In other words: something not human.
I tried to convince myself that this was ridiculous. I was almost able to convince myself that my own mind was ridiculous, and that I had never actually been anything other than human. That I really was Professor Andrew Martin and that every other thing had been a kind of dream.
Yes, I could almost do that.
Almost.
How to see for ever
That it will never come again,
Is what makes life so sweet.
– Emily Dickinson
Isobel was at her laptop, in the living room. An American friend of hers wrote a blog about ancient history and Isobel was contributing a comment about an article on Mesopotamia. I watched her, mesmerised.
The Earth’s moon was a dead place, with no atmosphere.
It had no way of healing its scars. Not like Earth, or its inhabitants. I was amazed, the way time mended things so quickly on this planet.
I looked at Isobel and I saw a miracle. It was ridiculous, I know. But a human, in its own small way, was a kind of miraculous achievement, in mathematical terms.
For a start, it wasn’t very likely that Isobel’s mother and father would have met. And even if they had met the chances of their having a baby would have been pretty slim, given the numerous agonies surrounding the human dating process.
Her mother would have had about a hundred thousand eggs ovulating inside her, and her father would have had five trillion sperm during that same length of time. But even then, even that one in five hundred million million million chance of existing was a terrible understatement, and nowhere near did the coincidence of a human life justice.
You see, when you looked at a human’s face, you had to comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin had a total of 150,000 generations before her, and that only includes the humans. That was 150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely children. That was a one in quadrillion chance multiplied by another quadrillion for every generation.
Or around twenty thousand times more than the number of the atoms in the universe. But even that was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million Earth years, certainly a very short time compared to the three and a half billion years since life first appeared on this planet.
Therefore, mathematically, rounding things up, there was no chance at all that Isobel Martin could have existed. A zero in tento-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans. So, if they believed in themselves – the logic must go – why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?
I don’t know how long I looked at her like this.
‘What’s going through your mind?’ she asked me, closing the laptop. (This is an important detail. Remember: she closed the laptop.)
‘Oh, just things.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well, I’m thinking about how life is so miraculous none of it really deserves the title “reality”.’
‘Andrew, I’m a little taken aback about how your whole worldview has become so romantic.’
It was ridiculous that I had ever failed to see it.
She was beautiful. A forty-one-year-old, poised delicately between the young woman she had been and the older one she would become. This intelligent, wound-dabbing historian. This person who would buy someone else’s shopping with no other motive than simply to help.
I knew other things now. I knew she’d been a screaming baby, a child learning to walk, a girl at school eager to learn, a teenager listening to Talking Heads in her bedroom while reading books by A.J.P. Taylor.
I knew she’d been a university student studying the past and trying to interpret its patterns.
She’d been, simultaneously, a young woman in love, full of a thousand hopes, trying to read the future as well as the past.
She had then taught British and European history, the big pattern she had discovered being the one that revealed that the civilisations that advanced with the Enlightenment did so through violence and territorial conquest more than through scientific progress, political modernisation and philosophical understanding.
She had then tried to uncover the woman’s place in this history, and it had been difficult because history had always been written by the victors of wars, and the victors of the gender wars had always been male, and so women had been placed in the margins and in the footnotes, if they had been lucky.
And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her death-bed she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books. But as soon as she made that move, she had felt her husband begin to take her for granted.
She had stuff to give, but it was ungiven; it was locked away.
And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love re-emerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it you could see forever.
Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity.
Yes, that was what love was for. (I may not have understood marriage, but I understood love, I was sure of it.)
Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and selfdeceptions. Even though, the big joke was, indeed the very biggest joke in the universe was, that Isobel Martin believed I had always been a human called Andrew Martin who had been born one hundred miles away in Sheffield, and not in fact 8653178431 light years away.
‘Isobel, I think I should tell you something. It is something very important.’
She looked worried. ‘What? What is it?’
There was an imperfection in her lower lip. The left side of it slightly fuller than the right. It was a fascinating detail on a face that only had fascinating details. How could I have ever found her hideous? How? How?
I couldn’t do it. Say it. I should have, but I didn’t.
‘I think we should buy a new sofa,’ I said.
‘That’s the important thing you want to tell me?’
‘Yes. I don’t like it. I don’t like purple.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. It’s too close to violet. All those short wavelength colours mess with my brain.’
‘You are funny. “Short wavelength colours.” ’
‘Well, that’s what they are.’
‘But purple is the colour of emperors. And you’ve always acted like an emperor so . . .’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘Byzantine empresses gave birth in the Purple Chamber. Their babies were given the honorary title “Porphyrogenitos” which meant “Born to the Purple” to separate them from riff-raff generals who won the throne through going to war. But then, in Japan, purple is the colour of death.’
I was mesmerised by her voice when she spoke about historical things. It had a delicacy to it, each sentence a long thin arm carrying the past as if it were porcelain. Something that could be brought out and presented in front of you but which could break and become a million pieces at any moment. I realised even her being a historian was part of her caring nature.
‘Well, I just think we could do with some new furniture,’ I said.
‘Do you now?’ she asked, staring deep into my eyes in a mockserious way.
One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physic
ist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them: ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.’
What if looking at the pretty girl felt like putting your hand on a hot stove? What was that? Quantum mechanics?
After a period of time, she leant towards me and kissed me. I had kissed her before. But now the lightening effect on my stomach was very like fear. Indeed, it was every symptom of fear, but a pleasurable fear. An enjoyable danger.
She smiled, and told me a story she had once read not in a history book but in a terrible magazine at the doctor’s. A husband and a wife who had fallen out of love had their own separate affairs on the Internet. It was only when they came to meet their illicit lovers that they realised they had actually been having an affair with each other. But far from tearing the marriage apart it restored it, and they lived more happily than before.
‘I have something to tell you,’ I said, after this story.
‘What?’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘Yes, but it is impossible to love you.’
‘Thank you. Precisely what a girl likes to hear.’
‘No. I mean, because of where I come from. No one there can love.’
‘What? Sheffield? It’s not that bad.’
‘No. Listen, this is new to me. I’m scared.’
She held my head in her hands, as if it were another delicate thing she wanted to preserve. She was a human. She knew one day her husband would die and yet she still dared to love him. That was an amazing thing.
We kissed some more.
Kissing was very much like eating. But instead of reducing the appetite the food consumed actually increased it. The food wasn’t matter, it had no mass, and yet it seemed to convert into a very delicious energy inside me.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said.
She said the word suggestively, as though upstairs wasn’t just a place but an alternate reality, made from a different texture of space-time. A pleasure land we would enter via a worm hole on the sixth stair. And, of course, she was absolutely right.
Afterwards, we lay there for a few minutes, and then she decided we needed some music.
‘Anything,’ I said, ‘but The Planets.’
‘That’s the only piece of music you like.’
‘Not anymore.’
So she put on something called ‘Love Theme’ by Ennio Morricone. It was sad, but beautiful.
‘Can you remember when we saw Cinema Paradiso?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘You hated it. You said it was so sentimental you wanted to throw up. You said it cheapens emotion to have it exaggerated and fetishised like that. Not that you’ve ever wanted to watch emotional things. I think, if I dare say it, you have always been scared of emotion, and so saying that you don’t like sentimentality is a way of saying you don’t like feeling emotion.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. That me is dead.’ She smiled.
She didn’t seem worried at all.
But of course she should have been. We all should have been. And just how worried we should have been would become clear to me only a few hours later.
The intruder
She woke me in the middle of the night.
‘I think I heard someone,’ she said. Her voice indicated a tightness of the vocal folds within her larynx. It was fear disguised as calm.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I swear to God, Andrew. I think there’s someone in the house.’
‘You might have heard Gulliver.’
‘No. Gulliver hasn’t come downstairs. I’ve been awake.’
I waited in the near-darkness, and then I heard something. Footsteps. It very much sounded like someone was walking around our living room. The clock’s digital display beamed 04:22.
I pulled back the duvet and got out of bed.
I looked at Isobel. ‘Just stay there. Whatever happens, stay right there.’
‘Be careful,’ Isobel said. She switched on her bedside light and looked for the phone that was usually in its cradle on the table. But it wasn’t there. ‘That’s weird.’
I left the room and waited a moment on the landing. There was silence now. The silence that can only exist in houses at twenty past four in the morning. It struck me then just how primitive life was here, with houses that could not do anything to protect themselves.
In short, I was terrified.
Slowly and quietly I tiptoed downstairs. A normal person would probably have switched the hallway light on, but I didn’t. This wasn’t for my benefit, but for Isobel’s. If she came down and saw whoever it was, and they saw her, well, that could have been a very dangerous situation. Also, it would have been unwise to alert the intruder of my presence downstairs – if they hadn’t already been alerted. And so it was that I crept into the kitchen and saw Newton sleeping soundly (maybe even suspiciously so) in his basket. As far as I could tell, no one else had been in here, or the utility room, and so I left to check the sitting room. No one was there, or no one that I could see anyway. There were just books, the sofa, an empty fruit bowl, a desk and a radio. So then I went along the hallway to the living room. This time, before I opened the door I sensed strongly that someone was there. But without the gifts I had no idea if my senses were fooling me.
I opened the door. As I did so, I felt a deep fear lightening my whole body. Prior to taking human form, I had never experienced such a feeling. What had we Vonnadorians ever had to be scared of, in a world without death or loss or uncontrollable pain?
Again, I saw only furniture. The sofa, the chairs, the switched-off television, the coffee table. No one was there, not at that moment, but we had definitely been visited. I knew this because Isobel’s laptop was on the coffee table. This, alone, wasn’t worrying, as she had left it there last night. What worried me, though, was that it was open. She had closed it. But not only that. The light emission. Even though the computer was facing away from me I could see that the screen was glowing, which meant someone had been using it within the last two minutes.
I quickly went around the coffee table to see what was on the screen, but nothing had been deleted. I closed the laptop and went upstairs.
‘What was it?’ Isobel asked, as I slid back into bed.
‘Oh, it was nothing. We must have been hearing things.’
And Isobel fell asleep as I stared up at the ceiling, wishing I had a god who could hear my prayers.
Perfect time
The next morning Gulliver brought his guitar downstairs and played a bit for us. He had learnt an old piece of music by a band known as Nirvana called ‘All Apologies’. With intense concentration on his face, he kept perfect time. He was very good, and we applauded him afterwards.
For a moment, I forgot every worry.
A king of infinite space
It turned out that Hamlet was quite a depressing thing to watch when you had just given up immortality and were worried that someone was watching you.
The best bit came half-way through when he looked up at the sky.
‘Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?’ he asked.
‘By th’ Mass,’ said another man, a curtain-fetishist called Polonius, ‘and ’tis like a camel, indeed.’
‘Methinks it is like a weasel,’ said Hamlet.
‘It is backed like a weasel.’
Then Hamlet squinted and scratched his head. ‘Or like a whale.’
And Polonius, who wasn’t really in tune with Hamlet’s surreal sense of humour: ‘Very like a whale.’
Afterwards, we went out to a restaurant. It was called Tito’s. I had a bread salad called ‘panzanella’. It had anchovies in it. Anchovies were a fish, so I spent the first five minutes carefully taking them out and laying them on the side of the plate, offering them silent words of grief.
‘You seemed to en
joy the play,’ said Isobel.
I thought I would lie. ‘I did. Yes. Did you?’
‘No. It was awful. I think it was fundamentally wrong to have the Prince of Denmark played by a TV gardener.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. It was really bad.’
She laughed. She seemed more relaxed than I had ever seen her. Less worried about me, and Gulliver.
‘There’s a lot of death in it, as well,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you scared of death?’
She looked awkward. ‘Of course, I’m scared to death of death. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Death and guilt. That’s all I have.’ Catholicism, I discovered, was a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin and guilt.
‘Well, I think you do amazingly. Considering that your body is starting a slow process of physical deterioration leading ultimately to . . .’
‘Okay, okay. Thank you. Enough death.’
‘But I thought you liked thinking about death. I thought that’s why we saw Hamlet.’
‘I like my death on a stage. Not over my penne arrabiata.’
So we talked and drank red wine as people came and left the restaurant. She told me of the module she was being cajoled into teaching next year. Early Civilised Life in the Aegean.
‘They keep trying to push me further and further back in time. Think they’re trying to tell me something. Next it will be Early Civilised Diplodocuses.’
She laughed. So I laughed too.
‘You should get that novel published,’ I said, trying a different tack. ‘Wider Than the Sky. It’s good. What I’ve read of it.’
‘I don’t know. That one was a bit private. Very personal. Of its time. I was in a dark place. That was when you were . . . well, you know. We’re over that now. I feel like a different person now. Almost like I’m married to a different person too.’
‘Well, you should write fiction again.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s getting the ideas.’
I didn’t want to tell her that I had quite a lot of ideas I could give her.