning. And besides, even if I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t have, because Gulliver had arrived home with a bruised eye. When human skin bruises, the skin takes various shades. Greys, browns, blues, greens. Among them, a dull violet. Beautiful, petrifying violet.

‘Gulliver, what happened?’ His mother asked the question quite a few times that evening but never got a satisfactory reply. He went into the small utility room behind the kitchen and closed the door.

‘Please, Gull, come out of there,’ said his mother. ‘We need to talk about this.’

‘Gulliver, come out of there,’ I added.

Eventually he opened the door. ‘Just leave me alone.’ That ‘alone’ was said with such a hard, cold force Isobel decided it was best to grant him that wish so we stayed downstairs while he trudged up to his room.

‘I’m going to have to phone the school about this tomorrow.’

I said nothing. Of course, I would later realise this was a mistake. I should have broken my promise to Gulliver and told her that he hadn’t been going to school. But I didn’t, because it wasn’t my duty. I did have a duty, but it wasn’t to humans. Even these ones. Especially these ones. And it was a duty I was already failing to follow, as that afternoon’s warning in the café had told me.

Newton, though, had a different sense of duty and he headed up three flights of stairs to be with Gulliver. Isobel didn’t know what to do, so she opened a few cupboard doors, stared into the cupboards, sighed, then closed them again.

‘Listen,’ I found myself saying, ‘he is going to have to find his own way, and make his own mistakes.’

‘We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That’s what we need to do. People can’t just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can’t do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?’

What could I say? ‘I’m sorry. I’m not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.’ And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect.

That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.

 

 

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.

‘Gulliver?’

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 human. 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.