Matt Haig - The Humans

I nodded.

Of course, something had been taken out, but I also knew it was nothing any human, Earth-based doctor would ever be able to understand.

It had been a difficult test, but I had passed it. I was as good as human. And they gave me some paracetamol and codeine for the pain which still pulsated inside my head and on my face.

Eventually, I went home.

The next day, Ari came to visit me. I was in bed. Isobel was at work and Gulliver was, quite genuinely it seemed, at school.

‘Man, you look fucking terrible.’

I smiled, lifted the bag of frozen peas from the side of my head.

‘Which is a coincidence, because I feel fucking terrible too.’

‘You should’ve gone to the police.’

‘Well, yes, I was thinking about it. Isobel thinks I should. But I have a little bit of a phobia about police. You know, ever since I was arrested for not wearing clothes.’

‘Yeah, well, you can’t have psychos roaming around pulverising anyone they feel like.’

‘No, I know. I know.’

‘Listen, mate, I just want to say that was big of you. That was old-school gentleman, defending your wife like that and, you know, kudos for it. It surprised me. I’m not putting you down or anything, but I didn’t know you were that kind of shining-armour guy.’

‘Well, I’ve changed. I have a lot of activity in my medial temporal lobe. I think it’s probably to do with that.’

Ari looked doubtful. ‘Well, whatever it is, you’re becoming a man of honour. And that’s rare for mathematicians. It’s always been us physicists who’ve had the big cojones , traditionally. Just don’t screw it up with Isobel. You know what I mean?’

I looked at Ari for a long time. He was a good man, I could see that. I could trust him. ‘Listen, Ari, you know that thing I was going to tell you. At the café at the college?’

‘When you had that migraine?’

‘Yes,’ I hesitated. I was disconnected, so I knew I could tell him. Or thought I could. ‘I am from another planet, in another solar system, in another galaxy.’

Ari laughed. It was a loud, deep blast of laughter without a single note of doubt. ‘Okay, ET, so you’ll be wanting to phone home now. If we’ve got a connection that reaches the Andromeda galaxy.’

‘It’s not the Andromeda galaxy. It’s further away. Many, many light years.’

This sentence was hardly heard as Ari was laughing so much. He stared at me with fake blankness. ‘So how did you get here? Space ship? Wormhole?’

‘No. I didn’t travel in any conventional way you would understand. It was anti-matter technology. Home is forever away, but it is also only a second away. Though now, I can never go back.’

It was no good. Ari, a man who believed in the possibility of alien life, still could not accept the idea when it was standing – or lying – right in front of him.

‘You see, I had special talents, as a result of technology. The gifts.’

‘Go on then,’ Ari said, controlling his laughter, ‘show me.’

‘I can’t. I have no powers now. I am exactly like a human.’

Ari found this bit especially funny. He was annoying me now. He was still a good man, but good men could be annoying, I realised.

‘Exactly like a human! Well, man, you’re fucked then, aren’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I think I might be.’

Ari smiled, looked concerned. ‘Listen, make sure you keep taking all the tablets. Not just the painkillers. All of them, yeah?’

I nodded. He thought I was mad. Maybe it would be easier if I could take on this view myself, the delusion that it was a delusion. If one day I could wake up and believe it was all a dream. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve researched you. I know you understand quantum physics, and I know you’ve written about simulation theory. You say there’s a thirty per cent chance that none of this is real. You told me in the café you believed in aliens. So I know you can believe this.’

Ari shook his head, but at least he wasn’t laughing now. ‘No. You’re wrong. I can’t.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said, realising that if Ari wouldn’t believe me Isobel never would. But Gulliver. There was always Gulliver. One day I would tell him the truth. But what then? Could he accept me as a father, knowing I had lied?

I was trapped. I had to lie, and to stay lying.

‘But, Ari,’ I said, ‘if I ever need a favour, if I ever need Gulliver and Isobel to stay at your house – would that be okay?’

He smiled. ‘Sure, mate, sure.’

The next day, still swollen with bruises, I was back at the college.

There was something about being in the house, even with Newton for company, that troubled me. It never had before, but now it made me feel incredibly lonely. So I went to work, and I realised why work was so important on Earth. It stopped you feeling lonely. But loneliness was there for me, waiting in my office, which was where I’d returned after my lecture on distribution models. But my head hurt and I must admit I did quite welcome the peace.

After a while there was a knock on the door. I ignored it. Loneliness minus a headache was my preferred option. But then it happened again. And it happened in such a way that I knew it was going to keep on happening, and so I stood up and went to the door. And, after a while, I opened it.

A young woman was there.

It was Maggie.

The wild flower in bloom. The one with the curly red hair and the full lips. She was twirling her hair around her finger again. She was breathing deeply, and seemed to be inhaling a different kind of air – one which contained a mysterious aphrodisiac, promising euphoria. And she was smiling.

‘So,’ she said.

I waited a minute for the rest of the sentence but it didn’t happen. ‘So’ was beginning, middle and end. It meant something, but I didn’t know what.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

She smiled again. Bit her lip. ‘To discuss the compatibility of bell curves and platykurtic distribution models.’

‘Right.’

‘Platykurtic,’ she added, running a finger down my shirt towards my trousers. ‘From the Greek. Platus meaning flat, kurtos meaning… bulging .’

‘Oh.’

Her finger danced away from me. ‘So, Jake LaMotta, let’s go.’

‘My name is not Jake LaMotta.’

‘I know. I was referencing your face.’

‘Oh.’

‘So, are we going?’

‘Where?’

‘Hat and Feathers.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. Or indeed, who she actually was to me, or to the man who had been Professor Andrew Martin.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

That was it, right there. My first mistake of the day. But by no means the last.

I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The ‘pub’ was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England. I rather liked the place.

‘Let’s find a quiet corner,’ she said to me, this young Maggie.

There were lots of corners, as there always seemed to be in human-made environments. Earth dwellers still seemed to be a long way off from understanding the link between straight lines and acute forms of psychosis, which might explain why pubs seemed to be full of aggressive people. There were straight lines running into each other all over the place . Every table, every chair, at the bar, at the ‘fruit machine’. (I enquired about these machines. Apparently they were aimed at men whose fascination with flashing squares of light was coupled with a poor grasp of probability theory.) With so many corners to choose from, it was a surprise to see us sit near a straight, continuous piece of wall, at an oval table and on circular stools.