Matrix

by Lauren Groff

Patience, she tells herself. Strike in rage, and all that you have built in this place could collapse.

All around, her sisters are rising, praying, baking bread, she can hear she is not alone in the world. She is terribly alone. For some days, meaning takes leave of the world. Marie lies in the abbess’s bed and thinks, absurdly, of her body as a feather mattress with the down pulled out in handfuls.

Perhaps, Marie will later think with wonder, after the queen dies, her grief drives her a little mad.

Wulfhild speaks all night of her loss, her dearest companion, the gentlest soul the earth has seen. Marie listens, though a small piece of her is comforted that Wulfhild knows something of what Marie feels, that she is not forced to bear her own desolation alone.

She tries to touch her sorrow in words, but it is like grasping at a cloud.

It strikes her now that god must be most like the sun in the sky, which rises for the day and sleeps at night, endlessly renewing itself; and it is warm for it pours out its warmth and light, and yet at the same time it is coldly remote, for it continues on even as humans who equally fill the earth with life live and die, and it does not care either way, it does not alter its path, it does not listen to the noises on the earth beneath, it cannot stop to notice human life at all, it shakes off what absurd stories we try to pin to it and exists in calm as only itself, radiant and distant and meaningless.

There is a great snowstorm that halts all progress, the nuns return to the dark, close abbey, and at first it is a relief, it puts them in mind of weary workhorses brought back to the comforts of the stable, but soon comfort becomes a feeling of captivity and they long for air. They watch the icicles grown downward off the roof and think of spring.

Who is to tell what invisible paths such magic takes.

Wulfhild’s three eldest daughters come to the abbey unbidden. Young Wulfhild, Hawise, and Milburga. They stand before Marie, each grave and pale, and she wants to gather them in her arms in her sorrow and guilt. If god had given her grandchildren, it would be these daughters of Wulfhild, whom Marie’s pride is now leaving motherless. Marie waits for the angry words from them, the recriminations for letting their mother work herself into her sickbed, but the young women press close, kiss her, she does not know why they still love her, she does not deserve their love. It was Marie’s violent grief for her love that sickened Wulfhild; Marie’s vast pride and arrogance.

She watches Wulfhild’s daughters’ faces as the understanding arrives slowly in each, one and then the next, that their mother is gone. We will see her in the next life, Marie says. The pain is too great for her not to believe it.

She has known prayer in her life, but before tonight it has been prayer like sending a coin with a wish into a body of water, it was hope dispersed vaguely outward. She sent it not toward the stern trinity imposed upon her, but toward the Virgin Mother who wore her own mother’s face. Even in prayer she was rebelling. She sees now what should have been apparent. She has made her life holy, she has lived sinless, she has said all the right words, but deep within she has coveted her own rebellious pride.

Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization after civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls. In the end, the earth will crack and the wicked will be cast into the lake of fire.

Life slows. Time is wheels within wheels.

The seasons with their colors: dove gray to green to floral prismatic to gold.

Such comfort in knowing all the old cycles will turn again.

But over these years Nest has come to understand that if you minister enough to any adult body, you will discover the frightened child hiding within it. The greater the protestations of power, the smaller the child.

To think: All the hatred so deep inside Marie when she was young has, through the pressure of time, somehow turned to love.

And plunged in darkness I spoke to my daughters of the beauty of this world, which I saw that I would soon leave. And I knew also that this would be the last of my visions. I feel them all gone. For I am all poured out like water. And all my bones are out of joint. And my heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.

Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.

And now that she is old and dying in the close herbed air of the infirmary, she thinks of how strange it is that it is not the long good comfortable times of happiness returning so close to the end, but rather the times of briefest ecstasy, and of darkness, of struggle and passion and hunger and misery.

Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.

Last rites. Everything possible with everything given has been done.

Marie longs for it, longs for it, her whole body reaches for it, the gold, the heavenly music, the release. To see god, who is not split in three, but singular. God, sole, female. She has had an eternity of community, it has been enough. Make haste, my beloved. So be it, she thinks. And it is. —

And then she feels a small chill wind upon her neck as though a breath blown upon her from close by. Someone or something is in the nave behind her. She swallows and sees her hands shaking before her and says a prayer while slowly standing up. She reaches for her candle, but as she touches the holder, the flame is extinguished. The smoke in the darkness spools over her hands. And she steels herself and turns to look, and sees a distant simmering of light in the place directly above where Marie has been buried under the stones. She knows without doubt that what she is seeing is the old abbess’s ghost, though later she will ask herself if it may have in fact been the moonlight shining off the glossy leaves of the oak outside and through the window, perhaps quivering its reflected light in the air.

Such fires, so small in themselves, will heat the world imperceptibly until after centuries it will be too hot to bear humanity.