Verity Rising

I

It’s the last time I’ll see my father alive, a suited silhouette against the spiral of autumn leaves caught in a frigid afternoon wind.

A cold day. A cold visit.

I sit as far away as the limo allows. My jacket’s at the café, and the rear compartment heater is off. I won’t ask him to turn it on. I won’t ask him for anything ever again.

His manicured hands clasp gently in his lap. “You’re making a mistake.”

I watch houses roll by, charming two-stories with winding drives - a nice neighborhood, a university town, where seasons change like clockwork and nothing is out of place.

“Without my reputation, my achievements are meaningless.” He clears his throat. “Ver, please.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snap.

“This is my legacy. Do what I ask, and everything goes to you. All you have to do is tell the truth.”

“Your truth has always been the only one that matters.” I pin him with a glare. “Not this time.”

“Then you will get nothing.”

The limo stops behind the café.

Right before I exit, I see it, tucked into the seat beside him.

Resentment possesses me.

I slide over to kiss his cheek, his gaze glued to the pale world outside.

I take it, slip it into my apron, and go back to work.

II

I clock in, twenty minutes late.

Farouk watches me with a cautious smile. He covered the lunch rush without breaking a sweat. This is the easy way of him. “How was it?”

“Same as before.”

I slide between him and the register, trying to ignore the way his chest grazes my back.

I haven’t told him that I love him. He knows too much of my grief.

Instinctively, I touch the little black notebook in my pocket.

He nods to me, frothing milk and accepting payment from a customer at the same time. “You told him not to come back?”

“Not exactly, but I think he knows.”

“How will you afford tuition?”

“I’ll manage.”

“I’ll help,” he says. Farouk, whose side business making sculptures from recycled materials barely covers his own.

“Everything has infinite forms,” he told me once. “Plastic. Metal. People. Especially people. You understand most of all.”

He pats my shoulder. “You’re free of him. We should celebrate.”

I don’t answer.

When my shift ends, I hang up my apron, clutch the notebook to my chest, and venture out into the cold. I toss a goodbye over my shoulder and pretend I didn’t see his crestfallen face.

III

RISING TO THE TOP- LABORER GAMBLES ON STOCKS, WINS BIG

Phoenix Rising, son of factory workers, becomes a household name overnight.

AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, FROM MAID TO MAGNATE’S WIFE

Billionaire Phoenix Rising files for divorce from his first wife on the eve of his wedding to former housestaff, a baby on the way.

THE FALL OF RISING - UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT OR CRIME OF PASSION?

When Bella Rising fell to her death, only her husband and daughter were there to witness. Will a jury believe a teenage girl who claims her mother was pushed?

IV

I stand by the oven as it heats my dinner. It’s the warmest spot in the apartment, so I’ve placed my desk beneath the nearby window.

Textbooks perch on the windowsill in a teetering stack.

A Brief History of Time

The Ghost Map

Evidence of the Afterlife

Parallel Worlds

Beside them rest my tarot decks. Usually, what I make from readings, combined with the café, covers rent. Under the table is a multi-tier case of wire-wrapped jewelry that I sell at the flea market, to cover tuition.

I’ve always made just enough.

Until now.

You only need to fall behind once to stay behind forever.

Last month, my jewelry stock was stolen while I was setting up my booth. Farouk has come every Saturday since, studying at my side in conditions from piercing sun to pounding drizzle.

The loss created a chasm that extra shifts, readings, and several odd jobs couldn’t get me across.

Desperate, I went to my father.

I didn’t say what it was for. I just asked for what I owed, down to the cent.

$1827.19

Nothing, to him.

He reclined at his desk and said, “Wealth isn’t the sum of a man’s possessions. It’s the weight his name bears upon the esteem of his peers.”

Easy words from someone who can purchase the esteem of anyone less wealthy than he is.

Anyone but me.

“Clear my name,” he continued, “and the money is yours. This and much more.”

When I didn’t answer, he turned to his little black notebook, dismissing me. More filled the shelves behind him, a library of musings he thought the world might someday need.

“What does he even write about?” I grab my dinner from the oven and sit down to examine the notebook.

The cover is worn, tendrils of spine stretched to breaking, bookmark frayed and faded. I open it. My second bite falls back into the container, forgotten.

The first few pages feature various scripts, none of them my father’s.

Certain excerpts stand out as I skim.

"This is my greatest creation."

"This journal is quite peculiar. Sometimes I think I’ve written something, then look to find the space beneath my pen as clean as the day it was made."

"Estas son las páginas de los demonios."

I flip through scribbles, drawings, torn pages, ink spills. A sentence in Arabic curves across the centerfold.

Farouk answers immediately. “What time - ”

“I need you to translate something.”

I send a picture.

“Promise me this isn’t for your next tattoo,” he teases. I don’t laugh. He clears his throat and reads. “Nothing can be written here that is untrue.”

Pages of stock predictions follow, all in my father’s hand.

They end with one entry, dated today:

"This is the day I die."

I hang up the phone.

I know what this notebook is.

And I know what I have to do.

V

The estate is dark, unchanged since my youth.

Gates. Cameras. Guard rotations.

I pass through like a ghost, traveling directly to my father’s study, to the wall of little black notebooks.

All of them, blank.

The only notebook that matters belongs to me now.

I crouch before his safe and locate a blank page.

I write:

"The first number in Phoenix Rising’s safe combination is -

I can’t write 0. Or 1. Or 2. But it allows the number 3.

I continue until I have the combination, which works on the first try.

Inside are two wills, one naming me sole heir to my fathers assets, one naming various shareholders. I throw the latter into the fireplace.

The soft glint of a plastic case at the back of the safe catches my eye.

I feed the DVD to his computer.

The security footage confirms what I’ve known my whole life. I watch my father push my mother to her death again. And again.

Finally, I stand.

I find his body in the library window where we used to read together, candles flickering gently on the sill.

Angry tears flood my eyes.

I hate him, hate that I mourn the small part of him that loved my mother and I.

“Bella Rising was a gift. She danced like hurricanes and sang like sunlight. You killed her. I hope you rot in hell.”

I knock over a candle and the fire spreads hungrily, to the curtains, then the wooden shelves, opulence turning to tinder.

Wealth to ruin.

I pull a fire alarm, then escape the way I came, a phantom in the night.

A column of flame rises in my wake, smoke spiraling into the indigo sky.

I walk to Farouk’s apartment, climb the fire escape, and knock on his window.

He stares out at me, concerned. “Ver - ”

I kiss him. Farouk opens up to me the way paper curls against flame. He carries me inside and strips off my clothes, unwrapping me, treasuring me.

We make love on the carpet, his window clattering in the wind, and I’m so happy to be alive, to have survived what I’ve survived.

I make my own destiny.

I’m complete, loved, and wanted

I’ll never feel this way again.

VI

I see them often.

My father in his perfect suit, a cigar between his teeth.

My mother, a bloody gash on her head, hair and dress windblown.

She doesn’t smile at me anymore.

Concern haunts her eyes when I go for long walks day and night, when I don’t eat and stay abed for weeks.

Farouk sleeps in his studio on the other side of the house, but visits often.

He’s there for me always, good days and bad.

It’s a good day.

I’m negotiating a contract for a new series of books. The first four volumes sit behind my desk, centered against a speckled marble wall.

The Modern Universe: Bridging the Gap Between Spirituality and Science

Thanks to my work, more is known about the metaphysical than ever before.

I owe it all to the little black notebook.

Farouk caught me once, scribbling so hard my hands were bloody.

That was the first night he tried to take it, the last that we shared a bed.

He’d held me close, so much like that first time - so much like the night that changed everything and made our wildest dreams possible.

By midnight, I was writing again. “Stop, Ver. You’re wasting your life away.”

“I’m uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Life can wait.”

My method was to write questions and place beside them a yes or no, depending on what the journal allowed. If it allowed neither, I’d rephrase and try again.

"Is time linear?" NO.

"Are humans the only conscious organisms?" NO.

"Is the soul separate from the body?"

"Is there life after death?" YES.

And so on.

The challenge was developing these questions in a way that pointed to evidence.

"The truth is that -

"The truth is -

"What is the truth?"

The editor enters the conference room with a pleasant smile. “Doctor. So nice to see you.”

I don’t recognize her. I meet so many people and most waste my time.

She continues. “I’ll begin by saying that our organization admires your work in no uncertain terms. It has changed the way we discuss everything from quantum physics to religious studies…

“...but we’re unable to publish without evidence to substantiate your recent claims. Many academics believe the arguments in your self-published journal are dangerous without proof.”

I don’t get in the town car outside the office building.

I write as I walk.

There’s an angle I’ve missed.

A phrase I haven’t considered.

Farouk finds me outside the café, scribbling on the curb.

At home, I scream at him to let me work. My reputation is everything. It won’t stand if I can’t prove that which the notebook has confirmed.

He gathers his things. I turn to the window.

“I hope it’s worth it,” he murmurs. “I really do.”

He shuts the door softly behind him.

Days pass in pale silence.

I write to the end of the journal.

I return to the start, find spaces on old pages, and keep writing.

I sleep in brief fits.

The journal fights me.

My blood stains the paper. I smudge it across the phrase that Farouk once translated.

Nothing can be written here that is untrue.

I write over it.

I write over everything, until there’s no space left.

I can clean it, I decide. Start over.

All that does is turn the pages to mush.

I fall to my knees, trying to separate the pages, to save them somehow.

An old note shines up at me from the bottom of the page.

What’s the truth?

An open space sits right below that line. The very last.

I reach for my pen with a trembling hand, and write in shrinking script.

The truth is out of reach.

The truth cannot be proven.

The truth is meaningless.