Read Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition for Free Online Page A

and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales . . .
    PRIOR : I like this; very zen; it’s . . . reassuringly incomprehensible and useless. We who are about to die thank you.
    LOUIS : You are not about to die.
    PRIOR : It’s not going well, really . . . Two new lesions. My leg hurts. There’s protein in my urine, the doctor says, but who knows what the fuck that portends. Anyway it shouldn’t be there, the protein. My butt is chapped from diarrhea and yesterday I shat blood.
    LOUIS : I really hate this. You don’t tell me—
    PRIOR : You get too upset, I wind up comforting you. It’s easier—
    LOUIS : Oh thanks.
    PRIOR : 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