Revelation (Part 2)

Revelation (Part Two) Kate brushes tears away, pulling her feet away from me, and sitting feet on the sofa, with hands and arms wrapped around her legs. The display looked much like that of a child. I receive flash images of Annie Lark, doing something similar. Kate says, “If his book had gone through, if he had tried to hook more people with it, my page would have been there. Right near the end. And it might have done no good, because I’m sure it is awful. It was the best I could do, with what I thought and knew at the time. But I like to think something I came up with would have made a difference . . . somewhere.” She reveals much about herself. I have never in my life engaged with another of my kind in such a way of honest thought and expression. “St. Hill wrote the book. He didn’t trust anyone under him to do it. The book contained everything he thought about everything. Once finished, he travelled through the manuscript, and filled in gaps. He claimed anything he hadn’t covered to be, as a rule, unimportant or insignificant. Then he defined himself as everything, anyway, and put the threats in just in case others didn’t see it that way.” She gently places a hand on her forehead. She seems to be in a state of fragility, but courageousness. Resolve. Strength. And then she snorts. A small, defensive laugh. “You know . . . Why am I going on about this, as though it’s so huge . . . such a serious thing to be talking about. Why am I doing that?” I keep silent. “I mean, you didn’t even know what the f**k I was talking about when I first mentioned the name ‘St. Hill,’ and yet privately, I think it’s so important to tell you everything. Like I think it means the same to you as it does me.” I say, “It is all very interesting to me, really.” And I know very well that nothing I say at this time could be the slightest bit more interesting than anything she could have to say. Please, continue! “OK,” she says, rubbing her face. “Those are my unclear thoughts. Let me get back to ones I think are clear. Right. So St. Hill’s book did reach completion, but never distribution. “And now, to my involvement in the whole thing. I worked for him. I did from a very, very young age. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘But she doesn’t know what he looks like!’ And I don’t. Don’t think I’m confused. I’m not confused. I never saw his face, because I never saw him with the lights on. OK? Let me put it to you this way: I think my work area was a closet. “The earliest I can remember, the time when I began working for him, I always heard about repaying my debt. That debt was my life. On my life’s receipt, he included all of nature. All things beautiful and sweet. And the clever f****r, he always said ‘you can’t return that!’ So I was convinced. On rare occasions I was allowed a break, outside, under the sunlight. The sensations were overwhelming, and the guilt was too. I owed him indeed, I thought, in service and in thanks. Love and praise. I was his child, he said; his daughter. Also his worker. “There’s a page or two or three, I won’t fumble through my papers, but they’re all about beauty and the incredible. Specifically the beauty surrounding people, even more so individuals. He said to me, that I could think of myself as his beautiful daughter, however without him I wouldn’t know what beauty meant. The same with how I felt. Without him standing over me, my feelings would dry up like a desert. Without him, I could never look forward to what it really means to feel something. I couldn’t look forward to anything. Not anything. He always explained so clearly, so vividly, what nothing meant. I had such a hard time understanding it. I was just young. But I was always just a tip-toe away from being nothing. “I worked. Really hard. Every time I went outside, I came back in and doubled my efforts. What a state of amazement I was in! To be given the chance to know everything, literally, the daughter of everything. And here is what, more or less, that boiled down to. I knew being that daughter meant, if I went further outside, saw other people, that they would be around me. Let me be around them. We would be together, and the time I spent not repaying my massive and growing debt would be so filled with feeling . . . I lose words to explain how it felt. “Then, one day, while I used light through a crack under my door to illuminate a hand written draft for my father’s book, that light went out--the usual precursor that I’m going outside; he would douse the outer room’s light so I couldn’t see him--and my door opened. I set everything into a stack, which is the stack you see with me here today, and stood up. Everything went as usual. He grabbed me, led me towards a door where I would be blindfolded until he put me outside--but I did something a little different. Just a random thing to do. I reached my hand out to the wall, and felt a protrusion. In half a second, I’d carelessly played with it just enough to move it up. It was a light switch! “The lights came on instantly, obviously. Just as quickly, my father, St. Hill, shoved me away, and took off at high speed from the room. I’ve never seen him since. It took me forever to find the courage to explore our house, and when I did, I was alone. It took another forever for me to get ahold my upset self, stop trying to keep working, pack up the few things important to me, and wander out of the house. Thankfully I wasn’t so young then . . . I survived on my own. “That’s not the half of my life to this point, but it’s where I’ll stop. Maybe I’ll never tell you anything else.” It is important, now that Kate’s finished, to point out that throughout her telling me all this, she fidgeted and played with her hands anxiously. In other words, she acted human. I imagine, were I to grab her hands, I would find them sweaty. I certainly feel the instinctive urge to do something. I decide to move closer to her on the sofa. She says, “You won’t be all that impressed with what I was ready to do that night, if you’d happened to have been St. Hill. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s a decision I’ve made. A hack one, maybe, but what can I say? If you had been St. Hill, I would have killed you. When I find him, I will kill him. Because when the light came on, I woke up--not literally--and to be honest, I think all of that has screwed me up, at least a little.” This she concedes: Kate D’Angelo, one screwed up individual. This I concede: Zeal, the same, and not moving an inch away from that nut job! There’s more . . . “Since I wrote that little rebellious page to sneak in, I guess you could say I was snapping out of it anyway. His big mistake came in allowing me outside. It gave such a weighty feeling in my stomach to go out there. And if that’s unclear, then f**k it. It’ll have to stay that way. I’m getting tired of talking. Anyway, I’ve found so many beautiful places that give the same feeling. I’d like to take you to one of them.”