Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth Page 2

  DAN. Like this, maybe.

  (DAN takes the item from the box, turns it over in his hand. ART glances over, then reacts with sharp interest.)

  ART. Hey, let me have a look at that!

  SANDY. What is it?

  DAN. A burin. Parrot beak, with inclined chisel point. I’d say probably Magdelanian.

  (DAN hands the object to ART, who inspects it carefully.)

  ART. Sure enough.

  LINDA. What’s a burin?

  ART. A flint tool for grooving wood, bone – especially antlers – to make spear and harpoon points. The Magdelanians weren’t noted for flint work. This is a nice specimen.

  HARRY. Okay. What’s a Magdelanian?

  DAN. A later Cro Magnon, without getting technical. The final culture of the Upper Paleolithic. If stones could speak, eh? Where did you get it, John?

  (JOHN seems to rouse from introspection.)

  JOHN. Believe it or not, from a thrift shop. For a quarter.

  ART. What a lucky bastard. I have to go digging for that kind of stuff!

  HARRY. Can I look at it?

  (JOHN nods. The burin is passed around. JOHN is again looking thoughtful. Finally LINDA hands the burin to JOHN, who puts it back in the box. A moment of silence.)

  JOHN. Maybe – I’m glad you did this.

  DAN. Did what? You mean, coming over? (off John’s nod) “Maybe?”

  JOHN. Definitely.

  HARRY. Gee, thanks.

  DAN. Well, so are we. So are we. We couldn’t let you just run off.

  JOHN. Thanks.

  (Another silent moment. Several puzzled expressions.)

  HARRY. What, are you on America’s Most Wanted?

  DAN. Out with it. You’re among friends!

  EDITH. Snoopy friends.

  (JOHN eyes are distant.)

  JOHN. Forget it.

  HARRY. Confound it, John, you’re creating a mystery! Obviously there’s something you’d like to say. Say it!

  JOHN. Yeah. Maybe.

  (Again he’s silent.)

  HARRY. Ten, nine, eight, seven –

  SANDY. – stop! –

  JOHN. There is something I’m kind of tempted to tell you. I think. I’ve never done this before. I wonder how it would pan out.

  (An uncomfortable silence… where is this going?)

  JOHN (cont’d) Okay. To pass the time, I wonder if you’d answer a silly question for me.

  ART. We’re teachers. We answer silly questions all the time.

  (A look from LINDA… )

  JOHN. What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic had survived until the present day?

  HARRY. What does this have to do with –

  DAN. You mean just, survived? Never died?

  JOHN. Yeah. What do you think he would be like?

  HARRY. I’ve met some guys. You ever been to the Ozarks?

  DAN. It’s an interesting idea. You working on a science-fiction story?

  JOHN. Say I am. What do you think he would be like?

  HARRY. Pretty tired?

  DAN. Seriously? Well, okay. As Art’s book title implies, he might be about like any of us.

  EDITH. Dan – a caveman?

  DAN. There’s no anatomical difference between, say, a Cro Magnon and us.

  ART. Except that as a rule we’ve grown a little taller.

  LINDA. What’s the selective advantage of height?

  ART. The better to see predators in high grass, my dear.

  DAN. Actually, tall and skinny radiates heat more effectively in warm climates.

  ART. As for Neanderthals, we’ve all seen apish people. That strain is still with us.

  EDITH. But he’d be a caveman.

  DAN. No, he wouldn’t. John’s hypothetical man would have lived through about a hundred and forty centuries –

  ART. – roughly –

  DAN. – and changed with every one of them – assuming normal intelligence, and men of the Upper Paleolithic were, we think, quite as intelligent as we are. They just didn’t know as much. But John’s man would have learned as the race learned. In fact, if he had an inquiring mind, his knowledge might be astonishing. (takes a sip) If you do write it, let me have a look. You’d probably make anthropological boners.

  JOHN. Deal.

  LINDA. What would keep him alive?

  EDITH. (looks at HARRY) What does a biologist say?

  HARRY. Cigarettes and ice cream. (gets laughs) Okay, okay, I’ll play. In science-fiction terms, perfect regeneration of body cells, especially in vital organs. The human body appears designed to live maybe a hundred and ninety years. Most of us die of slow poisoning.

  JOHN. Maybe he did something right. Something everybody else in history has done wrong.

  ART. Like eat the food, drink the water, and breathe the air?

  DAN. Prior to modern times, those were pristine. We’ve extended our life-span in a world not fit to live in.

  HARRY. It could happen. The pancreas turns over cells every twenty-four hours, the stomach lining in three days, the entire body in seven years. But the process falters. Waste accumulates and eventually is fatal to function. If a quirk in his immune system led to perfect detox and renewal, he could duck decay.

  EDITH. Now there’s a secret we’d all like to have!

  JOHN. Would you really want to do that? Live fourteen thousand years?

  HARRY. (the Gershwin tune:) “But who calls that livin’, when no gal will give in, to no man who’s nine-hundred years?”

  ART. If I was healthy, and didn’t age, why not?

  LINDA. What a chance to learn!

  SANDY. (changing the subject) Anyone hungry?

  (Off their affirmatives, SANDY heads for the kitchen.)

  HARRY. The more I think about it, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. One century’s magic is the next century’s science. They thought Columbus was nuts. Pasteur, Copernicus…

  JOHN. Aristarchus, long before that. I had a chance to sail with Columbus, but I’m not the adventurous type. I was pretty sure the world was round – but still, he might fall off an edge someplace.

  (Silence.)

  ART. Look around you. We just did.

  (Silence. )

  DAN. Well, I guess there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I don’t get it.

  JOHN. Nothing to get.

  DAN. What are we talking about? Explain.

  JOHN. You did a pretty good job of that.

  ART. We’ve been talking about a caveman who survived until this time.

  JOHN. As you said, what a chance to learn. Once I learned to learn.

  (Silence.)

  DAN. Did you start the whiskey before we got here?

  JOHN. Pretend it’s science-fiction. Figure it out.

  HARRY. A very old Cro Magnon, living until the present…

  (JOHN grunts loudly. Shockingly.)

  (After a blank moment, ART starts to laugh. DAN and HARRY join in. LINDA is staring at JOHN. SANDY comes to the kitchen door.)

  SANDY. What’s going on?

  ART. John has confided that he’s fourteen thousand years old!

  SANDY. He doesn’t look a day over nine hundred.

  (SANDY turns back into the kitchen. The chuckles subside.)

  ART. O-kay.

  HARRY. (Shatner imitation) All right, Spock, I’ll play your little game. What is it you want? What’s the punchline?

  JOHN. I have to move on every ten years or so, when people start wondering why I don’t age.

  ART. Very good. Quick. Let me see your story too, when it’s done.

  JOHN. Do you want more?

  HARRY. By all means. This is great. So you think you’re a Cro Magnon?

  JOHN. Well, I didn’t go to school and learn it. It’s my best guess, based on archeological data, maps, anthropological research. Since Mesopotamia, I’ve got the last three or four thousand years straight.

  ART. You’re ahead of most people. Do go on.

  (DAN and ART are amused. But underneath, puzzlement is starting
to show. What gives?)

  JOHN. You know all the background stuff, so I’ll make it short. In what I call my first lifetime, I aged to about thirty-five or so, what you see. I ended up leading my group. They saw me as magical. I didn’t even have to fight for it. But finally there was fear. They chased me away. They thought I was stealing their lives to stay young.

  HARRY. The prehistoric origin of the vampire myth?

  JOHN. The first thousand years I didn’t know up from sideways.

  DAN. How do you know, a thousand years?

  JOHN. An informed guess. From what I’ve learned, and my memories.

  ART. Most of us can scarcely remember our own childhoods, but you have memories of that time.

  JOHN. Like yours. Selective, the high points. And traumas, they stick in the mind forever. A put-down at three or thirty, you still feel a twinge.

  DAN. Go on.

  JOHN. I kept getting chased because I didn’t die. I got the hang of joining other groups I found. I also got the idea of moving on periodically. We were semi-nomadic, of course, following the weather, the game we hunted. Those few first thousand years were cold. We learned it was warmer at lower elevations. Late Glacial period, I guess.

  ART. What was the terrain like?

  JOHN. Mountainous, plains off to the west. Snow and ice.

  DAN. West? Something you learned in school?

  JOHN. Toward the setting sun. Another assumption based on memory. In fact, I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains in the distance, on the other side of an enormous deep valley, shadowed by the setting sun. Before they were separated from the continent by rising seas as glaciers melted.

  HARRY. That happened?

  DAN. The end of the Pleistocene. So far what he says fits.

  (SANDY and EDITH have come to the kitchen door. A touch of concern in SANDY’s eyes.)

  ART. Into any textbook.

  JOHN. That’s where I found it! How can I have knowledgeable recall, when I didn’t have knowledge? It’s retrospected. All I can do is integrate my recollections with modern findings.

  EDITH. A caveman! Are you going to hit me over the head with a club and drag me into the bedroom?

  JOHN. You’d be more fun conscious.

  EDITH. Oh, John.

  (EDITH turns back into the kitchen. SANDY stays in the doorway.)

  HARRY. Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not talking reincarnation. You’re not saying you remember – what would it be? – maybe two hundred lifetimes. Dying and being born again.

  JOHN. One lifetime.

  HARRY. Some lifetime. Maybe there is something to reincarnation. You’re supposed to come back again and again, and learn and learn. You just bypassed all the other bodies.

  DAN. John, what is the point?

  LINDA. (ignoring DAN) How about oceans?

  JOHN. I didn’t see any until much later.

  LINDA. How would you know an ocean from a lake?

  JOHN. Big waves. Something else I can surmise only in retrospect.

  LINDA. Were you curious about where it all came from? The question of origin?

  JOHN. We’d look at the sky and wonder. There had to be big guys up there. Otherwise, what made all this down here?

  EDITH’S VOICE. (from kitchen) Shit!

  (All suddenly look over – )

  EDITH. I dropped the tuna salad.

  (The rest now look back to JOHN:)

  JOHN. At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought maybe I was a bad guy, for not dying. In my way, I wondered if I was cursed, or maybe blessed. Later on, I wondered if I had a mission.

  EDITH. (from kitchen door) And now, do you think you do? God works in mysterious ways.

  JOHN. I think I just happened.

  (JOHN’s cell phone rings, on a table. He goes to answer it. Others look after him, concerned. EDITH starts to bring out food.)

  JOHN (cont’d) (into phone) Hello? Yes, Elly. Harrison can’t find your midterm? Hold on. Sandy?

  (SANDY digs into her briefcase. Pulls out papers. She brings them over to JOHN.)

  SANDY. Sorry. I picked it up by accident, with the periodicals.

  JOHN. Got it. What was that? (listens) Oh. You’re worried about your parents.

  (JOHN casually riffs the papers as you would the corner of a deck of cards. Finds Elly’s: it’s a D.)

  JOHN (cont’d) (into phone) Don’t worry, you passed. C plus. I’ll make sure it gets back to the office…You’re welcome. (hangs up) Nice kid. What does a pre-med need with history? (gives papers to SANDY) Make it so.

  (SANDY sits, balancing the papers on a knee, and starts to edit Elly’s test to C plus.)

  (The others are eating, drinking beers.)

  LINDA. More.

  ART. I was hoping we’d left that behind.

  HARRY. Oh, let’s go with it, Art, it’s interesting! And he’s making some sense, you know.

  ART. Like Hegel. Logic from absurd premises.

  (Over the following, they they continue eating and drinking.)

  EDITH. That van Gogh.

  JOHN. He gave it to me. I was Jacques Borne at the time, a pig farmer.

  (The others laugh: “pig farmer!”)

  JOHN (cont’d) I like to work with my hands. He’d come out to my place and paint. We would talk about capturing Nature in art. Turner, Cezanne…

  EDITH. The Nolde landscapes.

  JOHN. Not in van Gogh’s time.

  (as EDITH is embarrassed)

  He would have liked them, though.

  LINDA. I can’t understand why you don’t know where you were, back then. The geography hasn’t changed. I learned that in –

  ART. (cutting in) Professor Hanson’s tepid lectures. But you’re right.

  (LINDA shoots ART a look; he places a hand on her arm, a bit condescendingly, and she pulls away.)

  JOHN. (to LINDA) Where did you live when you were five years old?

  LINDA. Little Rock.

  JOHN. Your mother took you to the market. (off LINDA’s nod) Which direction was it. I mean, from your house?

  LINDA. I don’t know.

  JOHN. How far?

  LINDA. About three blocks.

  JOHN. Do you remember anything you saw on the way there? Any reference points that stuck?

  LINDA. There was, I think it was a gas station. And a big field. I was told never to go there alone.

  JOHN. If you went back there now, would it be the same?

  LINDA. Oh, no, I’m sure it must be all different now. Built up…

  (She falls silent, getting the point.)

  JOHN. Like the saying, you can’t go home again, because it isn’t there anymore. You’ve had the experience, picture it on my scale. I migrated through an endless flat place with endless new things. Forests, mountains, rivers, tundra. My memory sees what I saw then; my eye sees freeways, urban sprawl, Big Macs under the Eiffel tower. Early on, the world just got bigger and bigger, and then…Think what I’ve had to unlearn.

  (Silence. Digesting, skeptical, curious faces.)

  ART. Now you’re moving on again.

  JOHN. As Edith said, there’s talk about my not aging. When that happens, I’m gone.

  DAN. It might make sense to set up your next identity, your next ten years, and then just drop into it.

  JOHN. I’ve done that. I’ve even passed as my own son. “Oh, you’re an engineer too? Well, Ben was a good man. You’re hired.” Saves trouble with credentials, references. On the other hand, I’ve been busted a few times. I spent a year in jail in Belgium, 1862. That’s a date I remember, for faking a government application.

  LINDA. When did you come to America?

  JOHN. 1890, right after van Gogh’s death. With some French immigrants. Moving on.

  ART. An answer for every question, except one. Why are you doing this?

  JOHN. A whim. Maybe not such a good idea. As I said, it’s a first. I wanted you to say good-bye to me, not to what you’ve thought I was.
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  ART. Since this isn’t funny, we think you may be having a problem. A serious problem.

  JOHN. Hmm. Well, I’m going to lug some boxes.

  (ART rises, crosses to the farthest corner, pulls out his cell phone. JOHN bends to pick up a box beside the door.)

  SANDY. I’ll help.

  (DAN leans over and fingers the burin in the box JOHN is holding.)

  DAN. Wouldn’t you have relics, artifacts, of your early life? This, maybe?

  JOHN. Thrift shop. Really.

  (He takes a pen from the box.)

  If you lived a hundred, a thousand years, would you still have this? As a memento of your beginnings? Even if you didn’t have the concept of beginnings? What would have caused you to keep it? It would be lost. It might not exist any more. No, I don’t have artifacts.

  DAN. Interesting. You could have lied about that.

  JOHN. Don’t talk about me while I’m gone.

  (JOHN and SANDY go out the front door, with boxes and the bow in its closed case, head for the truck.)

  (Back inside the house, out of earshot:)

  DAN. Is he serious?

  EDITH. If so, I’m sorry to say, he’s…How could he have concealed that for ten years?

  HARRY. Well, at least he doesn’t appear to be dangerous.

  (HARRY is ostentatiously looking around. Pokes into the cushions of his chair.)

  DAN. What are you doing?

  HARRY. Looking for a hidden mike.

  (ART continues to speak quietly into his cell phone, then ends the call and puts it away. He rejoins the others.)

  (Stage lighting moves the focus from the guests inside the cabin to JOHN and SANDY at the truck. They are fitting boxes into the wagon. A slight breeze has whipped up. A distant haze of dust reddens the low sun.)