The Rising: Antichrist Is Born Read Online Free PDF

“self-talk” her psychology faculty friends would have called it. She called herself names, told herself she was being selfish, childish, unrealistic. She asked herself who she thought she was and told herself to be practical.
    Generally these tactics worked, at least temporarily. When Marilena really thought it through, somehow extracting herself from the emotion of it, she realized there was not room in her life, certainly not in Sorin’s, and absolutely not in their apartment, for a child— especially a newborn. Impossible.
    For weeks, months even, Marilena had become more and more inclined to stand her ground against the emotion. She believed she had learned to detect nature about to attack, and she would begin her self-talk immediately. “Don’t start,” she would tell herself. “This is just not going to happen.”
      It was not long, however, until a baby was on her mind every waking moment. Oh, it was not as if she had found ways to make it make sense. Rather she came to resign herself to the fact that this torment might forever be with her. Was there some other option, some avenue that might satisfy this instinct? Should she support an orphan, send money to a children’s cause?
    Marilena had never been one to buy into easy diagnoses of depression. She had always been able to chase a low mood by immersing herself more deeply into her reading and studying and teaching. Colleagues admonished her for equating clinical depression with the blues, rightly intimating that someone of her intellect should know better.
    She had become depressed and she knew it. She would not seek counsel or treatment. Nothing could fix this. The need for a child had become part of her being, and the knowledge of its impossibility left her in despair.
    Ironically, it had been that very paradox that had spurred her interest in a new pursuit. She had seen the ads in academic journals and even one of the many local papers: “Seeking something beyond yourself? Come and be astonished.” She had seen posters around the faculty offices with the same message but had paid them no more heed than had her colleagues.
    Marilena would have described herself as a humanist. She had not closed the door on the possibility of a supreme being, so agnostic perhaps fit her better than atheist. Finding the answers to life within oneself had always resonated most with her.
    Marilena had also long been self-reliant, eager to do things on her own, not inclined—like so many of her female friends—to need a partner in every new endeavor. Sure, it was sometimes more enjoyable when Sorin or another colleague joined her at an exhibit or lecture, but she was not averse to going by herself.
    Her intrigue at the ad for the Tuesday evening meetings at the library had been borne out of a desperate need to distract herself from what she could only assume was something she had always believed was a myth: her ticking biological clock. Motherhood had been such a foreign concept to her that it was not something she had even entertained until this longing attacked.
    Somehow she could not imagine satisfying her curiosity about these meetings alone, so she had asked Sorin to go with her. He motioned with his fingers for the paper and read the ad aloud. “Oh, Marilena, really,” he said, and she cringed. He tossed it back to her.
    Early in their marriage she had given up more easily, intimidated. But that had passed. “I would really like you to go with me,” she said.
      “But why? Can’t you imagine what this is? ‘Something beyond yourself,’ honestly.”
    “What? What do you think it is, Sorin?”
    “If not religion, then spiritualism, two sides of the same silly coin.”
    “Have you never entertained the idea that there might be something beyond our minds?”
    He pressed his lips together. “No, and neither have you. Now spare me this nonsense.”
    And she had—for a time. But resentment grew. She fell silent at home, answered him in monosyllables. He