The Rising: Antichrist Is Born (3 page)

There was certainly nothing wrong with being hardworking. Ray himself worked hard, studied, wanted to get good grades. He wanted to be the first in his family to go to college, and nowadays even scholarship athletes had to have good grades. He was a double threat. One of those major sports he loved so much should get him into some real college, and if he also had a good grade point average and class-leadership resume, he couldn’t miss. As much as his parents embarrassed him, he secretly wanted to make them proud.

“We’re plain and simple, all right,” he had said at the dinner table that evening. He was having more and more trouble keeping his mouth shut. And all that did was cause his parents to jump on him more.

“And what’s wrong with plain and simple?” his father thundered.

“Your dad built his tool and die business into something that puts food on this table—”

“—and clothes on my back, yeah, I know.”

“And it paid—”

“—for this house too, yeah, I know. I got it, all right?”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Rayford,” his mother said. “All of a sudden we’re not good enough for you. Who do you think you are?”

Ray knew he should apologize. I le felt like the brat he was. But what good was being the coolest kid in fourth grade if you lived in the seediest house in the neighborhood? He didn’t want to get into that. It would just bring out all the stuff about how at least it was paid for and his dad wasn’t in debt, and yeah, we may live paycheck to paycheck, but there are people a lot worse off than we are in this world.

Ray just wished he knew some of them. He was top man on the totem pole in lots of areas, but he had to hang his head when he got in and out of that car, and the last thing he wanted was to invite a friend home. When he visited other kids’ houses, he saw the possibilities. Someday. Someday.

“May I be excused?” he said.

His mother looked startled. “Well, to tell you the truth, young man, I was about to send you to your room for sassing your father, but—”

“Don’t fight my battles for me,” his dad said. “If he crosses the line, I’ll—”

“But what, Ma?” Ray said.

“But I made your favorite dessert, and I thought—”

“Lime delight? Yes!”

“He doesn’t deserve it,” his dad said.

“—and I thought since you had such a great game …”

“I’ll have it later,” Ray said, bolting for his room. He kept expecting his dad to make him come back; when he glanced their way from the stairs, his mom and dad were shaking their heads and looking at each other with such despair that he nearly went back on his own.

Why did he have to be this way? He didn’t really feel too good for them. It just hurt to be such a popular kid and not have all the stuff that should go along with it. Well, if it was true that hard work and brains could get you where you wanted to go in this world, he was going places.

Ray’s teacher told him not to be self-conscious about towering over his classmates. That was a laugh. He loved being tall. But she said, “It’s just a phase, and the rest will catch up. By junior high you won’t likely be the tallest. Some of the girls might even catch you.”

That was hardly what Ray wanted to hear. He hadn’t decided yet which sport would be his ticket to college, but he hoped it might be basketball. He already gave the lie to the adage that white guys can’t jump. If he could just keep growing, he’d be well over six feet by high school. He didn’t have to be the tallest guy on the team, but being one of the tallest would be great.

Ray rushed into his room and closed the door, as if shutting out the muffled sound of his parents would take them off his mind. Small and nondescript as the house was, he had made something of his room. Extended from nylon fishing lines all over the ceiling were model planes, from ancient props to tiny fighter jets to massive modern supersonic transports.

Whenever he was asked, in person or in writing, what he wanted to be when he grew up, he invariably answered, “Pilot or pro athlete.” He despised the condescending smiles of adults, which only made him recommit himself to his goals. Ray had heard enough that a professional athletic career—in any of his favorite sports—was as likely as being struck by lightning. And expressing his pilot dream always triggered teachers and counselors to remind him how hard he would have to work in math and science.

He knew. He knew. At least the aviation thing didn’t draw benevolent, sympathetic smiles. It was actually an achievable goal. His dad was good with engineering stuff, manufacturing, figuring things out. And while Ray excelled in all subjects, it happened that he liked math and science best.

Ray would do whatever he had to do to realize one of his dreams, because either one of them could bring him what he really wanted. Money. That was the bottom line. That was what set people apart. People with nice cars—the latest models—had more money than his dad. He was convinced of that. His dad claimed that those people were probably in debt, and Ray decided maybe a little debt wouldn’t be all bad, if for no other reason than to make it look like you had money.

But he would go one better. If he couldn’t be a pro athlete and make tens of millions, he’d be a commercial pilot and make millions. He’d look like he had money because he really had it and wouldn’t have to go into debt at all.

Marilena normally found the bus drafty, but as it slowly pulled away from the curb, she loosened her coat and tugged her collar away from her neck. It was her custom to lose herself in one of several thick paperbacks in her shoulder bag, but she would not be able to concentrate now. Not on the literary novel in French. Not on the history of the Hungarian revolution of

the twentieth century. Not on King Lear, which she so enjoyed in its original English.

She sat staring out the window as the shadowy Bucharest cityscape glided past, lit every few feet by amber halogen lamps. Her grandfather used to recall aloud when Communism was an empty promise and how one could walk more than two kilometers in the dark, hoping for one flickering vapor streetlight. “Like the old Soviet Union, we were a paper tiger, no threat to the international community. We would not have been able to engage our weapons. We had our finger on a button that did not work.”

Democracy and technology may have revolutionized Romania, but Marilena considered herself a throwback. She and Sorin were the only couple she knew who still owned a television receiver that did not hang from the wall. That happened to be another subject on which she and her husband agreed. “It’s a tool,” Sorin said, “not an object of worship. And it is the enemy

of scholarship.”

Their boxy old set made colleagues chuckle. “You know,” Sorin’s department vice-chair, Baduna Marius, informed them one night, “the world has come a long way since your flat-screen.”

Marilena had settled back to enjoy the spectacle as Sorin warmed to the topic. The vice-chair---a tall, dashing blond—kept insisting he was only joking, but once Sorin sank his teeth into an argument, his passion would not allow him to let it go until he had spent himself. He would gesture, rise, sit, run his hand through his hair. His fair skin would flush, his aging freckles darken. There had been times, Marilena had to admit, when she provoked him just to see him roll into action.

Ah, Sorin. Such a mind. Such enthusiasm for scholarship. Did she love him? In her own way. Certainly not romantically. No, never. And she was persuaded he had never seen her in that light either. How could he? He had taken advantage of her youthful devotion to satisfy his urges, yes, but as she matured perhaps he respected her enough to quit expecting acquiescence. Young and inexperienced, she had to have been clumsy. Surely she had never given him cause to see her as sexually appealing. She didn’t feel that way, didn’t see him that way, and could not pretend. In the end, she could not blame him for seeking physical—what? not love—satisfaction elsewhere.

They didn’t clash over it, didn’t argue, didn’t blame, didn’t seem to worry about it. It was something they never discussed. The quaint idea of the marriage bed simply disappeared from their lives. She didn’t miss it. Not really. She still cared for Sorin in a sisterly way. He was a dear friend, an admired mind. She worried after him, took care of him when he fell ill, as he did for her. They were familiar enough with each other, living in such close proximity, that they touched occasionally as friends might. If she amused him, he seemed not averse to briefly embracing her. When her parents died he even cupped her face in his hands and kissed her forehead.

As unconventional a marriage as it was in modern Romania, there was no rancor, no acrimony. Sure, they got on each other’s nerves. But she knew passionate couples with a passel of kids, husbands and wives unafraid of actual public displays of affection, who were also known to live their lives at decibel levels high enough to attract the attention of the police. She could be grateful, she guessed, that she and Sorin largely got along.

  So if there was anything to Viviana Ivinisova’s speculation that Marilena’s name aptly described her—the bitter part, the emptiness, the loneliness—the hole in her heart had nothing to do with Sorin, except that if she wanted to fill it, her husband was the logical vehicle.

The maternal instinct had ambushed her most incongruously one afternoon as she rode the bus home from the university. For days she had surprised herself by finally noticing the children who cavorted at the playground in the park near their apartment. Strange, she thought, that she had been only vaguely aware of them for years, and now she found herself watching with interest until she disembarked and headed across the street to her building.

Marilena found herself particularly taken with a young girl, probably five or six years old. Nothing was unique about the child, except that she had caught Marilena’s eye, and the woman enjoyed her smile and her manner for the few moments she saw her each day.

Then came the day of the miracle. Marilena didn’t know what else to call it. As she got off the bus the little girl deftly launched herself over the wrought-iron fence that separated the children from the busy street. “Oh, child!” Marilena called out, as the girl dashed past her and raced in front of the bus, which had not yet begun to move.

The little girl was chasing something. A ball? An animal? She looked neither right nor left. Marilena caught the bus driver’s eye. He shook his head, waiting with his foot obviously on the brake as Marilena followed the child into the street.

Seemingly from out of nowhere a black sedan crossed the double yellow line and passed several cars, sending others sliding to the curb. It was heading directly for the little girl! Marilena froze, screaming, but the girl never looked up. She knelt in the street, reaching for a kitten that bolted away at the last instant.

There was no way the car could miss the child. Marilena grimaced and clamped her eyes shut, waiting for the screech of tires and the killing thud. But it never came. She forced herself to peek and saw the car appear to pass right through the child and slide into the only parking spot left in front of her building.

Marilena expected the driver to leap from the car and check on the girl, but no one emerged. Several pedestrians rushed the car, Marilena following once she was sure the little girl was safely back in the park. People huddled around the car, peering into it, brows knitted. It was empty, A man laid his palm on the hood. “It’s cold,” he said. “Wasn’t this the car?”

The others, Marilena included, assured him it was. The man felt the tires. “Cold,” he said.

To a woman, of letters, this was more than strange. Marilena dared not even tell Sorin. A driverless car dematerialized as it bore down on a child? He would have laughed in her face.

That night she and Sorin sat reading at their respective desks. Both were crafting new curricula for the next term and occasionally tried ideas out on each other. Their courses were as far afield from marriage, home life, family, and children as they could be, and yet in the middle of casual conversation about required reading lists, Marilena was suddenly overcome.

She felt a longing so deep and severe that she could describe it—only to herself, of course—as physical pain. She would not have been in the least surprised had Sorin asked what was troubling her. How she was able to camouflage it and continue the conversation confounded her to this very night on the bus. It had been as if her very existence depended upon being held, loved, cherished, and—if possible—being allowed the inestimable privilege of holding, loving, and cherishing another.

Marilena had looked at Sorin in a new way, albeit only briefly. Was this an epiphany? Did she love him, want him, long for him? No. Simply no. Here was a man who, despite his prodigious intellect, held no appeal to her in any other way. He sat there late in the evening, hunched over his desk, reading, writing, thinking, discussing, still dressed in the suit and tie he had taught in all day. His only concession had been to slip off his shoes and suit jacket and loosen his tie. Years before she had given up urging him to change his clothes after work.

And his feet stank. Well, that was petty, she knew. She had her foibles and idiosyncrasies too, not the least her utter lack of interest in feminizing herself. So what was this, this visceral bombardment she could not ward off? In a flash Marilena knew, though she was certain it had never crossed her mind before. She needed, desperately wanted, a child.

It wasn’t that they had never discussed having cbildren. Sorin had established early in their relationship that he wanted no more children and hoped that was not an issue with her. She had assured him she felt no such inclination and couldn’t imagine herself a mother, let alone imagine a willingness to give up the time in her precious pursuit of knowledge. End of discussion.

Her late mother had raised the question more than once, of course. But Marilena had been so adamant in her refusal to discuss it that Sorin had actually stepped out of character and offended his mother-in-law by scolding her. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he said, “and I’m sure that you do, your daughter has made herself quite plain about this, and thus it is no longer any of your business.”