Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth Page 3

  SANDY. I love you, you know. (off his gentle look) Since my first week at the office.

  JOHN. I know.

  SANDY. And?

  JOHN. I care very much about you. But now you know what you’d be getting into.

  SANDY. Do you really believe you’re a caveman?

  JOHN. Do you?

  (SANDY studies his expression. After a long beat:)

  SANDY. Could you love me? Or you don’t believe in it any more?

  JOHN. I’ve gotten over it too many times. I enjoy companionship, and I’m fond of you. Certainly attracted.

  SANDY. That’s it? (beat) I can work with that.

  JOHN. If what I’m saying is true, you and any children will age. I won’t. And one day I’ll leave.

  (She looks at him, trying to hassle it in her mind.)

  SANDY. Talk about your May-December romances.

  JOHN. (a sad smile) The simple fact is, I can’t give you forever.

  SANDY. How long is forever? Who ever really has it? My parents split up before I was born! Mom’s next marriage lasted a whole three years. And then there’s illness and death and acts of God. (off John’s silence) No one knows how long they have. Or how little. (takes his hand) I love you. And I’ll take whatever you can give.

  JOHN. (soft – blunt) Like ten years?

  (After a few moments, they cross back to the house.)

  (As JOHN and SANDY enter: HARRY waiting is near the door. HARRY grabs JOHN around arms and waist.)the

  (A flash of action, and HARRY is on the floor, flat on his back, John’s knee on his chest, their faces inches apart. Others react. SANDY has pressed herself against a wall.)

  JOHN (cont’d) Why did you do that?

  HARRY. I wanted to see how fast you are. Test your reflexes.

  JOHN. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. I can’t hear a flea breathing. I am not, in any way, Superman.

  HARRY. I’m a second-degree black belt!

  JOHN. Give it another thousand years.

  (JOHN tries to help HARRY to his feet; HARRY waves him away.)

  DAN. Smooth demonstration, Harry.

  HARRY. Sit on it, Dan.

  ART. (quietly, to HARRY) Still think he’s not dangerous?

  (SANDY is disturbed by the darkening tone.)

  SANDY. Guys, please.

  LINDA. Well I still have questions.

  ART. (baiting JOHN) Yeah, so do I. Are we through with prehistory yet? Do you remember any of your original language?

  (JOHN looks to SANDY for a cue… “should I?” She nods.)

  JOHN. A little. One thing that hasn’t changed much.

  (He gestures with his head, making a wolf-whistle toward

  SANDY. Some laughs… )

  LINDA. Did you ever do any cave art?

  JOHN. You’ve seen the rock art at Les Eyzies? Some of them were the work of – what was his name? – Gurar. He was pretty good at it. He’d draw the animals we hoped to find, eat. One time after a fruitless hunt, our chief stomped his teeth out. His magic had failed. After that, somebody had to chew his food for him. Finally he got, I suppose, an infected jaw. He was abandoned.

  EDITH. That’s awful.

  LINDA. Is all this why your students say your knowledge of history is so amazing?

  (ART gives her an impatient look.)

  JOHN. No, that’s mostly from study. Again, it was always one man, one place at a time. My solitary viewpoint, in a world I knew almost nothing about.

  DAN. Let’s talk about what you say you do know about. Historical times.

  EDITH. Oh, don’t encourage him!

  JOHN. Over the next few thousand years, the Neolithic, it got warmer.

  ART. ‘A few thousand years.’ I know you’re guessing.

  JOHN. You can’t get there from here.

  ART. Pray continue.

  JOHN. We hunted reindeer, mammoth –

  ART.…bison, horses. Then game retreated northward as the climate changed. You got the idea of growing food instead of gathering it, raising animals instead of hunting them. Am I getting warm? Lakeside living became the norm. Fishing, fowling. Again, out of any textbook.

  JOHN. Even yours. You had most of it right. Finally I headed east. I’d become curious about the world, wanted to explore. I’d gotten the hang of going it alone, and fitting in when I wanted to.

  DAN. East, toward the rising sun.

  JOHN. I thought it might be warmer over there. That’s when I saw an ocean. The Mediterranean, probably. This was around the beginning of the Bronze Age. I followed trade routes from the east, copper, tin, learning languages as I went. And everywhere creation myths, new gods, so many and so different I finally realized they were probably all hogwash, though it was wise to pretend belief. I was Sumerian for maybe two thousand years, then Babylonian… finally under Hammurabi, a great man. Then I sailed as a Phoenician for a time. Moving on had been easy as a hunter-gatherer, harder when villages emerged, tougher still in city-states where authority was centralized and strangers were suspect. It seemed like I was always on the move. I learned some tricks. Even faked my death a few times. I headed east again, finally to India, luckily at the time of the Buddha.

  ART. Luckily?

  JOHN. The most extraordinary man I’ve ever known. He taught me things that I’d never thought about before.

  HARRY. You studied with the Buddha?

  JOHN. Until he died. He knew there was something special about me. I never told him.

  DAN. Well, it sounds fascinating. I almost wish it were true.

  ART. If it is true, why are you telling us? We might tell others.

  JOHN. (shrugs) It would vanish in disbelief. The story that goes around the room, no credibility. If I could make any of you believe me, in a month you wouldn’t. Some of you would say I’m a psychopath, others would be angry at a pointless joke.

  ART. Some of us are angry now.

  JOHN. I guess this was a bad idea. I love you all, I don’t want to put you through anything. I’m sorry if I have.

  EDITH. Then why are you doing it!

  JOHN. I wanted to say good-bye –

  EDITH. (cutting in, cold) As “yourself.” Well, I’d say you’ve done that. Whatever that “self” is.

  DAN. Easy, Edith, we’re just grading his homework.

  ART. (to DAN) You’re playing good cop. Enjoy it. This is a crock, and I’m tempted to walk out –

  JOHN. I’m sorry. I don’t like to hurt anyone.

  ART. – but I won’t. I’m curious. I want to know what the hell this is about.

  EDITH. I agree, John! What is this all about?

  (Under above, sound of a car pulling up outside. JOHN glances out the window. His expression turns wry. ART rises – )

  ART. And here comes Dr. Freud.

  (Footsteps on the porch. ART opens the door, revealing WILLIAM GRUBER. )

  GRUBER. John! I’m glad I caught you! Someone mentioned you were leaving today –

  JOHN. (cutting in) – someone called you and told you I’ve lost it. Come on in, Will. This is going in unexpected directions.

  GRUBER. (entering) So I hear.

  (GRUBER nods to the others. SANDY indicates the paper plates.)

  SANDY. Are you hungry? Pork chop, taco, cake?

  GRUBER. Ah. Thank you, no.

  JOHN. Whiskey?

  HARRY. Johnnie Walker Blue!

  GRUBER. Oh, yes!

  (JOHN pours a cup for GRUBER, who glances at ART and LINDA, instantly sizing up the situation.)

  GRUBER (cont’d) (to LINDA) You look familiar, my dear.

  LINDA. Linda Murphy. I’m in your Tuesday Psych One class.

  GRUBER. Well, this may be a lesson I could not have imagined. (to JOHN) I regret being obvious, John. These people are concerned for you.

  JOHN. Yeah, I’m cutting out paper dinosaurs.

  GRUBER. I really wish I’d been here at the beginning.

  ART. Don’t.

  JOHN. Me, too.

  DAN. Let me say somet
hing right here. There’s no way in the whole world for John to prove his story to us, and there’s no way for us to disprove it! No matter how outrageous we believe it is, and no matter how highly trained we believe we are, we absolutely can’t disprove it. Our friend is either a caveman, a liar, or a nut. So while we’re thinking about that, why not just go with it? He may jolt us into believing him, we may jolt him into reality.

  EDITH. “Believing”?

  ART. Whose reality?

  GRUBER. So you’re caveman?

  JOHN. Yes. I am, or was, a Cro Magnon. I think.

  GRUBER. You don’t know if you’re a caveman or not?

  JOHN. Oh, I’m sure about that.

  GRUBER. A Cro Magnon, then. When did you first realize this?

  JOHN. When the Cro Magnon was first identified. When anthropology gave them a name, I had mine.

  GRUBER. Well, please continue. I’m sure you must have more to say.

  JOHN. Want me to lie down on the couch?

  GRUBER. (smiles) As you wish.

  (Brief silence. GRUBER sips his whiskey.)

  As a physician, I am curious. In the enormous lifetime you describe, have you ever been ill?

  JOHN. Sure. As much as anyone else.

  GRUBER. Seriously ill?

  JOHN. Sometimes.

  GRUBER. Of what, do you know?

  JOHN. In prehistory, I can’t tell you. Maybe pneumonia, once or twice. The last few hundred years, I’ve gotten over typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox. I survived the black plague.

  GRUBER. Bubonic. Terrible.

  JOHN. More so than history describes.

  GRUBER. And smallpox. You are not scarred.

  JOHN. I don’t scar.

  HARRY. That’s not possible!

  GRUBER. Let us take John’s story at face value, and explore it from that perspective. If he doesn’t scar, it’s no stranger than the rest of it.

  HARRY. Would you come to my lab, John, before you take off? Suffer a few tests from your friendly biologist?

  JOHN. No, I’m leery of labs. I could go in and maybe stay in, for a thousand years, while cigarette-smoking men tried to figure me out.

  HARRY. You don’t think I’d betray you in any way.

  JOHN. Walls have ears.

  DAN. Medical tests might be a way of proving what you say.

  JOHN. I don’t want to prove it.

  ART. You’re telling us all this, the yarn of the century, and you don’t care if we believe you?

  JOHN. I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to. You’re not as crazy as you think I am.

  EDITH. Amen.

  SANDY. (to EDITH) I’ve always liked you.

  EDITH. Why, thank you, dear...

  SANDY. That’s changing.

  EDITH. Surely you don’t believe this nonsense?

  SANDY. I think we should remain courteous to someone we’ve known and trusted.

  LINDA. Here you sit – scholars, and you can’t break his story. All you can do is thumb your nose at it.

  ART. Are you doing that to us, John? Laughing at us, inside?

  JOHN. I wish you didn’t feel that way.

  ART. What you’re telling us, it offends common sense.

  JOHN. So does relativity, quantum mechanics, but that’s the way Nature works.

  DAN. Your story doesn’t fit into Nature as we know it.

  JOHN. And we know so little, Dan. Learning all the time. Even experts…each of you probably knows five “geniuses” in your specialty you disagree with; probably one you’d like to strangle.

  DAN. I’d strangle all of ’em!

  EDITH. Dammit Dan – it’s bad enough we have to listen to Harry’s idiotic jokes –

  HARRY. Well, thank you very much. Maybe when I get to be a hundred-ten I’ll be as smart as you are.

  EDITH. If you lived as long as John, you still wouldn’t grow up.

  DAN. Aw, take it easy. How often do you meet someone who thinks he is a Stone Age man?

  EDITH. Once is enough.

  HARRY. Edith?

  (She looks up, eyebrow raised. He blows her a kiss. She shakes her head…but her anger dissipates a little.)

  DAN. (beat) Alright then. A guy with your mind, you would have studied a great deal.

  JOHN. I have ten degrees, including all of yours. Except yours, Will.

  HARRY. That makes me feel a trifle Lilliputian.

  JOHN. But that’s over the span of a hundred and seventy years! I got my biology degree at Oxford in 1840, so I’m a little behind the times. The same in other areas. I can’t keep up with all the new stuff that comes along. Hell, these days no one can, even in your specialty.

  ART. So much for the myth of the super-wise, all knowing immortal.

  DAN. I see your point, John. No matter how long a man lives, he can’t be in advance of his times. He can’t know more than the best of the race knows, if that. When the world learned it was round, you learned it.

  JOHN. It took some time. News traveled slowly before communications got fancy. And there were problems of preconception, social obstacles, screams from the church.

  ART. Ten Doctorates. Impressive. Have you taught them, John?

  JOHN. Some. Look, you all might have done the same. Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius. I just had the time.

  DAN. (pondering) Time…

  ( A moment goes by. Everyone looking at DAN. He notices:)

  DAN (cont’d) Oh. You can’t see it, hear it, weigh it, you can’t isolate it in a laboratory. It’s our subjective sense of becoming – becoming what we are – instead of what we were a nanosecond ago – becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The Hopi see time as a landscape, existing before and behind us. We move through it slice by slice.

  LINDA. Clocks measure time.

  DAN. They measure themselves. The only objective referent of a clock is another one.

  EDITH. Very interesting. What has it to do with John?

  DAN. I wonder if he, somehow, exists outside of time, as we know it.

  (GRUBER has his hand in his jacket pocket. Speaks up suddenly:)

  GRUBER. People do go around armed these days. (as all react) If I shot you, John, you are immortal? Would you survive this?

  JOHN. I never said I was immortal, only that I’m old. I might die, and you could wonder the rest of your incarcerated life what it was you killed.

  (GRUBER fishes around, takes a pipe from his pocket.)

  GRUBER. May I?

  (Relieved expressions. JOHN nods. GRUBER lights up.)

  HARRY. Preferable to a gun, anyhow.

  DAN. That was a little much, Will.

  (Brief silence. GRUBER glances at the last box by the door. Books.)

  GRUBER. Books, Doctorates. Yes, you’ve grown and changed, but there is always innate nature. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable squatting in the back yard?

  (Several startled looks at GRUBER. DAN’s expression says, “What the hell?”)

  SANDY. That’s a nasty thing to say!

  JOHN. Sometimes I do, Will. I look up at the stars and wonder.

  GRUBER. What did primitive man make of them?

  JOHN. A great mystery. There were gods up there then. Shamans who knew about them told us so.

  HARRY. They still do.

  GRUBER. Have you ever wished it would end?

  JOHN. (beat) No.

  GRUBER. Fourteen thousand years. Injuries, illness, disasters, you survived them all. You’re a very lucky man.

  (Silence. JOHN considering Gruber’s last line. A sound is heard. A truck pulling up outside. JOHN goes to the door and opens it, revealing a MOVING MAN.)

  MOVING MAN #1. John Oldman?

  JOHN. Yes.

  MOVING MAN #1. Charity Now. We’re here to pick up the furniture.

  (JOHN steps aside. The MOVING MAN enters, followed by another MOVING MAN.)

  JOHN. It’s all yours.

  (An awkward moment as the group realizes they’ll have to leave their seats. They all rise.)

&
nbsp; MOVING MAN #2. (to SANDY) Sorry, miss.

  SANDY. That’s all right.

  (MOVING MAN #2 picks up SANDY’s chair, heads for the door. Under following, the two movers are back and forth, in and out, carrying chairs, tables, lamps, etc., to their truck.)

  (DAN is staring at JOHN.)

  DAN. You’re donating it? Everything?

  JOHN. I’ll get more.

  EDITH. Do you always travel this light?

  JOHN. Only way to move.

  (A brief silence, as all realize just how completely JOHN is severing his ties. Nothing to weigh him down. Finally:)

  GRUBER. (to JOHN) You’ve talked a good deal about your extraordinary amount of living. What do you think of dying, John? Do you fear death?

  JOHN. Who wouldn’t?

  GRUBER. How did primitive man regard death?

  JOHN. We had the practical concept. You stopped. You fell down, didn’t get up, started to smell bad and come apart. Injuries we could understand. If somebody’s insides were all over the ground. Infections were mysterious, aging was the greatest mystery of all.

  GRUBER. You realized you were different.

  JOHN. Much longer to realize how I was different, to synthesize my experience into a view of myself. I even thought for a while there was something wrong with everybody else! They got old and died. So did animals. But not me.

  (THE MOVING MEN are carrying out the box-spring. One gives the other a look. They move on, deadpan.

  LINDA is looking at Gruber’s pipe, not happily. She coughs. GRUBER notices.)

  GRUBER. Ah, forgive me, my dear.

  (GRUBER moves toward the front door, opens it.)

  GRUBER (cont’d) (to JOHN) You live simply.

  (GRUBER moves onto the porch a bit. JOHN moves to follow him outside.)

  JOHN. I’ve owned castles. When you’re always leaving, why leave a lot? I have money…