Джером Биксби: The Man From Earth

WILL: I really wish I’d been here from the beginning.

JOHN: Me too.

DAN: Well, let me just say something right now. There’s absolutely no way in the whole world for John to prove this story to us, just like there’s no way for us to disprove it. No matter how outrageous we think it is, no matter how highly trained some of us think we are, there’s absolutely no way to disprove it. Our friend is either a caveman, a liar, or a nut. So while we’re thinking about that, why don’t we just go with it? I mean, hell, who knows, he might jolt us into believing him, or we might jolt him back to reality.

EDITH: Believing?!

ART: Whose reality?

WILL: So… You’re a caveman.

JOHN: Yes. Uh… Uh, I was a Cro-Magnon, I think.

WILL: You don’t know if you’re a caveman or not?

JOHN: No, I’m sure about that.

WILL: A Cro-Magnon, then. When did you first realize this?

JOHN: Well, when the Cro-Magnon was first identified, when anthropology gave them a name, I had mine.

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

JOHN: Would you like for me to lie on the couch, doctor?

WILL: (laughing, patting the couch) As you wish. As a physician, I’m curious. In this enormous lifetime you describe, have you ever been ill?

JOHN: Sure, as much as anyone.

WILL: Seriously ill?

JOHN: Sometimes.

WILL: Of what? Do you know?

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

WILL: Bubonic? Oh, that’s terrible.

JOHN: More so than history describes.

WILL: And smallpox— But you’re not scarred.

JOHN: I don’t scar.

HARRY: No, John, that is not possible.

WILL: Please, let’s 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.

HARRY: John, would you please stop by my lab before you take off, suffer a few tests from your friendly neighborhood biologist?

JOHN: I’m leery of labs. Afraid I might go in and stay for a thousand years while cigarette-smoking men try to figure me out.

HARRY: You don’t think that I would 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 wanna prove it.

ART: So you’re telling us this, the yarn of the century, and you don’t care if we believe it or not?

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

EDITH: Amen.

SANDY: I’ve always liked you.

EDITH: Why, thank you, dear.

SANDY: Now that’s changing.

EDITH: Surely you don’t believe this nonsense?

SANDY: I think we should remain courteous to someone who we’ve known and trusted, Edith.

LINDA: Here you sit— You can’t break his story. All you can do is thumb your nose at it.

ART: Is that what you’re doing, John? Are you laughing at us inside?

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

ART: What you’re saying— It offends common sense!

JOHN: So does relativity, quantum mechanics— That’s the way nature works.

DAN: But your story doesn’t fit into nature as we know it.

JOHN: But we know so little, Dan. We know so little. I mean how many of you know five geniuses in your field that you disagree with… One you would like to strangle?

DAN: Ugh, strangle them all.

EDITH: Damn it, Dan, it’s bad enough we have to listen to Harry’s idiotic jokes.

HARRY: Thank you very much, Edith. Maybe when I’m 110, I’ll be as smart as you are.

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

DAN: Come on, guys. Take it easy. How often do we get to meet someone who says he’s a stone-age man?

EDITH: (mutters) Well, once is enough.

HARRY: Edith.

DAN: All right. A guy with your mind— You’d 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: That’s over the span of 170 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 the new stuff that comes along. No one can. Not even in their 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— I mean, when the world learned it was round, you learned it.

JOHN: It took some time. News traveled slowly before communications were fancy. There were social obstacles, preconceptions, screams from the church.

ART: Ten doctorates. That’s impressive, John. Did you teach them?

JOHN: Some. You might have all done the same. Living 14,000 years didn’t make me a genius. I just had time.

DAN: Time. We can’t see it, we can’t hear it, we can’t weigh it, we can’t measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond.

The Hopis see time as a landscape, existing before and behind us, and we move— We move through it, slice by slice.

LINDA: Clocks measure time.

DAN: No, they measure themselves. The objective referent of a clock is another clock.

EDITH: How very interesting. What has it got to do with John?

DAN: Oh, he— He might be a man who lives outside of time as we know it.

WILL: Yes, uh, well. People do go around armed these days. (Points at John with hand in jacket pocket, as if holding a gun) If I shot you, John— You’re immortal? Would you survive this?

JOHN: I never said I was immortal, just old. I might die. And then you could wonder the rest of your incarcerated life what you shot.

WILL: Well, uh, may I? (Pulls out a pipe)

Everyone sighs with relief.

HARRY: Preferable to a gun.

DAN: Will, that was a bit much.

WILL: (peering into a box) Ooh. Books. Doctorates. Yes, you have grown and changed. But there is always innate nature. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable squatting in the backyard?

DAN: Sometimes I do, will. Look up at the stars. Wonder.

WILL: And what did primitive man make of them?

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

HARRY: They still do.

WILL: Have you ever wished it would end?

JOHN: No.

WILL: Fourteen thousand years. Injuries, illness, disasters. You’ve survived them all. You’re a very lucky man.

Pensive pause, followed by a knock at the door

JOHN: Come in.

CHARITYNOW GUY #1: John Oldman?

JOHN Yes.

CHARITYNOW GUY #1: CharityNow. We’re here to pick up the furniture.

JOHN: It’s all yours.

HARRY: Here, take this chair. I’m gonna go drink in the corner.

CharityNow guys start removing the furniture.

DAN: You’re, uh… you’re donating it? Everything?

JOHN: I’ll get more.

EDITH: Do you always travel this light?

JOHN: It’s the only way to move.

WILL: Oh, you— 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?

WILL: How did primitive man regard death?

JOHN: Well, we had the practical concept. You know, we stopped, fell down, didn’t get up, started to smell bad, come apart.

Injuries we could understand— If someone’s insides were all over the ground. Infections… They were, uh, mysterious.