Matt Haig - The Humans

‘This is perfect,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Liquid nitrogen,’ I replied thoughtlessly.

‘A whisky and soda?’

‘Yes. One of them.’

And we drank and chatted like old friends, which I think we were. Though her conversational approach seemed quite different from Isobel’s.

‘Your penis is everywhere,’ she said at one point.

I looked around. ‘Is it?’

‘Two hundred and twenty thousand hits on YouTube.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘They’ve blurred it out, though. Quite a wise move, I would say, from first-hand experience.’ She laughed even more at this. It was a laugh that did nothing to relieve the pain pressing into and out of my face.

I changed the mood. I asked her what it meant, for her, to be a human. I wanted to ask the whole world this question, but, right now, she would do. And so she told me.

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build.

I thanked Maggie for this interpretation. And then I explained to her that I thought the meaning was coming to me, the more I forgot it. After that, I spoke a lot about Isobel. This seemed to irritate her, and she switched the subject.

‘After this,’ she said, circling the top of her glass with her finger, ‘are we going somewhere else?’

I recognised the tone of this ‘somewhere else’. It had the exact same frequency as Isobel’s use of the word ‘upstairs’ the Saturday before.

‘Are we going to have sex?’

She laughed some more. Laughter, I realised, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie. Humans existed inside their own delusions and laughing was a way out – the only possible bridge they had between each other. That, and love. But there was no love between me and Maggie, I want you to know that.

Anyway, it turned out we were going to have sex. So we left and walked along a few streets until we reached Willow Road and her flat. Her flat, by the way, was the messiest thing I had ever seen that hadn’t been a direct result of nuclear fission. A supercluster of books, clothes, empty wine bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes, old toast and unopened envelopes.

I discovered that her full name was Margaret Lowell. I wasn’t an expert on Earth names, but I still knew this was wildly inappropriate. She should have been called Lana Bellcurve or Ashley Brainsex or something. Anyway, apparently I never called her Margaret. (‘No one except my broadband provider calls me that.’) She was Maggie.

And Maggie, it transpired, was an unconventional human. For instance, when asked about her religion, she answered ‘Pythagorean’. She was ‘well travelled’, the most ridiculous expression if you belonged to a species that had only left its own planet to visit its moon (and Maggie, it transpired, hadn’t even been there). In this case, it merely meant she had taught English in Spain, Tanzania and various parts of South America for four years before returning to study maths. She also seemed to have a very limited sense of body shame, by human standards, and had worked as a lap dancer to pay for her undergraduate studies.

She wanted to have sex on the floor, which was an intensely uncomfortable way of having it. As we unclothed each other we kissed, but this wasn’t the kind of kissing that brought you closer, the kind that Isobel was good at. This was self-referential kissing, kissing about kissing, dramatic and fast and pseudo-intense. It also hurt. My face was still tender and Maggie’s meta-kisses didn’t really seem to accommodate the possibility of pain. And then we were naked, or rather the parts of us which needed to be naked were naked, and it started to feel more like a strange kind of fighting than anything else. I looked at her face, and her neck, and her breasts, and was reminded of the fundamental strangeness of the human body. With Isobel, I had never felt like I was sleeping with an alien, but with Maggie the level of exoticism bordered on terror. There was physiological pleasure, quite a good deal of it at times, but it was a very localised, anatomical kind of pleasure. I smelt her skin, and I liked the smell of it, a mixture of coconut-scented lotion and bacteria, but my mind felt terrible, for a reason that involved more than my head pain.

Almost immediately after we had started having sex I had a queasy sensation in my stomach, as though the altitude had drastically changed. I stopped. I got away from her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me.

‘I don’t know. But something is. This feels wrong. I realise I don’t want to have an orgasm right now.’

‘Bit late for a crisis of conscience.’

I really didn’t know what the matter was. After all, it was just sex.

I got dressed and discovered there were four missed calls on my mobile phone.

‘Goodbye, Maggie.’

She laughed some more. ‘Give my love to your wife.’

I had no idea what was so funny, but I decided to be polite and laughed too as I stepped outside into cool evening air, which was tainted with maybe a little more carbon dioxide than I had noticed before.

‘You’re home late,’ Isobel said. ‘I’ve been worried. I thought that man might have come after you.’

‘What man?’

‘That brute who smashed your face in.’

She was in the living room, at home, its walls lined with books about history and mathematics. Mainly mathematics. She was placing pens in a pot. She was staring at me with harsh eyes. Then she softened a bit. ‘How was your day?’

‘Oh,’ I said, putting down my bag, ‘it was okay. I did some teaching. I met some students. I had sex with that person. My student. The one called Maggie.’

It’s funny, I had a sensation these words were taking me somewhere, into a dangerous valley, but still I said them. Isobel, meanwhile, took a little time to process this information, even by human standards. The queasy feeling in my stomach hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified.

‘That’s not very funny.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be funny.’

She studied me for a long while. Then dropped a fountain pen on the floor. The lid came off. Ink sprayed. ‘What are you talking about?’

I told her again. The bit she seemed most interested in was the last part, about me having sex with Maggie. Indeed, she was so interested that she started to hyperventilate and throw the pen pot in the direction of my head. And then she began to cry.

‘Why are you crying?’ I said, but I was beginning to understand. I moved closer to her. It was then she launched an attack on me, her hands moving as fast as laws of anatomical motion allow. Her fingernails scratched my face, adding fresh wounds. Then she just stood there, looking at me, as if she had wounds too. Invisible ones.

‘I’m sorry, Isobel, you have to understand, I didn’t realise I was doing anything wrong. This is all new. You don’t know how alien all this is to me. I know it is morally wrong to love another woman, but I don’t love her. It was just pleasure. The way a peanut butter sandwich is pleasure. You don’t realise the complexity and hypocrisy of this system…’