Matt Haig - The Humans

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.

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.

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.