The Humans (29 page)

I painted some art, ate peanut butter breakfasts, and once went to an arthouse cinema to watch three films by Fellini in a row.

I caught a cold, got tinnitus and consumed a poisoned prawn.

I bought myself a globe, and I would often sit there, spinning it.

I felt blue with sadness, red with rage and green with envy. I felt the entire human rainbow.

I walked a dog for an elderly lady in the apartment above me, but the dog was never quite Newton. I talked over warm champagne at stifling academic functions. I shouted in forests just to hear
the echo. And every night I would go back and re-read Emily Dickinson.

I was lonely, but at the same time I appreciated other humans a bit more than they appreciated themselves. After all, I knew you could journey for light years and not come across a single one.
On occasion, I would weep just looking at them, sitting in one of the vast libraries on campus.

Sometimes I would wake up at three in the morning and find myself crying for no specific reason. At other times I would sit on my beanbag and stare into space, watching motes of dust suspended
in sunlight.

I tried not to make any friends. I knew that as friendships progressed questions would get more intrusive, and I didn’t want to lie to people. People would ask about my past, where I was
from, my childhood. Sometimes a student or a fellow lecturer would look at my hand, at the scarred and purple skin, but they would never pry.

It was a happy place, Stanford University. All the students wore smiles and red sweaters and looked very tanned and healthy for life forms who spent their entire days in front of computer
screens. I would walk like a ghost through the bustle of the quad, breathing that warm air, trying not to be terrified by the scale of human ambition surrounding me.

I got drunk a lot on white wine, which made me a rarity. No one seemed to have hangovers at this place. Also, I didn’t like frozen yoghurt – a big problem, as everyone at Stanford
lived
on frozen yoghurt.

I bought myself music. Debussy, Ennio Morricone, the Beach Boys, Al Greene. I watched
Cinema Paradiso
. There was a Talking Heads song called ‘This Must Be the Place’ which I
played over and over again, even though doing so made me feel melancholy and crave to hear her voice again, or to hear Gulliver’s footsteps on the stairs.

I read a lot of poetry, too, though that often had a similar effect. One day I was in the campus bookstore and saw a copy of
The Dark Ages
by Isobel Martin. I stood there for what must
have been the best part of half an hour reading her words aloud. ‘Freshly ravaged by the Vikings,’ I’d say, reading the penultimate page, ‘England was in a desperate state,
and responded with a brutal massacre of Danish settlers in 1002. Over the next decade, this unrest was shown to breed even greater violence as the Danes embarked on a series of reprisals,
culminating in Danish rule of England in 1013 . . .’ I pressed the page to my face, imagining it was her skin.

I travelled with my work. I went to Paris, Boston, Rome, São Paolo, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo. I wanted to fill my mind with human faces, in order to forget Isobel’s. But it had the
opposite effect. By studying the entire human species, I felt more towards her specifically. By thinking of the cloud, I thirsted for the raindrop.

So I stopped my travels and returned to Stanford, and tried a different tactic. I tried to lose myself in nature.

The highlight of my day became the evening, when I would get in my car and drive out of town. Often I would head to the Santa Cruz mountains. There was a place there called the Big Basin
Redwoods State Park. I would park my car and walk around, gazing in wonder at the giant trees, spotting jays and woodpeckers, chipmunks and racoons, occasionally a black-tailed deer. Sometimes, if
I was early enough, I would walk down the steep path near Berry Creek Falls, listening to the rush of water which would often be joined by the low croak of tree frogs.

At other times I would drive along Highway One and go to the beach to watch the sunset. Sunsets were beautiful here. I became quite hypnotised by them. In the past they had meant nothing to me.
After all, a sunset was nothing really but the slowing down of light. At sunset light has more to get through, and is scattered by cloud droplets and air particles. But since becoming human I was
just transfixed by the colours. Red, orange, pink. Sometimes there would be haunting traces of violet, too.

I would sit on the beach, as waves crashed and retreated over the sparkling sand like lost dreams. All those oblivious molecules, joining together, creating something of improbable wonder.

Often such sights were blurred by tears. I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between
things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.

One night I stayed sitting on the beach as dusk fell. A fortysomething woman walked along, bare-footed, with a spaniel and her teenage son. Even though this woman looked quite different from
Isobel, and though the son was blond, the sight caused my stomach to flip and my sinuses to loosen.

I realised that six thousand miles could be an infinitely long distance.

‘I am
such
a human,’ I told my espadrilles.

I meant it. Not only had I lost the gifts, emotionally I was as weak as any of them. I thought of Isobel, sitting and reading about Alfred the Great or Carolingian Europe or the ancient Library
of Alexandria.

This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset and you find yourself
wanting to share it with someone.

‘Beauty—be not caused—,’ said Emily Dickinson. ‘It is.’

In one way she was wrong. The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides which are themselves the result of
gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.

The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.

And they wouldn’t have been beautiful once, at least not to my eyes. To experience beauty on Earth you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is
beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life
unlived.

It was this particular kind of sadness that I felt, that evening.

It came with its own gravitational pull, tugging me eastwards towards England. I told myself I just wanted to see them again, one last time. I just wanted to catch sight of them from a distance,
to see with my own eyes that they were safe.

And, by pure coincidence, about two weeks later I was invited to Cambridge to take part in a series of lectures debating the relationship between mathematics and technology. My head of
department, a resilient and jolly fellow called Christos, told me he thought I should go.

‘Yes, Christos,’ I said, as we stood on a corridor floor made of polished pinewood. ‘I think I might.’

I stayed in student accommodation in Corpus Christi, of all places, and tried to keep a low profile. I had grown a beard now, was tanned, and had put on a bit of weight, so
people tended not to recognise me.

I did my lecture.

To quite a few jeers I told my fellow academics that I thought mathematics was an incredibly dangerous territory and that humans had explored it as fully as they could. To advance further, I
told them, would be to head into a no-man’s-land full of unknown perils.

Among the audience was a pretty red-haired woman who I recognised instantly as Maggie. She came up to me afterwards and asked if I’d like to go to the Hat and Feathers. I said no, and she
seemed to know I meant it, and after posing a jovial question about my beard, she left the hall.

After that, I went for a walk, naturally gravitating towards Isobel’s college.

I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the
insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide they pass right through.

I could hardly breathe, watching her, and didn’t even notice it was beginning to rain. I was just mesmerised by her. All eleven trillion cells of her.

Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had
been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn’t think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it.

She pulled open her umbrella as if she were just any woman pulling open an umbrella, and she kept on walking, stopping only to give some money to a homeless man with a long coat and a bad leg.
It was Winston Churchill.

Knowing I couldn’t follow Isobel, but feeling a need to connect with someone, I followed Winston Churchill instead. I followed slowly, ignoring the rain, feeling happy I
had seen Isobel and that she was alive and safe and as quietly beautiful as she had always been (even when I had been too blind to appreciate this).

Winston Churchill was heading for the park. It was the same park where Gulliver walked Newton, but I knew it was too early in the afternoon for me to bump into them, so I kept following. He
walked slowly, pulling his leg along as if it were three times as heavy as the rest of him. Eventually, he reached a bench. It was painted green, this bench, but the paint was flaking off to reveal
the wood underneath. I sat down on it too. We sat in rain-soaked silence for a while.

He offered me a swig of his cider. I told him I was okay. I think he recognised me but I wasn’t sure.

‘I had everything once,’ he said.

‘Everything?’

‘A house, a car, a job, a woman, a kid.’

‘Oh, how did you lose them?’

‘My two churches. The betting shop and the off-licence. And it’s been downhill all the way. And now I’m here with nothing, but I am myself with nothing. An honest bloody
nothing.’

‘Well, I know how you feel.’

Winston Churchill looked doubtful. ‘Yeah. Right you are, fella.’

‘I gave up eternal life.’

‘Ah, so you were religious?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And now you’re down here sinning like the rest of us.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, just don’t try and touch my leg again and we’ll get on fine.’

I smiled. He
did
recognise me. ‘I won’t. I promise.’

‘So, what made you give up on eternity if you don’t mind me askin’?’

‘I don’t know. I’m still working it out.’

‘Good luck with that, fella, good luck with that.’

‘Thanks.’

He scratched his cheek and gave a nervous whistle. ‘Eh, you haven’t got any money on you, have you?’

I pulled a ten-pound note out of my pocket.

‘You’re a star, fella.’

‘Well, maybe we all are,’ I said, looking skyward.

And that was the end of our conversation. He had run out of cider and had no more reason to stay. So he stood up and walked away, wincing in pain from his damaged leg, as a breeze tilted flowers
towards him.

It was strange. Why did I feel this lack inside me? This need to belong?

The rain stopped. The sky was clear now. I stayed where I was, on a bench covered with slow-evaporating raindrops. I knew it was getting later, and knew I should probably be heading back to
Corpus Christi, but I didn’t have the incentive to move.

What was I doing here?

What was my function, now, in the universe?

I considered, I considered, I considered, and felt a strange sensation. A kind of sliding into focus.

I realised, though I was on Earth, I had been living this past year as I had always lived. I was just thinking I could carry on, moving forward. But I was not me any more. I was a human, give or
take. And humans are about change. That is how they survive, by doing and un-doing and doing again.

I had done some things I couldn’t undo, but there were others I could amend. I had become a human by betraying rationality and obeying feeling. To stay me, I knew there would come a point
when I would have to do the same again.

Time passed.

Squinting, I looked again to the sky.

The Earth’s sun can look very much alone, yet it has relatives all across this galaxy, stars that were born in the exact same place, but which were now very far away from each other,
lighting very different worlds.

I was like a sun.

I was a long way from where I started. And I have changed. Once I thought I could pass through time like a neutrino passes through matter, effortlessly and without stopping to think, because
time would never run out.

As I sat there on that bench a dog came up to me. Its nose pressed into my leg.

‘Hello,’ I whispered, pretending not to know this particular English Springer Spaniel. But his pleading eyes stayed on me, even as he angled his nose towards his hip. His arthritis
had come back. He was in pain.

I stroked him and held my hand in place, instinctively, but of course I couldn’t heal him this time.

Then a voice behind me. ‘Dogs are better than human beings because they know but don’t tell.’

I turned. A tall boy with dark hair and pale skin and a tentative nervous smile. ‘Gulliver.’

He kept his eyes on Newton. ‘You were right about Emily Dickinson.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Part of your advice. I read her.’

‘Oh. Oh yes. She was a very good poet.’

He moved around the bench, sat down next to me. I noticed he was older. Not only was he quoting poetry but his skull had become more man-shaped. There was a slight trace of dark beneath the skin
on his jaw. His T-shirt said ‘The Lost’ – he had finally joined the band.