The Humans Read online

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Matt Haig, 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Quotation taken from interview with J. G. Ballard, © 2003, J. G. Ballard, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.

  Lyrics from ‘This Must Be The Place’ by David Byrne courtesy Index Music Inc.

  Extract from ‘That it will never come again’ by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Michael Franti quotation reproduced by kind permission of Guerilla Management Collective.

  Extract from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace reproduced by kind permission of the Hill Nadell Literary Agency.

  Extract from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (Random House) reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.

  Extract from Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2004 Marcus du Sautoy.

  Extract from Contact by Carl Sagan copyright © 1985 Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. formerly known as Carl Sagan Productions, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. This material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 875 6

  Export ISBN 978 0 85786 876 3

  eISBN 978 0 85786 877 0

  Typeset in Minion by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  To Andrea, Lucas and Pearl

  I have just got a new theory of eternity.

  – Albert Einstein

  Contents

  Preface

  (An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)

  PART I

  I took my power in my hand

  The man I was not

  Detached nouns and other early trials for the language-learner

  Texaco

  Corpus Christi

  Human clothes

  Questions

  Coffee

  Mad people

  The cubic root of 912,673

  Dead cows

  The world as will and representation

  Amnesia

  4 Campion Row

  The war and money show

  A stranger

  Starting the sequence

  Primes

  A moment of sheer terror

  The distribution of prime numbers

  Glory

  Dark matter

  Emily Dickinson

  Dishwasher

  A large house

  Daniel Russell

  The pain

  Egypt

  Where we are from

  The dog and the music

  Grigori Perelman

  Crunchy wholenut peanut butter

  Isobel’s dance

  The mother

  PART II

  I held a jewel in my fingers

  Sleepwalking

  I was a wasn’t

  Wider than the sky

  A few seconds of silence over breakfast

  Life/death/football

  Light-bulb

  Shopping

  The Zeta Function

  The problem with equations

  The violet

  The possibility of pain

  Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with the rain)

  The thing with feathers

  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens

  In-between

  Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes

  Social networking

  Forever is composed of nows

  Violence

  The taste of her skin

  The rhythm of life

  Teenagers

  Australian wine

  The watcher

  How to see for ever

  The intruder

  Perfect time

  A king of infinite space

  The art of letting go

  Neuroadaptive activity

  Platykurtic distribution

  The Hat and Feathers

  The ideal castle

  Somewhere else

  Places beyond logic

  PART III

  The wounded deer leaps the highest

  An encounter with Winston Churchill

  The replacement

  A game

  90.2 MHz

  The ultimate crime

  The nature of reality

  A face as shocked as the moon

  The second type of gravity

  Advice for a human

  A very brief hug

  The melancholy beauty of the setting sun

  When galaxies collide

  Home

  A note, and some acknowledgements

  Preface

  (An illogical hope in the face of overwhelming adversity)

  I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small water-logged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

  For the rest of you, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by their physical appearance.

  Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as ‘ears’, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows. All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept.

  The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.

  Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

  Yes, it is all very amusing, in a painful kind of way. But I have discovered human poetry while on Earth. One of these poets, the very best one (her name was Emily Dickinson), said this: ‘I dwell in possibility.’ So let us humour ourselves and do the same. Let us open our minds entirely, for what you are about to read will need every prejudice you may have to stand aside in the name of understanding.

  And let us consider this: what if there actually is a meaning to human life? And what if – humour me – life on Earth is something not just to fear and ridicule but also cherish? What then?

  Some of you may know what I have done by now, but none of you know the reason. This document, this guide, this account – call it what you will – will make everything clear. I plead with you to read this book with an open mind, and to work out for yourself the true value of human life.

  Let there be peace.

  PART I

  I took my power in my hand

  The man I was not

  So, what is this?r />
  You ready?

  Okay. Inhale. I will tell you.

  This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It’s about matter and antimatter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It’s about a forty-one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human.

  But let me state the obvious. I was not one. That first night, in the cold and the dark and the wind, I was nowhere near. Before I read Cosmopolitan, in the garage, I had never even seen this written language. I realise that this could be your first time too. To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would. The words I use are human words, typed in a human font, laid out consecutively in the human style. With your almost instantaneous ability to translate even the most exotic and primitive linguistic forms, I trust comprehension should not be a problem.

  Now, to reiterate, I was not Professor Andrew Martin. I was like you.

  Professor Andrew Martin was merely a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task. A task that had begun with his abduction, and death. (I am conscious this is setting a grim tone, so I will resolve not to mention death again for at least the rest of this page.)

  The point is that I was not a forty-three-year-old mathematician – husband, father – who taught at Cambridge University and who had devoted the last eight years of his life to solving a mathematical problem that had so far proved unsolvable.

  Prior to arriving on Earth I did not have mid-brown hair that fell in a natural side-parting. Equally, I did not have an opinion on The Planets by Holtz or Talking Heads’ second album, as I did not agree with the concept of music. Or I shouldn’t have, anyway. And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?

  Belonging as I did to a post-marital species, it goes without saying that I hadn’t been a neglectful husband with an eye for one of my students any more than I had been a man who walked his English Springer Spaniel – a category of hairy domestic deity otherwise known as a ‘dog’ – as an excuse to leave the house. Nor had I written books on mathematics, or insisted that my publishers use an author photograph that was now nearing its fifteenth anniversary.

  No, I wasn’t that man.

  I had no feeling for that man whatsoever. And yet he had been real, as real as you and I, a real mammalian life form, a diploid, eukaryotic primate who, five minutes before midnight, had been sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen and drinking black coffee (don’t worry, I shall explain coffee and my misadventures with it a little later). A life form who may or may not have jumped out of his chair as the breakthrough came, as his mind arrived at a place no human mind had ever reached before, the very edge of knowledge.

  And at some point shortly after his breakthrough he had been taken by the hosts. My employers. I had even met him, for the very briefest of moments. Enough for the – wholly incomplete – reading to be made. It was complete physically, just not mentally. You see, you can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them, not much of it anyway, so I had to learn a lot of things for myself. I was a forty-three-year-old newborn on planet Earth. It would become annoying to me, later on, that I had never met him properly, as meeting him properly would have been extremely useful. He could have told me about Maggie, for one thing. (Oh, how I wish he had told me about Maggie!)

  However, any knowledge I gained was not going to alter the simple fact that I had to halt progress. That is what I was there for. To destroy evidence of the breakthrough Professor Andrew Martin had made. Evidence that lived not only in computers but in living human beings.

  Now, where should we start?

  I suppose there is only one place. We should start with when I was hit by the car.

  Detached nouns and other early trials for the language-learner

  Yes, like I said, we should start with when I was hit by the car.

  We have to, really. Because for quite a while before that there was nothing. There was nothing and nothing and nothing and—

  Something.

  Me, standing there, on the ‘road’.

  Once there, I had several immediate reactions. First, what was with the weather? I was not really used to weather you had to think about. But this was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity. And for good reason. Second, where was the computer? There was meant to be a computer. Not that I actually knew what Professor Martin’s computer would look like. Maybe it looked like a road. Third, what was that noise? A kind of muted roaring. And fourth: it was night. Being something of a homebird, I was not really accustomed to night. And even if I had been, this wasn’t just any night. It was the kind of night I had never known. This was night to the power of night to the power of night. This was night cubed. A sky full of uncompromising darkness, with no stars and no moon. Where were the suns? Were there even suns? The cold suggested there might not have been. The cold was a shock. The cold hurt my lungs, and the harsh wind beating against my skin caused me to shake. I wondered if humans ever went outside. They must have been insane if they did.

  Inhaling was difficult, at first. And this was a concern. After all, inhaling really was one of the most important requirements of being a human. But I eventually got the knack.

  And then another worry. I was not where I was meant to be, that was increasingly clear. I was meant to be where he had been. I was meant to be in an office, but this wasn’t an office. I knew that, even then. Not unless it was an office that contained an entire sky, complete with those dark, congregating clouds and that unseen moon.

  It took a while – too long – to understand the situation. I did not know at that time what a road was, but I can now tell you that a road is something that connects points of departure with points of arrival. This is important. On Earth, you see, you can’t just move from one place to another place instantaneously. The technology isn’t there yet. It is nowhere near there yet. No. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time travelling in between places, be it on roads or on rail-tracks or in careers or relationships.

  This particular type of road was a motorway. A motorway is the most advanced type of road there is, which as with most forms of human advancement essentially meant accidental death was considerably more probable. My naked feet were standing on something called tarmac, feeling its strange and brutal texture. I looked at my left hand. It seemed so crude and unfamiliar, and yet my laughter halted when I realised this fingered freakish thing was a part of me. I was a stranger to myself. Oh, and by the way, the muted roaring was still there, minus the muted part.

  It was then I noticed what was approaching me at considerable speed.

  The lights.

  White, wide and low, they may as well have been the bright eyes of a fast-moving plain-sweeper, silver-backed, and now screaming. It was trying to slow, and swerve.

  There was no time for me to move out of the way. There had been, but not now. I had waited too long.

  And so it hit me with great, uncompromising force. A force which hurled me off the ground and sent me flying. Only not real flying, because humans can’t fly, no matter how much they flap their limbs. The only real option was pain, which I felt right until I landed, after which I returned to nothing again.

  Nothing and nothing and –

  Something.

  A man wearing clothes stood over me. The proximity of his face troubled me.

  No. A few degrees more than troubled.

  I was repulsed, terrified. I had never seen anything like this man. The face seemed so alien, full of unfathomable openings and protrusions. The nose, in particular, bothered me. It seemed to my innocent
eyes like there was something else inside him, pushing through. I looked lower. Noticed his clothes. He was wearing what I would later realise were a shirt and a tie, trousers and shoes. The exact clothes he should have been wearing and yet they seemed so exotic I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. He was looking at my injuries. Or rather: for them.

  I checked my left hand. It hadn’t been touched. The car had collided with my legs, then my torso, but my hand was fine.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ he said quietly, as though it was a secret.

  But the words were meaningless.

  He stared into my face and raised his voice, to compete with the sound of cars. ‘What are you doing out here?’

  Again, nothing. It was just a mouth moving, making noise.

  I could tell it was a simple language, but I needed to hear at least a hundred words of a new language before I could piece the whole grammatical jigsaw together. Don’t judge me on this. I know some of you need only ten or so, or just a single adjectival clause somewhere. But languages were never my thing. Part of my aversion to travel, I suppose. I must reiterate this. I did not want to be sent here. It was a job that someone had to do and – following my blasphemous talk at the Museum of Quadratic Equations, my so-called crime against mathematical purity – the hosts believed it to be a suitable punishment. They knew it was a job no one in their right mind would choose to do and, though my task was important, they knew I (like you) belonged to the most advanced race in the known universe and so would be up to the job.

  ‘I know you from somewhere. I recognise your face. Who are you?’

  I felt tired. That was the trouble with teleportation and matter shifting and bio-setting. It really took it out of you. And even though it put it back in to you, energy was always the price.

  I slipped into darkness and enjoyed dreams tinged with violet and indigo and home. I dreamed of cracked eggs and prime numbers and ever-shifting skylines.

  And then I awoke.

  I was inside a strange vehicle, strapped to primitive heart-reading equipment. Two humans, male and female (the female’s appearance confirmed my worst fears. Within this species, ugliness does not discriminate between genders), dressed in green. They seemed to be asking me something in quite an agitated fashion. Maybe it was because I was using my new upper limbs to rip off the crudely designed electrocardiographic equipment. They tried to restrain me, but they apparently had very little understanding of the mathematics involved, and so with relative ease I managed to leave the two green-clothed humans on the floor, writhing around in pain.