Often such sights were blurred by tears. I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.
One night I stayed sitting on the beach as dusk fell. A fortysomething woman walked along, bare-footed, with a spaniel and her teenage son. Even though this woman looked quite different from Isobel, and though the son was blond, the sight caused my stomach to flip and my sinuses to loosen.
I realised that six thousand miles could be an infinitely long distance.
‘I am such a human,’ I told my espadrilles.
I meant it. Not only had I lost the gifts, emotionally I was as weak as any of them. I thought of Isobel, sitting and reading about Alfred the Great or Carolingian Europe or the ancient Library of Alexandria.
This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.
‘Beauty—be not caused—,’ said Emily Dickinson. ‘It is.’
In one way she was wrong. The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.
The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.
And they wouldn’t have been beautiful once, at least not to my eyes. To experience beauty on Earth you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.
It was this particular kind of sadness that I felt, that evening.
It came with its own gravitational pull, tugging me eastwards towards England. I told myself I just wanted to see them again, one last time. I just wanted to catch sight of them from a distance, to see with my own eyes that they were safe.
And, by pure coincidence, about two weeks later I was invited to Cambridge to take part in a series of lectures debating the relationship between mathematics and technology. My head of department, a resilient and jolly fellow called Christos, told me he thought I should go.
‘Yes, Christos,’ I said, as we stood on a corridor floor made of polished pinewood. ‘I think I might.’
When galaxies collide
I stayed in student accommodation in Corpus Christi, of all places, and tried to keep a low profile. I had grown a beard now, was tanned, and had put on a bit of weight, so people tended not to recognise me.
I did my lecture.
To quite a few jeers I told my fellow academics that I thought mathematics was an incredibly dangerous territory and that humans had explored it as fully as they could. To advance further, I told them, would be to head into a no-man’s-land full of unknown perils.
Among the audience was a pretty red-haired woman who I recognised instantly as Maggie. She came up to me afterwards and asked if I’d like to go to the Hat and Feathers. I said no, and she seemed to know I meant it, and after posing a jovial question about my beard, she left the hall.
After that, I went for a walk, naturally gravitating towards Isobel’s college.
I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide they pass right through.
I could hardly breathe, watching her, and didn’t even notice it was beginning to rain. I was just mesmerised by her. All eleven trillion cells of her.
Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn’t think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.
She pulled open her umbrella as if she were just any woman pulling open an umbrella, and she kept on walking, stopping only to give some money to a homeless man with a long coat and a bad leg. It was Winston Churchill.
Home
One can’t love and do nothing.
– Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Knowing I couldn’t follow Isobel, but feeling a need to connect with someone, I followed Winston Churchill instead. I followed slowly, ignoring the rain, feeling happy I had seen Isobel and that she was alive and safe and as quietly beautiful as she had always been (even when I had been too blind to appreciate this).
Winston Churchill was heading for the park. It was the same park where Gulliver walked Newton, but I knew it was too early in the afternoon for me to bump into them, so I kept following. He walked slowly, pulling his leg along as if it were three times as heavy as the rest of him. Eventually, he reached a bench. It was painted green, this bench, but the paint was flaking off to reveal the wood underneath. I sat down on it too. We sat in rain-soaked silence for a while.
He offered me a swig of his cider. I told him I was okay. I think he recognised me but I wasn’t sure.
‘I had everything once,’ he said.
‘Everything?’
‘A house, a car, a job, a woman, a kid.’
‘Oh, how did you lose them?’
‘My two churches. The betting shop and the off-licence. And it’s been downhill all the way. And now I’m here with nothing, but I am myself with nothing. An honest bloody nothing.’
‘Well, I know how you feel.’
Winston Churchill looked doubtful. ‘Yeah. Right you are, fella.’
‘I gave up eternal life.’
‘Ah, so you were religious?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And now you’re down here sinning like the rest of us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, just don’t try and touch my leg again and we’ll get on fine.’
I smiled. He did recognise me. ‘I won’t. I promise.’
‘So, what made you give up on eternity if you don’t mind me askin’?’
‘I don’t know. I’m still working it out.’
‘Good luck with that, fella, good luck with that.’
‘Thanks.’
He scratched his cheek and gave a nervous whistle. ‘Eh, you haven’t got any money on you, have you?’
I pulled a ten-pound note out of my pocket.
‘You’re a star, fella.’
‘Well, maybe we all are,’ I said, looking skyward.
And that was the end of our conversation. He had run out of cider and had no more reason to stay. So he stood up and walked away, wincing in pain from his damaged leg, as a breeze tilted flowers towards him.
It was strange. Why did I feel this lack inside me? This need to belong?
The rain stopped. The sky was clear now. I stayed where I was, on a bench covered with slow-evaporating raindrops. I knew it was getting later, and knew I should probably be heading back to Corpus Christi, but I didn’t have the incentive to move.
What was I doing here?
What was my function, now, in the universe?
I considered, I considered, I considered, and felt a strange sensation. A kind of sliding into focus.
I realised, though I was on Earth, I had been living this past year as I had always lived. I was just thinking I could carry on, moving forward. But I was not me any more. I was a human, give or take. And humans are about change. That is how they survive, by doing and un-doing and doing again.
I had done some things I couldn’t undo, but there were others I could amend. I had become a human by betraying rationality and obeying feeling. To stay me, I knew there would come a point when I would have to do the same again.
Time pass
ed.
Squinting, I looked again to the sky.
The Earth’s sun can look very much alone, yet it has relatives all across this galaxy, stars that were born in the exact same place, but which were now very far away from each other, lighting very different worlds.
I was like a sun.
I was a long way from where I started. And I have changed. Once I thought I could pass through time like a neutrino passes through matter, effortlessly and without stopping to think, because time would never run out.
As I sat there on that bench a dog came up to me. Its nose pressed into my leg.
‘Hello,’ I whispered, pretending not to know this particular English Springer Spaniel. But his pleading eyes stayed on me, even as he angled his nose towards his hip. His arthritis had come back. He was in pain.
I stroked him and held my hand in place, instinctively, but of course I couldn’t heal him this time.
Then a voice behind me. ‘Dogs are better than human beings because they know but don’t tell.’
I turned. A tall boy with dark hair and pale skin and a tentative nervous smile. ‘Gulliver.’
He kept his eyes on Newton. ‘You were right about Emily Dickinson.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Part of your advice. I read her.’
‘Oh. Oh yes. She was a very good poet.’
He moved around the bench, sat down next to me. I noticed he was older. Not only was he quoting poetry but his skull had become more man-shaped. There was a slight trace of dark beneath the skin on his jaw. His T-shirt said ‘The Lost’ – he had finally joined the band.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, that poet said, I shall not live in vain.
‘How are you?’ I asked, as if he were a casual acquaintance I often bumped into.
‘I haven’t tried to kill myself, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And how is she?’ I asked. ‘Your mother?’
Newton came over with a stick, dropped it for me to throw. Which I did.
‘She misses you.’
‘Me? Or your dad?’
‘You. You’re the one who looked after us.’
‘I don’t have any powers to look after you now. If you chose to jump off a roof then you’d probably die.’
‘I don’t jump off roofs any more.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s progress.’
There was a long silence. ‘I think she wants you to come back.’
‘Does she say that?’
‘No. But I think she does.’
The words were rain in a desert. After a while I said, in a quiet and neutral tone, ‘I don’t know if that would be wise. It’s easy to misunderstand your mother. And even if you haven’t got it wrong there could be all kinds of difficulties. I mean, what would she even call me? I don’t have a name. It would be wrong for her to call me Andrew.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she really misses me?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah. I think so.’
‘What about you?’
‘I miss you, too.’
Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.
‘I miss you, too,’ I said. ‘I miss both of you.’
It was evening. The clouds were orange, pink and purple. Was this what I had wanted? Was this why I had come back to Cambridge?
We talked.
The light faded.
Gulliver attached the lead to Newton’s collar. The dog’s eyes spoke sad warmth.
‘You know where we live,’ said Gulliver.
I nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’
I watched him leave. The joke of the universe. A noble human, with thousands of days to live. It made no logical sense that I had developed into someone who wanted those days to be as happy and secure for him as they could possibly be, but if you came to Earth looking for logical sense you were missing the point. You were missing lots of things.
I sat back and absorbed the sky and tried not to understand anything at all. I sat there until it was night. Until distant suns and planets shone above me, like a giant advert for better living. On other, more enlightened planets, there was the peace and calm and logic that so often came with advanced intelligence. I wanted none of it, I realised.
What I wanted was that most exotic of all things. I had no idea if that was possible. It probably wasn’t, but I needed to find out.
I wanted to live with people I could care for and who would care for me. I wanted family. I wanted happiness, not tomorrow or yesterday, but now.
What I wanted, in fact, was to go home. So, I stood up.
It was only a short walk away.
Home – is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home – she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place.
– Talking Heads,
‘This Must Be the Place’
A note, and some acknowledgements
I first had the idea of writing this story in 2000, when I was in the grips of panic disorder. Back then, human life felt as strange for me as it does for the unnamed narrator. I was living in a state of intense but irrational fear that meant I couldn’t even go to a shop on my own – or anywhere – without suffering a panic attack. The only thing I could do to gain a degree of calm was read. It was a breakdown, of sorts, though as R.D. Laing (and later Jerry Maguire) famously said, breakdown is very often breakthrough and, weirdly, I don’t regret that personal hell now.
I got better. Reading helped. Writing helped also. This is why I became a writer. I discovered that words and stories provided maps of sorts, ways of finding your way back to yourself. I truly believe in the power of fiction to save lives and minds, for this reason. But it has taken me a lot of books to get to this one, the story I first wanted to tell. The one that attempted a look at the weird and often frightening beauty of being human.
So, why the delay? I suppose I needed a bit of distance from the person I had been, because even though the subject matter is far from autobiographical, it felt too personal, maybe because I knew the dark well from where the idea – jokes and all – first came from.
The writing proved a joy. I imagined writing it for myself in 2000, or someone in a similar state. I was trying to offer a map, but also to cheer that someone up. Maybe because the idea had been fermenting so long the words were all there, and the story came in a torrent.
Not that it didn’t need editing. Indeed, never has a story I have written needed an editor more, so I am very grateful to have one as wise as Francis Bickmore at Canongate. Among other things he told me that a board meeting in outer space might not be the best way to start, and crucially got me to think of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and bleed the weirdness in gradually. It was wonderful, though, to have an editor telling me to put stuff back in just as often as he was saying leave things out.
Thanks also to the other important early eyes on this. They include my agent Caradoc King, along with Louise Lamont and Elinor Cooper at AP Watt/United Agents, my US editor Millicent Bennet at Simon and Schuster, Kate Cassaday at Harper Collins Canada and film producer Tanya Seghatchian, for whom I’m now writing the screenplay. Tanya is just about the best person anyone could have on their side, and I feel particular loyalty to her as she has supported and assisted my work since my very first novel, and a meeting in a coffee shop nearly a decade ago.
I must thank all my lucky stars for having the support of Jamie Byng and Canongate, who are the most passionate publishers a writer could ask for. And of course Andrea – first reader, first critic, continual editor and best friend – and Lucas and Pearl, for adding wonder to my daily existence.
Thank you, humans.
Matt Haig, The Humans
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