Читать книгу The Humans - Matt Haig - Страница 13

I was not told to provide this document of human life. That was not in my brief. Yet I feel obliged to do so to explain some remarkable features of human existence. I hope you will thereby understand why I chose to do what, by now, some of you must know I did.

Anyhow, I had always known Earth was a real place. I knew that, of course I did. I had consumed, in capsule form, the famous travelogue The Fighting Idiots: My Time with the Humans of Water Planet 7,081. I knew Earth was a real event in a dull and distant solar system, where not a great deal happened and where travel options for the locals were severely limited. I’d also heard that humans were a life form of, at best, middling intelligence and one prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry and walking around in circles.

But I was starting to realise no preparation could have been enough.

By morning I was in this Cambridge place.

It was horrendously fascinating. The buildings were what I noticed first, and it was quite startling to realise that the garage hadn’t been a one-off. All such structures – whether built for consumerist, habitative or other purposes – were static and stuck to the ground.

Of course, this was meant to be my town. This was where ‘I’ had lived, on and off, for over twenty years. And I would have to act like that was true, even though it was the most alien place I had ever seen in my life.

The lack of geometric imagination was startling. There was not so much as a decagon in sight. Though I did notice that some of the buildings were larger and – relatively speaking – more ornately designed than others.

Temples to the orgasm, I imagined.

Shops were beginning to open. In human towns, I would soon learn, everywhere is a shop. Shops are to Earth-dwellers what equation booths are to Vonnadorians.

In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can’t just swallow every book going, can’t chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can’t just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead.

Understandably, a human needs to know what kind of book they are about to read. They need to know if it is a love story. Or a murder story. Or a story about aliens.

There are other questions, too, that humans have in bookstores. Such as, is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend never to have read in order to stay looking clever? Will it make them laugh, or cry? Or will it simply force them to stare out of the window watching the tracks of raindrops? Is it a true story? Or is it a false one? Is it the kind of story that will work on their brain or one which aims for lower organs? Is it one of those books that ends up acquiring religious followers or getting burned by them? Is it a book about mathematics or – like everything else in the universe – simply because of it?

Yes, there are lots of questions. And even more books. So, so many. Humans in their typical human way have written far too many to get through. Reading is added to that great pile of things – work, love, sexual prowess, the words they didn’t say when they really needed to say them – that they are bound to feel a bit dissatisfied about.

So, humans need to know about a book. Just as they need to know, when they apply for a job, if it will cause them to lose their mind at the age of fifty-nine and lead them to jump out of the office window. Or if, when they go on a first date, the person who is now making witticisms about his year in Cambodia will one day leave her for a younger woman called Francesca who runs her own public relations firm and says Kafkaesque without having ever read Kafka.

Anyway, there I was walking into this bookshop and having a look at some of the books out on the tables. I noticed two of the females who worked there were laughing and pointing towards my mid-section. Again, I was confused. Weren’t men meant to go in bookshops? Was there some kind of war of ridicule going on between the genders? Did booksellers spend all their time mocking their customers? Or was it that I wasn’t wearing any clothes? Who knew? Anyway, it was a little distracting, especially as the only laughter I had ever heard had been the fur-muffled chuckle of an Ipsoid. I tried to focus on the books themselves, and decided to look at those stacked on the shelves.

I soon noticed that the system they were using was alphabetical and related to the initial letter in the last name of each author. As the human alphabet only has 26 letters it was an incredibly simple system, and I soon found the Ms. One of these M books was called The Dark Ages and it was by Isobel Martin. I pulled it off the shelf. It had a little sign on it saying ‘Local Author’. There was only one of them in stock, which was considerably fewer than the number of books by Andrew Martin. For example, there were thirteen copies of an Andrew Martin book called The Square Circle and eleven of another one called American Pi. They were both about mathematics.

I picked up these books and realised they both said ‘£8.99’ on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop.

I eventually settled into a walk, as running without clothes is not entirely compatible with external testicles, and then I started to read.

I searched both books for the Riemann hypothesis, but I couldn’t find anything except unrelated references to the long-dead German mathematician Bernhard Riemann himself.

I let the books drop to the ground.

People were really beginning to stop and stare. All around me were things I didn’t quite yet comprehend: litter, advertisements, bicycles. Uniquely human things.

I passed a large man with a long coat and a hairy face who, judging from his asymmetrical gait, seemed to be injured.

Of course, we may know brief pain, but this did not seem of that type. It reminded me that this was a place of death. Things deteriorated, degenerated, and died here. The life of a human was surrounded on all sides by darkness. How on Earth did they cope?

Idiocy, from slow reading. It could only be idiocy.

This man, though, didn’t seem to be coping. His eyes were full of sorrow and suffering.

‘Jesus,’ the man mumbled. I think he was mistaking me for someone. ‘I’ve seen it all now.’ He smelt of bacterial infection and several other repugnant things I couldn’t identify.

I thought about asking him for directions, as the map was rendered in only two dimensions and a little vague, but I wasn’t up to it yet. I might have been able to say the words but I didn’t have the confidence to direct them towards such a close face, with its bulbous nose and sad pink eyes. (How did I know his eyes were sad? That is an interesting question, especially as we Vonnadorians never really feel sadness. The answer is I don’t know. It was a feeling I had. A ghost inside me, maybe the ghost of the human I had become. I didn’t have all his memories, but did I have other things. Was empathy part-biological? All I know is it unsettled me, more than the sight of pain. Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.) So I walked past him and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I tried to find my own way to somewhere.

Now, I knew Professor Martin worked at the university but I had no idea what a university looked like. I guessed they wouldn’t be zirconium-clad space stations hovering just beyond the atmosphere, but other than that I didn’t really know. The ability to view two different buildings and say, oh this was that type of building, and that was this, well, that was simply lost on me. So I kept walking, ignoring the gasps and the laughter, and feeling whichever brick or glass façade I was passing by, as though touch held more answers than sight.

And then the very worst possible thing happened. (Brace yourselves, Vonnadorians.)

It began to rain.

The sensation of it on my skin and my hair was horrific, and I needed it to end. I felt so exposed. I began to jog, looking for an entry into somewhere. Anywhere. I passed a vast building with a large gate and sign outside. The sign said ‘The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary’. Having read Cosmopolitan I knew what ‘virgin’ meant in full detail but I had a problem with some of the other words. Corpus and Christi seemed to inhabit a space just beyond the language. Corpus was something to do with body, so maybe Corpus Christi was a tantric full body orgasm. In truth, I didn’t know. There were smaller words too, and a different sign. These words said ‘Cambridge University’. I used my left hand to open the gate and walked through, on to grass, heading towards the building that still had lights on.

Signs of life and warmth.

The grass was wet. The soft dampness of it repulsed me and I seriously considered screaming.

It was very neatly trimmed, this grass. I was later to realise that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier, and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction (as this was) with ‘grand’ architecture. But right then, I was oblivious to both the significance of tidy grass and architectural grandeur and so I kept walking, towards the main building.

A car stopped somewhere behind me. Again, there were blue lights flashing, sliding across the stone façade of Corpus Christi.

(Flashing blue lights on Earth = trouble.)

A man ran towards me. There was a whole crowd of other humans behind him. Where had they come from? They all seemed so sinister, in a pack, with their odd-looking clothed forms. They were aliens to me. That was the obvious part. What was less obvious was the way I seemed like an alien to them. After all, I looked like them. Maybe this was another human trait. Their ability to turn on themselves, to ostracise their own kind. If that was the case, it added weight to my mission. It made me understand it better.

Anyway, there I was, on the wet grass, with the man running towards me and the crowd further away. I could have run, or fought, but there were too many of them – some with archaic-looking recording equipment. The man grabbed me. ‘Come with me, sir.’ I thought of my purpose. But right then I had to comply. Indeed, I just wanted to get out of the rain.

‘I am Professor Andrew Martin,’ I said, having complete confidence that I knew how to say this phrase. And that is when I discovered the truly terrifying power of other people’s laughter.

‘I have a wife and a son,’ I said, and I gave their names. ‘I need to see them. Can you take me to see them?’

‘No. Not right now. No, we can’t.’

He held my arm tightly. I wanted, more than anything, for his hideous hand to let go. To be touched by one of them, let alone gripped, was too much. And yet I did not attempt to resist as he led me towards a vehicle.

I was supposed to draw as little attention to myself as possible while doing my task. In that, I was failing already.