The Humans (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.’