Matt Haig - The Humans

You must destroy him. You must destroy both of them.

No. There is no need. If you want me to, if you really think it is required, then I can manipulate his neurological processes. I can make him forget what his father told him. Not that he really knows anyway. He has no real understanding of mathematics.

The effects of any mind manipulation you carry out disappear the moment you return home. You know that .

He won’t say anything.

He might have said something already. Humans aren’t to be trusted. They don’t even trust themselves.

Gulliver hasn’t said anything. And Isobel knows nothing.

You must complete your task. If you do not complete your task, someone else will be sent to complete it for you.

No. No. I will complete it. Don’t worry. I will complete my task.

I stood next to his bed while he slept. I don’t know how long I just stood there, in the dark, listening to his deep breathing as he slipped deeper and deeper below dreams. Half an hour, maybe.

He hadn’t pulled the window blind down, so I looked out at the night. There was no moon from this angle, but I could see a few stars. Suns lighting dead solar systems elsewhere in the galaxy. Everywhere you can see in their sky, or almost everywhere, is lifeless. That must affect them. That must give them ideas above their station. That must send them insane.

Gulliver rolled over, and I decided to wait no longer. It was now or it was never.

You will pull back your duvet , I told him, in a voice he wouldn’t have heard if he had been awake but which reached right in, riding theta-waves, to become a command from his own brain. And slowly you will sit up in your bed, your feet will be on the rug and you will breathe and you will compose yourself and then you will stand up .

And he did, indeed, stand up. He stayed there, breathing deeply and slowly, waiting for the next command.

You will walk to the door. Do not worry about opening the door, because it is already open. There. Just walk, just walk, just walk to your door .

He did exactly as I said. And he was there in the doorway, oblivious to everything except my voice. A voice which only had two words that needed to be said. Fall forward . I moved closer to him. Somehow those words were slow to arrive. I needed time. Another minute, at least.

I was there, closer, able to smell the scent of sleep on him. Of humanity. And I remembered: You must complete your task. If you do not complete your task, someone else will be sent to complete it for you . I swallowed. My mouth was so dry it hurt. I felt the infinite expanse of the universe behind me, a vast if neutral force. The neutrality of time, of space, of mathematics, of logic, of survival. I closed my eyes.

Waited.

Before I opened them, I was being gripped by the throat. I could barely breathe.

He had turned 180 degrees, and his left hand had me by the neck. I pulled it away, and now both his hands were fists swinging at me, wild, angry, hitting me almost as much as he missed.

He got the side of my head. I walked backwards away from him, but he was moving forwards at just the same speed. His eyes were open. He was seeing me now. Seeing me and not seeing me all at the same time. I could have said stop of course, but I didn’t. Maybe I wanted to witness some human violence first-hand, even unconscious violence, to understand the importance of my task. By understanding it I would be able to fulfil it. Yes, that might have been it. That may also have explained why I let myself bleed when he punched me on the nose. I had reached his desk now and could retreat no further, so I just stood there as he kept hitting my head, my neck, my chest, my arms. He roared now, his mouth as wide as it could go, baring teeth.

‘ Raaaah! ’

This roar woke him up. His legs went weak and he nearly fell to the floor but he recovered in time.

‘I,’ he said. He didn’t know where he was for a moment. He saw me, in the dark, and this time it was conscious sight. ‘Dad?’

I nodded as a slow thin stream of blood reached my mouth. Isobel was running up the stairs to the attic. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I heard a noise so I came upstairs. Gulliver was sleepwalking, that’s all.’

Isobel switched the light on, gasped as she saw my face. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘It’s nothing. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘Gulliver?’

Gulliver was sitting on the edge of his bed now, flinching from the light. He too looked at my face but he didn’t say anything at all.

Gulliver wanted to go back to bed. To sleep. So, ten minutes later, Isobel and I were alone, and I was sitting on the side of the bath as she placed an antiseptic solution called TCP on a circle of cotton wool and dabbed it gently on a cut on my forehead, and then on my lip.

Now, these were wounds I could have healed with a single thought. Just to feel pain, sometimes, was enough to cancel it. And yet, even as the antiseptic stung on contact with each cut, the injuries stayed. I forced them to. I couldn’t allow her to get suspicious. But was it just that?

‘How’s your nose?’ she asked. I caught sight of it in the mirror. A smear of blood around one nostril.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, feeling it. ‘It isn’t broken.’

Her eyes squinted in pure concentration. ‘This one on your forehead is really bad. And there’s going to be one giant bruise there. He must have really hit you hard. Did you try and restrain him?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I did. But he kept on.’

I could smell her. Clean, human smells. The smells of the creams she used to wash and moisturise her face. The smell of her shampoo. A delicate trace of ammonia barely competing with the heavy scent of antiseptic. She was physically closer to me than she had ever been. I looked at her neck. She had two little dark moles on it, close together, charting unknown binary stars. I thought of Andrew Martin kissing her. This was what humans did. They kissed. Like so many human things, it made no sense. Or maybe, if you tried it, the logic would unfold.

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He just yelled. It was very primal.’

‘I don’t know, between you and him, it never ends.’

‘What never ends?’

‘The worry.’

She placed the blood-stained cotton wool in the small bin beside the sink.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

We went back to bed. She held my hand in the dark. I gently pulled it away.

‘We’ve lost him,’ she said. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about Gulliver.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we just have to accept him as he is, even if he’s different to what we’ve known.’

‘I just don’t understand him. You know, he’s our son. And we’ve known him for sixteen years. And yet, I feel like I don’t know him at all.’

‘Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.’