Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Tony Kushner
If it’s bad I’ll tell you.
LOUIS: Shitting blood sounds bad to me.
PRIOR: And I’m telling you.
LOUIS: And I’m handling it.
PRIOR: Tell me some more about justice.
LOUIS: I am handling it.
PRIOR: Well Louis you win Trooper of the Month.
(Louis starts to cry.)
PRIOR: I take it back. You aren’t Trooper of the Month.
This isn’t working.
Tell me some more about justice.
LOUIS: You are not about to die.
PRIOR: Justice . . .
LOUIS: . . . is an immensity, a . . . confusing vastness.
Justice is God.
(Little pause)
Prior?
PRIOR: Hmmm?
LOUIS: You love me.
PRIOR: Yes.
LOUIS: What if I walked out on this?
Would you hate me forever?
(Prior kisses Louis on the forehead.)
PRIOR: Yes.
(Prior sits at the foot of the bed, facing out, away from Louis.)
JOE: I think we ought to pray. Ask God for help. Ask him together.
HARPER: God won’t talk to me. I have to make up people to talk to me.
JOE: You have to keep asking.
HARPER: I forgot the question.
Oh yeah. God, is my husband a—
JOE (Scary): Stop it. Stop it. I’m warning you.
Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me? What do you want from me, Harper? More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.
As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent. Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.
HARPER: No, no, not that, that’s Utah talk, Mormon talk, I hate it, Joe, tell me, say it.
JOE: All I will say is that I am a very good man who has worked very hard to become good and you want to destroy that. You want to destroy me, but I am not going to let you do that.
(Little pause.)
HARPER: I’m going to have a baby.
JOE: Liar.
HARPER: You liar.
A baby born addicted to pills. A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are.
(Pause.)
JOE: Are you really . . .?
HARPER: No.
(He turns to go.)
HARPER: Yes.
(He stops. He believes her.)
HARPER: No.
Yes.
(He tries to approach her.)
HARPER: Get away from me.
Now we both have a secret.
(Joe leaves the room.)
PRIOR (Speaking to Louis but not looking at him): One of my ancestors was a ship’s captain who made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants—Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship—La Grande Geste—but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship’s only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they’d grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board.
LOUIS: Jesus.
PRIOR: I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.
I like your cosmology, baby. While time is running out I find myself drawn to anything that’s suspended, that lacks an ending. But it seems to me that it lets you off scot-free.
LOUIS: What do you mean?
PRIOR: No judgment, no guilt or responsibility.
LOUIS: For me.
PRIOR: For anyone. It was an editorial “you.”
LOUIS: Please get better. Please.
Please don’t get any sicker.
Scene 9
A week later. Roy and Henry, his doctor, in Henry’s office.
HENRY: Nobody knows what causes it. And nobody knows how to cure it. The best theory is that we blame a retrovirus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Its presence is made known to us by the useless antibodies which appear in reaction to its entrance into the bloodstream through a cut, or an orifice. The antibodies are powerless to protect the body against it. Why, we don’t know. The body’s immune system ceases to function. Sometimes the body even attacks itself. At any rate it’s left open to a whole horror house of infections from microbes which it usually defends against.
Like Kaposi’s sarcomas. These lesions. Or your throat problem. Or the glands.
We think it may also be able to slip past the blood-brain barrier into the brain. Which is of course very bad news.
And it’s fatal in we don’t know what percent of people with suppressed immune responses.
(Pause. Roy sits, brooding. Henry waits. Then:)
ROY: This is very interesting, Mr. Wizard, but why the fuck are you telling me this?
HENRY (Hesitating, confused, then): Well, I have just removed one of three lesions which biopsy results will probably tell us is a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion. And you have a pronounced swelling of glands in your neck, groin, and armpits—lymphadenopathy is another sign. And you have oral candidiasis and maybe a little more fungus under the fingernails of two digits on your right hand. So that’s why—
ROY: This disease.
HENRY: Syndrome.
ROY: Whatever. It afflicts mostly homosexuals and drug addicts.
HENRY: Mostly. Hemophiliacs are also at risk.
ROY: Homosexuals and drug addicts. So why are you implying that I . . .
(Roy stares hard at Henry, who begins to feel nervous.)
ROY: What are you implying, Henry?
HENRY: I don’t . . .
ROY: I’m not a drug addict.
HENRY: Oh come on Roy.
ROY: What, what, come on Roy what? Do you