Somewhere else
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.
Places beyond logic
‘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 . . .’
She had stopped. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and her first question became her only one. ‘Who is she?’ And then: ‘Who is she?’ And soon after: ‘Who is she?’
I was reluctant to speak. Speaking to a human you cared about, I realised, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all. I could have lied. I could have backtracked. But I realised lying, though essential to keep someone in love with you, actually wasn’t what my love demanded. It demanded truth.
So I said, in the simplest words I could find, ‘I don’t know. But I don’t love her. I love you. I didn’t realise that it was such a big thing. I sort of knew, as it was happening. My stomach told me, in a way it never tells me with peanut butter. And then I stopped.’ The only time I’d come across the concept of infidelity was in Cosmopolitan magazine, and they really hadn’t done enough to explain it properly. They’d sort of said it depends on the context and, you see, it was such an alien concept for me to understand. It was like trying to get a human to understand transcellular healing. ‘I’m sorry.’
She wasn’t listening. She had her own things to say. ‘I don’t even know you. I have no idea of who you are. No idea. If you’ve done this, you really are an alien to me . . .’
‘Am I? Listen, Isobel, you’re right. I am. I am not from here. I have never loved before. All this is new. I’m an amateur at this. Listen, I used to be immortal, I could not die, I could not feel pain, but I gave that up . . .’
She wasn’t even listening. She was a galaxy away.
‘All I know, all I know beyond any doubt, is that I want a divorce. I do. That is what I want. You have destroyed us. You have destroyed Gulliver. Again.’
Newton appeared at this point, wagging his tail to try and calm the mood.
Isobel ignored Newton and started to walk away from me. I should have let her go, but bizarrely I couldn’t. I held on to her wrist.
‘Stay,’
I said.
And then it happened. Her arm swung at me with ferocious force, her clenched hand an asteroid speeding towards the planet of my face. Not a slap or a scratch this time but a smack. Was this where love ended? With an injury on top of an injury on top of an injury?
‘I’m leaving the house now. And when I come back, I want you gone. Do you understand? Gone. I want you out of here, and out of our lives. It’s over. Everything. It’s all over. I thought you’d changed. I honestly thought you’d become someone else. And I let you in again! What a fucking idiot!’
I kept my hand over my face. It still hurt. I heard her footsteps head away from me. The door opened. The door closed. I was alone again with Newton.
‘I’ve really done it now,’ I said.
He seemed to agree, but I couldn’t understand him any more. I might as well have been any human trying to understand any dog. But he seemed something other than sad, as he barked in the direction of the living room and the road beyond. It seemed less like condolence and more like warning. I went to look out of the living-room window. There was nothing to be seen. So I stroked Newton one more time, offered a pointless apology, and left the house.
PART III
The wounded deer leaps the highest
It belongs to the perfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
An encounter with Winston Churchill
I walked to the nearest shop, a brightly lit and unsympathetic place called Tesco Metro. I bought myself a bottle of Australian wine.
I walked along a cycle path and drank it, singing ‘God Only Knows’. It was quiet. I sat down by a tree and finished the bottle.
I went and bought another. I sat down on a park bench, next to a man with a large beard. It was the man I had seen before. On my first day. The one who had called me Jesus. He was wearing the same long dirty raincoat and he had the same scent. This time I found it fascinating. I sat there for a while just working out all the different aromas – alcohol, sweat, tobacco, urine, infection. It was a uniquely human smell, and rather wonderful in its own sad way.
‘I don’t know why more people don’t do this,’ I said, striking up a conversation.
‘Do what?’
‘You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.’
‘Are you taking the piss, fella?’
‘No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn’t be doing it.’
Of course, this was a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were always doing things they didn’t like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three per cent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they’d be back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.
A blue plastic bag floated by on the wind. The bearded man rolled a cigarette. He had shaky fingers. Nerve damage.
‘Ain’t no choice in love and life,’ he said.
‘No. That’s true. Even when you think there are choices there aren’t really. But I thought humans still subscribed to the illusion of free will?’
‘Not me, chief.’ And then he started singing, in a mumbled baritone of very low frequency. ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone . . .’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I’m Andrew,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’
‘What’s bothering you? You got beat up? Your face looks like shit.’
‘Yeah, in lots of ways. I had someone love me. And it was the most precious thing, that love. It gave me a family. It made me feel like I belonged. And I broke it.’
He lit the cigarette, which flopped out of his face like a numb antennae. ‘Ten years me and my wife were married,’ he said. ‘Then I lost my job and she left me the same week. That’s when I turned to drink and my leg started to turn on me.’
He lifted up his trousers. His left leg was swollen and purple. And violet. I could see he expected me to be disgusted. ‘Deep vein thrombosis. Effing agony, it is. Effing fucking agony. And it’s gonna bloody kill me one of these days.’
He passed me the cigarette. I inhaled. I knew I didn’t like it, but I still inhaled.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘Winston bloody Churchill.’
‘Oh, like the wartime prime minister.’ I watched him close his eyes and suck on his cigarette. ‘Why do people smoke?’
‘No idea. Ask me something else.’
‘Okay, then. How do you cope with loving someone who hates you? Someone who doesn’t want to see you again.’
‘God knows.’
He winced. He was in agony. I had noticed his pain on the first day, but now I wanted to do something about it. I had drunk enough to believe I could, or at least to forget I couldn’t.
He was about to roll his trousers down, but seeing the pain he was in, I told him to wait a moment. I placed my hand on the leg.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s a very simple procedure of bio-set transference, involving reverse-apoptosis, working at the molecular level to restore and recreate dead and diseased cells. To you it will look like magic, but it isn’t.’
My hand stayed there and nothing happened. And nothing kept on happening. It looked very far from magic.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m an alien. I’m considered a useless failure in two galaxies.’
‘Well, could you please take your damn hand off my leg?’
I took my hand away. ‘Sorry. Really. I thought I still had the ability to heal you.’
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve seen you before.’
‘Yes. I know. I passed you, on my first day in Cambridge. You may remember. I was naked.’
He leant back, squinted, angled his head. ‘Nah. Nah. Wasn’t that. I saw you today.’
‘I don’t think you did. I’m pretty sure I would have recognised you.’
‘Nah. Definitely today. I’m good with faces, see.’
‘Was I with someone? A young woman? Red hair?’ He considered. ‘Nah. It was just you.’
‘Where was I?’
‘Oh, you were on, let me think, you’d have been on Newmarket Road.’
‘Newmarket Road?’ I knew the name of the street, because it was where Ari lived, but I hadn’t ever been on the street myself. Not today. Not ever. Though of course, it was very likely that Andrew Martin – the original Andrew Martin – had been down there many times. Yes, that must have been it. He was getting mixed up. ‘I think you might be confused.’
He shook his head. ‘It was you all right. This morning. Maybe midday. No word of a lie.’
And with that the man stood up and hobbled slowly away from me, leaving a trail of smoke and spilt alcohol.
A cloud passed across the sun. I looked up to the sky. I had a thought as dark as the shade. I stood up. I took the phone out of my pocket and called Ari. Eventually someone picked up. It was a woman. She was breathing heavily, sniffing up snot, struggling to turn noise into coherent words.
‘Hello, this is Andrew. I wondered if Ari was there.’
And then the words came, in morbid succession: ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.’
The replacement
I ran.
I left the wine and I ran as fast as I could, across the park, along streets, over main roads, hardly thinking about traffic. It hurt, this running. It hurt my knees, my hips, my heart and my lungs. All those components, reminding me they would one day fail. It also, somehow, aggravated the various facial aches and pains I was suffering. But, mostly, it was my mind that was in turmoil.
This was my fault. This had nothing to do with the Riemann hypothesis and everything to do with the fact that I had told Ari the truth about where I was from. He hadn’t believed
me, but that hadn’t been the point. I had been able to tell him, without getting an agonising violet-tainted warning. They had disconnected me, but they must still have been watching, and listening, which meant they could probably hear me now.
‘Don’t do it. Don’t hurt Isobel or Gulliver. They don’t know anything.’
I reached the house that, up until this morning, I had been living in with the people I had grown to love. I crunched my way up the gravel driveway. The car wasn’t there. I looked through the living-room window, but there was no sign of anyone. I had no key with me so I rang the doorbell.
I stood and waited, wondering what I could do. After a while, the door opened, but I still couldn’t see anyone. Whoever had opened the door clearly didn’t want to be seen.
I stepped into the house. I walked past the kitchen. Newton was asleep in his basket. I went over to him, shook him gently. ‘Newton! Newton!’ But he stayed asleep, breathing deeply, mysteriously unwakeable.
‘I’m in here,’ said a voice, coming from the living room.
So I followed it, that familiar voice, until I was there, looking at a man sitting on the purple sofa with one leg crossed over the other. He was instantly familiar to me – indeed, he could not have been more so – and yet, at the same time, the sight of him was terrifying.
For it was myself I was looking at.
His clothes were different (jeans instead of cords, a T-shirt instead of shirt, trainers in place of shoes) but it was definitely the form of Andrew Martin. The mid-brown hair, naturally parted. The tired eyes, and the same face except for the absence of bruises.
‘Snap!’ he said, smiling. ‘That is what they say here, isn’t it? You know, when they are playing card games. Snap! We are identical twins.’
‘Who are you?’
He frowned, as if I’d asked such a basic question it shouldn’t have been asked. ‘I’m your replacement.’