DAN: I suppose there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I don’t get it.
JOHN: There’s nothing to get.
Music builds…
DAN: What are we talking about?
ART: We were just talking about a caveman…who survives until the present time.
JOHN: As you said, what a chance to learn, once I learned to learn.
DAN: Did you start the whiskey before we got here?
JOHN: Pretend it’s science fiction. Figure it out.
HARRY: Okay, a— (heh heh) — very old Cro-Magnon living until the — present.
Music crescendos…
JOHN: (slowly leans forward and suddenly GRUNTS LOUDLY like a caveman)
Everyone jumpsr startledr and then laughs.
EDITH: Oh!
SANDY: (entering) What?
ART: John just confided that he’s fourteen thousand years old.
SANDY: Oh, John, you don’t look a day over nine hundred!
ART: (laughing) Okay!
HARRY: Alright Spock, I’ll play your little game. What do you want? What’s the punch line?
JOHN: Every ten years or so, when people start to notice I don’t age, I move on.
Pause.
ART:…That’s very good, that’s very quick John. I wanna read that story when you’re done.
JOHN: You want more?
HARRY: Yeah, by all means. This is great! Alright, now… (chuckles)…So you think you’re a-a-uh — Cro-Magnon.
JOHN: Well, I didn’t learn it in school. That’s my best guess. Based on archaeological data, maps, anthropological research. Since Mesopotamia, I’ve got the last…four thousand years straight.
ART: Well you’re ahead of most people, so please, go on.
JOHN: Well you know the background stuff, so I’ll make it brief. In what I call my first lifetime, I aged to about thirty-five. What you see. I ended up leading my group. They saw me as magical. I didn’t even have to fight for it. Then, fear came. And they chased me away. They thought that I was…stealing their lives away to stay young.
HARRY: The prehistoric origin of the vampire myth. That is good!
JOHN: First thousand years, I didn’t know up from sideways.
DAN: How do you know the first thousand years?
JOHN: An informed guess, based on what I’ve learned in my memories.
ART: Most people can scarcely remember their childhood, but you have memories of that time?
JOHN: Like yours. Selective. Y’know, the high points, the low points, traumas. They stick in the mind forever. Put down at three or thirty-five, you still feel a twinge.
DAN: Go on.
JOHN: I kept getting chased because I wouldn’t die, so I got the hang of joining new groups I found. I also got the idea of periodically moving on. We were semi-nomadic, of course, following the weather and the game we hunted. The first two thousand years were cold. We learned it was warmer at lower elevations. Late glacial period, I assume.
ART: What was the terrain like?
JOHN: Mountainous. Vast plains to the West—
DAN: West — something you learned in school.
JOHN: Towards the setting sun. I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This is before they were separated from the continent by rising seas, as the glaciers melted.
HARRY: That happened?
DAN: Yes, the end of the Pleistocene. So far what he says fits.
ART: Oh, yeah, into any textbook.
JOHN: And that’s where I found it. How can I have knowledgeable recall if I didn’t have knowledge? It’s all retrospective. All I can do is integrate my recollections with modern findings.
EDITH: Caveman, you gonna hit me over the head with a club and drag me into the bedroom?
JOHN: You’d be more fun conscious.
EDITH: Oh, John.
HARRY: Let me get this straight. We’re not talking about, uh, reincarnation. You’re not saying that you remember, whatever the hell it would be, 200 separate lifetimes, dying and being born again and yada yada?
JOHN: One lifetime.
HARRY: Some lifetime, (laughs)
Wow! Maybe there is something to this reincarnation thing. You’re supposed to come back again and again, learn and learn, and somehow, John, you just managed to bypass all the other bodies.
DAN: Well, what’s the point?
LINDA: What about oceans?
JOHN: Didn’t see them till much later.
LINDA: So how would you know an ocean from a lake?
JOHN: Big waves. Something else I can only surmise in retrospect.
LINDA: Were you curious about where it all came from?
JOHN: We would look up at the sky and wonder. "There’s gotta be some big guys up there. What else made all this down here?"
At first I thought there was, uh, something wrong with me — maybe I was a bad guy for not dying. Then I began to wonder if I was cursed, or perhaps blessed. Then I thought maybe I had a mission.
EDITH: Do you still think you do? God works in mysterious ways.
JOHN: I think I just happened.
Phone rings, aside.
HARRY: (laughs) Wow.