The Humans - by Matt Haig

When galaxies collide

I stayed in student accommodation in Corpus Christi, of all places, and tried to keep a low profile. I had grown a beard now, was tanned, and had put on a bit of weight, so people tended not to recognise me.

I did my lecture.

To quite a few jeers I told my fellow academics that I thought mathematics was an incredibly dangerous territory and that humans had explored it as fully as they could. To advance further, I told them, would be to head into a no-man’s-land full of unknown perils.

Among the audience was a pretty red-haired woman who I recognised instantly as Maggie. She came up to me afterwards and asked if I’d like to go to the Hat and Feathers. I said no, and she seemed to know I meant it, and after posing a jovial question about my beard, she left the hall.

After that, I went for a walk, naturally gravitating towards Isobel’s college.

I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide they pass right through.

I could hardly breathe, watching her, and didn’t even notice it was beginning to rain. I was just mesmerised by her. All eleven trillion cells of her.

Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn’t think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.

She pulled open her umbrella as if she were just any woman pulling open an umbrella, and she kept on walking, stopping only to give some money to a homeless man with a long coat and a bad leg. It was Winston Churchill.

 

 

Home

One can’t love and do nothing.

– Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

 

 

Knowing I couldn’t follow Isobel, but feeling a need to connect with someone, I followed Winston Churchill instead. I followed slowly, ignoring the rain, feeling happy I had seen Isobel and that she was alive and safe and as quietly beautiful as she had always been (even when I had been too blind to appreciate this).

Winston Churchill was heading for the park. It was the same park where Gulliver walked Newton, but I knew it was too early in the afternoon for me to bump into them, so I kept following. He walked slowly, pulling his leg along as if it were three times as heavy as the rest of him. Eventually, he reached a bench. It was painted green, this bench, but the paint was flaking off to reveal the wood underneath. I sat down on it too. We sat in rain-soaked silence for a while.

He offered me a swig of his cider. I told him I was okay. I think he recognised me but I wasn’t sure.

‘I had everything once,’ he said.

‘Everything?’

‘A house, a car, a job, a woman, a kid.’

‘Oh, how did you lose them?’

‘My two churches. The betting shop and the off-licence. And it’s been downhill all the way. And now I’m here with nothing, but I am myself with nothing. An honest bloody nothing.’

‘Well, I know how you feel.’

Winston Churchill looked doubtful. ‘Yeah. Right you are, fella.’

‘I gave up eternal life.’

‘Ah, so you were religious?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And now you’re down here sinning like the rest of us.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, just don’t try and touch my leg again and we’ll get on fine.’

I smiled. He did recognise me. ‘I won’t. I promise.’

‘So, what made you give up on eternity if you don’t mind me askin’?’

‘I don’t know. I’m still working it out.’

‘Good luck with that, fella, good luck with that.’

‘Thanks.’

He scratched his cheek and gave a nervous whistle. ‘Eh, you haven’t got any money on you, have you?’

I pulled a ten-pound note out of my pocket.

‘You’re a star, fella.’

‘Well, maybe we all are,’ I said, looking skyward.

And that was the end of our conversation. He had run out of cider and had no more reason to stay. So he stood up and walked away, wincing in pain from his damaged leg, as a breeze tilted flowers towards him.

It was strange. Why did I feel this lack inside me? This need to belong?

The rain stopped. The sky was clear now. I stayed where I was, on a bench covered with slow-evaporating raindrops. I knew it was getting later, and knew I should probably be heading back to Corpus Christi, but I didn’t have the incentive to move.

What was I doing here?

What was my function, now, in the universe?

I considered, I considered, I considered, and felt a strange sensation. A kind of sliding into focus.

I realised, though I was on Earth, I had been living this past year as I had always lived. I was just thinking I could carry on, moving forward. But I was not me any more. I was a human, give or take. And humans are about change. That is how they survive, by doing and un-doing and doing again.

I had done some things I couldn’t undo, but there were others I could amend. I had become a human by betraying rationality and obeying feeling. To stay me, I knew there would come a point when I would have to do the same again.

Time passed.

Squinting, I looked again to the sky.

The Earth’s sun can look very much alone, yet it has relatives all across this galaxy, stars that were born in the exact same place, but which were now very far away from each other, lighting very different worlds.

I was like a sun.

I was a long way from where I started. And I have changed. Once I thought I could pass through time like a neutrino passes through matter, effortlessly and without stopping to think, because time would never run out.

As I sat there on that bench a dog came up to me. Its nose pressed into my leg.

‘Hello,’ I whispered, pretending not to know this particular English Springer Spaniel. But his pleading eyes stayed on me, even as he angled his nose towards his hip. His arthritis had come back. He was in pain.

I stroked him and held my hand in place, instinctively, but of course I couldn’t heal him this time.

Then a voice behind me. ‘Dogs are better than human beings because they know but don’t tell.’

I turned. A tall boy with dark hair and pale skin and a tentative nervous smile. ‘Gulliver.’

He kept his eyes on Newton. ‘You were right about Emily Dickinson.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Part of your advice. I read her.’

‘Oh. Oh yes. She was a very good poet.’

He moved around the bench, sat down next to me. I noticed he was older. Not only was he quoting poetry but his skull had become more man-shaped. There was a slight trace of dark beneath the skin on his jaw. His T-shirt said ‘The Lost’ – he had finally joined the band.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, that poet said, I shall not live in vain.

‘How are you?’ I asked, as if he were a casual acquaintance I often bumped into.

‘I haven’t tried to kill myself, if that’s what you mean.’

‘And how is she?’ I asked. ‘Your mother?’

Newton came over with a stick, dropped it for me to throw. Which I did.

‘She misses you.’

‘Me? Or your dad?’

‘You. You’re the one who looked after us.’

‘I don’t have any powers to look after you now. If you chose to jump off a roof then you’d probably die.’

‘I don’t jump off roofs any more.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s progress.’

There was a long silence. ‘I think she wants you to come back.’

‘Does she say that?’

‘No. But I think she does.’

The words were rain in a desert. After a while I said, in a quiet and neutral tone, ‘I don’t know if that would be wise. It’s easy to misunderstand your mother. And even if you haven’t got it wrong there could be all kinds of difficulties. I mean, what would she even call me? I don’t have a name. It would be wrong for her to call me Andrew.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she really misses me?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah. I think so.’

‘What about you?’

‘I miss you, too.’

Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.

‘I miss you, too,’ I said. ‘I miss both of you.’

It was evening. The clouds were orange, pink and purple. Was this what I had wanted? Was this why I had come back to Cambridge?

We talked.

The light faded.

Gulliver attached the lead to Newton’s collar. The dog’s eyes spoke sad warmth.

‘You know where we live,’ said Gulliver.

I nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’

I watched him leave. The joke of the universe. A noble human, with thousands of days to live. It made no logical sense that I had developed into someone who wanted those days to be as happy and secure for him as they could possibly be, but if you came to Earth looking for logical sense you were missing the point. You were missing lots of things.

I sat back and absorbed the sky and tried not to understand anything at all. I sat there until it was night. Until distant suns and planets shone above me, like a giant advert for better living. On other, more enlightened planets, there was the peace and calm and logic that so often came with advanced intelligence. I wanted none of it, I realised.

What I wanted was that most exotic of all things. I had no idea if that was possible. It probably wasn’t, but I needed to find out.

I wanted to live with people I could care for and who would care for me. I wanted family. I wanted happiness, not tomorrow or yesterday, but now.

What I wanted, in fact, was to go home. So, I stood up.

It was only a short walk away.

 

Home – is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there

I come home – she lifted up her wings

Guess that this must be the place.

– Talking Heads,

‘This Must Be the Place’