The Humans - by Matt Haig

A game

‘I know you are right,’ I told him for the seventeenth time, looking straight into his eyes, ‘but I have been weak. I admit it to you now. I was and remain unable to harm any more humans, especially those ones I have lived with. But what you have said to me has reminded me of my original purpose. I am not able to fulfil that purpose and no longer have the gifts to do so, but equally I realise it has to be fulfilled, and so in a way I’m thankful you are here. I’ve been stupid. I’ve tried and I have failed.’

Jonathan sat back on the sofa and studied me. He stared at my bruises and sniffed the air between us. ‘You have been drinking alcohol.’

‘Yes. I have been corrupted. It is very easy, I find, when you live like a human, to develop some of their bad habits. I have drunk alcohol. I have had sex. I have smoked cigarettes. I have eaten peanut butter sandwiches and listened to their simple music. I have felt many of the crude pleasures that they can feel, as well as physical and emotional pain. But still, despite my corruption, there remains enough of me left, enough of my clear rational self, to know what has to be done.’

He watched me. He believed me, because every word I was speaking was the truth. ‘I am comforted to hear this.’

I didn’t waste a moment. ‘Now listen to me. Gulliver will return home soon. He won’t be on a car or a bike. He’ll be walking. He likes to walk. We will hear his feet on the gravel, and then we will hear his key in the door. Normally, he heads straight into the kitchen to get himself a drink or a bowl of cereal. He eats around three bowls of cereal a day. Anyway, that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he will most likely enter the kitchen first.’

Jonathan was paying close attention to everything I was telling him. It felt strange, terrible even, giving him this information, but I really couldn’t think of any other way.

‘You want to act fast,’ I said, ‘as his mother will be home soon. Also, there’s a chance he may be surprised to see you. You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn’t the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible. Another fact to consider is that Gulliver has, quite independently, attempted to take his own life before. So, I suggest that however you choose to kill him it would be a good idea to make it look like suicide. Maybe after his heart has stopped, you could slice one of his wrists, cutting through the veins. That way, less suspicion will be aroused.’

Jonathan nodded, then looked around the room. At the television, the history books, the armchair, the framed art prints on the wall, the telephone in its cradle.

‘It will be a good idea to have the television on,’ I told him, ‘even if you are not in this room. Because I always watch the news and leave it on.’

He switched on the television.

We sat and watched footage of war in the Middle East, without saying a word. But then he heard something that I couldn’t, his senses being so much sharper.

‘Footsteps,’ he said. ‘On the gravel.’

‘He’s here,’ I said. ‘Go to the kitchen. I’ll hide.’

 

 

90.2 MHz

I waited in the sitting room. The door was closed. There would be no reason for Gulliver to enter here. Unlike the living room he hardly ever came into this room. I don’t think I’d ever heard him do so.

So I stayed there, still and quiet, as the front door opened, then closed. He was unmoving, in the hallway. No footsteps.

‘Hello?’

Then a response. My voice but not my voice, coming from the kitchen. ‘Hello, Gulliver.’

‘What are you doing here? Mum said you’d gone. She phoned me, said you’d had an argument.’

I heard him – me, Andrew, Jonathan – respond in measured words. ‘That is right. We did. We had an argument. Don’t worry, it wasn’t too serious.’

‘Oh yeah? Sounded pretty serious from Mum’s side of things.’ Gulliver paused. ‘Whose are those clothes you’re wearing?’

‘Oh, these, they’re just old ones I didn’t know I had.’

‘I’ve never seen them before. And your face, it’s totally healed. You look completely better.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Right, anyway, I might go upstairs. I’ll get some food later.’

‘No. No. You will stay right here.’ The mind patterning was beginning. His words were shepherds ushering away conscious thought. ‘You will stay here and you will take a knife – a sharp knife, the sharpest there is in this room—’

It was about to happen. I could feel it, so I did what I had planned to do. I went over to the bookcase and picked up the clockwork radio, turned the power dial through a full 360-degree rotation and pressed the button with the little green circle.

On.

The small display became illuminated: 90.2 MHz.

Classical music blared out at almost full volume as I carried the radio back along the hallway. Unless I was very much mistaken it was Debussy.

‘You will now press that knife into your wrist and press it hard enough to cut through every vein.’

‘What’s that noise?’ Gulliver asked, his head clearing. I still couldn’t see him. I still wasn’t quite at the kitchen doorway.

‘Just do it. End your life, Gulliver.’

I entered the kitchen and saw my doppelgänger facing away from me as he pressed his hand on to Gulliver’s head. The knife fell to the floor. It was like looking at a strange kind of human baptism. I knew that what he was doing was right, and logical, from his perspective, but perspective was a funny thing.

Gulliver collapsed; his whole body was convulsing. I placed the radio down on the unit. The kitchen had its own radio. I switched that on, too. The TV was still on in the other room, as I had intended it to be. A cacophony of classical music and newsreaders and rock music filled the air as I reached Jonathan and pulled his arm so he now had no contact with Gulliver.

He turned, held me by the throat, pressing me back against the refrigerator.

‘You have made a mistake,’ he said.

Gulliver’s convulsions stopped and he looked around, confused. He saw two men, both identical, like his father, pressing into each other’s necks with equivalent force.

I knew that, whatever else happened, I had to keep Jonathan in the kitchen. If he stayed in the kitchen, with the radios on and the TV in the next room, we would be equally matched.

‘Gulliver,’ I said. ‘Gulliver, give me the knife. Any knife. That knife. Give me that knife.’

‘Dad? Are you my Dad?’

‘Yes, I am. Now give me the knife.’

‘Ignore him, Gulliver,’ Jonathan said. ‘He’s not your father. I am. He’s an imposter. He’s not what he looks like. He’s a monster. An alien. We have to destroy him.’

As we carried on, locked in our mutually futile combative pose, matching strength with strength, I saw Gulliver’s eyes fill with doubt.

He looked at me.

It was time for the truth.

‘I’m not your father. And neither is he. Your dad is dead, Gulliver. He died on Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He was taken by the . . .’ I thought of a way of putting it that he would understand. ‘. . . by the people we work for. They extracted information from him, and then they killed him. And they sent me here, as him, to kill you. And kill your mother. And anyone who knew about what he had achieved that day, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it because I started, I started to feel something that was meant to be impossible . . . I empathised with you. Grew to like you. Worry about you. Love you both. And I gave everything up . . . I have no power, no strength.’

‘Don’t listen to him, son,’ Jonathan said. And then he realised something. ‘Turn off the radios. Listen to me, turn off the radios now.’

I stared at Gulliver with pleading eyes. ‘Whatever you do, don’t turn them off. The signal interferes with the technology. It’s his left hand. His left hand. Everything is in his left hand . . .’

Gulliver was clambering upright. He looked numb. His face was unreadable.

I thought hard.

‘The leaf!’ I yelled. ‘Gulliver, you were right. The leaf, remember, the leaf! And think of—’

It was then that the other version of myself smashed his head into my nose, with swift and brutal force. My head rebounded against the fridge door and everything dissolved. Colours faded, and the noise of the radios and the faraway newsreader swam into each other. A swirling audio soup.

It was over.

‘Gulli—’

The other me switched one of the radios off. Debussy disappeared. But at the moment the music went away I heard a scream. It sounded like Gulliver. And it was, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. It was a scream of determination. A primal roar of rage, giving him the courage he needed to stab the knife that had been about to cut his own wrists into the back of a man who looked every inch his own father.

And the knife went deep.

With that roar, and that sight, the room sharpened into focus. I could get to my feet before Jonathan’s finger reached the second radio. I yanked him back by the hair. I saw his face. The pain clearly articulated in the way only human faces can manage. The eyes, shocked yet pleading. The mouth seeming to melt away.

Melt away. Melt away. Melt away.

 

 

The ultimate crime

I would not look at his face again. He could not die while that technology remained inside him. I dragged him over to the Aga.

‘Lift it up,’ I ordered Gulliver. ‘Lift up the cover.’

‘Cover?’

‘The hot plate.’

He did it. He lifted the circular steel ring up and let it fall back, and he did so without a single question in his eyes.

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘He’s fighting. Help me with his arm.’

Together we had enough force to press his palm down to the burning metal. The scream, as we kept him there, was horrendous. Knowing what it was I was doing, it truly sounded like the end of the universe.

I was committing the ultimate crime. I was destroying gifts, and killing one of my kind.

‘We’ve got to keep it there,’ I shouted to Gulliver. ‘We’ve got to keep it there! Hold! Hold! Hold!’

And then I switched my attention to Jonathan.

‘Tell them it is over,’ I whispered. ‘Tell them you have completed your mission. Tell them there has been a problem with the gifts and that you will not be able to return. Tell them, and I will stop the pain.’

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.