Angels in America
By Tony KushnerHarper is a sad Mormon Valium addict. In this monologue she is listening to the radio and talking to herself, as she often does.
HARPER:
People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining... beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart... When you look at the ozone layer, from outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering aureole encircling the atmosphere, encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It's a kind of gift from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way...This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn't be left alone...
I'd like to go traveling. Leave you behind to worry. I'll send postcards with strange stamps and tantalizing messages on the back. "Later maybe." "Nevermore..."
I'm undecided. I feel...like something's going to give. It's 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Or maybe troubles will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it's even worse than I know, maybe...I want to know, maybe I don't. The suspense...it's killing me...
Harper and Prior meet in Heaven. Prior is told that he can choose whether or not he wants to return to Earth. Harper isn't really sure how she got there.
HARPER:
I know. Heaven is depressing, full of dead people and all, but life...
It's all a matter of the opposable thumb and forefinger; not of the hand but of the heart; we grab hold like nobody's business, and then we don't seem to be able to let go. Not letting go deforms you.
But I can't stay. I feel terrible, but I've never felt more alive. I've finally found the secret of all that Mormon energy. Devastation. That's what makes people migrate, build things. Heartbroken people do it, people who have lost love. Because I don't think God loves His people any better than Joe loved me. The string was cut, and off they went.
I have to go now. I'm ready to lose him. Armed with the truth. He's got a sweet hollow center, but he's the nothing man.
I hope you come back. Look at this place. Can you imagine spending eternity here?
Harper, on a plane, after leaving Joe for good.
HARPER:
Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.
God! It's been years since I was on a plane!
When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening...
But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
At least I think that's so.
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