Matt Haig - The Humans

‘As rain?’ I asked, the worry adding a quiver to my voice.

I tried to read her facial expressions, but it was difficult. She wasn’t terrified any more, but what was she? Was she sad? Confused? Angry? Disappointed? I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. She left me, after a hundred more words of the conversation. Words, words, words. There was a brief kiss on my cheek, and a hug, and I tried not to flinch or tighten up, hard as that was for me. And then she turned away and wiped something from her eye, which had leaked. I felt like I was expected to do something, say something, feel something, but I didn’t know what. ‘I saw your book,’ I said. ‘In the shop. Next to mine.’

‘Some of you still remains then,’ she said. The tone was soft, but slightly scornful, or I think it was. ‘Andrew, just be careful. Do everything they say and it will be all right. Everything will be all right.’

And then she was gone.

I was told to go to the dining hall to eat. This was a terrible experience. For one thing, it was the first time I had been confronted with so many of their species in an enclosed area. Second, the smell. Of boiled carrot. Of pea. Of dead cow.

A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multipurpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.

I didn’t care about cows. If it had been my assignment to kill a cow then I would have happily done so. But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them. So I ate the vegetables. Or rather, I ate a single slice of boiled carrot. Nothing, I realised, could make you feel quite so homesick as eating disgusting, unfamiliar food. One slice was enough. More than enough. It was, in fact, far too much and it took me all my strength and concentration to battle that gag reflex and not throw up.

I sat on my own, at a table in the corner, beside a tall pot plant. The plant had broad, shining, rich green flat vascular organs known as leaves which evidently served a photosynthetic function. It looked exotic to me, but not appallingly so. Indeed, the plant looked rather pretty. For the first time I was looking at something here and not being troubled. But then I looked away from the plant, towards the noise, and all the humans classified as crazy. The ones for whom the ways of this world were beyond them. If I was ever going to relate to anyone on this planet, they were surely going to be in this room. And just as I was thinking this one of them came up to me. A girl with short pink hair, and a circular piece of silver through her nose (as if that region of the face needed more attention given to it), thin orange-pink scars on her arms, and a quiet, low voice that seemed to imply that every thought in her brain was a deadly secret. She was wearing a T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words ‘Everything was beautiful (and nothing hurt)’. Her name was Zoë. She told me that straight away.

And then she said, ‘New?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Day?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is. We do appear to be angled towards the sun.’

She laughed, and her laughter was the opposite of her voice. It was a kind of laugh that made me wish there was no air for those manic waves to travel on and reach my ears.

Once she had calmed down she explained herself. ‘No, I mean, are you here permanently or do you just come in for the day? Like me? A “voluntary commitment” job.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I will be leaving soon. I am not mad, you see. I have just been a little confused about things. I have a lot to get on with. Things to do. Things to finish off.’

‘I recognise you from somewhere,’ said Zoë.

‘Do you? From where?’

I scanned the room. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. There were seventy-six patients and eighteen members of staff. I needed privacy. I needed, really, to get out of there.

‘Have you been on the telly?’

‘I don’t know.’

She laughed. ‘We might be Facebook friends.’

‘Yeah.’

She scratched her horrible face. I wondered what was underneath. It couldn’t have been any worse. And then her eyes widened with a realisation. ‘No. I know. I’ve seen you at uni. You’re Professor Martin, aren’t you? You’re something of a legend. I’m at Fitzwilliam. I’ve seen you around the place. Better food in Hall than here, isn’t it?’

‘Are you one of my students?’

She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’

This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.’

‘Well, I didn’t see it like that. I mean, Pythagoras sounded like a bit of a dude, but, no, I’m not really über-big on numbers. I’m philosophy. That’s probably why I’m in here. OD’d on Schopenhauer.’

‘Schopenhauer?’

‘He wrote a book called The World as Will and Representation . I’m meant to be doing an essay on it. Basically it says that the world is what we recognise in our own will. Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation. Because those same cravings shape what we see we end up feeding from ourselves, until we go mad. And end up in here.’

‘Do you like it in here?’

She laughed again, but I noticed her kind of laughing somehow made her look sadder. ‘No. This place is a whirlpool. It sucks you deeper. You want out of this place, man. Everyone in here is off the charts , I tell you.’ She pointed at various people in the room, and told me what was wrong with them. She started with an over-sized, red-faced female at the nearest table to us. ‘That’s Fat Anna. She steals everything. Look at her with the fork. Straight up her sleeve… Oh, and that’s Scott. He thinks he’s the third in line to the throne… And Sarah, who is totally normal for most of the day and then at a quarter past four starts screaming for no reason. Got to have a screamer… and that’s Crying Chris… and there’s Bridget the Fidget who’s always moving around at the speed of thought…’

‘The speed of thought,’ I said. ‘That slow?’

‘…and… Lying Lisa… and Rocking Rajesh. Oh, oh yeah, and you see that guy over there, with the sideburns? The tall one, mumbling to his tray?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s gone the full K-Pax.’

‘What?’

‘He’s so cracked he thinks he’s from another planet.’

‘ No ,’ I said. ‘ Really? ’

‘Yeah. Trust me. In this canteen we’re just one mute Native American away from a full cuckoo’s nest.’

I had no idea what she was talking about.

She looked at my plate. ‘Are you not eating that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could.’ And then, thinking I might get some information out of her, I asked, ‘If I had done something, achieved something remarkable, do you think I would have told a lot of people? I mean, we humans are proud aren’t we? We like to show off about things.’

‘Yes, I suppose.’

I nodded. Felt panic rising as I wondered how many people knew about Professor Andrew Martin’s discovery. Then I decided to broaden my enquiry. To act like a human I would after all need to understand them, so I asked her the biggest question I could think of. ‘What do you think the meaning of life is, then? Did you discover it?’