The Humans

An encounter with Winston Churchill

I walked to the nearest shop, a brightly lit and unsympathetic place called Tesco Metro. I bought myself a bottle of Australian wine.

I walked along a cycle path and drank it, singing ‘God Only Knows’. It was quiet. I sat down by a tree and finished the bottle.

I went and bought another. I sat down on a park bench, next to a man with a large beard. It was the man I had seen before. On my first day. The one who had called me Jesus. He was wearing the same long dirty raincoat and he had the same scent. This time I found it fascinating. I sat there for a while just working out all the different aromas – alcohol, sweat, tobacco, urine, infection. It was a uniquely human smell, and rather wonderful in its own sad way.

‘I don’t know why more people don’t do this,’ I said, striking up a conversation.

‘Do what?’

‘You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.’

‘Are you taking the piss, fella?’

‘No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn’t be doing it.’

Of course, this was a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were always doing things they didn’t like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three per cent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they’d be back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.

A blue plastic bag floated by on the wind. The bearded man rolled a cigarette. He had shaky fingers. Nerve damage.

‘Ain’t no choice in love and life,’ he said.

‘No. That’s true. Even when you think there are choices there aren’t really. But I thought humans still subscribed to the illusion of free will?’

‘Not me, chief.’ And then he started singing, in a mumbled baritone of very low frequency. ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone…’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Andrew,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’

‘What’s bothering you? You got beat up? Your face looks like shit.’

‘Yeah, in lots of ways. I had someone love me. And it was the most precious thing, that love. It gave me a family. It made me feel like I belonged. And I broke it.’

He lit the cigarette, which flopped out of his face like a numb antennae. ‘Ten years me and my wife were married,’ he said. ‘Then I lost my job and she left me the same week. That’s when I turned to drink and my leg started to turn on me.’

He lifted up his trousers. His left leg was swollen and purple. And violet. I could see he expected me to be disgusted. ‘Deep vein thrombosis. Effing agony, it is. Effing fucking agony. And it’s gonna bloody kill me one of these days.’

He passed me the cigarette. I inhaled. I knew I didn’t like it, but I still inhaled.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘Winston bloody Churchill.’

‘Oh, like the wartime prime minister.’ I watched him close his eyes and suck on his cigarette. ‘Why do people smoke?’

‘No idea. Ask me something else.’

‘Okay, then. How do you cope with loving someone who hates you? Someone who doesn’t want to see you again.’

‘God knows.’

He winced. He was in agony. I had noticed his pain on the first day, but now I wanted to do something about it. I had drunk enough to believe I could, or at least to forget I couldn’t.

He was about to roll his trousers down, but seeing the pain he was in, I told him to wait a moment. I placed my hand on the leg.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s a very simple procedure of bio-set transference, involving reverse-apoptosis, working at the molecular level to restore and recreate dead and diseased cells. To you it will look like magic, but it isn’t.’

My hand stayed there and nothing happened. And nothing kept on happening. It looked very far from magic.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m an alien. I’m considered a useless failure in two galaxies.’

‘Well, could you please take your damn hand off my leg?’

I took my hand away. ‘Sorry. Really. I thought I still had the ability to heal you.’

‘I know you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘Yes. I know. I passed you, on my first day in Cambridge. You may remember. I was naked.’

He leant back, squinted, angled his head. ‘Nah. Nah. Wasn’t that. I saw you today.’

‘I don’t think you did. I’m pretty sure I would have recognised you.’

‘Nah. Definitely today. I’m good with faces, see.’

‘Was I with someone? A young woman? Red hair?’ He considered. ‘Nah. It was just you.’

‘Where was I?’

‘Oh, you were on, let me think, you’d have been on Newmarket Road.’

‘Newmarket Road?’ I knew the name of the street, because it was where Ari lived, but I hadn’t ever been on the street myself. Not today. Not ever. Though of course, it was very likely that Andrew Martin – the original Andrew Martin – had been down there many times. Yes, that must have been it. He was getting mixed up. ‘I think you might be confused.’

He shook his head. ‘It was you all right. This morning. Maybe midday. No word of a lie.’

And with that the man stood up and hobbled slowly away from me, leaving a trail of smoke and spilt alcohol.

A cloud passed across the sun. I looked up to the sky. I had a thought as dark as the shade. I stood up. I took the phone out of my pocket and called Ari. Eventually someone picked up. It was a woman. She was breathing heavily, sniffing up snot, struggling to turn noise into coherent words.

‘Hello, this is Andrew. I wondered if Ari was there.’

And then the words came, in morbid succession: ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.’

The replacement

I ran.

I left the wine and I ran as fast as I could, across the park, along streets, over main roads, hardly thinking about traffic. It hurt, this running. It hurt my knees, my hips, my heart and my lungs. All those components, reminding me they would one day fail. It also, somehow, aggravated the various facial aches and pains I was suffering. But, mostly, it was my mind that was in turmoil.

This was my fault. This had nothing to do with the Riemann hypothesis and everything to do with the fact that I had told Ari the truth about where I was from. He hadn’t believed me, but that hadn’t been the point. I had been able to tell him, without getting an agonising violet-tainted warning. They had disconnected me, but they must still have been watching, and listening, which meant they could probably hear me now.

‘Don’t do it. Don’t hurt Isobel or Gulliver. They don’t know anything.’

I reached the house that, up until this morning, I had been living in with the people I had grown to love. I crunched my way up the gravel driveway. The car wasn’t there. I looked through the living-room window, but there was no sign of anyone. I had no key with me so I rang the doorbell.

I stood and waited, wondering what I could do. After a while, the door opened, but I still couldn’t see anyone. Whoever had opened the door clearly didn’t want to be seen.

I stepped into the house. I walked past the kitchen. Newton was asleep in his basket. I went over to him, shook him gently. ‘Newton! Newton!’ But he stayed asleep, breathing deeply, mysteriously unwakeable.

‘I’m in here,’ said a voice, coming from the living room.

So I followed it, that familiar voice, until I was there, looking at a man sitting on the purple sofa with one leg crossed over the other. He was instantly familiar to me – indeed, he could not have been more so – and yet, at the same time, the sight of him was terrifying.

For it was myself I was looking at.

His clothes were different (jeans instead of cords, a T-shirt instead of shirt, trainers in place of shoes) but it was definitely the form of Andrew Martin. The mid-brown hair, naturally parted. The tired eyes, and the same face except for the absence of bruises.

‘Snap!’ he said, smiling. ‘That is what they say here, isn’t it? You know, when they are playing card games. Snap! We are identical twins.’

‘Who are you?’

He frowned, as if I’d asked such a basic question it shouldn’t have been asked. ‘I’m your replacement.’

‘My replacement?’

‘That is what I said. I am here to do what you were unable to do.’

My heart was racing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘To destroy information.’

Fear and anger were sometimes the same thing. ‘You killed Ari?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? He didn’t know the Riemann hypothesis had been proved.’

‘No. I know. I have been given broader instructions than you. I have been told to destroy anyone you have told about your’ – he considered the right word – ‘origins.’

‘So they’ve been listening to me? They said I was disconnected.’

He pointed at my left hand, where the technology still evidently lived. ‘They took your powers away, but they didn’t take theirs. They listen sometimes. They check.’

I stared at it. At my hand. It looked, suddenly, like an enemy.

‘How long have you been here? On Earth, I mean.’

‘Not long.’

‘Someone broke into this house a few nights ago. They accessed Isobel’s computer.’

‘That was me.’

‘So why the delay? Why didn’t you finish the job that night?’

‘You were here. I did not want to hurt you. No Vonnadorian has killed another Vonnadorian. Not directly.’

‘Well, I’m not really a Vonnadorian. I am a human. The paradox is that I’m light years from home, and yet this feels like my home. That is a strange thing to feel. So, what have you been doing? Where have you been living?’

He hesitated, swallowed hard. ‘I have been living with a female.’

‘A female human? A woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Outside Cambridge. A village. She doesn’t know my name. She thinks I am called Jonathan Roper. I convinced her we were married.’

I laughed. The laugh seemed to surprise him. ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘I don’t know. I have gained a sense of humour. That is one thing that happened when I lost the gifts.’

‘I am going to kill them, do you know that?’

‘No. Actually, I don’t. I told the hosts there is no point. That’s about the last thing I said to them. They seemed to understand me.’

‘I have been told to, and that is what I will do.’

‘But don’t you think it’s pointless, that there’s no real reason to do it?’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘No, I do not think that’, he said, in a voice which was mine but deeper, somehow, and flatter. ‘I do not see a separation. I have lived with a human for only a few days but I have seen the violence and hypocrisy that runs through this species.’

‘Yes, but there is good in them. A lot of good.’

‘No. I don’t see it. They can sit and watch dead human bodies on TV screens and feel nothing at all.’

‘That’s how I saw it at first, but—’

‘They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.’

‘Yes, there is a bad logic here, I agree with you, yet I truly believe—’

He wasn’t listening. He stood up now, stared at me with determined eyes as he paced the room and delivered his speech. ‘They believe God is always on their side, even if their side is at odds with the rest of their species. They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the two most important events that happen to them – procreation and death. They pretend to know that money can’t buy them happiness, yet they would choose money every time. They celebrate mediocrity at every available opportunity and love to see others’ misfortune. They have lived on this planet for over a hundred thousand generations and yet they still have no idea about who they really are or how they should really live. In fact, they know less now than they once did.’

‘You’re right but don’t you think there is something beautiful in these contradictions, something mysterious?’

‘No. No, I do not. What I think is that their violent will has helped them dominate the world, and “civilise” it, but now there is nowhere left for them to go, and so the human world has turned in on itself. It is a monster that feasts on its own hands. And still they do not see the monster, or if they do they do not see that they are inside it, molecules within the beast.’

I looked at the bookshelves. ‘Have you read human poetry? Humans understand these failings.’

He still wasn’t listening.

‘They have lost themselves but not their ambitions. Do not think that they would not leave this place if they had the chance. They’re beginning to realise life is out there, that we or beings like us, are out there, and they won’t just stop at that. They will want to explore, and as their mathematical understanding expands, then they will eventually be able to do so. They will find us, eventually, and when they do, they will not want to be friends, even if they think – as they always do – that their own ends are perfectly benevolent. They will find a reason to destroy or subjugate other life forms.’

A girl in a school uniform walked past the house. Pretty soon, Gulliver would be coming home.

‘But there is no connection between killing these people and stopping progress, I promise you. No connection.’

He stopped pacing the room and came over to me, leant into my face. ‘Connections? I will tell you about connections… An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.’

‘You’re talking about something very different.’

‘No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours?’

‘Humans learn the errors of their ways though,’ I said, ‘and they care more for each other than you think.’

‘No. I know they care for each other when the other in question is like them, or lives under their roof, but any difference is a step further away from their empathy. They find it preposterously easy to fall out among themselves. Imagine what they would do to us, if they could.’

Of course, I had already imagined this and was scared of the answer. I was weakening. I felt tired and confused.

‘But we were sent here to kill them. What makes us any better?’

‘We act as a result of logic, of rational thinking. We are here to preserve, even to preserve the humans. Think about it. Progress is a very dangerous thing for them. The boy must be killed, even if the woman can be saved. The boy knows. You told us yourself.’

‘You are making a little mistake.’

‘What is my mistake?’

‘You cannot kill a mother’s son without killing the mother.’

‘You are speaking in riddles. You have become like them.’

I looked at the clock. It was half-past four. Gulliver would return home at any moment. I tried to think what to do. Maybe this other me, this ‘Jonathan’ was right. Well, there wasn’t really a maybe. He was right: the humans could not handle progress very well and they were not good at understanding their place in the world. They were, ultimately, a great danger to themselves and others.

So I nodded, and I walked over and sat on that purple sofa. I felt sober now, and fully conscious of my pain.

‘You are right,’ I said. ‘You are right. And I want to help you.’

A game

‘I know you are right,’ I told him for the seventeenth time, looking straight into his eyes, ‘but I have been weak. I admit it to you now. I was and remain unable to harm any more humans, especially those ones I have lived with. But what you have said to me has reminded me of my original purpose. I am not able to fulfil that purpose and no longer have the gifts to do so, but equally I realise it has to be fulfilled, and so in a way I’m thankful you are here. I’ve been stupid. I’ve tried and I have failed.’

Jonathan sat back on the sofa and studied me. He stared at my bruises and sniffed the air between us. ‘You have been drinking alcohol.’

‘Yes. I have been corrupted. It is very easy, I find, when you live like a human, to develop some of their bad habits. I have drunk alcohol. I have had sex. I have smoked cigarettes. I have eaten peanut butter sandwiches and listened to their simple music. I have felt many of the crude pleasures that they can feel, as well as physical and emotional pain. But still, despite my corruption, there remains enough of me left, enough of my clear rational self, to know what has to be done.’

He watched me. He believed me, because every word I was speaking was the truth. ‘I am comforted to hear this.’

I didn’t waste a moment. ‘Now listen to me. Gulliver will return home soon. He won’t be on a car or a bike. He’ll be walking. He likes to walk. We will hear his feet on the gravel, and then we will hear his key in the door. Normally, he heads straight into the kitchen to get himself a drink or a bowl of cereal. He eats around three bowls of cereal a day. Anyway, that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he will most likely enter the kitchen first.’

Jonathan was paying close attention to everything I was telling him. It felt strange, terrible even, giving him this information, but I really couldn’t think of any other way.

‘You want to act fast,’ I said, ‘as his mother will be home soon. Also, there’s a chance he may be surprised to see you. You see, his mother has thrown me out of the house because I was unfaithful to her. Or rather the faith I had wasn’t the right kind. Given the absence of mind-reading technology, humans believe monogamy is possible. Another fact to consider is that Gulliver has, quite independently, attempted to take his own life before. So, I suggest that however you choose to kill him it would be a good idea to make it look like suicide. Maybe after his heart has stopped, you could slice one of his wrists, cutting through the veins. That way, less suspicion will be aroused.’

Jonathan nodded, then looked around the room. At the television, the history books, the armchair, the framed art prints on the wall, the telephone in its cradle.

‘It will be a good idea to have the television on,’ I told him, ‘even if you are not in this room. Because I always watch the news and leave it on.’

He switched on the television.

We sat and watched footage of war in the Middle East, without saying a word. But then he heard something that I couldn’t, his senses being so much sharper.

‘Footsteps,’ he said. ‘On the gravel.’

‘He’s here,’ I said. ‘Go to the kitchen. I’ll hide.’

90.2 MHz

I waited in the sitting room. The door was closed. There would be no reason for Gulliver to enter here. Unlike the living room he hardly ever came into this room. I don’t think I’d ever heard him do so.

So I stayed there, still and quiet, as the front door opened, then closed. He was unmoving, in the hallway. No footsteps.

‘Hello?’

Then a response. My voice but not my voice, coming from the kitchen. ‘Hello, Gulliver.’

‘What are you doing here? Mum said you’d gone. She phoned me, said you’d had an argument.’

I heard him – me, Andrew, Jonathan – respond in measured words. ‘That is right. We did. We had an argument. Don’t worry, it wasn’t too serious.’

‘Oh yeah? Sounded pretty serious from Mum’s side of things.’ Gulliver paused. ‘Whose are those clothes you’re wearing?’

‘Oh, these, they’re just old ones I didn’t know I had.’

‘I’ve never seen them before. And your face, it’s totally healed. You look completely better.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Right, anyway, I might go upstairs. I’ll get some food later.’

‘No. No. You will stay right here.’ The mind patterning was beginning. His words were shepherds ushering away conscious thought. ‘You will stay here and you will take a knife – a sharp knife, the sharpest there is in this room—’

It was about to happen. I could feel it, so I did what I had planned to do. I went over to the bookcase and picked up the clockwork radio, turned the power dial through a full 360-degree rotation and pressed the button with the little green circle.

On.

The small display became illuminated: 90.2 MHz.

Classical music blared out at almost full volume as I carried the radio back along the hallway. Unless I was very much mistaken it was Debussy.

‘You will now press that knife into your wrist and press it hard enough to cut through every vein.’

‘What’s that noise?’ Gulliver asked, his head clearing. I still couldn’t see him. I still wasn’t quite at the kitchen doorway.

‘Just do it. End your life, Gulliver.’

I entered the kitchen and saw my doppelgänger facing away from me as he pressed his hand on to Gulliver’s head. The knife fell to the floor. It was like looking at a strange kind of human baptism. I knew that what he was doing was right, and logical, from his perspective, but perspective was a funny thing.

Gulliver collapsed; his whole body was convulsing. I placed the radio down on the unit. The kitchen had its own radio. I switched that on, too. The TV was still on in the other room, as I had intended it to be. A cacophony of classical music and newsreaders and rock music filled the air as I reached Jonathan and pulled his arm so he now had no contact with Gulliver.

He turned, held me by the throat, pressing me back against the refrigerator.

‘You have made a mistake,’ he said.

Gulliver’s convulsions stopped and he looked around, confused. He saw two men, both identical, like his father, pressing into each other’s necks with equivalent force.

I knew that, whatever else happened, I had to keep Jonathan in the kitchen. If he stayed in the kitchen, with the radios on and the TV in the next room, we would be equally matched.

‘Gulliver,’ I said. ‘Gulliver, give me the knife. Any knife. That knife. Give me that knife.’

‘Dad? Are you my Dad?’

‘Yes, I am. Now give me the knife.’

‘Ignore him, Gulliver,’ Jonathan said. ‘He’s not your father. I am. He’s an imposter. He’s not what he looks like. He’s a monster. An alien. We have to destroy him.’

As we carried on, locked in our mutually futile combative pose, matching strength with strength, I saw Gulliver’s eyes fill with doubt.

He looked at me.

It was time for the truth.

‘I’m not your father. And neither is he. Your dad is dead, Gulliver. He died on Saturday, the seventeenth of April. He was taken by the…’ I thought of a way of putting it that he would understand. ‘… by the people we work for. They extracted information from him, and then they killed him. And they sent me here, as him, to kill you. And kill your mother. And anyone who knew about what he had achieved that day, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it because I started, I started to feel something that was meant to be impossible… I empathised with you. Grew to like you. Worry about you. Love you both. And I gave everything up… I have no power, no strength.’

‘Don’t listen to him, son,’ Jonathan said. And then he realised something. ‘Turn off the radios. Listen to me, turn off the radios now.’

I stared at Gulliver with pleading eyes. ‘Whatever you do, don’t turn them off. The signal interferes with the technology. It’s his left hand. His left hand. Everything is in his left hand…’

Gulliver was clambering upright. He looked numb. His face was unreadable.

I thought hard.

‘The leaf!’ I yelled. ‘Gulliver, you were right. The leaf, remember, the leaf! And think of—’

It was then that the other version of myself smashed his head into my nose, with swift and brutal force. My head rebounded against the fridge door and everything dissolved. Colours faded, and the noise of the radios and the faraway newsreader swam into each other. A swirling audio soup.

It was over.

‘Gulli—’

The other me switched one of the radios off. Debussy disappeared. But at the moment the music went away I heard a scream. It sounded like Gulliver. And it was, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. It was a scream of determination. A primal roar of rage, giving him the courage he needed to stab the knife that had been about to cut his own wrists into the back of a man who looked every inch his own father.

And the knife went deep.

With that roar, and that sight, the room sharpened into focus. I could get to my feet before Jonathan’s finger reached the second radio. I yanked him back by the hair. I saw his face. The pain clearly articulated in the way only human faces can manage. The eyes, shocked yet pleading. The mouth seeming to melt away.

Melt away. Melt away. Melt away.

The ultimate crime

I would not look at his face again. He could not die while that technology remained inside him. I dragged him over to the Aga.

‘Lift it up,’ I ordered Gulliver. ‘Lift up the cover.’

‘Cover?’

‘The hot plate.’

He did it. He lifted the circular steel ring up and let it fall back, and he did so without a single question in his eyes.

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘He’s fighting. Help me with his arm.’

Together we had enough force to press his palm down to the burning metal. The scream, as we kept him there, was horrendous. Knowing what it was I was doing, it truly sounded like the end of the universe.

I was committing the ultimate crime. I was destroying gifts, and killing one of my kind.

‘We’ve got to keep it there,’ I shouted to Gulliver. ‘We’ve got to keep it there! Hold! Hold! Hold!’

And then I switched my attention to Jonathan.

‘Tell them it is over,’ I whispered. ‘Tell them you have completed your mission. Tell them there has been a problem with the gifts and that you will not be able to return. Tell them, and I will stop the pain.’

A lie. And a gamble that they were tuned to him and not to me. But a necessary one. He told them, yet his pain continued.

How long were we like this? Seconds? Minutes? It was like Einstein’s conundrum. The hot stove versus the pretty girl. Towards the end of it, Jonathan was on his knees, losing consciousness.

Tears streamed down my face as I finally pulled that sticky mess of a hand away. I checked his pulse. He was gone. The knife pierced through his chest as he fell back. I looked at the hand, and this face, and it was clear. He was disconnected, not just from the hosts, but from life.

The reason it was clear was that he was becoming himself – the cellular reconfiguration that automatically followed death. The whole shape of him was changing, curling in, his face flattening, his skull lengthening, his skin mottled shades of purple and violet. Only the knife in his back stayed. It was strange. Within the context of that Earth kitchen this creature, structured precisely as I had been, seemed entirely alien to me.

A monster. A beast. Something other.

Gulliver stared, but said nothing. The shock was so profound it was a challenge to breathe, let alone speak.

I did not want to speak either, but for more practical reasons. Indeed, I worried that I may already have said too much. Maybe the hosts had heard everything I had said in that kitchen. I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had one more thing to do.

They took your powers away, but they didn’t take theirs.

But before I could do anything a car pulled up outside. Isobel was home.

‘Gulliver, it’s your mother. Keep her away. Warn her.’

He left the room. I turned back to the heat of that hot plate and positioned my hand next to where his had been, where pieces of his flesh still fizzed. And I pressed down, and felt a pure and total pain which took away space and time and guilt.

The nature of reality

What was reality?

An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A dream? A dream. Well, yes, maybe. But if this had been a dream then it was one from which I hadn’t yet woken.

But once humans really study things in depth – whether in the artificially divided fields of quantum physics or biology or neuroscience or mathematics or love – they come closer and closer to nonsense, irrationality and anarchy. Everything they know is disproved, over and over again. The Earth is not flat; leeches have no medicinal value; there is no God; progress is a myth; the present is all they have.

And this doesn’t just happen on the big scale. It happens to each individual human too.

In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn’t there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

I was something. And now I am something else.

I was a monster and now I am a different type of monster. One that will die, and feel pain, but one that will also live, and maybe even find happiness one day. Because happiness is possible for me now. It exists on the other side of the hurt.

A face as shocked as the moon

As for Gulliver, he was young, and could accept things better than his mother. His life had never really made sense to him so the final proof of its nonsensical nature was a kind of relief to him. He was someone who had lost a father and also someone who had killed, but the thing he had killed was something he didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to. He could have cried for a dead dog, but a dead Vonnadorian meant nothing to him. On the subject of grief, it was true that Gulliver was worried about his father, and wanted to know that he hadn’t felt any pain. I told him he hadn’t. Was that true? I didn’t know. That was part of being human, I discovered. It was about knowing which lies to tell, and when to tell them. To love someone is to lie to them. But I never saw him cry for his dad. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was hard to feel the loss of someone who had never really been there.

Anyway, after dark he helped drag the body outside. Newton was awake now. He had woken after Jonathan’s technology had melted away. And now he accepted what he was seeing as dogs seemed to accept everything. There were no canine historians, so that made things easier. Nothing was unexpected. At one point he began digging in the ground, as if trying to help us, but that wasn’t required. No grave needed to be dug as the monster – and that was how I referred to it in my mind, the monster – would in its natural state decompose rapidly in this oxygen-rich atmosphere. It was quite a struggle, dragging him out there, especially given my burnt hand and the fact that Gulliver had to stop to be sick at one point. He looked dreadful. I remember watching him, staring at me from beneath his fringe, his face as shocked as the moon.

Newton wasn’t our only observer.

Isobel watched us in disbelief. I hadn’t wanted her to come outside and see but she did so. At that point she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know, for instance, that her husband was dead or that the corpse I was dragging looked, essentially, how I had once looked.

She learnt these things slowly, but not slowly enough. She would have needed at least a couple of centuries to absorb these facts, maybe even more. It was like taking someone from Regency England to twenty-first century downtown Tokyo. She simply could not come to terms with it. After all, she was a historian. Someone whose job was to find patterns, continuities and causes, and to transform the past into a narrative that walked the same curving path. But on this path someone had now thrown something down from the sky that had landed so hard it had broken the ground, tilted the Earth, made the route impossible to navigate.

Which is to say, she went to the doctor and asked for some tablets. The pills she was given didn’t help and she ended up staying in bed for three weeks through exhaustion. It was suggested that she might have an illness called ME. She didn’t, of course. She was suffering from grief. A grief for not just the loss of her husband but also the loss of familiar reality.

She hated me, during that time. I had explained everything to her: that none of this had been my decision, that I had been sent here reluctantly with no task except to halt human progress and to act for the greater good of the entire cosmos. But she couldn’t look at me because she didn’t know what she was looking at. I had lied to her. I’d slept with her. I’d let her tend my wounds. But she hadn’t known who she had been sleeping with. It didn’t matter that I had fallen in love with her, and that it was that act of total defiance that had saved her life and Gulliver’s. No. That didn’t matter at all.

I was a killer and, to her, an alien.

My hand slowly healed. I went to the hospital and they gave me a transparent plastic glove to wear, filled with an antiseptic cream. At the hospital they asked me how it had happened and I told them I had been drunk and leant on the hot plate without thinking, and without feeling the pain until it was too late. The burns became blisters and the nurse burst them, and I watched with interest as clear liquid oozed out.

Selfishly I had hoped at some point that my injured hand might trigger some sympathy from Isobel. I wanted to see those eyes again. Eyes that had gazed worriedly at my face after Gulliver had attacked me in his sleep.

I briefly toyed with the idea that I should try and convince her that nothing I had told her was true. That we were more magic realism than science fiction, specifically that branch of literary fiction that comes complete with an unreliable narrator. That I wasn’t really an alien. That I was a human who’d had a breakdown, and there was nothing extraterrestrial or extramarital about me. Gulliver might have known what he had seen, but Gulliver had a fragile mind. I could easily have denied everything. A dog’s health fluctuates. People fall off roofs and survive. After all, humans – especially adult ones – want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.

But it seemed too disrespectful, somehow, and I couldn’t do it. Lies were everywhere on this planet, but true love had its name for a reason. And if a narrator tells you it was all just a dream you want to tell him he has simply passed from one delusion into another one, and he could wake from this new reality at any time. You had to stay consistent to life’s delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con. And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks. But while I knew I couldn’t correct this version of things with any integrity, living with it was hard.

You see, before coming to Earth I had never wanted or needed to be cared for, but I hungered now to have that feeling of being looked after, of belonging, of being loved.

Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe it was more than I deserved to be allowed to stay in the same house, even if I had to sleep on that hideous purple sofa.

The only reason this was granted, I imagined, was Gulliver. Gulliver wanted me to stay. I had saved his life. I had helped him stand up to bullies. But his forgiveness still came as a surprise.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t Cinema Paradiso, but he seemed to accept me as an extraterrestrial life form far more easily than he had accepted me as a father.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked me, one Saturday morning, at five minutes to seven, before his mother was awake.

‘Far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far away.’

‘How far is far?’

‘It’s very hard to explain,’ I said. ‘I mean, you think France is far away.’

‘Just try,’ he said.

I noticed the fruit bowl. Only the day before, I had been to the supermarket buying healthy food the doctor had recommended for Isobel. Bananas, oranges, grapes, a grapefruit.

‘Okay,’ I said, grabbing the large grapefruit. ‘This is the sun.’

I placed the grapefruit on the coffee table. I then looked for the smallest grape I could find. I placed it at the other end of the table.

‘That is Earth, so small you can hardly see it.’

Newton stepped closer to the table, clearly attempting to annihilate Earth in his jaws. ‘No, Newton,’ I said. ‘Let me finish.’

Newton retreated, tail between his legs.

Gulliver was frowning as he studied the grapefruit and the fragile little grape. He looked around. ‘So where is your planet?’

I think he honestly expected me to place the orange I was holding somewhere else in the room. By the television or on one of the bookshelves. Or maybe, at a pinch, upstairs.

‘To be accurate, this orange should be placed on a coffee table in New Zealand.’

He was silent for a moment, trying to understand the level of far-ness I was talking about. Still in a trance he asked, ‘Can I go there?’

‘No. It’s impossible.’

‘Why? There must have been a spaceship.’

I shook my head. ‘No. I didn’t travel. I may have arrived, but I didn’t travel.’

He was confused, so I explained, but then he was even more confused.

‘Anyway, the point is, there is no more chance of me crossing the universe now than any other human. This is who I am now, and this is where I have to stay.’

‘You gave up the universe for a life on the sofa?’

‘I didn’t realise that at the time.’

Isobel came downstairs. She was wearing her white dressing gown and her pyjamas. She was pale, but she was always pale in the morning. She looked at me and Gulliver talking, and for a moment, she seemed to greet the scene with a rarely seen fondness. But the expression faded as she remembered everything.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Gulliver.

‘What is the fruit doing?’ she asked, traces of sleep still evident in her quiet voice.

‘I was explaining to Gulliver where I came from. How far away.’

‘You came from a grapefruit?’

‘No. The grapefruit is the sun. Your sun. Our sun. I lived on the orange. Which should be in New Zealand. Earth is now in Newton’s stomach.’

I smiled at her. I thought she might find this funny, but she just stared at me the way she had been staring at me for weeks. As if I were light years away from her.

She left the room.

‘Gulliver,’ I said, ‘I think it would be best if I left. I shouldn’t have stayed, really. You see, this isn’t just about all this stuff. You know that argument me and your mother had? The one you never found out about?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I was unfaithful. I had sex with a woman called Maggie. One of my – your father’s – students. I didn’t enjoy it, but that was beside the point. I didn’t realise it would hurt your mother, but it did. I didn’t know the exact rules of fidelity but that isn’t really an excuse, or not one I can use, when I was deliberately lying about so many other things. When I was endangering her life, and yours.’ I sighed. ‘I think, I think I’m going to leave.’

‘Why?’

That question tugged at me. It reached into my stomach, and pulled.

‘I just think it will be for the best, right now.’

‘Where are you going to go?’

‘I don’t know. Not yet. But don’t worry, I’ll tell you when I get there.’

His mother was back in the doorway.

‘I’m going to leave,’ I told her.

She closed her eyes. She inhaled. ‘Yes,’ she said, with the mouth I had once kissed. ‘Yes. Maybe it is for the best.’ Her whole face crumpled, as if her skin were the emotion she wanted to screw up and throw away.

My eyes felt a warm, gentle strain. My vision blurred. Then something ran down my cheek, all the way to my lips. A liquid. Like rain, but warmer. Saline.

I had shed a tear.

The second type of gravity

Before I left I went upstairs to the attic. It was dark in there, except for the glow of the computer. Gulliver was lying on his bed, staring out of the window.

‘I’m not your dad, Gulliver. I don’t have a right to be here.’

‘No. I know.’ Gulliver chewed on his wristband. Hostility glistened in his eyes like broken glass.

‘You’re not my dad. But you’re just like him. You don’t give a shit. And you shagged someone behind Mum’s back. He did that too, you know.’

‘Listen, Gulliver, I’m not trying to leave you, I’m trying to bring back your mother, okay? She’s a bit lost right now and my presence here isn’t helping.’

‘It’s just so fucked up. I feel totally alone.’

Sun suddenly shone through the window, oblivious to our mood.

‘Loneliness, Gulliver, is a fact as universal as hydrogen.’

He sighed a sigh that should really have belonged to an older human. ‘I just don’t feel cut out sometimes. You know, cut out for life. I mean, people at school, loads of their parents are divorced but they seem to have an okay relationship with their dads. And everyone’s always thought, with me, what excuse did I have to go off the rails? What was wrong with my life? Living in a nice house with rich non-divorced parents. What the fuck could possibly be wrong there?

‘But it was all bullshit. Mum and Dad never loved each other, not since I can remember anyway. Mum seemed to change after he had his breakdown – I mean, after you came – but that was just her delusion. I mean, you weren’t even who she thought you were. It’s come to something when you relate to ET more than your own dad. He was crap. Seriously, I can’t think of one piece of advice he gave me. Except I shouldn’t become an architect because architecture takes a hundred years to be appreciated.’

‘Listen, you don’t need guidance, Gulliver. Everything you need is inside your own head. You have more knowledge about the universe than anyone on your own planet.’ I pointed at the window. ‘You’ve seen what’s out there. And also, I should say, you’ve shown yourself to be really strong.’

He stared out of the window again. ‘What’s it like up there?’

‘Very different. Everything is different.’

‘But how?’

‘Well, just existing is different. No one dies. There’s no pain. Everything is beautiful. The only religion is mathematics. There are no families. There are the hosts – they give instructions – and there is everyone else. The advancement of mathematics and the security of the universe are the two concerns. There is no hatred. There are no fathers and sons. There is no clear line between biology and technology. And everything is violet.’

‘It sounds awesome.’

‘It’s dull. It’s the dullest life you can imagine. Here, you have pain, and loss, that’s the price. But the rewards can be wonderful Gulliver.’

He looked at me, disbelieving. ‘Yeah. Well, I don’t have a clue how to find them.’

The phone rang. Isobel answered. Moments later, she was calling up to the attic.

‘Gulliver, it’s for you. A girl. Nat.’

I couldn’t help but notice the faintest of faint smiles on Gulliver’s face, a smile he felt embarrassed about and tried to hide under clouds of discontent as he left the room.

I sat and breathed, with lungs that would one day stop functioning but which still had a lot of warm clear air to inhale. Then I turned to Gulliver’s primitive Earth computer and began to type, giving as much advice as I could think of to help a human.

Advice for a human

1. Shame is a shackle. Free yourself.

2. Don’t worry about your abilities. You have the ability to love. That is enough.

3. Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.

4. Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.

5. Laugh. It suits you.

6. Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

7. Irony is fine, but not as fine as feeling.

8. Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

9. Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.

10. History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.

11. Sex can damage love but love can’t damage sex.

12. The news should start with mathematics, then poetry, and move down from there.

13. You shouldn’t have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

14. Your life will have 25,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

15. The road to snobbery is the road to misery. And vice versa.

16. Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.

17. Wear clothes, by all means, but remember they are clothes.

18. One life form’s gold is another life form’s tin can.

19. Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

20. If you become an architect, remember this: the square is nice. So is the rectangle. But you can overdo it.

21. Don’t bother going into space until you can leave the solar system. Then go to Zabii.

22. Don’t worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.

23. Happiness is not out here. It is in there.

24. New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.

25. There is only one genre in fiction. The genre is called ‘book’.

26. Never be too far away from a radio. A radio can save your life.

27. Dogs are geniuses of loyalty. And that is a good kind of genius to have.

28. Your mother should write a novel. Encourage her.

29. If there is a sunset, stop and look at it. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

30. Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.

31. Failure is a trick of the light.

32. You are human. You will care about money. But realise it can’t make you happy because happiness is not for sale.

33. You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don’t worry about it.

34. David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ tells you nothing about space, but its musical patterns are very pleasing to the ears.

35. When you look up at the sky, on a clear night, and see thousands of stars and planets, realise that very little is happening on most of them. The important stuff is further away.

36. One day humans will live on Mars. But nothing there will be more exciting than a single overcast morning on Earth.

37. Don’t always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It’s the warm bits that matter.

38. Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

39. No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.

40. Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you they just don’t quite understand the joke that is themselves.

41. Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

42. In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

43. Everything matters.

44. You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music. Music, by the way, is how you see things you can’t otherwise see. It is the most advanced thing you have. It is a superpower. Keep up with the bass guitar. You are good at it. Join a band.

45. My friend Ari was one of the wisest humans who ever lived. Read him.

46. A paradox. The things you don’t need to live – books, art, cinema, wine and so on – are the things you need to live.

47. A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.

48. No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.

49. Don’t be scared of anyone. You killed an alien assassin sent from the other side of the universe with a bread knife. Also, you have a very hard punch.

50. At some point, bad things are going to happen. Have someone to hold on to.

51. Alcohol in the evening is very enjoyable. Hangovers in the morning are very unpleasant. At some point you have to choose: evenings, or mornings.

52. If you are laughing, check that you don’t really want to cry. And vice versa.

53. Don’t ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.

54. That girl you are on the phone to. There will be others. But I hope she is nice.

55. You are not the only species on Earth with technology. Look at ants. Really. Look. What they do with twigs and leaves is quite amazing.

56. Your mother loved your father. Even if she pretends she didn’t.

57. There are a lot of idiots in your species. Lots and lots. You are not one of them. Hold your ground.

58. It is not the length of life that matters. It’s the depth. But while burrowing, keep the sun above you.

59. Numbers are pretty. Prime numbers are beautiful. Understand that.

60. Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.

61. One day, if you get into a position of power, tell people this: just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.

62. Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it’s a safe setting. In which case: start fires.

63. It’s not the technique, it’s the method. It’s not the words, it’s the melody.

64. Be alive. That is your supreme duty to the world.

65. Don’t think you know. Know you think.

66. As a black hole forms it creates an immense gamma-ray burst, blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds. You could disappear at any second. This one. Or this one. Or this one. Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

67. War is the answer. To the wrong question.

68. Physical attraction is, primarily, glandular.

69. Ari believed we are all a simulation. Matter is an illusion. Everything is silicon. He could be right. But your emotions? They’re solid.

70. It’s not you. It’s them. (No, really. It is.)

71. Walk Newton whenever you can. He likes to get out of the house. And he is a lovely dog.

72. Most humans don’t think about things very much. They survive by thinking about needs and wants alone. But you are not one of them. Be careful.

73. No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.

74. A quark is not the smallest thing. The wish you have on your death-bed – to have worked harder – that is the smallest thing. Because it won’t be there.

75. Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.

76. In your mind, change the name of every day to Saturday. And change the name of work to play.

77. When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know it is not done by watching news.

78. You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.

79. Leonardo da Vinci was not one of you. He was one of us.

80. Language is euphemism. Love is truth.

81. You can’t find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being.

82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

83. A watched pot never boils. That is all you need to know about quantum physics.

84. You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

85. The Dark Ages never ended. (But don’t tell your mother.)

86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunise yourself with art. And love.

87. Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.

88. Which is to say: don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.

89. At the sub-atomic level, everything is complex. But you do not live at the sub-atomic level. You have the right to simplify. If you don’t, you will go insane.

90. But know this. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role.

91. You are lucky to be alive. Inhale and take in life’s wonders. Never take so much as a single petal of a single flower for granted.

92. If you have children and love one more than another, work at it. They will know, even if it’s by a single atom less. A single atom is all you need to make a very big explosion.

93. School is a joke. But go along with it, because you are very near to the punchline.

94. You don’t have to be an academic. You don’t have to be anything. Don’t force it. Feel your way, and don’t stop feeling your way until something fits. Maybe nothing will. Maybe you are a road, not a destination. That is fine. Be a road. But make sure it’s one with something to look at out of the window.

95. Be kind to your mother. And try and make her happy.

96. You are a good human, Gulliver Martin.

97. I love you. Remember that.

A very brief hug

I packed a bag full of Andrew Martin’s clothes and then I left.

‘Where are you going to go?’ asked Isobel.

‘I don’t know. I’ll find somewhere. Don’t worry.’

She looked like she was going to worry. We hugged. I longed to hear her hum the theme to Cinema Paradiso. I longed to hear her talk to me about Alfred the Great. I longed for her to make me a sandwich, or pour TCP on a swab of cotton wool. I longed to hear her share her worries about work, or Gulliver. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

The hug ended. Newton, by her side, looked up at me with the most forlorn eyes.

‘Goodbye,’ I said.

And I walked across the gravel, towards the road and somewhere in the universe of my soul a fiery, life-giving star collapsed, and a very black hole began to form.

The melancholy beauty of the setting sun

The thing with black holes, of course, is that they are really very neat and tidy. There is no mess inside a black hole. All the disordered stuff that goes through the event horizon, all that in-falling matter and radiation, is compressed to the smallest state it can possibly be. A state that might easily be called nothing at all.

Black holes, in other words, give clarity. You lose the warmth and fire of the star but you gain order and peace. Total focus.

That is to say, I knew what to do.

I would stay as Andrew Martin. This was what Isobel wanted. You see, she wanted the least fuss possible. She didn’t want a scandal, or a missing person’s inquiry, or a funeral. So, doing what I thought was best, I moved out, rented a small flat in Cambridge for a while, and then I applied for jobs elsewhere in the world.

Eventually, I got a teaching job in America, at Stanford University in California. Once there, I did as well as I needed to do while making sure I didn’t do anything to advance any mathematical understanding that would lead to a leap in technological progress. Indeed, I had a poster on my office wall with a photograph of Albert Einstein on it, and one of his famous statements: ‘Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological animal.’

I never mentioned anything about a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, except to persuade my peers of its inherent impossibility. My main motive for doing so was to make sure no Vonnadorian ever had need to visit Earth. But also, Einstein was right. Humans weren’t good at handling progress and I didn’t want to see more destruction than necessary inflicted on or by this planet.

I lived on my own. I had a nice apartment in Palo Alto that I filled with plants.

I got drunk, got high, got lower than low.

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.’

When galaxies collide

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.

Home

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.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, that poet said, I shall not live in vain.

‘How are you?’ I asked, as if he were a casual acquaintance I often bumped into.

‘I haven’t tried to kill myself, if that’s what you mean.’

‘And how is she?’ I asked. ‘Your mother?’

Newton came over with a stick, dropped it for me to throw. Which I did.

‘She misses you.’

‘Me? Or your dad?’

‘You. You’re the one who looked after us.’

‘I don’t have any powers to look after you now. If you chose to jump off a roof then you’d probably die.’

‘I don’t jump off roofs any more.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s progress.’

There was a long silence. ‘I think she wants you to come back.’

‘Does she say that?’

‘No. But I think she does.’

The words were rain in a desert. After a while I said, in a quiet and neutral tone, ‘I don’t know if that would be wise. It’s easy to misunderstand your mother. And even if you haven’t got it wrong there could be all kinds of difficulties. I mean, what would she even call me? I don’t have a name. It would be wrong for her to call me Andrew.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she really misses me?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah. I think so.’

‘What about you?’

‘I miss you, too.’

Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.

‘I miss you, too,’ I said. ‘I miss both of you.’

It was evening. The clouds were orange, pink and purple. Was this what I had wanted? Was this why I had come back to Cambridge?

We talked.

The light faded.

Gulliver attached the lead to Newton’s collar. The dog’s eyes spoke sad warmth.

‘You know where we live,’ said Gulliver.

I nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’

I watched him leave. The joke of the universe. A noble human, with thousands of days to live. It made no logical sense that I had developed into someone who wanted those days to be as happy and secure for him as they could possibly be, but if you came to Earth looking for logical sense you were missing the point. You were missing lots of things.

I sat back and absorbed the sky and tried not to understand anything at all. I sat there until it was night. Until distant suns and planets shone above me, like a giant advert for better living. On other, more enlightened planets, there was the peace and calm and logic that so often came with advanced intelligence. I wanted none of it, I realised.

What I wanted was that most exotic of all things. I had no idea if that was possible. It probably wasn’t, but I needed to find out.

I wanted to live with people I could care for and who would care for me. I wanted family. I wanted happiness, not tomorrow or yesterday, but now.

What I wanted, in fact, was to go home. So, I stood up.

It was only a short walk away.