All we know of the external world is our own shit, piss, tears, sweat, spit, snot, come, pus, babies, and sometimes blood. Margery said, “For your love I would be chopped up as stew meat for the pot.” Her lips parted in sexual hunger. Flesh was not all flesh but partly appetite.

Before she met Jesus, Margery had appeared refined to herself: she was a mayor’s daughter. She had recognized in Jesus her own aristocracy. Little by little she adopted vulgar manners to conform to Jesus’s view of her; her words retreated to where substances and bodies pass into the world, like this stew-meat image used by the young roofer who rejected her—like the dream of my carcass chopped up in a tub!

I aimed at L. the longing for seduction and credence I had aimed at the world. Naked in bed, he praised my writing—the one thing a stranger could like. He called me and my friends The Writers Who Love Too Much—giddy laughter. Smoothing a wrinkle by my ear, he experimented with my age and aging itself. I felt a surge of hope but the skin sank back to its position.

•

Margery couldn’t catch her breath. Her life was husked away—friends, husband, children, city, house, the temporal order of her community. No one met her with even the smallest portion of her suffering and excitement, no one suspected what she put into her waiting. She felt she was running out of material. All that remained was for Jesus to abandon her. Margery steps into modernity so empty she needs an autobiography.

“Margery, here are some handsome people; they will die before a year is up.” Jesus told her when the plague would occur. “I have ordained you to be a mirror and to sorrow.” So image and loss are one—an addiction, round and empty in that nothing reflected back but the absence of her own self. She could not materialize.

“Ah, Jesus, you are all generosity.”

PART FOUR

Margery’s Passion

A-non aperyd verily to hir syght an awngel al clothyd in white beryng an howge boke be-forn hym.

47

Jesus walked towards his Passion with a preoccupied frown. The world grew pale. Mary fell in a dead faint. Jesus lifted her head; she looked up amazed and whispered, “How can I suffer this much sorrow? Let me die before you . . . never let me suffer this day of sorrow . . . I can never bear the sorrow I will have from your death. No one can comfort me but you.”

Jesus kissed her lips as though she were his little girl. “I will be King, you will be Queen. You will have power over devils—they will be afraid of you, and you never of them. Queen of Heaven, Empress of Hell, and Lady of the World.”