Matt Haig - The Humans

She looked off into the distance, as though twenty years ago were a physical thing that could be seen sitting at a table in the corner of the room. And as I stared at those eyes, which were loitering somewhere in the infinity between past and present, happy and sad, I deeply wanted to have been that person she was talking about. The one who had braved the rain and got soaked to the skin two decades ago. But I wasn’t that person. And I would never be him.

I felt like Hamlet. I had absolutely no idea what to do.

‘He must have loved you,’ I said.

She stopped daydreaming. Was suddenly alert. ‘What?’

‘I,’ I said, staring down at my slow-melting limoncello ice-cream. ‘And I still love you. As much as I did then. I was just, you know, seeing us, the past, in the third person. Distance of time…’

She held my hand across the table. Squeezed it. For a second I could dream I was Professor Andrew Martin, just as easily as a TV gardener could dream he was Hamlet.

‘Can you remember when we used to go punting on the Cam?’ she asked. ‘That time you fell in the water… God, we were drunk. Can you remember? While we were still here, before you had that Princeton offer and we went to America. We really had fun, didn’t we?’

I nodded, but I felt uncomfortable. Also, I didn’t want to leave Gulliver on his own any longer. I asked for the bill.

‘Listen,’ I said, as we walked out of the restaurant, ‘there’s something I really feel obliged to let you know…’

‘What?’ she asked, looking up at me. Holding on to my arm as she flinched at the wind. ‘What is it?’

I breathed deeply, filling my lungs, seeking courage somewhere in the nitrogen and the oxygen. In my mind I ran through the pieces of information I had to give her.

I am not from here.

In fact, I am not even your husband.

I am from another planet, in another solar system, in a distant galaxy.

‘The thing is… well, the thing is…’

‘Think we should probably cross the road,’ said Isobel, tugging my arm, as two silhouettes – a shouting female and a male – came towards us on the pavement. So we did, crossing at an angle that tried to balance the concealment of fear with rapid avoidance – that angle being, as it was everywhere in the universe, 48 degrees away from the straight line on which we had been travelling.

Midway across that carless road I turned and saw her. Zoë. The woman from the hospital I had met on my first day on this planet. She was still shouting at the large, muscular, shaven-headed man. The man had a tattoo of a tear on his face. I remembered her confession of her love of violent men.

‘I’m telling you, you’ve got it wrong! You’re the one that’s crazy! Not me! But if you want to go around like a primitive life form that’s fine! Do it, you thick piece of shit!’

‘You pretentious, cock-munching slag!’

And then she saw me.

‘It’s you,’ Zoë said.

‘You know her?’ whispered Isobel.

‘I’m afraid… yes. From the hospital.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Please,’ I said to the man, ‘be nice.’

The man was staring at me. His shaven head, along with the rest of his body, came towards me.

‘And what on Earth has it got to do with you?’

‘On Earth,’ I said, ‘it’s nice to see people getting on together.’

‘You fuckin’ what ?’

‘Just turn around,’ Isobel said fearlessly, ‘and leave everyone alone. Seriously, if you do anything else you’ll just regret it in the morning.’

It was then he turned to Isobel and held her face, squeezing her cheeks hard, distorting her beauty. Anger flared inside me as he said to her, ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you meddling bitch.’

Isobel now had fear-swollen eyes.

There were rational things to do here, I was sure, but I had come a long way since rationality.

‘Leave us all alone,’ I said, momentarily forgetting that my words were just that. Words.

He looked at me and he laughed. And with that laughter came the terrifying knowledge that I had no power whatsoever. The gifts had been taken from me. I was, to all intents and purposes, no more equipped for a fight with a giant gym-bodied thug than the average human professor of mathematics, which wasn’t particularly well equipped at all.

He beat me. And it was a proper beating. Not the kind Gulliver had given me, and which I had opted to feel. No. If there had been an option not to feel the cheap metal rings of this man’s fist collide into my face with comet-like force then I would have taken that option. As I would have done only moments later when I was on the ground receiving a kick in the stomach, rapidly unsettling the undigested Italian food residing there, followed by the final piece of brutalist punctuation – the kick to the head. More of a stamp, actually.

After that, there was nothing.

There was darkness, and Hamlet .

This was your husband. Look you now what follows.

I heard Isobel wailing. I tried to speak to her, but words were hard to reach. The counterfeit presentment of two brothers .

I could hear the rise and fall of a siren, and knew it was for me.

Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear.

I woke, in the ambulance, and there was only her. Her face above me, like a sun that eyes could stand, and she stroked my hand as she had once stroked my hand the first time I’d met her.

‘I love you,’ she said.

And I knew the point of love right then.

The point of love was to help you survive.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

So I let go.

I let go of everything in the universe.

Everything, except her hand.

I woke up in the hospital.

It was the first time in my life I had woken in serious physical pain. It was night-time. Isobel had stayed for a while and had fallen asleep in a plastic chair. But she had now been told to go home. So I was alone, with my pain, feeling how truly helpless it was to be a human. And I stayed awake in the dark, urging the Earth to rotate faster and faster so that it could be facing the sun again. For the tragedy of night to become the comedy of day. I wasn’t used to night. Of course, I had experienced it on other planets but Earth had the darkest nights I had ever experienced. Not the longest, but the deepest, the loneliest, the most tragically beautiful. I consoled myself with random prime numbers. 73. 131. 977. 1213. 83719. Each as indivisible as love, except by one and itself. I struggled to think of higher primes. Even my mathematical skills had abandoned me, I realised.

They tested my ribs, my eyes, my ears, and inside my mouth. They tested my brain and my heart. My heart had caused no concern, though they did consider forty-nine beats per minute to be a little on the slow side. As for my brain, they were a little concerned about my medial temporal lobe, as there seemed to be some unusual neuroadaptive activity taking place.

‘It’s as though there has been something taken out of your brain and your cells are trying to over-compensate, but clearly nothing has been taken out or damaged. But it is very strange.’