PRIOR
We have reached a verdict, your honor.
This man's heart is deficient.
He loves, but his love is worth nothing.
Harper
Pitt
I don't understand this. If I did never see you before and
I don't
think I did and I don't think you should be here in
this hallucination
because in my experience the mind which
is
where hallucinations come
from shouldn't be able to make
anything up that wasn't there to start
with that didn't enter it
from experience from the real
world.
Imagination can't create
anything new can it? It only recycles bits and
pieces from the world
and reassembles them into
visions. Am I making
sense right now?
Prior Walter
Given the circumstances, yes.
Harper Pitt
So when we think we have escaped the unbearable ordinariness
and
well... untruthfulness of our lives it's really all in the same
ordinariness and falseness rearranged
into the
appearance
of novelty
and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.
[to a dying Roy Cohn]
Ethel Rosenberg
I came here to forgive, but all I can do is take
pleasure in your
misery. Knowing that I would
get to see you die, more horribly than
I
did. And
you are. Cause you're dying in shit, Roy. Defeated.
[Leans in]
Ethel
Rosenberg
And you could kill me... but you couldn't ever defeat me...
you never
won. And when you die, all anyone will say is,
"Better that he had
never lived at all."
Belize
I live in America, Louis. I don't have to love it.
You do that.
Everyone's gotta have something to
love.
Louis Ironson
Everyone does.
Roy Cohn
[under the impression that Belize is the Angel of
Death]
Let me ask you something, sir.
Belize
[going along with it]
"Sir"?
Roy Cohn
What's it like? After?
Belize
After...?
Roy Cohn
This misery ends?
Belize
Hell or heaven?
[Roy indicates
"Heaven" through a glance]
Belize
Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn
A city. Good. I was worried...
it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.
Belize
Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but
flowering weeds. On every
corner a wrecking
crew and something new and crooked going up
catty corner to that. Windows missing in every
edifice like broken teeth,
fierce gusts of gritty
wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
Roy Cohn
Isaiah.
Belize
Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary
like rubies and
obsidian, and diamond-colored
cowspit
streamers in the wind. And voting
booths.
Roy Cohn
And a dragon atop a golden horde.
Belize
And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages,
and big dance palaces full of music and lights and
racial impurity and gender confusion. And
all the deities
are creole, mulatto,
brown as the mouths of rivers.
Race,
taste and history finally overcome. And you
ain't there.
Roy Cohn
And Heaven?
Belize
That was Heaven, Roy.
Roy
The fuck it was.
Prior Walter Ancestor #2
The twentieth century. Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly,
terribly old.
Harper Pitt
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 that 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's a kind of painful progress.
Longing for
what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I
think that's so.
