The Humans

Sleepwalking

I stood next to his bed while he slept. I don’t know how long I just stood there, in the dark, listening to his deep breathing as he slipped deeper and deeper below dreams. Half an hour, maybe.

He hadn’t pulled the window blind down, so I looked out at the night. There was no moon from this angle, but I could see a few stars. Suns lighting dead solar systems elsewhere in the galaxy. Everywhere you can see in their sky, or almost everywhere, is lifeless. That must affect them. That must give them ideas above their station. That must send them insane.

Gulliver rolled over, and I decided to wait no longer. It was now or it was never.

You will pull back your duvet, I told him, in a voice he wouldn’t have heard if he had been awake but which reached right in, riding theta-waves, to become a command from his own brain. And slowly you will sit up in your bed, your feet will be on the rug and you will breathe and you will compose yourself and then you will stand up.

And he did, indeed, stand up. He stayed there, breathing deeply and slowly, waiting for the next command.

You will walk to the door. Do not worry about opening the door, because it is already open. There. Just walk, just walk, just walk to your door.

He did exactly as I said. And he was there in the doorway, oblivious to everything except my voice. A voice which only had two words that needed to be said. Fall forward. I moved closer to him. Somehow those words were slow to arrive. I needed time. Another minute, at least.

I was there, closer, able to smell the scent of sleep on him. Of humanity. And I remembered: You must complete your task. If you do not complete your task, someone else will be sent to complete it for you. I swallowed. My mouth was so dry it hurt. I felt the infinite expanse of the universe behind me, a vast if neutral force. The neutrality of time, of space, of mathematics, of logic, of survival. I closed my eyes.

Waited.

Before I opened them, I was being gripped by the throat. I could barely breathe.

He had turned 180 degrees, and his left hand had me by the neck. I pulled it away, and now both his hands were fists swinging at me, wild, angry, hitting me almost as much as he missed.

He got the side of my head. I walked backwards away from him, but he was moving forwards at just the same speed. His eyes were open. He was seeing me now. Seeing me and not seeing me all at the same time. I could have said stop of course, but I didn’t. Maybe I wanted to witness some human violence first-hand, even unconscious violence, to understand the importance of my task. By understanding it I would be able to fulfil it. Yes, that might have been it. That may also have explained why I let myself bleed when he punched me on the nose. I had reached his desk now and could retreat no further, so I just stood there as he kept hitting my head, my neck, my chest, my arms. He roared now, his mouth as wide as it could go, baring teeth.

‘Raaaah!’

This roar woke him up. His legs went weak and he nearly fell to the floor but he recovered in time.

‘I,’ he said. He didn’t know where he was for a moment. He saw me, in the dark, and this time it was conscious sight. ‘Dad?’

I nodded as a slow thin stream of blood reached my mouth. Isobel was running up the stairs to the attic. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I heard a noise so I came upstairs. Gulliver was sleepwalking, that’s all.’

Isobel switched the light on, gasped as she saw my face. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘It’s nothing. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘Gulliver?’

Gulliver was sitting on the edge of his bed now, flinching from the light. He too looked at my face but he didn’t say anything at all.

I was a wasn’t

Gulliver wanted to go back to bed. To sleep. So, ten minutes later, Isobel and I were alone, and I was sitting on the side of the bath as she placed an antiseptic solution called TCP on a circle of cotton wool and dabbed it gently on a cut on my forehead, and then on my lip.

Now, these were wounds I could have healed with a single thought. Just to feel pain, sometimes, was enough to cancel it. And yet, even as the antiseptic stung on contact with each cut, the injuries stayed. I forced them to. I couldn’t allow her to get suspicious. But was it just that?

‘How’s your nose?’ she asked. I caught sight of it in the mirror. A smear of blood around one nostril.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, feeling it. ‘It isn’t broken.’

Her eyes squinted in pure concentration. ‘This one on your forehead is really bad. And there’s going to be one giant bruise there. He must have really hit you hard. Did you try and restrain him?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I did. But he kept on.’

I could smell her. Clean, human smells. The smells of the creams she used to wash and moisturise her face. The smell of her shampoo. A delicate trace of ammonia barely competing with the heavy scent of antiseptic. She was physically closer to me than she had ever been. I looked at her neck. She had two little dark moles on it, close together, charting unknown binary stars. I thought of Andrew Martin kissing her. This was what humans did. They kissed. Like so many human things, it made no sense. Or maybe, if you tried it, the logic would unfold.

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He just yelled. It was very primal.’

‘I don’t know, between you and him, it never ends.’

‘What never ends?’

‘The worry.’

She placed the blood-stained cotton wool in the small bin beside the sink.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

We went back to bed. She held my hand in the dark. I gently pulled it away.

‘We’ve lost him,’ she said. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about Gulliver.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we just have to accept him as he is, even if he’s different to what we’ve known.’

‘I just don’t understand him. You know, he’s our son. And we’ve known him for sixteen years. And yet, I feel like I don’t know him at all.’

‘Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.’

‘That’s a very difficult thing. And a very strange thing to come from your mouth, Andrew.’

‘So, I suppose the next question is: what about me? Do you understand me?’

‘I don’t think you understand yourself, Andrew.’

I wasn’t Andrew. I knew I wasn’t Andrew. But equally, I was losing myself. I was a wasn’t, that was the problem. I was lying in bed with a human woman I could now almost appreciate as beautiful, wilfully still feeling the sting of antiseptic in my wounds, and thinking of her strange but fascinating skin, and the way she had cared for me. No one in the universe cared for me. (You didn’t did you?) We had technology to care for us now, and we didn’t need emotions. We were alone. We worked together for our preservation but emotionally we needed no one. We just needed the purity of mathematical truth. And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

I had so many worries now. So many questions.

‘Do you believe humans are ever knowable?’ I asked.

‘I wrote a book on Charlemagne. I hope so.’

‘But humans, in their natural state, are they good or are they bad, would you say? Can they be trusted? Or is their own real state just violence and greed and cruelty?’

‘Well, that’s the oldest question there is.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m tired, Andrew. I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, me too. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Night.’

‘Night.’

I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I still wasn’t used to the night. It may not have been as dark as I first thought it to be. There was moonlight, starlight, airglow, streetlamps, and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but the humans still spent half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark. And it was a comfort, being next to her. So I just stayed there, hearing her breath move in and out, sounding like the tide of some exotic sea. At some point my little finger touched hers, in the double-night beneath the duvet, and this time I kept it there and imagined I was really what she thought I was. And that we were connected. Two humans, primitive enough to truly care about each other. It was a comforting thought, and the one which led me down those ever-darkening stairs of the mind towards sleep.

I may need more time.

You do not need time.

I am going to kill who I need to kill, don’t worry about that.

We are not worried.

But I am not just here to destroy information. I am here to gather it. That is what you said, wasn’t it? Stuff on mathematical understanding can be read across the universe, I know that. I’m not talking about neuro-flashes. I’m talking about stuff that can only be picked up on from here, on Earth itself. To give us more insight into how the humans live. It has been a long time since anyone was here, at least in human terms.

Explain why you need more time for this. Complexity demands time, but humans are primitives. They are the most shallow of mysteries.

No. You are wrong. They exist simultaneously in two worlds – the world of appearances and the world of truth. The connecting strands between these worlds take many forms. When I first arrived here I did not understand certain things. For instance, I did not understand why clothes were so important. Or why a dead cow became beef, or why grass cut a certain way demanded not to be walked upon, or why household pets were so important to them. The humans are scared of nature, and are greatly reassured when they can prove to themselves they have mastery over it. This is why lawns exist, and why wolves evolved into dogs, and why their architecture is based on unnatural shapes. But, really, nature, pure nature is just a symbol to them. A symbol of human nature. They are interchangeable. So what I am saying—

What are you saying?

What I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves. They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get they are for ever removed. What I am saying, I suppose, is that last night I was about to kill the boy. Gulliver. He was about to fall down the stairs in his sleep but then his true nature came out and he attacked me.

Attacked you with what?

With himself. With his arms. His hands. He was still asleep but his eyes were open. He attacked me, or the me he thinks I am. His father. And it was pure rage.

The humans are violent. That is not news.

No, I know. I know. But he woke, and he wasn’t violent. That is the battle they have. And I believe if we understand human nature a little more, then we will know better what action to take in the future, when other advances are made. In the future, when another over-population crisis arises there may come a time when Earth becomes a valid option for our species. So, surely as much knowledge as possible on human psychology and society and behaviour is going to help?

They are defined by greed.

Not all of them. For instance, there is a mathematician called Grigori Perelman. He turned down money and prizes. He looks after his mother. We have a distorted view. I think it would be useful for all of us if I researched further.

But you don’t need the two humans for that.

Oh, I do.

Why?

Because they think they know who I am. And I have a true chance of seeing them. The real them. Behind the walls they have built for themselves. And speaking of walls, Gulliver knows nothing now. I cancelled his knowledge of what his father told him on his last night. While I am here, there is no danger.

You must act soon. You don’t have for ever.

I know. Don’t worry. I won’t need for ever.

They must die.

Yes.

Wider than the sky

‘It was sleep psychosis,’ Isobel told Gulliver at breakfast the next day. ‘It’s very common. Lots of people have had it. Lots of perfectly normal and sane people. Like that man from R.E.M. He had it, and he was meant to be as nice as rock stars come.’

She hadn’t seen me. I had just entered the kitchen. But now she noticed my presence and was puzzled by the sight of me. ‘Your face,’ she said. ‘Last night there were cuts and bruises. It’s totally healed.’

‘Must have been better than it looked. The night might exaggerate things.’

‘Yes, but even so—’

She glanced at her son, struggling uneasily with his cereal, and decided not to go on.

‘You might need the day off school, Gulliver,’ said Isobel.

I expected him to agree to this, seeing that he preferred an education that involved staring at rail-tracks. But he looked at me, considered for a moment, and concluded, ‘No. No. It’s okay. I feel fine.’

Later, it was just me and Newton in the house. I was still ‘recovering’, you see. Recover. The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically. Yet I needed to find what lay beneath, something that would satisfy the hosts and justify the delay I was taking in my task. I discovered a pile of paper, tied with an elastic band. It was in Isobel’s wardrobe, hidden among all those essential clothes, yellowing with age. I sniffed the page and guessed at least a decade. The top sheet had the words ‘Wider than the Sky’ on them, along with these ones: ‘A novel by Isobel Martin’. A novel? I read a little bit of it and realised that although the central character’s name was Charlotte, she could just as easily have been called Isobel.

So, families often stayed together. Wives sometimes managed to stay with husbands and put up with whichever misery they felt by writing novels and hiding them at the bottom of their wardrobes. Mothers put up with their children, no matter how difficult those children were, no matter how close to insanity they pushed their parents.

Anyway, I stopped reading there. I felt it was an intrusion. A bit rich, I know, from someone who was living inside her husband’s identity. I put it back in its place in the wardrobe underneath the clothes.

Later on, I told her what I had found.

She gave me an unreadable look, and her cheeks went red. I didn’t know if it was a blush or anger. Maybe it was a little of both.

‘That was private. You weren’t ever supposed to see that.’

‘I know. That is why I wanted to see it. I want to understand you.’

‘Why? There’s no academic glory or million-dollar prize if you solve me, Andrew. You shouldn’t go snooping around.’

‘Shouldn’t a husband know a wife?’

‘That really is quite rich coming from you.’

‘What does that mean?’

She sighed. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘You should say whatever you feel you should say.’

‘Good policy. But I think that would mean we’d have divorced around 2002, at a conservative estimate.’

‘Well? Maybe you would have been happier if you had divorced him, I mean me, in 2002.’

‘Well, we’ll never know.’

‘No.’

And the phone rang. It was someone for me.

‘Hello?’

A man spoke. His voice was casual, familiar, but there was a curiosity there, too. ‘Hey, it’s me. Ari.’

‘Oh, hello Ari.’ I knew Ari was supposed to be my closest friend, so I tried to sound friend-like. ‘How are you? How’s your marriage?’

Isobel looked at me with an emphatic frown, but I don’t think he’d heard properly.

‘Well, just got back from that thing in Edinburgh.’

‘Oh,’ I said, trying to pretend I knew what ‘that thing in Edinburgh’ was. ‘Right. Yes. That thing in Edinburgh. Of course. How was that?’

‘It was good. Yeah, it was good. Caught up with the St Andrews lot. Listen, mate, I hear it’s been a bit of a week for you.’

‘Yes. It has. It has been a lot of a week for me.’

‘So I wasn’t sure if you’d still be up for the football?’

‘The football?’

‘Cambridge–Kettering. We could have a pint of mild and a bit of a chat, about that top secret thing you told me the last time we spoke.’

‘Secret?’ Every molecule of me was now alert. ‘What secret?’

‘Don’t think I should broadcast it.’

‘No. No. You’re right. Don’t say it out loud. In fact, don’t tell anyone.’ Isobel was now in the hallway, looking at me with suspicion. ‘But to answer you, yes, I will go to the football.’

And I pressed the red button on the phone, weary at the probability that I would have to switch another human life into non-existence.

A few seconds of silence over breakfast

You become something else. A different species. That is the easy bit. That is simple molecular rearrangement. Our inner technology can do that, without a problem, with the correct commands and model to work from. There are no new ingredients in the universe, and humans – however they may look – are made of roughly the same things we are.

The difficulty, though, is the other stuff. The stuff that happens when you look in the bathroom mirror and see this new you and don’t want to throw up into the sink at the sight of yourself like you have wanted to every other morning. And when you wear clothes, and you realise it is starting to feel like quite a normal thing to do.

And when you walk downstairs and see the life form that is meant to be your son eating toast, listening to music only he can hear, it takes you a second – or two, three, four seconds – to realise that, actually, this is not your son. He means nothing to you. Not only that: he has to mean nothing to you.

Also, your wife. Your wife is not your wife. Your wife who loves you but doesn’t really like you, because of something you never did, but which couldn’t be any worse, from her perspective, than the something you’re going to do. She is an alien. She is as alien as they come. A primate whose nearest evolutionary cousins are hairy tree-dwelling knuckle draggers known as chimpanzees. And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar, and you can judge her as humans judge her. You can watch her when she drinks her pink grapefruit juice, and stares at her son with worried, helpless eyes. You can see that for her being a parent is standing on a shore and watching her child in a vulnerable craft, heading out over deeper and deeper water, hoping but not knowing there will be land somewhere ahead.

And you can see her beauty. If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalising and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion.

I was confused. I was lost.

I wished I had a new wound, just so she could attend to me.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked me.

‘You,’ I said.

She looked at Gulliver. He couldn’t hear us. Then she looked back at me, as confused as myself.

We are worried. What are you doing?

I told you.

Well?

I am accumulating information.

You are wasting time.

I’m not. I know what I am doing.

It was never meant to take this long.

I know. But I am learning more about the humans. They are more complicated than we first thought. They are sometimes violent, but more often care about each other. There is more goodness in them than anything else, I am convinced of it.

What are you saying?

I don’t know what I am saying. I am confused. Some things have stopped making sense.

This happens, occasionally, on a new planet. The perspective changes to that of its inhabitants. But our perspective has not changed. Do you understand that?

Yes. I do understand.

Stay pure.

I will.

Life/death/football

Humans are one of the few intelligent beings in the galaxy who haven’t quite solved the problem of death. And yet they don’t spend their whole lives screeching and howling in terror, clawing at their own bodies, or rolling around on the floor. Some humans do that – I saw them in the hospital – but those humans are considered the mad ones.

Now, consider this.

A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.

But at ground level the humans don’t appear to spend their entire lives in a catatonic state.

No. They do other things. Things like:

– washing

– listening

– gardening

– eating

– driving

– working

– yearning

– earning

– staring

– drinking

– sighing

– reading

– gaming

– sunbathing

– complaining

– jogging

– quibbling

– caring

– mingling

– fantasising

– googling

– parenting

– renovating

– loving

– dancing

– fucking

– regretting

– failing

– striving

– hoping

– sleeping

Oh, and sport.

Apparently I, or rather Andrew, liked sport. And the sport he liked was football.

Luckily for Professor Andrew Martin, the football team he supported was Cambridge United, one of those which successfully avoided the perils and existential trauma of victory. To support Cambridge United, I discovered, was to support the idea of failure. To watch a team’s feet consistently avoid the spherical Earth-symbol seemed to frustrate their supporters greatly, but they obviously wouldn’t have it any other way. The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree, humans don’t actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds but if they keep on winning they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

Now, I was there at the game to see Cambridge United play against a team called Kettering. I had asked Gulliver if he wanted to come with me – so I could keep an eye on him – and he had said, with sarcasm, ‘Yeah, Dad, you know me so well.’

So, it was just me and Ari, or to give him his full title Professor Arirumadhi Arasaratham. As I have said, this was Andrew’s closest friend, although I had learnt from Isobel that I didn’t really have friends as such. More acquaintances. Anyway, Ari was an ‘expert’ (human definition) on theoretical physics. He was also quite rotund, as if he didn’t just want to watch football but become one.

‘So,’ he said, during a period when Cambridge United didn’t have the ball (that is to say, any time during the match), ‘how are things?’

‘Things?’

He stuffed some crisps into his mouth and made no attempt to conceal their fate. ‘You know, I was a bit worried about you.’ He laughed. It was the laugh human males do, to hide emotion. ‘Well, I say worry, it was more mild concern. I say mild concern but it was more ‘wonder if he’s done a Nash?’’

‘What do you mean?’

He told me what he meant. Apparently human mathematicians have a habit of going mad. He gave me a list of names – Nash, Cantor, Gödel, Turing – and I nodded along as if they meant something. And then he said ‘Riemann.’

‘Riemann?’

‘I heard you weren’t eating much so I was thinking more Gödel than Riemann, actually,’ he said. By Gödel, I later learnt, he meant Kurt Gödel, another German mathematician. However, this one’s particular psychological quirk was that he had believed everyone was trying to poison his food. So he had stopped eating altogether. By that definition of madness, Ari appeared very sane indeed.

‘No. I haven’t done one of those. I am eating now. Peanut butter sandwiches mainly.’

‘Sounds like more of a Presley,’ he said, laughing. And then he gave me a serious look. I could tell it was serious because he had swallowed and wasn’t putting any more food in his mouth. ‘Because, you know, prime numbers are fucking serious, man. Some serious shit. They can make you lose it. They’re like sirens. They call you in with their isolated beauty and before you know it you are in some major mind-shit. And when I heard about your naked corpus at Corpus I thought you were cracking up a bit.’

‘No. I am on the rails,’ I said. ‘Like a train. Or a clothes-hanger.’

‘And Isobel? Everything fine with you and Isobel?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is my wife. And I love her. Everything is fine. Fine.’

He frowned at me. Then he took a moment’s glance to see if Cambridge United were anywhere near the ball. He seemed relieved to see they weren’t.

‘Really? Everything’s fine?’

I could see he needed more confirmation. ‘Till I loved I never lived.’

He shook his head and gave a facial expression I can now safely classify as bewilderment.

‘What’s that? Shakespeare? Tennyson? Marvell?’

I shook my head. ‘No. It was Emily Dickinson. I have been reading a lot of her poetry. And also Anne Sexton’s. And Walt Whitman too. Poetry seems to say a lot about us. You know, us humans.’

‘Emily Dickinson? You’re quoting Emily Dickinson at a match?’

‘Yes.’

I sensed, again, I was getting the context wrong. Everything here was about context. There was nothing that was right for every occasion. I didn’t get it. The air always had hydrogen in it wherever you were. But that was pretty much the only consistent thing. What was the big difference that made quoting love poetry inappropriate in this context? I had no idea.

‘Right,’ he said, and paused for the large, communal groan as Kettering scored a goal. I groaned too. Groaning was actually quite diverting, and certainly the most enjoyable aspect of sport spectating. I might have overdone it a little bit though, judging from the looks I was getting. Or maybe they had seen me on the Internet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And what does Isobel feel about everything?’

‘Everything?’

‘You, Andrew. What does she think? Does she know about… you know? Is that what triggered it?’

This was my moment. I inhaled. ‘The secret I told you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘About the Riemann hypothesis?’

He scrunched his face in confusion. ‘What? No, man. Unless you’ve been sleeping with a hypothesis on the side?’

‘So what was the secret?’

‘That you’re having it away with a student.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling relief. ‘So I definitely didn’t say anything about work the last time I saw you.’

‘No. For once, you didn’t.’ He turned back to the football. ‘So, are you going to spill the beans about this student?’

‘My memory is a bit hazy, to be honest with you.’

‘That’s convenient. Perfect alibi. If Isobel finds out. Not that you’re exactly man of the match in her eyes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No offence, mate, but you’ve told me what her opinion is.’

‘What is her opinion of’ – I hesitated – ‘of me?’

He pressed one final handful of crisps in his mouth and washed it down with that disgusting phosphoric acid-flavoured drink called Coca-Cola.

‘Her opinion is that you are a selfish bastard.’

‘Why does she think that?’

‘Maybe because you are a selfish bastard. But then, we’re all selfish bastards.’

‘Are we?’

‘Oh yeah. It’s our DNA. Dawkins pointed that out to us, way back. But you, man, your selfish gene is on a different level. With you, I should imagine, your selfish gene is similar to the one that smashed a rock over the head of that penultimate Neanderthal, before turning round and screwing his wife.’

He smiled and carried on watching the match. It was a long match. Elsewhere in the universe, stars formed and others ceased to be. Was this the purpose of human existence? Was the purpose somewhere inside the pleasure, or at least the casual simplicity of a football match? Eventually, the game ended.

‘That was great,’ I lied, as we walked out of the grounds.

‘Was it? We lost four nil.’

‘Yes, but while I watched it I didn’t think once about my mortality, or the various other difficulties our mortal form will bring in later life.’

He looked bewildered again. He was going to say something but he was beaten to it by someone throwing an empty can at my head. Even though it was thrown from behind I had sensed it coming, and ducked quickly out of the way. Ari was stunned by my reflexes. As, I think, was the can-thrower.

‘Oi, wanker,’ the can-thrower said, ‘you’re that freak on the web. The naked one. Bit warm, ain’t you? With all those clothes on.’

‘Piss off, mate,’ Ari said nervously.

The man did the opposite.

The can-thrower was walking over. He had red cheeks and very small eyes and greasy black hair. He was flanked by two friends. All three of them had faces ready for violence. Red Cheeks leaned in close to Ari. ‘What did you say, big man?’

‘There might have been a “piss” in there,’ said Ari, ‘and there was definitely an “off”.’

The man grabbed Ari’s coat. ‘Think you’re smart?’

‘Moderately.’

I held the man’s arm. ‘Get off me, you fucking perv,’ he responded. ‘I was speaking to fat bastard.’

I wanted to hurt him. I had never wanted to hurt anyone – only needed to, and there was a difference. With this person, there was a definite desire to hurt him. I heard the rasp of his breath, and tightened his lungs. Within seconds he was reaching for his inhaler. ‘We’ll be on our way,’ I said, releasing the pressure in his chest. ‘And you three won’t bother us again.’

Ari and I walked home, unfollowed.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ari. ‘What was that?’

I didn’t answer. How could I? What that had been was something Ari could never understand.

Clouds gathered together quickly. The sky darkened.

It looked like rain. I hated rain, as I have told you. I knew Earth rain wasn’t sulphuric acid, but rain, all rain, was something I could not abide. I panicked.

I started running.

‘Wait!’ said Ari, who was running behind me. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Rain!’ I said, wishing for a dome around the whole of Cambridge. ‘I can’t stand rain.’

Light-bulb

‘Have a nice time?’ Isobel asked on my return. She was standing on top of one form of primitive technology (step-ladder) changing another one (incandescent light-bulb).

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did some good groaning. But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll go again.’

She dropped the new bulb. It smashed. ‘Damn. We don’t have another one.’ She looked, almost, like she might cry about this fact. She stepped down from the ladder, and I stared up at the dead light-bulb still hanging there. I concentrated hard. A moment later it was working again.

‘That was lucky. It didn’t need changing after all.’

Isobel stared at the light. The golden illumination on her skin was quite mesmerising, for some reason. The way it shifted shadow. Made her more distinctly herself. ‘How weird,’ she said. Then she looked down at the broken glass.

‘I’ll see to that,’ I said. And she smiled at me and her hand touched mine and gave it a quick pulse of gratitude. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting at all. She embraced me, gently, with broken glass still at our feet.

I breathed her in. I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realised the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

‘Oh Andrew,’ she said. I didn’t know what she meant by this simple declaration of my name, but when she stroked my back I found myself stroking hers, and saying the words that seemed somehow the most appropriate. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…’

Shopping

I went to the funeral of Daniel Russell. I watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, and earth being sprinkled over the top of the wood casket. There were lots of people there, most of them wearing black. A few were crying.

Afterwards, Isobel wanted to go over and talk to Tabitha. Tabitha looked different to when I had last seen her. She looked older, even though it had only been a week. She wasn’t crying, but it seemed like an effort not to.

Isobel stroked her arm. ‘Listen, Tabitha, I just want you to know, we’re here. Whatever you need, we’re here.’

‘Thank you, Isobel. That really does mean a lot. It really does.’

‘Just basic stuff. If you don’t feel up to the supermarket. I mean, supermarkets are not the most sympathetic of places.’

‘That’s very kind. I know you can do it online, but I’ve never got the hang of it.’

‘Well, don’t worry. We’ll sort it out.’

And this actually happened. Isobel went to get another human’s shopping, and paid for it, and came home and told me I was looking better.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You’re looking yourself again.’

The Zeta Function

‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ Isobel asked me, the next Monday morning, as I ate my first peanut butter sandwich of the day.

Newton was asking it, too. Either that, or he was asking about the sandwich. I tore him off a piece. ‘Yes. It will be fine. What could go wrong?’

This was when Gulliver let out a mocking groan sound. The only sound he’d made all morning.

‘What’s up, Gulliver?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ he said. He didn’t expand. Instead, he left his uneaten cereal and stormed upstairs.

‘Should I follow him?’

‘No,’ Isobel said. ‘Give him time.’

I nodded.

I trusted her.

Time was her subject, after all.

An hour later I was in Andrew’s office. It was the first time I had been there since I had deleted the email to Daniel Russell. This time, I wasn’t in a rush and could absorb a few more details. As he was a professor, there were books lining every wall, designed so that from whichever angle you looked at him you would see a book.

I looked at some of the titles. Very primitive-looking in the main. A History of Binary and Other Non-decimal Numeration. Hyperbolic Geometry. The Book of Hexagonal Tessellation. Logarithmic Spirals and the Golden Mean.

There was a book written by Andrew himself. One I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been here. It was a thin book called The Zeta Function. It had the words ‘Uncorrected Proof Copy’ on the cover. I made sure the door was locked and then sat down in his chair and read every word.

And what a depressing read it was, I have to say. It was about the Riemann hypothesis, and what seemed like his futile quest to prove it and explain why the spaces between prime numbers increased the way they did. The tragedy was in realising how desperately he had wanted to solve it – and, of course, after he’d written the book he had solved it, though the benefits he’d imagined would never happen, because I had destroyed the proof. And I began to think of how fundamentally our equivalent mathematical breakthrough – the one which we came to know as the Second Basic Theory of Prime Numbers – had on us. How it enabled us to do all that we can do. Travel the universe. Inhabit other worlds, transform into other bodies. Live as long as we want to live. Search each other’s minds, each other’s dreams. All that.

The Zeta Function did, however, list all the things humans had achieved. The main steps on the road. The developments that had advanced them towards civilisation. Fire, that was a biggie. The plough. The printing press. The steam engine. The microchip. The discovery of DNA. And humans would be the first to congratulate themselves on all this. But the trouble was, for them, they had never made the leap most other intelligent life forms in the universe had made.

Oh, they had built rockets and probes and satellites. A few of them even worked. Yet, really, their mathematics had thus far let them down. They had yet to do the big stuff. The synchronisation of brains. The creation of free-thinking computers. Automation technology. Inter-galactic travel. And as I read, I realised I was stopping all these opportunities. I had killed their future.

The phone rang. It was Isobel.

‘Andrew, what are you doing? Your lecture started ten minutes ago.’

She was cross, but in a concerned way. It still felt strange, and new, having someone be worried about me. I didn’t fully understand this concern, or what she gained by having it, but I must confess I quite liked being the subject of it. ‘Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. I will go. Bye, erm, darling.’

Be careful. We are listening.

The problem with equations

I walked into the lecture hall. It was a large room made predominantly of dead trees.

There were a lot of people staring at me. These were students. Some had pens and paper. Others had computers. All were waiting for knowledge. I scanned the room. There were 102 of them, in total. Always an unsettling number, stuck as it is between two primes. I tried to work out the students’ knowledge level. You see, I didn’t want to overshoot. I looked behind me. There was a whiteboard where words and equations were meant to be written but there was nothing on it.

I hesitated. And during that hesitation someone sensed my weakness. Someone on the back row. A male of about twenty, with bushy blond hair and a T-shirt which said ‘What part of N = R x f^s x f^p x n^e x f ^l x fⁱ x f^c x L don’t you understand?’

He giggled at the wit he was about to display and shouted out, ‘You look a bit overdressed today, Professor!’ He giggled some more, and it was contagious; the howling laughter spreading like fire across the whole hall. Within moments, everyone in the hall was laughing. Well, everyone except one person, a female.

The non-laughing female was looking at me intently. She had red curly hair, full lips and wide eyes. She had a startling frankness about her appearance. An openness that reminded me of a death flower. She was wearing a cardigan and coiling strands of her hair around her finger.

‘Calm down,’ I said, to the rest of them. ‘That is very funny. I get it. I am wearing clothes and you are referring to an occasion in which I was not wearing clothes. Very funny. You think it is a joke, like when Georg Cantor said the scientist Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, or when John Nash started seeing men in hats who weren’t really there. That was funny. The human mind is a limited, but high plateau. Spend your life at its outer limits and, oops, you might fall off. That is funny. Yes. But don’t worry, you won’t fall off. Young man, you are right there in the middle of your plateau. Though I appreciate your concern, I have to say I am feeling much better now. I am wearing underpants and socks and trousers and even a shirt.’

People were laughing again, but this time the laughter felt warmer. And it did something to me, inside, this warmth. So then I started laughing, too. Not at what I had just said, because I didn’t see how that was funny. No. I was laughing at myself. The impossible fact that I was there, on that most absurd planet and yet actually liking being there. And I felt an urge to tell someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it and I realised that I didn’t want to tell the hosts. I wanted to tell Isobel.

Anyway, I did the lecture. Apparently I had been meant to be talking about something called ‘post-Euclidean geometry’. But I didn’t want to talk about that, so I talked about the boy’s T-shirt.

The formula written on it was something called Drake’s equation. It was an equation devised to calculate the likelihood of advanced civilisations in Earth’s galaxy, or what the humans called the Milky Way galaxy. (That is how humans came to terms with the vast expanse of space. By saying it looks like a splatter of spilt milk. Something dropped out of the fridge that could be wiped away in a second.)

So, the equation:

N = R x f^p x n^e x f ^l x f ⁱ x f^c x L

N was the number of advanced civilisations in the galaxy with whom communication might be possible. R was the average annual rate at which stars were formed. The f ^p was the fraction of those stars with planets. The n^e was the average number of those planets that have the right eco-systems for life. The f ¹ was the fraction of those planets where life would actually develop. The f ⁱ was the fraction of the above planets that could develop intelligence. The f ^c was the fraction of those where a communicative technologically advanced civilisation could develop. And L was the lifetime of the communicative phase.

Various astrophysicists had looked at all the data and decided that there must, in fact, be millions of planets in the galaxy containing life, and even more in the universe at large. And some of these were bound to have advanced life with very good technology. This of course was true. But the humans didn’t just stop there. They came up with a paradox. They said, ‘Hold on, this can’t be right. If there are this many extraterrestrial civilisations with the ability to contact us then we would know about it because they would have contacted us.’

‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ said the male whose T-shirt started this detour.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s not. Because the equation should have some other fractions in there. For instance, it should have—’

I turned and wrote on the board behind me:

f^cgas

‘Fraction who could give a shit about visiting or communicating with Earth.’

And then:

f^dsbthdr

‘Fraction who did so but the humans didn’t realise.’

It was not exactly difficult to make human students of mathematics laugh. Indeed, I had never met a sub-category of life form so desperate to laugh – but still, it felt good. For a few brief moments, it even felt slightly more than good.

I felt warmth and, I don’t know, a kind of forgiveness or acceptance from these students.

‘But listen,’ I said, ‘don’t worry. Those aliens up there – they don’t know what they are missing.’

Applause. (When humans really like something they clap their hands together. It makes no sense. But when they do it on behalf of you, it warms your brain.)

And then, at the end of the lecture, the staring woman came up to me.

The open flower.

She stood close to me. Normally, when humans stand and talk to each other they try and leave some air between them, for purposes of breathing and etiquette and claustrophobia limitation. With this one, there was very little air.

‘I phoned,’ she said, with her full mouth, in a voice I had heard before, ‘to ask about you. But you weren’t there. Did you get my message?’

‘Oh. Oh yes. Maggie. I got the message.’

‘You seemed on top form today.’

‘Thank you. I thought I would do something a bit different.’

She laughed. The laughter was fake, but something about its fakeness made me excited for some unfathomable reason. ‘Are we still having our first Tuesdays of the month?’ she asked me.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, utterly confused. ‘First Tuesdays of the month will be left intact.’

‘That’s good.’ Her voice sounded warm and menacing, like the wind that speeds across the southern waste lands of home. ‘And listen, you know that heavy conversation we had, the night before you went la-la?’

‘La-la?’

‘You know. Before your routine at Corpus Christi.’

‘What did I tell you? My mind’s a little hazy about that night, that’s all.’

‘Oh, the kind of things you can’t say in lecture halls.’

‘Mathematical things?’

‘Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but mathematical things are the kind of things you can say in lecture halls.’

I wondered about this woman, this girl, and more specifically I wondered what kind of relationship she’d had with Andrew Martin.

‘Yes. Oh yes. Of course.’

This Maggie knew nothing, I told myself.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you.’

‘Yes. Yes. See you.’

She walked away, and I watched her walk away. For a moment there was no fact in the universe except the one that related to a female human called Maggie walking away from me. I didn’t like her, but I had no idea why.

The violet

A little while later I was in the college café, with Ari, having a grapefruit juice while he had a sugar-laden coffee and a packet of beef-flavoured crisps.

‘How’d it go, mate?’

I tried not to catch his cow-scented breath. ‘Good. Good. I educated them about alien life. Drake’s Equation.’

‘Bit out of your territory?’

‘Out of my territory? What do you mean?’

‘Subject-wise.’

‘Mathematics is every subject.’

He screwed up his face. ‘Tell ’em about Fermi’s Paradox?’

‘They told me, actually.’

‘All bollocks.’

‘You think?’

‘Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?’

‘That is pretty much what I said.’

‘I mean, personally, I think physics tells us there is an exo-planet out there with life on it. But I don’t think we understand what we’re looking for or what form it will take. Though I think this will be the century we find it. Course, most people don’t want to find it. Even the ones who pretend they do. They don’t want to really.’

‘Don’t they? Why not?’

He held up his hand. A signal for me to have patience while he completed the important task of chewing and then swallowing the crisps that were in his mouth. ‘’Cause it troubles people. They turn it into a joke. You’ve got the brightest physicists in the world these days, saying over and over and over, as plainly as physicists can manage, that there has to be other life out there. And other people too – and I mean thick people, mainly – you know, star sign people, the kind of people whose ancestors used to find omens in ox shit. But not just them, other people too, people who should know a lot better – you’ve got those people saying aliens are obviously made up because War of the Worlds was made up and Close Encounters of The Third Kind was made up and though they liked those things they kind of formed a prejudice in their head that aliens can only be enjoyed as fiction. Because if you believe in them as fact you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said.’

‘Which is what?

‘That humans are not at the centre of things. You know, the planet is in orbit around the sun. That was a fucking hilarious joke in the 1500s, but Copernicus wasn’t a comedian. He was, apparently, the least funny man of the whole Renaissance. He made Raphael look like Richard Pryor. But he was telling the fucking truth. The planet is in orbit around the sun. But that was out there, I’m telling you. Course, he made sure he was dead by the time it was published. Let Galileo take the heat.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

As I listened, I noticed a pain begin behind my eyes, getting sharper. On the fringes of my vision there was a blur of violet.

‘Oh, and animals have nervous systems,’ Ari went on, between swigs of coffee. ‘And could feel pain. That annoyed a few people at the time, too. And some people still don’t want to believe the world is as old as it is because that would mean having to accept the truth that humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.’

‘Right,’ I said, massaging my eyelids.

‘Recorded history is just the length it takes to the flush. And now we know we don’t have free will, people are getting pissed off about that, too. So, if and when they discover aliens they’d be really pretty unsettled because then we’d have to know, once and for all, that there is nothing really unique or special about us at all.’ He sighed, and gazed intently at the interior of his empty packet of crisps. ‘So I can see why it’s easy to dismiss alien life as a joke, one for teenage boys with overactive wrists and imaginations.’

‘What would happen,’ I asked him, ‘if an actual alien were found on Earth?’

‘What do you think would happen?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’

‘Well, I think if they had the brains to get here they’d have the brains to not reveal they were alien. They could have been here. They could have arrived in things that weren’t anything like sci-fi ‘ships’. They might not have UFOs. There might be no flying involved, and no object to fail to identify. Who the fuck knows? Maybe they were just you.’

I sat upright in my chair. Alert. ‘What?’

‘U. As in: no FO. Unidentified. Unidentified.’

‘Okay. But what if, somehow, they were identified. They were “I”. What if humans knew an alien was living among them?’

After asking this, all around the café appeared little wisps of violet in the air, which no one seemed to notice.

Ari downed the last of his coffee, and then considered for a moment. Scratched his face with his meaty fingers. ‘Well, put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be that poor bastard.’

‘Ari,’ I said. ‘Ari, I am that—’

Poor bastard, was what I was going to say. But I didn’t because right then, at that precise moment, there was a noise inside my head. It was a sound of the highest possible frequency and it was extremely loud. Accompanying it, and matching it for intensity, was the pain behind my eyes, which became infinitely worse. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, and it was a pain I had no control over.

Wishing it not to be there wasn’t the same thing as it not being there, and that confused me. Or it would have done, if I’d had the capacity to think beyond the pain. And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet. But this sharp, throbbing heat pressing behind my eyes was too much.

‘Mate, what’s up?’

I was holding my head by this point, trying to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.

I looked at Ari’s unshaven face, then at the few other people in the café, and the girl with glasses who was standing behind the counter. Something was happening to them, and to the whole place. Everything was dissolving into a rich, varied violet, a colour more familiar to me than any other. ‘The hosts,’ I said, aloud and almost simultaneously the pain increased further. ‘Stop, oh stop, oh stop.’

‘Man, I’m calling an ambulance,’ he said, because I was on the floor now. A swirling violet sea.

‘No.’

I fought against it. I got to my feet.

The pain lessened.

The ringing became a low hum.

The violet faded. ‘It was nothing,’ I said.

Ari laughed, nervous. ‘I’m no expert but that honestly looked like something.’

‘It was just a headache. A flash of pain. I’ll go to the doctor and check it out.’

‘You should. You really should.’

‘Yes. I will.’

I sat down. An ache remained, as a reminder, for a while, along with a few ethereal wisps in the air only I could see.

‘You were going to say something. About other life.’

‘No,’ I said quietly.

‘Pretty sure you were, man.’

‘Yeah, well. I think I’ve forgotten.’

And after that the pain disappeared altogether, and the air lost its final trace of violet.

The possibility of pain

I didn’t mention anything to Isobel or Gulliver. I knew it was unwise, because I knew the pain had been a warning. And besides, even if I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t have, because Gulliver had arrived home with a bruised eye. When human skin bruises, the skin takes various shades. Greys, browns, blues, greens. Among them, a dull violet. Beautiful, petrifying violet.

‘Gulliver, what happened?’ His mother asked the question quite a few times that evening but never got a satisfactory reply. He went into the small utility room behind the kitchen and closed the door.

‘Please, Gull, come out of there,’ said his mother. ‘We need to talk about this.’

‘Gulliver, come out of there,’ I added.

Eventually he opened the door. ‘Just leave me alone.’ That ‘alone’ was said with such a hard, cold force Isobel decided it was best to grant him that wish so we stayed downstairs while he trudged up to his room.

‘I’m going to have to phone the school about this tomorrow.’

I said nothing. Of course, I would later realise this was a mistake. I should have broken my promise to Gulliver and told her that he hadn’t been going to school. But I didn’t, because it wasn’t my duty. I did have a duty, but it wasn’t to humans. Even these ones. Especially these ones. And it was a duty I was already failing to follow, as that afternoon’s warning in the café had told me.

Newton, though, had a different sense of duty and he headed up three flights of stairs to be with Gulliver. Isobel didn’t know what to do, so she opened a few cupboard doors, stared into the cupboards, sighed, then closed them again.

‘Listen,’ I found myself saying, ‘he is going to have to find his own way, and make his own mistakes.’

‘We need to find out who did that to him, Andrew. That’s what we need to do. People can’t just go around inflicting violence on human beings like that. They just can’t do that. What ethical code do you live by where you can sound so indifferent about it?’

What could I say? ‘I’m sorry. I’m not indifferent. I care for him, of course I do.’ And the terrifying thing, the absolutely awful fact I had to face, was that I was right. I did care. The warning had failed, you see. Indeed, it had had the opposite effect.

That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.

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

I couldn’t sleep.

Of course I couldn’t. I had a whole universe to worry about.

And I kept thinking about the pain, and the sound, and the violet.

On top of that, it was raining.

I decided to leave Isobel in bed and go and talk with Newton. I headed slowly downstairs, with my hands over my ears, trying to cancel out the sound of falling cloud water drumming against the windows. To my disappointment Newton was sleeping soundly in his basket.

On my return upstairs I noticed something else. The air was cooler than it should have been, and the coolness was coming from above rather than below. This went against the order of things. I thought of his bruised eye, and I thought further back.

I headed up towards the attic and noticed that everything there was exactly as it should be. The computer, the Dark Matter posters, the random array of socks – everything, that was, except Gulliver himself.

A piece of paper floated towards me, carried on the breeze from the open window. On it were two words.

I’m sorry.

I looked at the window. Outside was the night and the shivering stars of this most alien, yet most familiar galaxy.

Somewhere beyond this sky was home. I realised I could now get back there if I wanted. I could just finish my task and be back in my painless world. The window sloped in line with the roof, which like so many roofs here was designed to usher away the rain. It was easy enough for me to climb out of but for Gulliver it must have been quite an exertion.

The difficult thing for me was the rain itself.

It was relentless.

Skin-soaking.

I saw him sitting on the edge, next to the gutter rail, with his knees pulled into his chest. He looked cold and bedraggled. And seeing him there I saw him not as a special entity, an exotic collection of protons, electrons and neutrons, but as a – using the human term – as a person. And I felt, I don’t know, connected with him. Not in the quantum sense in which everything was connected to everything else, and in which every atom spoke to and negotiated with every other atom. No. This was on another level. A level far, far harder to understand.

Can I end his life?

I started walking towards him. Not easy, given the human feet and 45-degree angle and the wet slate – sleek quartz and muscovite – on which I was relying.

When I was getting close he turned around and saw me.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He was frightened. That was the main thing I noticed.

‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’

‘Dad, just go away.’

What he was saying made sense. I mean, I could have just left him there. I could have escaped the rain, the terrible sensation of that falling water on my thin non-vascular skin, and gone inside. It was then I had to face why I was really out there.

‘No,’ I said, to my own confusion. ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go away.’

I slipped a little. A tile came unstuck, slid, fell and smashed to the ground. The smash woke Newton, who started barking.

Gulliver’s eyes widened, then his head jerked away. His whole body seemed full of nervous intention.

‘Don’t do it,’ I said.

He let go of something. It landed in the gutter. The small plastic cylinder that had contained the twenty-eight diazepam tablets. Now empty.

I stepped closer. I had read enough human literature to realise that suicide was a real option, here, on Earth. Yet again I wondered why this should have bothered me.

I was becoming mad.

Losing my rationality.

If Gulliver wanted to kill himself then, logically, that solved a major problem. And I should just stand back and let it happen.

‘Gulliver, listen to me. Don’t jump. Trust me, you’re nowhere near high enough to guarantee that you’ll kill yourself.’ This was true, but as far as I could calculate there was still a very good chance of him falling and dying on impact. In which instance, there would be nothing I could do to help him. Injuries could always be healed. Death meant death. A zero squared was still a zero.

‘I remember swimming with you,’ he said, ‘when I was eight. When we were in France. Can you remember, that night you taught me how to play dominoes?’

He looked back at me, wanting to see a recognition I couldn’t give him. It was hard to see his bruised eye in this light; there was so much darkness across his face he might as well have been all bruise.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I remember that.’

‘Liar! You don’t remember.’

‘Listen, Gulliver, let’s go inside. Let’s talk about this indoors. If you still want to kill yourself I’ll take you to a higher building.’

Gulliver didn’t seem to be listening, as I kept stepping on the slippery slate towards him.

‘That’s the last good memory I have,’ he said. It sounded sincere.

‘Come on, that can’t be true.’

‘Do you have any idea what it’s like? To be your son?’

‘No. I don’t.’

He pointed to his eye. ‘This. This is what it’s like.’

‘Gulliver, I’m sorry.’

‘Do you know what it’s like to feel stupid all the time?’

‘You’re not stupid.’ I was still standing. The human way would have been to shuffle down on my backside, but that would have taken too much time. So I kept taking tentative steps on the slate, leaning back just enough, in continuous negotiation with gravity.

‘I’m stupid. I’m nothing.’

‘No, Gulliver, you’re not. You’re something. You’re—’

He wasn’t listening.

The diazepam was taking hold of him.

‘How many tablets did you take?’ I asked. ‘All of them?’

I was nearly at him, my hand was almost within grasping distance of his shoulder as his eyes closed and he disappeared into sleep, or prayer.

Another tile came loose. I slipped on to my side, losing my footing on the rain-greased tiles until I was left hanging on to the gutter rail. I could have easily climbed back up. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Gulliver was now tilting forward.

‘Gulliver, wait! Wake up! Wake up, Gulliver!’

The tilt gained momentum.

‘No!’

He fell, and I fell with him. First internally, a kind of emotional falling, a silent howl into an abyss, and then physically. I sped through the air with a dreadful velocity.

I broke my legs.

So that was my intention. Let the legs take the pain, and not the head, because I would need my head. But the pain was immense. For a moment I worried they wouldn’t reheal. It was only the sight of Gulliver lying totally unconscious on the ground a few metres away that gave me focus. Blood leaked from his ear. To heal him I knew I would first of all need to heal myself. And it happened. Simply wishing was enough, if you wished hard enough, with the right kind of intelligence.

That said, cell regeneration and bone reconstruction still took a lot of energy, especially as I was losing a lot of blood and had multiple fractures. But the pain diminished as a strange, intense fatigue took over me and gravity tried to grip me to the ground. My head hurt, but not as a result of the fall; from the exertion involved in my physical restoration.

I stood up dizzily. I managed to move towards where Gulliver lay, the horizontal ground now sloping more than the roof.

‘Gulliver. Come on. Can you hear me? Gulliver?’

I could have called for help, I knew that. But help meant an ambulance and a hospital. Help meant humans grasping around in the dark of their own medical ignorance. Help meant delay and a death I was meant to approve of, but couldn’t.

‘Gulliver?’

There was no pulse. He was dead. I must have been seconds too late. I could already detect the first tiny descent in his body temperature.

Rationally, I should have resigned myself to this fact.

And yet.

I had read a lot of Isobel’s work and so I knew that the whole of human history was full of people who tried against the odds. Some succeeded, most failed, but that hadn’t stopped them. Whatever else you could say about these particular primates, they could be determined. And they could hope. Oh yes, they could hope.

And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort. At home, nothing had been an effort. That was the whole point of home, the comfort of a perfectly effortless existence. Yet there I was. Hoping. Not that I was standing there, passively, just wishing him better from a distance. Of course not. I placed my left hand – my gift hand – to his heart, and I began to work.

The thing with feathers

It was exhausting.

I thought of binary stars. A red giant and a white dwarf, side by side, the life force of one being sucked into that of the other.

His death was a fact I was convinced I could disprove, or dissuade.

But death wasn’t a white dwarf. It was a good bit beyond that. It was a black hole. And once you stepped past that event horizon, you were in very difficult territory.

You are not dead. Gulliver, you are not dead.

I kept at it, because I knew what life was, I understood its nature, its character, its stubborn insistence.

Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.

There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities.

A chair could stop being a chair at any moment. That was quantum physics. And you could manipulate atoms if you knew how to talk to them.

You are not dead, you are not dead.

I felt terrible. Waves of deep-level pained, bone-scorching effort tore through me like solar flares. And yet he still lay there. His face, I noticed for the first time, looking like his mother. Serene, egg-fragile, precious.

A light came on inside the house. Isobel must have woken, from the sound of Newton’s barking if nothing else, but I wasn’t conscious of that. I was just aware that Gulliver was suddenly illuminated and, shortly after, there was the faintest flicker of a pulse beneath my hand.

Hope.

‘Gulliver, Gulliver, Gulliver—’

Another pulse.

Stronger.

A defiant drumbeat of life. A back-beat, waiting for melody.

Duh-dum.

And again, and again, and again.

He was alive. His lips twitched, his bruised eyes moved like an egg about to hatch. One opened. So did the other. It was the eyes, on Earth, that mattered. You saw the person, and the life inside them, if you saw the eyes. And I saw him, this messed-up, sensitive boy and felt, for a moment, the exhausted wonder of a father. It should have been a moment to savour, but it wasn’t. I was being flooded with pain, and violet.

I could feel myself about to collapse on to the glossy wet ground.

Footsteps behind me. And that was the last thing I heard before the darkness arrived to make its claim, along with remembered poetry, as Emily Dickinson shyly came towards me through the violet and whispered in my ear.

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens

I was back at home, on Vonnadoria, and it was exactly how it had always been. And I was exactly how I had always been, among them, the hosts, feeling no pain and no fear.

Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity.

Any human who arrived here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they had entered Heaven

But what happened in Heaven?

What did you do there?

After a while, didn’t you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn’t light need shade? Didn’t it? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I was missing the point. Maybe the point was to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. It certainly had been, but what happened if you’d never required that aim because you were born after that goal had been met? I was younger than the hosts. I did not share their appreciation of just how lucky I was. Not any more. Not even in a dream.

In-between

I woke up.

On Earth.

But I was so weak I was returning to my original state. I had heard about this. Indeed, I had swallowed a word capsule about it. Rather than allow you to die your body would return to its original state, because the amount of extra energy deployed to be someone else would more usefully serve to preserve your life. And that was all the gifts were there for, really. Self-preservation. The protection of eternity.

Which was fine, in theory. In theory, it was a great idea. But the only problem was that this was Earth. And my original state wasn’t equipped for the air here, or the gravity, or the face-to-face contact. I didn’t want Isobel to see me. It just could not happen.

And so, as soon as I felt my atoms itch and tingle, warm and shift, I told Isobel to do what she was already doing: looking after Gulliver.

And as she crouched down, with her back to me, I got to my feet, which at this point were recognisably human-shaped. Then I shifted myself – midway between two contrasting forms – across the back garden. Luckily the garden was large and dark, with lots of flowers and shrubs and trees to hide behind. So I did. I hid among the beautiful flowers. And I saw Isobel looking around, even as she was calling for an ambulance for Gulliver.

‘Andrew!’ she said at one point, as Gulliver got to his feet.

She even ran into the garden to have a look. But I stayed still.

‘Where have you disappeared to?’

My lungs began to burn. I needed more nitrogen.

It would have taken only one word in my native tongue. Home. The one the hosts were primed to hear, and I would be back there. So why didn’t I say it? Because I hadn’t finished my task? No. It wasn’t that. I was never going to finish my task. That was the education this night had brought me. So why? Why was I choosing risk and pain over their opposites? What had happened to me? What was wrong?

Newton, now, came out into the garden. He trotted along, sniffing the plants and flowers until he sensed me standing there. I expected him to bark and draw attention, but he didn’t. He just stared at me, his eyes shining blank circles, and seemed to know exactly who it was, standing behind the juniper bushes. But he stayed quiet.

He was a good dog.

And I loved him.

I can’t do it.

We know.

There is no point in doing it anyway.

There is every point.

I don’t believe Isobel and Gulliver should be harmed.

We believe you have been corrupted.

I haven’t. I have gained more knowledge. That is all that has happened.

No. You have been infected by them.

Infected? Infected? With what?

With emotion.

No. I haven’t. That is not true.

It is true.

Listen, emotions have a logic. Without emotions humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you.

You are speaking like one of them. You are not a human. You are one of us. We are one.

I know I am not a human.

We think you need to come home.

No.

You must come home.

I never had a family.

We are your family.

No. It isn’t the same.

We want you home.

I have to ask to come home and I am not going to. You can interfere with my mind but you can’t control it.

We will see.

Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of dominoes

The next day we were in the living room. Me and Isobel. Newton was upstairs with Gulliver, who was now asleep. We had checked on him but Newton was staying there, on guard.

‘How are you?’ asked Isobel.

‘It was not death,’ I said. ‘For I stood up.’

‘You saved his life,’ said Isobel.

‘I don’t think so. I didn’t even have to do CPR. The doctor said he had very minor injuries.’

‘I don’t care what the doctor says. He jumped from the roof. That could have killed him. Why didn’t you shout for me?’

‘I did.’ It was a lie, obviously, but the whole framework was a lie. The belief that I was her husband. It was all fiction. ‘I did shout for you.’

‘You could have killed yourself.’

(I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time – almost all of it – with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.) ‘But I didn’t kill myself. I am alive. Let’s concentrate on that.’

‘What happened to your tablets? They were in the cupboard.’

‘I threw them away.’ This was a lie, obviously. The unclear thing was who I was protecting? Isobel? Gulliver? Myself?

‘Why? Why would you throw them away?’

‘I didn’t think it was a good idea, to have them lying around. You know, given his condition.’

‘But they’re diazepam. That’s valium. You can’t overdose on valium, you’d need a thousand.’

‘No. I know that.’ I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.

Isobel nodded. She too was drinking tea. The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.

‘Do you know what they told me?’ she said.

‘No. What? What did they tell you?’

‘They told me he could stay in.’

‘Right.’

‘It was up to me. I had to say if I thought he was a suicide risk or not. And I said I thought he would be more of a risk in there than out here. They said if he tried anything like this again then there’d be no choice about it. He’d be admitted, and they’d watch him.’

‘Oh. Well, we’ll watch him. That’s what I say. That hospital is full of mad people. People who think they’re from other planets. Stuff like that.’

She smiled a sad smile, and blew a brown tide of ripples across the surface of her drink. ‘Yes. Yes. We’ll have to.’

I tried to understand something. ‘It’s me, isn’t it? It was my fault, for that day I didn’t wear clothes.’

Something about this question switched the mood. Isobel’s face hardened. ‘Andrew, do you really think this was about one day? About your breakdown?’

‘Oh,’ I said, which I knew wasn’t in context. But I had nothing else to say. ‘Oh’ was always the word I resorted to, the one that filled empty spaces. It was verbal tea. The ‘oh’ should have really been a ‘no’, because I didn’t think this was about one day. I thought it was about thousands of days, most of which I hadn’t been there to observe. And so an ‘oh’ was more appropriate.

‘This wasn’t about one event. This was about everything. It’s not obviously solely your fault but you haven’t really been there, have you, Andrew? For all his life, or at least since we moved back to Cambridge, you’ve just not been there.’

I remembered something he’d told me on the roof. ‘What about France?’

‘What?’

‘I taught him dominoes. I swam with him in a swimming pool. In France. The country. France.’

She frowned, confused. ‘France? What? The Dordogne? Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of bloody dominoes. Is that your “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Is that fatherhood?’

‘No. I don’t know. I was just giving a… a solid example of what he was like.’

‘He?’

‘I mean I. What I was like.’

‘You’ve been there on holiday. Yes. Yes you have. Unless they were working holidays. Come on, you remember Sydney! And Boston! And Seoul! And Turin! And, and, Düsseldorf!’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, staring at the unread books on the shelves like unlived memories. ‘I remember them vividly. Of course.’

‘We hardly saw you. And when we did see you, you were always so stressed about the lecture you were going to give or the people you were going to meet. And all those rows we had. We have. Until, you know, you got ill. And got better. Come on, Andrew, you know what I’m saying. This isn’t breaking news, is it?’

‘No. Not at all. So, where else have I failed?’

‘You haven’t failed. It’s not an academic paper to be assessed by your peers. It’s not success or failure. It’s our life. I’m not wrapping it in judgemental language. I’m just trying to tell you the objective truth.’

‘I just want to know. Tell me. Tell me things I’ve done. Or haven’t done.’

She toyed with her silver necklace. ‘Well, come on. It’s always been the same. Between the ages of two and four you weren’t back home in time for a single bath or bedtime story. You’d fly off the handle about anything that got in the way of you and your work. Or if I ever came close to mentioning that I had sacrificed my career for this family – at that time when I had been making real sacrifices – you wouldn’t even so much as postpone a book deadline. I’d be shot down in flames.’

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said, thinking of her novel, Wider Than the Sky. ‘I’ve been terrible. I have. I think you would be better off without me. I think, sometimes, that I should leave and never come back.’

‘Don’t be childish. You sound younger than Gulliver.’

‘I’m being serious. I have behaved badly. I sometimes think it would be better if I went and never returned. Ever.’

This threw her. She had her hands on her hips but her glare softened. She took a big breath.

‘I need you here. You know I need you.’

‘Why? What do I give to this relationship? I don’t understand.’

She clenched her eyes shut. Whispered, ‘That was amazing.’

‘What?’

‘What you did there. Out on the roof. It was amazing.’

She then made the most complex facial expression I have ever seen on a human. A kind of frustrated scorn, tinged with sympathy, which slowly softened into a deep, wide humour, culminating in forgiveness and something I couldn’t quite recognise, but which I thought might have been love.

‘What’s happened to you?’ She said it as a whisper, nothing more than a structured piece of breath.

‘What? Nothing. Nothing has happened to me. Well, a mental breakdown. But I’m over that. Other than that – nothing.’ I said this flippantly, trying to make her smile.

She smiled, but sadness quickly claimed her. She looked up to the ceiling. I was beginning to understand these wordless forms of communication.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, feeling kind of solid and authoritative. Kind of real. Kind of human. ‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I know,’ I said. And I stood up, again to help when I was supposed to hurt.

Social networking

Essentially, social networking on Earth was quite limited. Unlike on Vonnadoria, the brain synchronisation technology wasn’t there, so subscribers couldn’t communicate telepathically with each other as part of a true hive mind. Nor could they step into each other’s dreams and have a walk around, tasting imagined delicacies in exotic moonscapes. On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them.

But on the plus side, human computer networks, I discovered, were preposterously easy to hack into as all their security systems were based on prime numbers. And so I hacked into Gulliver’s computer and changed the name of every single person on Facebook who had bullied Gulliver to ‘I Am the Cause of Shame’, and blocked them from posting anything with the word ‘Gulliver’ in it, and gave each of them a computer virus which I dubbed ‘The Flea’ after a lovely poem. This virus ensured the only messages they would ever be able to send were ones that contained the words ‘I am hurt and so I hurt’.

On Vonnadoria I had never done anything so vindictive. Nor had I ever felt quite so satisfied.

Forever is composed of nows

We went to the park to walk Newton. Parks were the most common destination on dog walks. A piece of nature – grass, flowers, trees – that was not quite allowed to be truly natural. Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted. The flowers were beautiful. Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Gulliver, as we sat down on the bench.

‘What doesn’t?’

We watched Newton sniffing the flowers, livelier than ever.

‘I was fine. No damage. Even my eye’s better.’

‘You were lucky.’

‘Dad, before I went out on the roof, I’d had twenty-eight diazepam.’

‘You’d need more.’

He looked at me, angry for saying this, as if I was humiliating him. Using knowledge against him.

‘Your mum told me that,’ I added. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I didn’t want you to save me.’

‘I didn’t save you. You were just lucky. But I really think you should ignore feelings like that. That was a moment in your life. You have a lot more days to live. About twenty-four thousand more days to live, probably. That’s a lot of moments. You could do many great things in that time. You could read a lot of poetry.’

‘You don’t like poetry. That’s one of the few facts I know about you.’

‘It’s growing on me… Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t kill yourself. Don’t ever kill yourself. Just, that’s my advice, don’t kill yourself.’

Gulliver took something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It was a cigarette. He lit it. I asked if I could try it. Gulliver seemed troubled by this but handed it over. I sucked on the filter and brought the smoke into my lungs. And then I coughed.

‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver.

He shrugged.

‘It’s an addictive substance with a high fatality rate. I thought there would be a point.’

I handed the cigarette back to Gulliver.

‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, still confused.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

He took another drag, and suddenly realised it wasn’t doing anything for him either. He flicked the cigarette in a steep arc towards the grass.

‘If you want,’ I said, ‘we could play dominoes when we get home. I bought a box this morning.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Or we could go to the Dordogne.’

‘What?’

‘Go swimming.’

He shook his head. ‘You need some more tablets.’

‘Yes. Maybe. You ate all mine.’ I tried to smile, playfully, and try some more Earth humour. ‘You fucker!’

There was a long silence. We watched Newton sniffing around the circumference of a tree. Twice.

A million suns imploded. And then Gulliver came out with it.

‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this expectation on me because I’m your son. My teachers read your books. And they look at me like some bruised apple that’s fallen off the great Andrew Martin tree. You know, the posh boy who got expelled from his boarding school. The one who set stuff on fire. Whose parents gave up on him. Not that I’m bothered about that now. But even in the holidays you were never around. You were always somewhere else. Or just making everything tense and horrible with Mum. It’s just shit. You should have just done the right thing and got divorced years ago. You’ve not got anything in common.’

I thought about all this. And didn’t know what to say. Cars passed by on the road behind us. The sound was very melancholy somehow, like the bass rumble of a sleeping Bazadean. ‘What was your band called?’

‘The Lost,’ he said.

A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now I was empathising with humans I could empathise with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem. Emily Dickinson was making me human. But not that human. There was a dull ache in my head and a small weight of tiredness in my eyes as the leaf became green.

I brushed it away quickly, but it was too late.

‘What just happened?’ Gulliver asked, staring at the leaf as it floated away on the breeze.

I tried to ignore him. He asked again.

‘Nothing happened to the leaf,’ I said.

He forgot about the leaf he might have seen the moment he saw two teenage girls and a boy his own age walking on the road that ran behind the park. The girls were laughing into their hands at the sight of us. I have realised that, essentially, there are two broad categories of human laughter, and this was not the good kind.

The boy was the boy I had seen on Gulliver’s Facebook page. Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke.

Gulliver shrank.

‘It’s the Martin Martians! Freaks!’

Gulliver cowered lower on the bench, crippled with shame.

I turned around, assessed Theo’s physical structure and dynamic potential. ‘My son could beat you into the ground,’ I shouted. ‘He could flatten your face into a more attractive geometric form.’

‘Fuck, Dad,’ said Gulliver, ‘what are you doing? He’s the one who fucked up my face.’

I looked at him. He was a black hole. The violence was all inward. It was time for him to push some the other way.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’re a human. It’s time to act like one.’

Violence

‘No,’ said Gulliver.

But it was too late. Theo was crossing the road. ‘Yeah, you’re a comedian now, are you?’ he said as he swaggered towards us.

‘It would be fucking amusing to see you lose to my fucking son, if that’s what you fucking mean,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, my dad’s a Taekwondo teacher. He taught me how to fight.’

‘Well, Gulliver’s father is a mathematician. So he wins.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘You will lose,’ I told the boy, and I made sure the words went all the way down and stayed there, like rocks in a shallow pond.

Theo laughed, and jumped with troubling ease over the low stone wall that bordered the park, with the girls following. This boy, Theo, was not as tall as Gulliver but more strongly built. He was almost devoid of neck and his eyes were so close together he was borderline cyclopic. He was walking backwards and forwards on the grass in front of us, warming up by punching and kicking the air.

Gulliver was as pale as milk. ‘Gulliver,’ I told him, ‘you fell off a roof yesterday. That boy is not a forty-foot drop. There is nothing to him. No depth. You know how he is going to fight.’

‘Yes,’ said Gulliver. ‘He’s going to fight well.’

‘But you, you’ve got surprise on your side. You aren’t scared of anything. All you’ve got to do is realise that this Theo symbolises everything you’ve ever hated. He is me. He is bad weather. He is the primitive soul of the Internet. He is the injustice of fate. I am asking, in other words, for you to fight him like you fight in your sleep. Lose everything. Lose all shame and consciousness and beat him. Because you can.’

‘No,’ said Gulliver, ‘I can’t.’

I lowered my voice, conjured the gifts. ‘You can. He has the same bio-chemical ingredients inside him as you do, but with less impressive neural activity.’ I saw that Gulliver looked confused, so I tapped the side of my head and explained. ‘It’s all about the oscillations.’

Gulliver stood up. I clipped the lead to Newton’s collar. He whined, sensing the atmosphere.

I watched Gulliver walk over the grass. Nervous, tight-bodied, as if being dragged by an invisible chord.

The two girls were chewing something they didn’t plan to swallow, and were giggling excitedly. Theo too was looking thrilled. Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

And then Theo hit Gulliver. And he hit him again. Both times in the face, sending Gulliver staggering backwards. Newton growled, seeking involvement, but I kept him where he was.

‘You are fucking nothing,’ said Theo, raising his foot fast through the air to Gulliver’s chest. Gulliver grabbed the leg, and Theo hopped for a while, or at least long enough to look ridiculous.

Gulliver looked at me through the still air in silence.

Then Theo was on the ground and Gulliver let him stand up before the switch flicked and he went wild, punching away as if trying to rid himself of his own body, as if it were something that could be shaken away. And pretty soon the other boy was bleeding and he fell back on the grass, his head momentarily tilting back and touching down on a rose bush. He sat up and dabbed his face with his fingers and saw the blood and looked at it as if it were a message he’d never expected to receive.

‘All right, Gulliver,’ I said, ‘It’s time to go home.’ I went over to Theo. I crouched down.

‘You are done now, do you understand?’

Theo understood. The girls were silent but still chewed, if only at half-speed. Cow-speed. We walked out of the park. Gulliver hardly had a scratch.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I hurt him.’

‘Yes. How does that make you feel? Was it cathartic?’

He shrugged. The trace of a smile hid somewhere inside his lips. It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilised surface of a human being. It wasn’t the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they’d gone to to conceal it. A homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something. So it was important, for Gulliver, to release what he only released in sleep out into the waking world.

‘Dad, you’re not yourself, are you?’ he said, before we got back.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

I expected another question but none came.

The taste of her skin

I was not Andrew. I was them. And we woke, and the still light bedroom was clotted with violet, and though my head didn’t hurt exactly, it felt extremely tight, as though my skull was a fist and my brain was the bar of soap it contained.

I tried switching off the light, but the dark didn’t work. The violet stayed, expanding and leaking across reality like spilt ink.

‘Get away,’ I urged the hosts. ‘Get away.’

But they had a hold on me. You. If you are reading this. You had a terrible hold. And I was losing myself, and I knew this because I turned over in bed and I could see Isobel in the dark, facing away from me. I could see the shape of her, half under the duvet. My hand touched the back of her neck. I felt nothing towards her. We felt nothing towards her. We didn’t even see her as Isobel. She was simply a human. The way, to a human, a cow or a chicken or a microbe is simply a cow or a chicken or a microbe.

As we touched her bare neck, we gained the reading. It was all we needed. She was asleep, and all we had to do was stop her heart from beating. It was really very easy. We moved our hand slightly lower, felt the heart beating through her ribs. The movement of our hand woke her slightly, and she turned, sleepily, and said with her eyes still closed, ‘I love you.’

The ‘you’ was a singular one, and it was a call to me or the me-Andrew she thought I was, and it was then that I managed to defeat them, become a me and not a we, and the thought that she had just escaped death by such a narrow margin made me realise the intensity of my feelings towards her.

‘What’s the matter?’

I couldn’t tell her, so I kissed her instead. Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war. You can’t touch us, is what the kiss said.

‘I love you,’ I told her, and as I smelt her skin, I knew I had never wanted anyone or anything more than I wanted her, but the craving for her was a terrifying one now. And I needed to keep underlining my point.

‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.

Afterwards, I held her and she held me and I gently kissed her forehead as the wind beat against the window.

She fell asleep.

I watched her, in the dark. I wanted to protect her and keep her safe. Then I got out of bed.

I had something to do.

I am staying here.

You can’t. You have gifts not made for that planet. Humans will become suspicious.

Well then, I want to be disconnected.

We cannot allow that.

Yes, you can. You have to. The gifts are not compulsory. That is the point. I cannot allow my mind to be interfered with.

We were not the ones interfering with your mind. We were trying to restore it.

Isobel doesn’t know anything about the proof. She doesn’t know. Just leave her. Leave us. Leave us all. Please. Nothing will happen.

You do not want immortality? You do not want the chance to return home or to visit anywhere else in the universe other than the lonely planet on which you now reside?

That is right.

You do not want the chance to take other forms? To return to your own original nature?

No. I want to be a human. Or as close to being a human as it is possible for me to be.

No one in all our histories has ever asked to lose the gifts.

Well, it is a fact you must now update.

You do realise what this means?

Yes.

You will be trapped in a body that cannot regenerate itself. You will grow old. You will get diseases. You will feel pain, and for ever know – unlike the rest of the ignorant species you want to belong to – that you have chosen that suffering. You have brought it on yourself.

Yes. I know that.

Very well. You have been given the ultimate punishment. And it makes it no less a punishment for having been asked for. You have now been disconnected. The gifts are gone. You are now human. If you declare you are from another planet you will never have proof. They will believe you are insane. And it makes no difference to us. It is easy to fill your place.

You won’t fill my place. It is a waste of resources. There is no point to the mission. Hello? Are you listening? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello?

The rhythm of life

Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.

All I know is that it’s a frightening thing. And humans are very frightened of it, which is why they have quiz shows. To take their mind off it and think of something else.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic. The opting for anguish over calm, for mortality over eternity, and for Earth over home.

I awoke feeling terrible. My eyes itched with tiredness. My back was stiff. There was a pain in my knee, and I could hear a mild ringing. Noises that belonged below a planet’s surface were coming from my stomach. Overall, the sensation I was feeling was one of conscious decay.

In short, I felt human. I felt forty-three years old. And now I had made the decision to stay I was full of anxiety.

This anxiety was not just about my physical fate. It was the knowledge that at some point in the future the hosts were going to send someone else. And what would I be able to do, now that I had no more gifts than the average human?

It was a worry, at first. But that gradually faded as time went by and nothing happened. Lesser worries began to occupy my mind. For instance, would I be able to cope with this life? What had once seemed exotic began to feel rather monotonous as things settled into a rhythm. It was the archetypal human one which went: wash, breakfast, check the Internet, work, lunch, work, dinner, talk, watch television, read a book, go to bed, pretend to be asleep, then actually sleep.

Belonging as I did to a species which had only ever really known one day, there was initially something quite exciting about having any kind of rhythm at all. But now I was stuck here for good I began to resent humans’ lack of imagination. I believed they should have tried to add a little more variety into proceedings. I mean, this was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was ‘if only I had more time’. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have had to write ‘the day after’ thirty thousand times before a final ‘tomorrow’ in order to illustrate the amount of time on a human’s hands.

The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfilment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it, and repeated it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn’t work for them – as was usually the case – they stuck to it anyway. Then they’d alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

One initial proposal I wanted to put to them was to swap things over. For instance, have five fun days and two not-fun days. That way – call me a mathematical genius – they would have more fun. But as things stood, there weren’t even two fun days. They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday’s liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week’s solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull. In other words one seventh of human days worked quite well. The other six weren’t very good, and five of those were roughly the same day stuck on repeat.

The real difficulty, for me, was mornings.

Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.

A human, typically, has to do the following things. He or she will get out of bed, sigh, stretch, go to the toilet, shower, shampoo their hair, condition their hair, wash their face, shave, deodorise, brush their teeth (with fluoride!), dry their hair, brush their hair, put on face cream, apply make-up, check everything in the mirror, choose clothes based on the weather and the situation, put on those clothes, check everything again in the mirror – and that’s just what happens before breakfast. It’s a wonder they ever get out of bed at all. But they do, repeatedly, thousands of times each. And not only that – they do it by themselves, with no technology to help them. Maybe a little electrical activity in their toothbrushes and hairdryers, but nothing more than that. And all to reduce body odour, and hairs, and halitosis, and shame.

Teenagers

Another thing adding force to the relentless gravity dogging this planet was all the worry that Isobel still had for Gulliver. She was pinching her bottom lip quite a lot, and staring vacantly out of windows. I had bought Gulliver a bass guitar, but the music he played was so gloomy it gave the house an unceasing soundtrack of despair.

‘I just keep thinking of things,’ said Isobel, when I told her that all this worry was unhealthy. ‘When he got expelled from school. He wanted it. He wanted to be expelled. It was a sort of academic suicide. I just worry, you know. He’s always been so bad at connecting with people. I can remember the first ever report he had at nursery school. It said he had resisted making any attachments. I mean, I know he’s had friends, but he’s always found it difficult. Shouldn’t there be girlfriends by now? He’s a good-looking boy.’

‘Are friends so important? What’s the point of them?’

‘Connections, Andrew. Think of Ari. Friends are how we connect to the world. I just worry, sometimes, that he’s not fixed here. To the world. To life. He reminds me of Angus.’

Angus, apparently, was her brother. He had ended his own life in his early thirties because of financial worries. I felt sad when she told me that. Sad for all the humans who find it easy to feel ashamed about things. They were not the only life form in the universe to have suicide, but they were one of the most enthusiastic about it. I wondered if I should tell her that he wasn’t going to school. I decided I should.

‘What?’ Isobel asked. But she had heard. ‘Oh God. So what’s he been doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just walking around, I think.’

‘Walking around?’

‘When I saw him he was walking.’

She was angry now, and the music Gulliver was playing (quite loudly, by this point) wasn’t helping.

And Newton was making me feel guilty with his eyes.

‘Listen, Isobel, let’s just—’

It was too late. Isobel raced up the stairs. The inevitable row ensued. I could only hear Isobel’s voice. Gulliver’s was too quiet and low, deeper than the bass guitar. ‘Why haven’t you been to school?’ his mother shouted. I followed, with nausea in my stomach, and a dull ache in my heart.

I was a traitor.

He shouted at his mother, and his mother shouted back. He mentioned something about me getting him into fights but fortunately Isobel had no clue what he was talking about.

‘Dad, you bastard,’ he said to me at one point.

‘But the guitar. That was my idea.’

‘So you’re buying me now?’

Teenagers, I realised, were really quite difficult. In the same way the south-eastern corner of the Derridean galaxy was difficult.

His door slammed. I used the right tone of voice. ‘Gulliver, calm down. I am sorry. I am only trying to do what is best for you. I am learning here. Every day is a lesson, and some lessons I fail.’

It didn’t work. Unless working meant Gulliver kicking his own door with rage. Isobel eventually went downstairs, but I stayed there. An hour and thirty-eight minutes sitting on the beige wool carpet on the other side of the door.

Newton came to join me. I stroked him. He licked my wrist with his rough tongue. I stayed right there, tilted my head towards the door.

‘I am sorry, Gulliver,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. And I am sorry I embarrassed you.’

Sometimes the only power you need is persistence. Eventually, he came out. He just looked at me, hands in pockets. He leant against the door-frame. ‘Did you do something on Facebook?’

‘I might have done.’

He tried not to smile.

He didn’t say much after that but he came downstairs and we all watched television together. It was a quiz show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (As the show was aimed at humans, the question was rhetorical.)

Then, shortly after, Gulliver went to the kitchen to see how much cereal and milk would fit into a bowl (more than you could imagine) and then he disappeared back to the attic. There was a feeling of something having been accomplished. Isobel told me she had booked us tickets to see an avant-garde production of Hamlet at the Arts Theatre. It was apparently about a suicidal young prince who wants to kill the man who has replaced his father.

‘Gulliver is staying at home,’ said Isobel.

‘That might be wise.’

Australian wine

‘I’ve forgotten to take my tablets today.’

Isobel smiled. ‘Well, one evening off won’t hurt. Do you want a glass of wine?’

I hadn’t tried wine before so I said yes, as it really did seem to be a very revered substance. It was a mild night so Isobel poured me a glass and we sat outside in the garden. Newton decided to stay indoors. I looked at the transparent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments, ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.

Then I considered the glass. The glass had been distilled from rock and so it knew things. It knew the age of the universe because it was the universe.

I took another sip.

After the third sip, I was really beginning to see the point, and it did something rather pleasant to the brain. I was forgetting the dull aches of my body and the sharp worries of my mind. By the end of the third glass I was very, very drunk. I was so drunk I looked to the sky and believed I could see two moons.

‘You do realise you’re drinking Australian wine, don’t you?’ she said.

To which I may have replied ‘Oh.’

‘You hate Australian wine.’

‘Do I? Why?’ I said.

‘Because you’re a snob.’

‘What’s a snob?’

She laughed, looked at me sideways. ‘Someone who didn’t used to sit down with his family to watch TV,’ she said. ‘Ever.’

‘Oh.’

I drank some more. So did she. ‘Maybe I am becoming less of one,’ I said.

‘Anything is possible.’ She smiled. She was still exotic to me. That was obvious, but it was a pleasant exoticism now. Beyond pleasant, in fact.

‘Actually, anything is possible,’ I told her, but didn’t go into the maths.

She put her arm around me. I did not know the etiquette. Was this the moment I was meant to recite poetry written by dead people or was I meant to massage her anatomy? I did nothing. I just let her stroke my back as I stared upwards, beyond the thermosphere, and watched the two moons slide together and become one.

The watcher

The next day I had a hangover.

I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered. I woke with a headache, a dry mouth, and a bad stomach. I left Isobel in bed and went downstairs for a glass of water, then I had a shower. I got dressed and went into the living room to read poetry.

I had the strange but real sense that I was being watched. The sense grew and grew. I stood up, went to the window. Outside the street was empty. The large, static redbrick houses just stood there, like decharged crafts on a landing strip. But still I stayed looking. I thought I could see something reflected in one of the windows, a shape beside a car. A human shape, maybe. My eyes might have been playing tricks. I was hungover, after all.

Newton pressed his nose into my knee. He released a curious high-pitched whine.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I stared out of the glass again, away from reflections, to direct reality. And then I saw it. Dark, hovering just above that same parked car. I realised what it was. It was the top of a human head. I had been right. Someone was hiding from my stare.

‘Wait there,’ I told Newton. ‘Guard the house.’

I ran outside, across the drive and onto the street, just in time to see someone sprinting away around the next corner. A man, wearing jeans and a black top. Even from behind, and at a distance, the man struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t think where I had seen him.

I turned the corner, but there was no one there. It was just another empty suburban street, and a long one. Too long for the person to have run down. Well, it wasn’t quite empty. There was an old human female, walking towards me, dragging a shopping trolley. I stopped running.

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling. Her skin was creased with age, in the way typical of the species. (The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.)

I think she knew me. ‘Hello,’ I said back.

‘How are you now?’

I was looking around, trying to assess the possible escape routes. If they had slid down one of the passageways then they could have been anywhere. There were about two hundred obvious possibilities.

‘I’m, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’

My eyes darted around but were unrewarded. Who was this man? I wondered. And where was he from?

Occasionally, in the days that followed, I would have that feeling again, of being watched. But I never caught a glimpse of my watcher, which was strange, and led me to only two possibilities. Either I was becoming too dull-witted and human, or the person I was looking for, the one who I could sometimes feel watching me in university corridors and in supermarkets, was too sharp-witted to be caught.

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

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 physicist 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 enjoy 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.

‘We haven’t done this for years, have we?’ she said.

‘Done what?’

‘Talk. Like this. It feels like a first date or something. In a good way. It feels like I’m getting to know you.’

‘Yes.’

‘God,’ she said wistfully.

She was drunk now. So was I, even though I was still on my first glass.

‘Our first date,’ she went on. ‘Can you remember?’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘It was here. But it was an Indian then. What was its name?… The Taj Mahal. You’d changed your mind on the phone after I wasn’t too impressed at the Pizza Hut suggestion. Cambridge didn’t even have a Pizza Express back then. God… twenty years. Can you believe it? Talk about the compression of time through memory. I remember it better than anything. I was late. You waited an hour for me. Out in the rain. I thought that was so romantic.’

She looked off into the distance, as though twenty years ago were a physical thing that could be seen sitting at a table in the corner of the room. And as I stared at those eyes, which were loitering somewhere in the infinity between past and present, happy and sad, I deeply wanted to have been that person she was talking about. The one who had braved the rain and got soaked to the skin two decades ago. But I wasn’t that person. And I would never be him.

I felt like Hamlet. I had absolutely no idea what to do.

‘He must have loved you,’ I said.

She stopped daydreaming. Was suddenly alert. ‘What?’

‘I,’ I said, staring down at my slow-melting limoncello ice-cream. ‘And I still love you. As much as I did then. I was just, you know, seeing us, the past, in the third person. Distance of time…’

She held my hand across the table. Squeezed it. For a second I could dream I was Professor Andrew Martin, just as easily as a TV gardener could dream he was Hamlet.

‘Can you remember when we used to go punting on the Cam?’ she asked. ‘That time you fell in the water… God, we were drunk. Can you remember? While we were still here, before you had that Princeton offer and we went to America. We really had fun, didn’t we?’

I nodded, but I felt uncomfortable. Also, I didn’t want to leave Gulliver on his own any longer. I asked for the bill.

‘Listen,’ I said, as we walked out of the restaurant, ‘there’s something I really feel obliged to let you know…’

‘What?’ she asked, looking up at me. Holding on to my arm as she flinched at the wind. ‘What is it?’

I breathed deeply, filling my lungs, seeking courage somewhere in the nitrogen and the oxygen. In my mind I ran through the pieces of information I had to give her.

I am not from here.

In fact, I am not even your husband.

I am from another planet, in another solar system, in a distant galaxy.

‘The thing is… well, the thing is…’

‘Think we should probably cross the road,’ said Isobel, tugging my arm, as two silhouettes – a shouting female and a male – came towards us on the pavement. So we did, crossing at an angle that tried to balance the concealment of fear with rapid avoidance – that angle being, as it was everywhere in the universe, 48 degrees away from the straight line on which we had been travelling.

Midway across that carless road I turned and saw her. Zoë. The woman from the hospital I had met on my first day on this planet. She was still shouting at the large, muscular, shaven-headed man. The man had a tattoo of a tear on his face. I remembered her confession of her love of violent men.

‘I’m telling you, you’ve got it wrong! You’re the one that’s crazy! Not me! But if you want to go around like a primitive life form that’s fine! Do it, you thick piece of shit!’

‘You pretentious, cock-munching slag!’

And then she saw me.

The art of letting go

‘It’s you,’ Zoë said.

‘You know her?’ whispered Isobel.

‘I’m afraid… yes. From the hospital.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Please,’ I said to the man, ‘be nice.’

The man was staring at me. His shaven head, along with the rest of his body, came towards me.

‘And what on Earth has it got to do with you?’

‘On Earth,’ I said, ‘it’s nice to see people getting on together.’

‘You fuckin’ what?’

‘Just turn around,’ Isobel said fearlessly, ‘and leave everyone alone. Seriously, if you do anything else you’ll just regret it in the morning.’

It was then he turned to Isobel and held her face, squeezing her cheeks hard, distorting her beauty. Anger flared inside me as he said to her, ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you meddling bitch.’

Isobel now had fear-swollen eyes.

There were rational things to do here, I was sure, but I had come a long way since rationality.

‘Leave us all alone,’ I said, momentarily forgetting that my words were just that. Words.

He looked at me and he laughed. And with that laughter came the terrifying knowledge that I had no power whatsoever. The gifts had been taken from me. I was, to all intents and purposes, no more equipped for a fight with a giant gym-bodied thug than the average human professor of mathematics, which wasn’t particularly well equipped at all.

He beat me. And it was a proper beating. Not the kind Gulliver had given me, and which I had opted to feel. No. If there had been an option not to feel the cheap metal rings of this man’s fist collide into my face with comet-like force then I would have taken that option. As I would have done only moments later when I was on the ground receiving a kick in the stomach, rapidly unsettling the undigested Italian food residing there, followed by the final piece of brutalist punctuation – the kick to the head. More of a stamp, actually.

After that, there was nothing.

There was darkness, and Hamlet.

This was your husband. Look you now what follows.

I heard Isobel wailing. I tried to speak to her, but words were hard to reach. The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.

I could hear the rise and fall of a siren, and knew it was for me.

Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear.

I woke, in the ambulance, and there was only her. Her face above me, like a sun that eyes could stand, and she stroked my hand as she had once stroked my hand the first time I’d met her.

‘I love you,’ she said.

And I knew the point of love right then.

The point of love was to help you survive.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

So I let go.

I let go of everything in the universe.

Everything, except her hand.

Neuroadaptive activity

I woke up in the hospital.

It was the first time in my life I had woken in serious physical pain. It was night-time. Isobel had stayed for a while and had fallen asleep in a plastic chair. But she had now been told to go home. So I was alone, with my pain, feeling how truly helpless it was to be a human. And I stayed awake in the dark, urging the Earth to rotate faster and faster so that it could be facing the sun again. For the tragedy of night to become the comedy of day. I wasn’t used to night. Of course, I had experienced it on other planets but Earth had the darkest nights I had ever experienced. Not the longest, but the deepest, the loneliest, the most tragically beautiful. I consoled myself with random prime numbers. 73. 131. 977. 1213. 83719. Each as indivisible as love, except by one and itself. I struggled to think of higher primes. Even my mathematical skills had abandoned me, I realised.

They tested my ribs, my eyes, my ears, and inside my mouth. They tested my brain and my heart. My heart had caused no concern, though they did consider forty-nine beats per minute to be a little on the slow side. As for my brain, they were a little concerned about my medial temporal lobe, as there seemed to be some unusual neuroadaptive activity taking place.

‘It’s as though there has been something taken out of your brain and your cells are trying to over-compensate, but clearly nothing has been taken out or damaged. But it is very strange.’

I nodded.

Of course, something had been taken out, but I also knew it was nothing any human, Earth-based doctor would ever be able to understand.

It had been a difficult test, but I had passed it. I was as good as human. And they gave me some paracetamol and codeine for the pain which still pulsated inside my head and on my face.

Eventually, I went home.

The next day, Ari came to visit me. I was in bed. Isobel was at work and Gulliver was, quite genuinely it seemed, at school.

‘Man, you look fucking terrible.’

I smiled, lifted the bag of frozen peas from the side of my head.

‘Which is a coincidence, because I feel fucking terrible too.’

‘You should’ve gone to the police.’

‘Well, yes, I was thinking about it. Isobel thinks I should. But I have a little bit of a phobia about police. You know, ever since I was arrested for not wearing clothes.’

‘Yeah, well, you can’t have psychos roaming around pulverising anyone they feel like.’

‘No, I know. I know.’

‘Listen, mate, I just want to say that was big of you. That was old-school gentleman, defending your wife like that and, you know, kudos for it. It surprised me. I’m not putting you down or anything, but I didn’t know you were that kind of shining-armour guy.’

‘Well, I’ve changed. I have a lot of activity in my medial temporal lobe. I think it’s probably to do with that.’

Ari looked doubtful. ‘Well, whatever it is, you’re becoming a man of honour. And that’s rare for mathematicians. It’s always been us physicists who’ve had the big cojones, traditionally. Just don’t screw it up with Isobel. You know what I mean?’

I looked at Ari for a long time. He was a good man, I could see that. I could trust him. ‘Listen, Ari, you know that thing I was going to tell you. At the café at the college?’

‘When you had that migraine?’

‘Yes,’ I hesitated. I was disconnected, so I knew I could tell him. Or thought I could. ‘I am from another planet, in another solar system, in another galaxy.’

Ari laughed. It was a loud, deep blast of laughter without a single note of doubt. ‘Okay, ET, so you’ll be wanting to phone home now. If we’ve got a connection that reaches the Andromeda galaxy.’

‘It’s not the Andromeda galaxy. It’s further away. Many, many light years.’

This sentence was hardly heard as Ari was laughing so much. He stared at me with fake blankness. ‘So how did you get here? Space ship? Wormhole?’

‘No. I didn’t travel in any conventional way you would understand. It was anti-matter technology. Home is forever away, but it is also only a second away. Though now, I can never go back.’

It was no good. Ari, a man who believed in the possibility of alien life, still could not accept the idea when it was standing – or lying – right in front of him.

‘You see, I had special talents, as a result of technology. The gifts.’

‘Go on then,’ Ari said, controlling his laughter, ‘show me.’

‘I can’t. I have no powers now. I am exactly like a human.’

Ari found this bit especially funny. He was annoying me now. He was still a good man, but good men could be annoying, I realised.

‘Exactly like a human! Well, man, you’re fucked then, aren’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I think I might be.’

Ari smiled, looked concerned. ‘Listen, make sure you keep taking all the tablets. Not just the painkillers. All of them, yeah?’

I nodded. He thought I was mad. Maybe it would be easier if I could take on this view myself, the delusion that it was a delusion. If one day I could wake up and believe it was all a dream. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve researched you. I know you understand quantum physics, and I know you’ve written about simulation theory. You say there’s a thirty per cent chance that none of this is real. You told me in the café you believed in aliens. So I know you can believe this.’

Ari shook his head, but at least he wasn’t laughing now. ‘No. You’re wrong. I can’t.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said, realising that if Ari wouldn’t believe me Isobel never would. But Gulliver. There was always Gulliver. One day I would tell him the truth. But what then? Could he accept me as a father, knowing I had lied?

I was trapped. I had to lie, and to stay lying.

‘But, Ari,’ I said, ‘if I ever need a favour, if I ever need Gulliver and Isobel to stay at your house – would that be okay?’

He smiled. ‘Sure, mate, sure.’

Platykurtic distribution

The next day, still swollen with bruises, I was back at the college.

There was something about being in the house, even with Newton for company, that troubled me. It never had before, but now it made me feel incredibly lonely. So I went to work, and I realised why work was so important on Earth. It stopped you feeling lonely. But loneliness was there for me, waiting in my office, which was where I’d returned after my lecture on distribution models. But my head hurt and I must admit I did quite welcome the peace.

After a while there was a knock on the door. I ignored it. Loneliness minus a headache was my preferred option. But then it happened again. And it happened in such a way that I knew it was going to keep on happening, and so I stood up and went to the door. And, after a while, I opened it.

A young woman was there.

It was Maggie.

The wild flower in bloom. The one with the curly red hair and the full lips. She was twirling her hair around her finger again. She was breathing deeply, and seemed to be inhaling a different kind of air – one which contained a mysterious aphrodisiac, promising euphoria. And she was smiling.

‘So,’ she said.

I waited a minute for the rest of the sentence but it didn’t happen. ‘So’ was beginning, middle and end. It meant something, but I didn’t know what.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

She smiled again. Bit her lip. ‘To discuss the compatibility of bell curves and platykurtic distribution models.’

‘Right.’

‘Platykurtic,’ she added, running a finger down my shirt towards my trousers. ‘From the Greek. Platus meaning flat, kurtos meaning… bulging.’

‘Oh.’

Her finger danced away from me. ‘So, Jake LaMotta, let’s go.’

‘My name is not Jake LaMotta.’

‘I know. I was referencing your face.’

‘Oh.’

‘So, are we going?’

‘Where?’

‘Hat and Feathers.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. Or indeed, who she actually was to me, or to the man who had been Professor Andrew Martin.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

That was it, right there. My first mistake of the day. But by no means the last.

The Hat and Feathers

I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The ‘pub’ was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England. I rather liked the place.

‘Let’s find a quiet corner,’ she said to me, this young Maggie.

There were lots of corners, as there always seemed to be in human-made environments. Earth dwellers still seemed to be a long way off from understanding the link between straight lines and acute forms of psychosis, which might explain why pubs seemed to be full of aggressive people. There were straight lines running into each other all over the place. Every table, every chair, at the bar, at the ‘fruit machine’. (I enquired about these machines. Apparently they were aimed at men whose fascination with flashing squares of light was coupled with a poor grasp of probability theory.) With so many corners to choose from, it was a surprise to see us sit near a straight, continuous piece of wall, at an oval table and on circular stools.

‘This is perfect,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Liquid nitrogen,’ I replied thoughtlessly.

‘A whisky and soda?’

‘Yes. One of them.’

And we drank and chatted like old friends, which I think we were. Though her conversational approach seemed quite different from Isobel’s.

‘Your penis is everywhere,’ she said at one point.

I looked around. ‘Is it?’

‘Two hundred and twenty thousand hits on YouTube.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘They’ve blurred it out, though. Quite a wise move, I would say, from first-hand experience.’ She laughed even more at this. It was a laugh that did nothing to relieve the pain pressing into and out of my face.

I changed the mood. I asked her what it meant, for her, to be a human. I wanted to ask the whole world this question, but, right now, she would do. And so she told me.

The ideal castle

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build.

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.