by Matt Haig
‘Do you want a coffee? Fruit juice? We’ve acquired a taste for pomegranate juice. Though Daniel believes antioxidants are a marketing ploy.’
‘I would like a water if that’s okay.’
We were in the kitchen now. It was about twice the size of Andrew Martin’s kitchen, but it was so cluttered it felt no bigger. There were saucepans hanging above my head. There was an envelope on the unit addressed to ‘Daniel and Tabitha Russell’.
Tabitha poured me water from a jug.
‘I’d offer you a slice of lemon but I think we’re out. There’s one in the bowl but it must be blue by now. The cleaners never sort the fruit out. They won’t touch it.
‘And Daniel won’t eat fruit. Even though the doctor has told him he’s got to. But then the doctor has told him to relax and slow down, too, and he doesn’t do that either.’
‘Oh. Why?’
She looked baffled.
‘His heart attack. You remember that? You aren’t the only frazzled mathematician in the world.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘How is he?’
‘Well, he’s on beta-blockers. I’m trying to get him on muesli and skimmed milk and to take it easier.’
‘His heart,’ I said, thinking aloud.
‘Yes. His heart.’
‘That is one of the reasons I came, in fact.’ She handed me a glass and I took a sip. As I did so, I thought of the startling capacity for belief inherent in this species. Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth. ‘Where is he?’
‘In his study. Upstairs.’
‘His study?’
‘You know where that is, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Of course. I know where that is.’
Daniel Russell
Of course, I had been lying.
I had no idea where Daniel Russell’s study was, and this was a very big house, but as I was walking along the first-floor landing I heard a voice. The same dry voice I had heard on the phone.
‘Is that the saviour of mankind?’
I followed the voice all the way to the third doorway on the left, which was half-open. I could see framed pieces of paper lining a wall. I pushed open the door and saw a bald man with a sharp angular face and a small – in human terms – mouth. He was smartly dressed. He was wearing a red bow tie and a checked shirt.
‘Pleased to see you’re wearing clothes,’ he said, suppressing a sly smile. ‘Our neighbours are people of delicate sensibilities.’
‘Yes. I am wearing the right amount of clothes. Don’t worry about that.’
He nodded, and kept nodding, as he leant back in his chair and scratched his chin. A computer screen glowed behind him, full of Andrew Martin’s curves and formulas. I could smell coffee. I noticed an empty cup. Two of them, in fact.
‘I have looked at it. And I have looked at it again. This must have taken you to the edge, I can see that. This is something. You must have been burning yourself with this, Andrew. I’ve been burning just reading through it.’
‘I worked very hard,’ I said. ‘I was lost in it. But that happens, doesn’t it, with numbers?’
He listened with concern. ‘Did they prescribe anything?’ he asked.
‘Diazepam.’
‘Do you feel it’s working?’
‘I do. I do. I feel it is working. Everything feels a little bit alien I would say, a tad other-worldly, as if the atmosphere is slightly different, and the gravity has slightly less pull, and even something as familiar as an empty coffee cup has a terrible difference to it. You know, from my perspective. Even you. You seem quite hideous to me. Almost terrifying.’
Daniel Russell laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh.
‘Well, there’s always been a frisson between us, but I always put that down to academic rivalry. Par for the course. We’re not geographers or biologists. We’re numbers men. We mathematicians have always been like that. Look at that miserable bastard Isaac Newton.’
‘I named my dog after him.’
‘So you did. But listen, Andrew, this isn’t a moment to nudge you to the kerb. This is a moment to slap you on the back.’
We were wasting time. ‘Have you told anyone about this?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Of course not. Andrew, this is yours. You can publicise this how you want. Though I would probably advise you, as a friend, to wait a little while. At least a week or so, until all this unwelcome stuff about your little Corpus incident has died down.’
‘Is mathematics less interesting for humans than nudity?’
‘It tends to be, Andrew. Yes. Listen. Go home, take it easy this week. I’ll put a word in with Diane at Fitz and explain that you’ll be fine but you may need some time off. I’m sure she’ll be pretty flexible. The students are going to be tricky on your first day back. You need to build your strength up. Rest a while. Come on Andrew, go home.’
I could smell the foul scent of coffee getting stronger. I looked around at all the certificates on the wall and felt thankful to come from a place where personal success was meaningless.
‘Home?’ I said. ‘Do you know where that is?’
‘Course I do. Andrew, what are you talking about?’
‘Actually, I am not called Andrew.’
Another nervous chuckle. ‘Is Andrew Martin your stage name? If it is, I could have thought of better.’
‘I don’t have a name. Names are a symptom of a species which values the individual self above the collective good.’
This was the first time he stood up out of his chair. He was a tall man, taller than me. ‘This would be amusing, Andrew, if you weren’t a friend. I really think you might need to get proper medical help for this. Listen, I know a very good psychiatrist who you—’
‘Andrew Martin is someone else. He was taken.’
‘Taken?’
‘After he proved what he proved, we were left with no choice.’
‘We? What are you talking about? Just have an objective ear, Andrew. You are sounding out of your mind. I think you ought to go home. I’ll drive you back. I think it would be safer. Come on, let’s go. I’ll take you home. Back to your family.’
He held out his right arm, gesturing towards the door. But I wasn’t going anywhere.
The pain
‘You said you wanted to slap my back.’
He frowned. Above the frown, the skin covering the top of his skull shone. I stared at it. At the shine.
‘What?’
‘You wanted to slap my back. That is what you said. So, why not?’
‘What?’
‘Slap my back. Then I will go.’
‘Andrew—’
‘Slap my back.’
He exhaled slowly. His eyes were the mid-point between concern and fear. I turned, gave him my back. Waited for the hand, then waited some more. Then it came. He slapped my back. On that first contact, even with clothes between us, I made the reading. Then when I turned, for less than a second, my face wasn’t Andrew Martin’s. It was mine.
‘What the—’
He lurched backwards, bumping into his desk. I was, to his eyes, Andrew Martin again. But he had seen what he had seen. I only had a second, before he would begin screaming, so I paralysed his jaw. Somewhere way below the panic of his bulging eyes, there was a question: how did he do that? To finish the job properly I would need another contact: my left hand on his shoulder was sufficient.
Then the pain began. The pain I had summoned.
He held his arm. His face became violet. The colour of home.
I had pain too. Head pain. And fatigue.
But I walked past him, as he dropped to his knees, and deleted the email and the attachment. I checked his sent folder but there was nothing suspicious.
I stepped out on to the landing.
‘Tabitha! Tabitha, call an ambulance! Quick! I think, I think Daniel is having a heart attack!’
Egypt
Less than a minute later she was upstairs, on the phone, her face full of panic as she knelt down, trying to push a pill – an aspirin – into her husband’s mouth. ‘His mouth won’t open! His mouth won’t open! Daniel, open your mouth! Darling, oh my God darling, open your mouth!’ And then to the phone. ‘Yes! I told you! I told you! The Hollies! Yes! Chaucer Road! He’s dying! He’s dying!’
She managed to cram inside her husband’s mouth a piece of the pill, which bubbled into foam and dribbled onto the carpet. ‘Mnnnnnn,’ her husband was saying desperately. ‘Mnnnnnn.’
I stood there watching him. His eyes stayed wide, wide open, ipsoid-wide, as if staying in the world was a simple matter of forcing yourself to see.
‘Daniel, it’s all right,’ Tabitha was saying, right into his face. ‘An ambulance is on its way. You’ll be okay, darling.’
His eyes were now on me. He jerked in my direction. ‘Mnnnnnn!’
He was trying to warn his wife. ‘Mnnnnnn.’
She didn’t understand.
Tabitha was stroking her husband’s hair with a manic tenderness. ‘Daniel, we’re going to Egypt. Come on, think of Egypt. We’re going to see the Pyramids. It’s only two weeks till we go. Come on, it’s going to be beautiful. You’ve always wanted to go . . .’
As I watched her I felt a strange sensation. A kind of longing for something, a craving, but for what I had no idea. I was mesmerised by the sight of this human female crouched over the man whose blood I had prevented from reaching his heart.
‘You got through it last time and you’ll get through it this time.’
‘No,’ I whispered, unheard. ‘No, no, no.’
‘Mnnn,’ he said, gripping his shoulder in infinite pain.
‘I love you, Daniel.’
His eyes clenched shut now, the pain too much.
‘Stay with me, stay with me, I can’t live all alone . . .’
His head was on her knee. She kept caressing his face. So this was love. Two life forms in mutual reliance. I was meant to be thinking I was watching weakness, something to scorn, but I wasn’t thinking that at all.
He stopped making noise, he seemed instantly heavier for her, and the deep clenched creases around his eyes softened and relaxed. It was done.
Tabitha howled, as if something had been physically wrenched out of her. I have never heard anything like that sound. It troubled me greatly, I have to say.
A cat emerged from the doorway, startled by the noise maybe, but indifferent to the scene in general. It returned back from where it came.
‘No,’ said Tabitha, over and over, ‘no, no, no!’
Outside, the ambulance skidded to a halt on the gravel. Blue flashing lights appeared through the window.
‘They’re here,’ I told Tabitha and went downstairs. It was a strange and overwhelming relief to tread my way down those soft, carpeted stairs, and for those desperate sobs and futile commands to fade away into nothing.
Where we are from
I thought about where we – you and I – are from.
Where we are from there are no comforting delusions, no religions, no impossible fiction.
Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason.
Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion.
Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation.
Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness.
Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can’t just let the universe do what it wants to do, because we will be inside it for eternity.
Where we are from we will never be lying on a luxurious carpet, clutching our chest as our faces turn purple and our eyes seek desperately to view our surroundings for one last time.
Where we are from our technology, created on the back of our supreme and comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, has meant not only that we can travel great distances, but also that we can rearrange our own biological ingredients, renew and replenish them. We are psychologically equipped for such advances. We have never been at war with ourselves. We never place the desires of the individual over the requirements of the collective.
Where we are from we understand that if the humans’ rate of mathematical advancement exceeds their psychological maturity, then action needs to be taken. For instance, the death of Daniel Russell, and the knowledge he held, could end up saving many more lives. And so: he is a logical and justifiable sacrifice.
Where we are from there are no nightmares.
And yet, that night, for the very first time in my life I had a nightmare.
A world of dead humans with me and that indifferent cat walking through a giant carpeted street full of bodies. I was trying to get home. But I couldn’t. I was stuck here. I had become one of them. Stuck in human form, unable to escape the inevitable fate awaiting all of them. And I was getting hungry and I needed to eat but I couldn’t eat, because my mouth was clamped shut. The hunger became extreme. I was starving, wasting away at rapid speed. I went to the garage I had been in that first night and tried to shove food in my mouth, but it was no good. It was still locked from this inexplicable paralysis. I knew I was going to die.
Die.
How did humans ever stomach the idea?
I woke.
I was sweating and out of breath. Isobel touched my back. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as Tabitha had said. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.’
The dog and the music
The next day I was alone.
Well no, actually, that’s not quite true.
I wasn’t alone. There was the dog. Newton. The dog named after a human who had come up with the ideas of gravity and inertia. Given the slow speed with which the dog left its basket, I realised the name was a fitting tribute to these discoveries. He was awake now. He was old and he hobbled, and he was half-blind.
He knew who I was. Or who I wasn’t. And he growled whenever he was near me. I didn’t quite understand his language just yet but I sensed he was displeased. He showed his teeth but I could tell years of subservience to his bipedal owners meant the very fact that I was standing up was enough for me to command a certain degree of respect.
I felt sick. I put this down to the new air I was breathing. But each time I closed my eyes I saw Daniel Russell’s anguished face as he lay on the carpet. I also had a headache, but that was the lingering after-effect of the energy I had exerted yesterday.
I knew life was going to be easier during my short stay here if Newton was on my side. He might have information, have picked up on signals, heard things. And I knew there was one rule that held fast across the universe: if you wanted to get someone on your side what you really had to do was relieve their pain. It seems ridiculous now, such logic. But the truth was even more ridiculous, and too dangerous to acknowledge to myself, that after the need to hurt I felt an urge to heal.
So I went over and gave him a biscuit. And then, after giving him the biscuit, I gave him sight. And then, as I stroked his hind leg, he whimpered words into my ear I couldn’t quite translate. I healed him, giving myself not only an even more intense headache but also wave upon wave of fatigue in the process. Indeed, so exhausted was I that I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up, I was coated in dog saliva. Newton’s tongue was still at it, licking me with considerable enthusiasm. Licking, licking, licking, as though the meaning of canine existence was something just beneath my skin.
‘Could you please stop that?’ I said. But he couldn’t. Not until I stood up. He was physically incapable of stopping.
And even once I h
ad stood up he tried to stand up with me, and on me, as if he wanted to be upright, too. It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you. Seriously, if there was a needier species in the universe I had yet to meet it.
‘Get away,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want your love.’
I went to the living room and sat down on the sofa. I needed to think. Would Daniel Russell’s death be viewed by the humans as suspicious? A man on heart medication succumbing to a second and this time fatal heart attack? I had no poison, and no weapon they would ever be able to identify.
The dog sat down next to me, placed his head on my lap, then lifted his head off my lap, and then on again, as if deciding whether or not to put his head on my lap was the biggest decision he had ever faced.
We spent hours together that day. Me and the dog. At first I was annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone, as what I needed to do was to focus and work out when I was going to act next. To work out how much more information I needed to acquire before doing what would have to be my final acts here, eliminating Andrew Martin’s wife and child. I shouted at the dog again to leave me alone, and he did so, but when I stood in the living room with nothing but my thoughts and plans I realised I felt a terrible loneliness and so called him back. And he came, and seemed happy to be wanted again.
I put something on that interested me. It was called The Planets by Gustav Holst. It was a piece of music all about the humans’ puny solar system, so it was surprising to hear it had quite an epic feel. Another confusing thing was that it was divided into seven ‘movements’ each named after ‘astrological characters’. For instance, Mars was ‘the Bringer of War’, Jupiter was ‘the Bringer of Jollity’, and Saturn was ‘the Bringer of Old Age’.
This primitivism struck me as funny. And so was the idea that the music had anything whatsoever to do with those dead planets. But it seemed to soothe Newton a little bit, and I must admit one or two parts of it had some kind of effect on me, a kind of electrochemical effect. Listening to music, I realised, was simply the pleasure of counting without realising you were counting. As the electrical impulses were transported from the neurons in my ear through my body, I felt – I don’t know – calm. It made that strange unease that had been with me since I had watched Daniel Russell die on his carpet settle a little.