Terrestrial History

He came out of the ocean. He walked up the seabed until the seabed became a beach, strode through the waves as if the water weren’t even there. He stopped only when he stood before me.

But first, of course, I should explain.

I’m not the kind of person to tell a story like this. I’ve always been irritated by mysticism, by blithe statements about inexplicable phenomena. At dinner parties, say, when people start to recount spooky, inexplicable events, I’m the one with their teeth gritted, calculating privately the way in which the experience being spoken of could be accounted for by suggestion, by mist, by a bird loose in the attic, by strong painkillers or carbon monoxide poisoning.

I’m irked by the way such stories are told so lightly, as if visits from spirits or aliens should have no implications for our rule-­governed world, for the forces that underpin our grids of GPS and radio, our steady certainty that our cars will drive, and our planes will stay in the sky. If you really have had a premonition, I have wanted to ask these friends, how do you think that works, in terms of the flow of time, in terms of chains of cause and effect? Or what substance do you think a ghostly soul is made of, that it may pertain after death and still reflect light as it moves flittingly across a moonlit garden? Where does the essence of old Uncle Toby, whom you believe to be haunting you, reside?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t deny mystery. Science is driven, after all, by what is unknown. Newton spoke of himself as a boy playing on the seashore, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered. Yet the mysteries of the supernatural have always seemed so facile, so simple in the way that they posit forces that flatter our sentimental views of ourselves. Existence at a quantum level is stranger than the strangest ghost story. But it isn’t built around our everlasting existence, the echoing of our own little human dramas across time and space. In all its complexity and strange elegance, is the universe really built to allow us glimpses of our dead? Forewarnings of small instances of bad luck? I know it is a poor thing to say about others’ beliefs, but it seems so childish.

Which is all to say—­at too great a length, as is my way—­that I understand. I realise that you may be doubting, that you might think my own story is so much familiar anthropocentrism.

If this is the case, then I can say only that I was once wary like this, like you.

I came to the house to finish a review paper on computing challenges in confinement models, which I had spent almost two years putting off. My husband Ruaraidh suggested I come out for two weeks over the university’s summer break. He would take care of our four-­year-­old son, Andrew, on his own for the time I was away.

I was grateful for the gesture, and I resented the gesture. I was in a hole, and for some reason I didn’t want to be dragged out. My work, my research, had always been the thing I needed no encouragement with. Yet, since they’d let my contract expire at the fusion lab down in Oxford (because I wouldn’t reconcile myself with their approach to turbulence modelling), and since I had returned to Edinburgh, to boring, piecemeal work and reviews of the findings of others, I had been making no real progress. “You don’t know how to work,” Ruaraidh told me. “You only know how to play.”

He was an academic too, but his research was different. He wrote doggedly about neoliberalism in the Western novel. “Isn’t that a bit outdated?” I asked him back when I first met him. “Why are you still stuck on that?”

He had frowned and said, “The effects of the ideology are still with us, and anyway, couldn’t I say the same thing about fusion?”

Touché, I thought. He was exciting then, different from all the physicists I worked with in the way that he was so broadly educated and interested, not hidebound and literal, as my colleagues were.

I had vainly thought that I was also different from the other researchers in my lab. I had been a wunderkind, it’s true. I had been horribly indulged. I didn’t want to be like the other physicists, and I liked Ruaraidh for all the ways that he wasn’t like a physicist.

Yet, alone at the white cottage, I was no longer a wunderkind; not a kind at all, in fact. And probably Ruaraidh was right; I’d been reliant on intuition and simple childish curiosity. I felt neither impulse now.

I walked around the creaking house and thought of the paper I was supposed to write. But I moved to do nothing. The first day on the island, arriving off the ferry, I’d spent time making the cottage habitable: opening the shutters, turning on the hot water, vacuuming up the dust that had accumulated on sills. After that, I’d gone to the shops in town to buy provisions, and then I allowed myself to take things slowly, assuring myself that I needed to acclimatise. I made a coffee and then another. My drafts and data sat untouched on the black hard drive on the kitchen table. The weather was blissful. I walked along the coast for hours. (Because what was the point of coming all the way out here, to this landscape, if I wasn’t going to permit myself to explore it?) Like this, I found that I had been at the cottage for over a week and done none of the work that I had come with the intention of completing.

We had bought the house with the money that my father left me in his will. He collapsed with a heart attack at sixty-­eight, just before the pandemic. He wasn’t young, I suppose, but it was still a jarring death. He had been such a fit man, a jogging grandfather: the kind one sees out on country roads on a Sunday morning, clad in a fluorescent rain jacket and baggy leggings, grimacing gamely into the rain. The summer after his death, on a holiday on Lewis, Ruaraidh and I, exploring the west side of the island, drove down a road as far as it would go, until it became a rutted track, and there was a pretty white cottage with a for sale sign nailed to the gate.

Ruaraidh was more doubtful than I was. His own father was an islander, born and raised on Mull. He was wary of these rural communities with their gossip, their hostility to outsiders. He thought, with justification, that we should be leaving the property for locals who would use it year-­round. (But surely it would have been other city dwellers who would have bought it if we hadn’t.)

He said, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

“Not really,” I said. But that was the point.

As a young researcher, I had been told that I was a natural, that my mind was built for the work that I did. I’d first written on shear effects in magnatised plasmas. The logic had somehow felt easy to me. I’d seen a way to synthesise a couple of ideas. It just seemed to click, though I worked day and night, I’ll admit. I didn’t dwell on the labour I did, however, because it felt better to think my small successes the result of some innate property of mine, evidence of a capability I held within myself. I loved the idea that I had an edge on all the other Ph.D.s who laboured at the same task. But now, in the house, one cause of my reluctance to do my work was the worry that I might not be able to complete it as I once had. I was forty. (Only forty, I tried to reassure myself.) Things had fallen into place before, resolved for me as they hadn’t for others. But recently such clarity had been harder to come by. What if I was losing my edge?

Once, everything had felt so close to hand. But life had been so much simpler. There was just the work. There was not our flat, not Ruaraidh, not Andrew needing to be taken down to school with his lunch, his gym kit, his art project, the permission form for the trip next week, and Jasper to be dropped at the dog walker with a bag of food for the day. Loading the car on such days, when it was my turn, I was up and down the stairs to the flat, having forgotten so many things, and I still left without something I should have taken. I felt that my mind was fractured by it all.

Also, I thought of my mother, confined for the last five years to a nursing home in East Kilbride. She drifted, lucid sometimes and able to recognise me and my brother, but at others lost in her own past to the point she didn’t know me. Periodically, she seemed to think she was still ten years old, late for history class. Somehow, she could reconcile this idea of herself as a 1950s schoolgirl with her presence in the nursing home, with the uniformed staff, the blaring TVs, the old, wrinkled faces in the rooms she passed. It was chilling to see the stories that the mind could tell itself, the way she could return, against all evidence, to the notion that she needed to hurry to catch up with her childhood friend Jane, who would already be walking to the old brick schoolhouse at the top of the hill.

She had come to the cottage the summer before, in fact, and though it had been hard work to accommodate her, she had seemed happy. She didn’t always know where she was, but she liked the light, the sea air. She was kind to her grandson Andrew. We’d set the living room up as a bedroom so that she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. The only problem was that Ruaraidh and I, on the floor above, couldn’t hear her waking in the night. She got up, turned on lights, wandered around. She didn’t go outside, but two mornings in a row I opened the fridge to find seashells. Ruaraidh and I collected shells, which we stored on the windowsill of the kitchen extension. Mum seemed particularly drawn to a conch that Ruaraidh had brought back from a conference in Florida. On consecutive mornings, I opened the fridge to find it next to the yogurt. My mother was back in bed both times. When she got up after the second instance of this, I mentioned the shell and she looked at me like I was the one losing it. I don’t know why I wanted her to acknowledge the strange act when that recollection was clearly beyond her. Her confusion was old news, but it disquieted me. Taking the conch shell from the fridge, I had run my fingers over it. It was a lovely yellowish white, shading in places to dark caramel. The outside was smooth, but the inside where the crustacean had clung into its home was lightly ridged, pinkish. I shifted it around in my hands, felt the natural mathematics of the thing. Cooled like this, held in the clean light of the kitchen, the object was blissful to grasp, and what alarmed me was not the illogic of my mother picking up the shell and putting it where she had, but a feeling that I almost understood why she had done so and a resultant fear that similar impulses could live latent within me.

But I was different from my mother, I told myself. I ate blueberries in the morning, I taxed my mind. I have a memory of her during my childhood speaking on the phone to her sister, my aunt, saying, “Of course, Hannah has all those brains . . .” I recall that she sat on the sofa in the living room, her back to me as I passed down the hallway, and there was an odd distaste to the way she said those words, as if she were describing “those brains” as a condition, like the eczema rashes which prompted her to rub lotion onto her forearms each morning.

In the house alone, I argued with Mum, continued conversations with the woman begun twenty years before.

This time, the weather was improbably good; too warm, by all rights, for the Western Isles. It was 2025, another summer of climate breakdown: fires on forested hillsides in Turkey and Greece, mudslides in Slovenia. It was the period in which the acceleration of these crises was still a shock. There had been reports the week before I arrived on the island of the lobster fishermen in Stornoway pulling up their creels to find octopuses, drawn north by warming seas. What does a Scottish fisherman do with an octopus? I asked myself. It sounded like the start of a dirty joke.

The urge to find humour in it was a defence, I suppose. Every summer was worse, but also better, Ruaraidh pointed out, than the summer that would come after. He was becoming bitter. It only took a newspaper article about green capitalism (and there were plenty) to set him off on a rant about greenwashing. I was bitter too, I suppose, but for different reasons. Fusion seemed to me such an easy solution, were it funded appropriately, were the gatekeepers of projects not so inflexible. Ruaraidh, I know, struggled to believe in the purpose of what I was doing (or had been doing). “We’re not where we are because of a need for solutions,” he had said. “They could solve the climate crisis tomorrow with the tools we have at hand.” (Who they were I didn’t ask him to specify. Governments, I guess. CEOs. Investment bankers. The category seemed to get broader as Ruaraidh ranted, until eventually it became us.)

This particular day—­the one I am trying to explain—­was hot, right into the late evening, after dinner, when I realised that I had lost my watch.

I walked around the house lifting cushions, scanning over surfaces, cutting through the stuffy inside air. I looked in the bathroom, I looked on the bench outside the back door of the cottage. I tried to push aside thoughts of my mother moving trance-­like through the same rooms. Then I remembered the swim I had taken in the afternoon. Of course, I thought. I was being too slow. I’d drunk too much wine with dinner. I had forgotten that I’d taken off my watch before I headed into the water. It would be down on the beach, on the rock on which I had left my clothes.

Jasper had been padding next to me as a I searched the house, wagging his tail, sniffing the things I moved as if it were all a game. I put on my shoes. I opened the back door and Jasper bounded out past me, thrilled by the unexpected expedition. He was a vizsla: ginger, skinny, all bones and muscles. He dashed out into the long grass in front of the house, which was tall in the middle of the summer, swaying and rippling in the warm wind.

I have explained my doubts about premonitions, but that night did already seem special. Everything was vivid. I remember, for instance, the bank beside the path to the cove. The slope was covered with small yellow flowers. These quivered as they were struck by the wind that came off the sea and channelled up the gulley down which the beach path descended. This night, these little heads all shook with a strangely even frequency, which made me think of the way that old VHS tapes would shiver in place when you paused them. I remember being a child in the early nineties and pausing a recording of Star Trek: The Next Generation in order to take in a tracking shot of the Enterprise, to examine the spaceship thrumming there, in dark space, on the old cathode-­ray TV. This was all connected, somehow. Held in the moment.

Jasper barked from lower down the path, already halfway to the sand. I followed him, taking care stepping down the dry, muddy footholds kicked into the grassy bank.

There was a brackish, salty, vegetal odour to the air. Jasper was crouched on the beach chewing on a washed-­up stick of kelp. The tide had come in some way since I had swum and the sound of the waves breaking echoed off the high cliffs of gneiss.

The beach was small, invisible from the road, unmarked on Google Maps, and so seldom visited by tourists, even in high summer. The prints of my own bare feet from earlier, leading to and from the water, were the only ones I could make out.

I walked to the rock from which those footsteps originated. My watch was there, glinting. I felt a suffusing relief. It was a man’s watch, actually; my dad’s. Gold, with a leather strap. I picked it up and put it on. It had been warmed by the sun, and this warmth meant that, fastening it, I felt that someone else—­my father, I imagined, gladly, then—­had been wearing it.

I sat on the sand, my back to the rock, and looked out at the water.

The sun was descending to the sea. Already the water had darkened. It had been clear blue when I had swum earlier, the clumps of weed puckering underneath me, the riffles and ridges of the sandy bottom visible below. Now the waves were like pewter, holding their light, glinting only where burrs of curling surf caught the slanting rays of sunlight.

I dug my hands down into the sand: the warm dry upper layer, the hard-­packed cooler grains beneath. Jasper was sniffing around the rocks behind me. I shut my eyes. I could feel the slight warmth of the dusky light on my face. I listened to the sound of the waves, the noise of the water fizzing in and retreating whisperingly out. Gulls, riding updrafts from the cliffs behind, called. It started then, I suppose. I opened my eyes again, and there was what seemed to be a flash of light on the horizon. I couldn’t quite understand that. I doubted what I’d witnessed, but I also knew that I had seen something. My pulse jumped.

Jasper had arrived beside me, wagging his tail, watching me enquiringly. I dusted sand from my hands, looked out at the water and the reddening sky. Was it the light from a ship that I’d seen? I could make out no boats on the horizon. Was it some strange manifestation of the northern lights? The waves curled and broke and I scanned all that water ahead of me. Jasper pressed to my side. I could feel his ribs against my ribs. I could feel his own small heart thumping away.

I don’t know how much time passed before I saw the shape in the sea. Perhaps it had been there since the flash and I had been merely finding a way to see it, to parse what was in front of me. It was unmistakably a figure. That was the first thing I thought. I spent no time considering any other possibility—­that it may be a rock or a seal, for instance. I just knew.

A dark figure stood in the surf.

The water rose and fell around its chest. I had the steady sense that it was looking at me. The waves slipped by it. I realised then that it was moving towards me.

It approached the beach. Each wave struck lower against it as it came towards the shore. It didn’t swim. It advanced steadily, walking up the rising seabed. I could make out its torso then. It had a heavy head, thin arms. The water didn’t disrupt its patient progress. It walked as if through air.

Then it was in the breakers, which curled and frothed and spluttered around the figure. I saw its knees rising, its careful stride.

It trod through the flat, foam-­latticed water ahead of the waves and I could make out the entirety of its legs, which were thin and long in comparison to the thick body, vaguely amphibian to my mind.

The figure was larger than a human. It had a giant slab-­like body and a wide head, lumped, neckless on top of that. It was like a golem, I thought, like some kind of animate statue.

I didn’t move, though. I was not capable of it in the moment, I found. To stand seemed as impossible to me as rising to a hover and flying off.

Instead, I just looked at the figure as it stepped onto the beach. I studied its feet, which were striking bird-­like things, with three toes and a fourth toe behind the heel. I watched the prints made by these feet in the soft wet sand, saw waves advancing and spluttering into them, erasing them as the water drew out again. It made the creature more understandable, somehow, to see the marks it was making on the world.

It walked over the flat wet sand, and then the smooth crescent beyond that, and then the dry pitted sand on which I sat.

I was still.

It stopped just ahead of me.

Jasper stood. His tail came out from between his legs and rose behind him. A ridge of his short ginger fur stood along his back. He barked, and I felt a pang of love. What could he do, the skinny dog? But he was trying.

The being was a couple of metres away, its long shadow cast over me, laid out over the rock behind. Its skin was markless but matte, like silicone, I thought. Where water clung to the creature, it hung in round droplets.

I was still frozen against my rock. Jasper approached the creature, barking. The creature began to lower itself, bending its thin legs, moving its hands towards the dog.

I waited.

Its knees pressed into the sand. Its hands were large, with thin fingers. It moved one of these open hands right up to Jasper’s barking head. I held my breath. The hand didn’t move. I released the air from my lungs slowly, as I realised that the creature was holding a palm in front of Jasper for Jasper to sniff. Jasper realised this himself, sniffed, sat back on his haunches, and watched the large figure enquiringly.

Now maybe you see why I first spoke of my doubts, to gain the leeway to say this, to show that I didn’t want to believe the sight before me. But I did. I knew too that, despite the great stature of the figure, it was human.

Perhaps I could have worked out that what I saw was a suit, could have calculated the way that a body fitted within. But at the time, I didn’t. I merely felt with certainty that I was being faced by a human consciousness.

I looked up at the figure. Quite suddenly a portion of the suit—­a dot on the headlike lump that topped the torso—­became translucent, and there, hanging like a bug stuck in amber, was the glowing face of a young man: boyish, freckled. He blinked. He smiled down at me. He said, “Hello.”

I said (I was shocked that I could say), “Hello?”

The boy’s illuminated face said, “I imagine this is a surprise for you.”

I said, “It’s like a strange dream.” But that was me being stumped for how to reply. It was nothing like a dream. I felt awake. The rest of my life was the dream, I felt then.

The boy nodded from within the suit. He had a gentle expression.

“Who are you?” I said.

“A human,” he said. “A human like you.”

“I do have some questions,” I said.

Jasper was still sitting on his haunches, looking up.

“I can imagine,” said the boy.

We both laughed then.

The sea came in and out. The sun was nearly down over the horizon and the sky behind the figure was still blazing.

“I’m from the future,” said the boy. “I know that sounds hard to believe . . .”

In that moment, forgive me, I could believe it.

The boy said, “I know who you are too. I’ve come here to see you.”

My heart fluttered. I wanted it, I realised. I wanted to believe it. He had come for me. Across time. It was mad, and yet I could feel in my bones that it made sense, or that it could make sense.

Maybe we are all, deep down, waiting for something like this to happen. Or perhaps it was just me, the entitlement that Ruaraidh had long lamented. I felt, I’m sorry, that what he said was true. I have been waiting and haven’t known I was waiting, I thought. He had come for me, and though I knew—­yes—­that I should doubt, I didn’t.