Angels in America (13 page)

(The ghost snatches up a plastic pill bottle from Prior
'
s night-stand.)

PRIOR
: Pills.

PRIOR 1
: Pills. For the pestilence.
(He struggles to open the bottle but can't get past the safety cap)
I too—
(He throws the bottle aside)

PRIOR
: Pestilence . . . You too what?

PRIOR 1
: The pestilence in my time was much worse than now. Whole villages of empty houses. You could look outdoors and see Death walking in the morning, dew dampening the ragged hem of his black robe. Plain as I see you now.

PRIOR
: You died of the plague.

PRIOR 1
: The spotty monster. Like you, alone.

PRIOR
: I'm not alone.

PRIOR 1
: You have no wife, no children.

PRIOR
: I'm gay.

PRIOR 1
: So? Be gay, dance in your altogether for all I care, what's that to do with not having children?

PRIOR
: Gay homosexual, not bonny, blithe and—never mind.

PRIOR 1
: I had twelve. When I died.

(A second ghost appears, this one dressed in the clothing of an elegant seventeenth-century Londoner.)

PRIOR 1
(Pointing to the new ghost)
: And I was three years younger than him.

(Prior sees the new ghost and screams!)

PRIOR
: Oh God another one.

PRIOR
2: Prior Walter. Prior to you by some seventeen others.

PRIOR
1: He's counting the bastards.

PRIOR
: Are we having a convention?

PRIOR
2: We've been sent to declare Her fabulous incipience. They love a well-paved entrance with lots of heralds, and—

PRIOR
1: The messenger come. Prepare the way. The infinite descent, a breath in air—

PRIOR
2: They chose us, I suspect, because of the mortal affinities. In a family as long-descended as the Walters there are bound to be a few carried off by plague.

PRIOR
1: The spotty monster.

PRIOR
2: Black Jack. Came from a water pump, half the city of London, can you imagine? His came from fleas. Yours, I understand, is the lamentable consequence of venery—

PRIOR
1: Fleas on rats, but who knew that?

PRIOR
: Am I going to die?

PRIOR
2: We aren't allowed to discuss—

PRIOR
1: When you do, you don't get ancestors to help you through it. You may be surrounded by children but you die alone.

PRIOR
: I'm afraid.

PRIOR
1
(Grim)
: You should be. There aren't even torches, and the path's rocky, dark and steep.

PRIOR
2: Don't alarm him. There's good news before there's bad.

     
We two come to strew rose petal and palm leaf before the triumphal procession. Prophet. Seer. Revelator. It's a great honor for the family.

PRIOR
1: He hasn't got a family.

PRIOR
2: I meant for the Walters, for the family in the larger sense.

PRIOR
(Singing)
:

     
All I want is a room somewhere,

     
Far away from the cold night air—

PRIOR
2
(Putting a hand on Prior
'
s forehead)
: Calm, calm, this is no brain fever . . .

(Prior keeps his eyes closed. The lights begin to change. Distant Glorious Music.)

PRIOR
1
(Low chant)
: Adonai, Adonai,

     
Olam ha-yichud,

     
Zefirot, Zazahot,

     
Ha-adam, ha-gadol

     
Daughter of Light,

     
Daughter of Splendors,

     
Fluor! Phosphor!

     
Lumen! Candle!

PRIOR
2
(Simultaneously, louder than Prior 1)
: Even now,

     
From the mirror-bright halls of Heaven,

     
Across the cold and lifeless infinity of space,

     
The Messenger comes

     
Trailing orbs of light,

     
Fabulous, incipient,

     
Oh Prophet,

     
To you!

PRIOR 1 AND PRIOR
2: Prepare, prepare,

     
The Infinite Descent,

     
A breath, a feather,

     
Glory to—

(They vanish.)

Scene 2

The next day. Split scene: Prior in an exam room in an outpatient clinic at the hospital; he's seated on a stool, hooked up to a pentamidine IV drip. Louis and Belize facing one another at a table in a coffee shop. Louis, responding to something Belize has said, is pursuing an idea as he always does, by thinking aloud
.

LOUIS
: Why has democracy succeeded in America? Of course by succeeded I mean comparatively, not literally, not in the present, but what makes for the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up? Why does the power that was once so carefully preserved at the top of the pyramid by the original framers of the Constitution seem drawn inexorably downward and outward in spite of the best effort of the Right to
stop this? I mean it's the really hard thing about being Left in this country, the American Left can't help but trip over all these petrified little fetishes: freedom, that's the worst; you know,
Jeane Kirkpatrick
for God's sake will go on and on about freedom and so what does that mean, the word “freedom,” when she talks about it, or human rights; you have Bush talking about human rights, and so what are these people talking about, they might as well be talking about the mating habits of Venusians, these people don't begin to know what, ontologically, freedom is or human rights, like they see these bourgeois property-based Rights-of-Man-type rights but that's not enfranchisement, not democracy, not what's implicit, what's potential within the idea, not the idea with blood in it. That's just liberalism, the worst kind of liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance, and what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.

BELIZE
: Uh-huh.

LOUIS
: Well don't you think that's true?

BELIZE
: Uh-huh. It is.

LOUIS
:
Power
is the object, not being tolerated. Fuck assimilation. But I mean in spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we're different from every other nation on earth, in that, with people here of every race, we can't— Ultimately what defines us isn't race, but politics. Not like any European country where there's an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith, like all Dutchmen, I mean Dutch people, are well, Dutch, and the Jews of Europe
were never Europeans, just a small problem. Facing the monolith. But here there are so many small problems, it's really just a collection of small problems, the monolith is missing. Oh, I mean, of course I suppose there's the monolith of White America. White Straight Male America.

BELIZE
: Which is not unimpressive, even among monoliths.

LOUIS
: Well, no, but when the race thing gets taken care of—and I don't mean to minimalize how major it is, I mean I know it is, this is a really, really incredibly racist country but it's like, well, the British. I mean, all these blue-eyed pink people. And it's just weird, you know, I mean I'm not all that Jewish-looking, or . . . well, maybe I am but, you know, in New York, everyone is . . . well, not everyone, but so many are but so but in England, in London I walk into bars and I feel like Sid the Yid, you know I mean like Woody Allen in
Annie Hall
, with the payess and the gabardine coat, like never, never anywhere so much—I mean, not actively despised, not like they're Germans, who I think are still terribly anti-Semitic, and racist too, I mean black-racist, they pretend otherwise but, anyway, in London, there's just— And at one point I met this black gay guy from Jamaica who talked with a lilt but he said his family'd been living in London since before the Civil War—the American one—and how the English never let him forget for a minute that he wasn't blue-eyed and pink and I said yeah, me too, these people are anti-Semites and he said yeah but the British Jews have the clothing business all sewed up and blacks there can't get a foothold. And it was an incredibly awkward moment of just . . . I mean here we were, in this bar that was gay but it was a
pub
, you know, the beams and the plaster and those horrible little, like, two-day-old fish-and-egg
sandwiches—and just so British, so
old
, and I felt, well, there's no way out of this because both of us are, right now, too much immersed in this history, hope is dissolved in the sheer age of this place, where race is what counts and there's no real hope of change. It's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America—

BELIZE
: Here in America race doesn't count.

LOUIS
: No, no, that's not—I mean you
can't be
hearing that.

BELIZE
: I—

LOUIS
: It's— Look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist—only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people—

BELIZE
: POWER to the People! AMEN!
(Looking at his watch) OH MY GOODNESS!
Will you look at the time, I gotta—

LOUIS
: Do you—You think this is, what, racist or naive or something?

BELIZE
: Well it's certainly
something
. Look, I just remembered I have an appointment—

LOUIS
: What? I mean I really don't want to, like, speak from some position of privilege and—

BELIZE
: I'm sitting here, thinking, eventually he's
got
to run out of steam, so I let you rattle on and on saying about maybe seven or eight things I find really offensive—

LOUIS
: What?

BELIZE
: But I know you, Louis, and I know the guilt fueling this peculiar tirade is obviously already swollen bigger than your hemorrhoids—

LOUIS
: I don't have hemorrhoids.

BELIZE
: I hear different. May I finish?

LOUIS
: Yes, but I don't have hemorrhoids.

BELIZE
: So finally, when I—

LOUIS
: Prior told you—He's an asshole, he shouldn't have—

BELIZE
: You promised, Louis. Prior is not a subject.

LOUIS
: You brought him up.

BELIZE
: I brought up hemorrhoids.

LOUIS
: So it's indirect. Passive-aggressive.

BELIZE
: Unlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn't have a race problem.

LOUIS
: Oh be fair I never said that.

BELIZE
: Not exactly, but—

LOUIS
: I said—

BELIZE
: —but it was close enough, because if it'd been that blunt I'd've just walked out and—

LOUIS
: You deliberately misinterpreted! I—

BELIZE
: Stop interrupting! I haven't been able to—