The following is an excerpt from You Have a New Memory, out next week from Grand Central.
My faith first wavers in the train station parking lot. It’s not really even a station—there’s no ticket booth or shaded bench, just a scythe of pavement cleaving the railroad tracks, a half-flight of concrete steps, and a gravel dugout. The train from Paris was an inrush of rolling farmland and blazing expanses of mustard and the dancing specular light of phone screens on the train car’s ceiling. The connecting station had a ticket machine, an espresso machine, and a vending machine that dispensed wedges of fresh Comté. Winding farther into the countryside, every house had a trampoline in the yard. All this bucolic wonder and you could still be bored. As we pulled into the village, I saw a pair of listless children sitting on the sun-drenched mesh of one, inhaling the scent of warm plastic.
I look for habits. Would they wear habits? Lots of nuns, I read on the internet, have updated their wardrobes to include cotton skirts and tasteful khaki chore coats. A few even wear denim, to better identify with the common man. They’re invested in volunteering and protesting and cave-aging small-batch cheddar. I chose Benedictines because the order has a tradition of hospitality, and because the names of the abbeys are beautiful: Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Our Lady of Grace.
I chose this abbey over the others for its renunciation of aesthetic indulgence, which is to say, its web design. The few photographs available online are dimly lit and strangely cropped: a wooden chair positioned ominously in the corner of an otherwise empty room; a close-up shot of part of an unidentified painted landscape, taken with the flash on. On another abbey’s website, the nuns had a Monastic Live Webcam that streamed prayer services the way some national parks stream salmon. The webcam was positioned in a high corner of the chapel, like a security camera. The space was airy and modern: light wood, clear glass, a whiff of celebrity megachurch. Half a dozen women in gabardine robes sat in stackable chairs in silence. I watched them pray and I felt like a pervert.
I’d unadvisedly packed a pair of Los Angeles Apparel long-sleeve cotton shirts without trying them on; the one I’m wearing is child-sized, stifling and slutty all at the same time. I button my jacket over my stomach and wonder if my jacket is starting to smell. A car pulls into the dugout and idles, and my heart leaps, and then the only other person in the parking lot—a middle-aged woman with a duffel bag, whom I’d hubristically clocked as a potential abbess—approaches the window, waving. It’s six o’clock on a Tuesday in the kind of town where everyone goes home for a nap at three. The car pulls away. This station, this corner, this village: empty. I don’t have the abbey’s phone number; it occurs to me that they might not have a phone at all. And anyway, somewhere along the Swiss border I’d lost reception, my browser apologetically gray, the pulsing dot of my location gone still. The green dot: my existence concentrated to a fine point. I have, without noticing, disappeared. But isn’t doubt just the maligned cousin of possibility? I flip through error screens on my useless phone, then turn it off.
A silver van swerves into the parking lot with such vigor that it nearly taps my luggage. A man unfolds himself from the front seat, emerging in pieces: ginger beard, plaid button-down, slim gray canvas pants, high-top sneakers. No priest’s collar. He has ingenue eyes, blue and perpetually widened in wonder or confusion. When he confirms I’m there for the monastery as if I’m not the only person in the parking lot, his grin reveals quaintly crooked teeth.
John, I learn on the half-hour drive past sparkling streams and fields of the sort of cows that model for organic milk cartons, is some sort of cloistral assistant. He’s affable, delighted by my delight at the sight of livestock. His English is better than my French, but small talk is still an amicable struggle. I took French all through high school but my teacher was from Poughkeepsie and so my accent is bizarre and embarrassing, and I’m too self-conscious about it to speak anything beyond a few well-worn sentences.
John manages the abbey with his wife, Fabienne. He smells like something I can’t place, woody and sweet, faintly animal. As we drive the forest closes around us like we’re telling a gossipy story. The road becomes a dirt path flanked by a stone wall, and then there’s the abbey. It’s less a building than a complex: a thousand years of haphazard renovations, an expansive mélange of marble, stone, wood, and plaster in shades of mottled pink and gray. It appears to have been built into the hillside, one side butting up against the forest. Trees swell above us. I look up and have the sudden image of a wave poised to crash. At its crest, a glinting metal cross pokes through the pines.
My parents, like so many of their generation, were raised Catholic in the wooden paddle days and later sought ablution in acid-laced lemonade and Jerry Garcia’s sweat. Agnostics themselves, they enrolled my siblings and me in Catholic school as a sort of reverse psychology experiment: They feared that if they raised us godless, we would fill that spiritual deficit with fanaticism and they’d have to deal with insufferable dogmatism at faraway Christmas dinners. Better to disillusion us early. At home we were casually Catholic: I was allowed to watch Beavis and Butt-Head and take the Lord’s name in vain, but I couldn’t pet a stranger’s dog without my mom comparing me to Saint Francis. I was a solitary and fearful kid, haunted by a nonspecific shame. I liked the small pencils the church stashed between the pews for signing alms checks.
My strongest memory of Catholic school is sitting at the back of the first-grade classroom, one small hand in the air, besieged by a powerful need to shit. Mrs. Mortar had a dome of box-dyed hair and a wardrobe of desaturated floral prints that decades later might be characterized as coastal grandma. She taught us that while most crucifixion art depicts stigmata in the palms, the nails were actually driven through the soft tissue of the wrists, between the radius and ulna bones, to hold the body aloft and prolong suffering. She only let one child go to the bathroom at a time. I remember my classmates trotting obediently out the classroom door as my gut churned. I caught Mrs. Mortar’s eye and waved my arm frantically, mouthed Emergency. Mrs. Mortar held my gaze, reminded the class that well-behaved children go first, and called on someone else. The meek shall inherit the earth. I shit my shorts.
I sat quietly in my own waste for the rest of the day, endured whispers of disgust, tried not to move my legs too much as I shuffled to the car in my soiled khakis. In the container of my mom’s Volvo, the smell was unbearable. The ruse was up, my mom forced to pull over and peel my tights off in a McDonald’s bathroom stall, swearing bombastically. That was the first time someone I loved asked what was wrong with me. I couldn’t understand her frustration. I had followed directions. In my memory the tights she shoved into the sanitary bin were my favorite, snowy white and speckled with cartoon dalmatian puppies, but I don’t think the school dress code would have allowed that. That’s devotion: a candle for the parts that don’t make sense. I recently tried to find the same tights online, but nothing came up except polyester dog costumes on happy children who never shit their pants. During the search, my phone kept autocorrecting dalmatian to salvation.
John insists on lugging my suitcase into the courtyard, a garden of slender willows and neatly trimmed hedges circling a murky fountain. The grounds are still and I wonder whether the nuns are in mass, if I’m disrupting a sacred moment. I recall some online image of a trail of cloaked devotees trudging up a hill at dusk, heads bowed in reverence. I follow John and imagine myself atop a mountain, prostrate before the setting sun.
Off the courtyard there’s a welcome center with postcards and miniature wooden crucifixes for sale and, beyond that, a small table where John hands me a disconcerting number of liability waivers.
“Can you read that?” he asks, and I honestly tell him I can’t, and he shrugs. “Bureaucracy. The French love it.” I sign them all. The last sheet, he tells me, pledges my allegiance to the Carthusian brotherhood.
“The brotherhood,” I say.
“Yes, yes—though they can’t be here.” John doesn’t elucidate whether this is for religious or scheduling reasons. He glances at and then files away the documents that allow me to die here without consequence.
“And . . . the nuns?”
John’s eyes widen to full aperture. “Nuns?”
What clueless, cruel Mrs. Mortar once marked down as alack ofcuriosity and easilysuccumbstopeerpressure I might reframe as a willingness to open oneself to the world: a tender receptivity. When I learn that there is no community of nuns, justice-loving or otherwise, at my Benedictine retreat, and that in fact it’s not at all a Benedictine convent but a Carthusian cloister, in which one spends fourteen hours a day in a stone cell, silent but for the three to four hours of mandatory prayer, I surrender. I have the next ten days, after all, to contemplate fate, and whether I saw nuns on the website, or whether, in a fit of late-night mistranslation, I may have emailed the wrong monastery.
Sequestration is often imposed when one is deemed very good or very bad. The effects of isolation in prisoners are well documented: loss of concentration, loss of memory, obsessive and violent thought patterns, paranoia, suicidal ideation, hallucinations, psychosis. The UN categorizes solitary confinement for more than fifteen days as a form of torture.
Self-imposed solitude, on the other hand, is a fundamental sacred experience. Reclusion is a pre-Christian, nearly global spiritual practice; while its exact origins are untraceable, anthropological evidence suggests eremitism has existed as long as humans have had social groups from which to escape.
It takes some effort to disentangle what I know of cloistered women from what I think I know of cloistered women, which is tinged with group singalongs and lesbianism and the occasional bout of Satanism. Considered a sort of living sacrifice to the church, medieval women were confined to abbeys not unlike the one I expected to join, or isolated more drastically: In the initiation ritual of the anchoress, her cell was dug out into a grave. Accompanied by a choir’s funeral dirges, the devoted processed from the church to the cell and crawled into her burial pit. Before locking her in the enclosure, the celebrant sprinkled over her a fistful of dirt.
Spiritual sequestration is meant to punish—as the ascetic monk Dorotheus of Thebes succinctly wrote of his body, “It kills me, so I kill it”—but it’s also a means to an end: mortification of the flesh, the deadening of human sensation to heighten awareness of the holy. There is a fascinating tension between the derealization of the body and the creation of art. In the liminal state of quarantine, the 12th-century nun Hildegard of Bingen was struck by debilitatingly painful tongues of flame that carried angelic harmonies. From her trances she manifested surreal illuminated manuscripts and strange, florid music; she is widely regarded today as one of the world’s earliest and most innovative composers. In her own solitude, the anchoress Julian of Norwich encountered the Virgin Mary as a little girl and Jesus as a rotting corpse. She recounted these visions over the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest confirmed work written by a woman in the English language. I wanted to abscond to a nunnery because I was captivated by Hildegard and Julian and the quixotic weirdness of their art, and also because only an extreme experience of compulsory deprivation might return the nameless thing I’ve lost.
The problem came on slowly, like delayed-onset tinnitus: one day I notice the whole world’s pitch is off, and in the moment of noticing I realize it’s been like that for a long time. Every opinion I have is someone else’s, baby bird food I suck down and turn around and spit into someone else’s throat. Every fact is flanked by a targeted ad. A scaly rash has bloomed around my eyelids. At night I check the doors and the windows and the burners on the stove, and then I check each of my accounts, one by one, to make sure I didn’t post anything stupid, and then I check them again. I can’t sleep through the night and I can’t endure the day without retreating to my bed to rot: Ophelia in a pool of blue light. A ringing in the ears.
While disappointingly vacant of nuns, the Carthusian cloisters operate under a similar pretense of mysticism. Per my rudimentary understanding of the cloister’s welcome packet, Saint Bruno of Cologne established the first Carthusian monastery with the support of a bishop who’d received a prophetic image of the monk resplendent under a garland of stars. I feel relatively apathetic toward the hollow-eyed TikTok TradCaths and their persnickety rules—my culture, your costume, et cetera—but I am awed, sometimes, by closed circuits of devotion, what it means to follow and have followers at all. The 20th-century mystic Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I want so badly to believe that at the core of me is something bloody and beating and true, and if I could shut the fuck up, like a shy animal it would reveal itself to me. My life feels like it’s out the train window, a blur of motion and consequence, the seat facing backward so I charge blindly into the future. I want divine reorientation. I want to suck sugar from the palm of God’s hand.
The first rule of the cloisters is to honor your vow of silence. The second is to write John a note if your silence induces a mental breakdown. I will not spend two weeks with my sisters in Christ, but on Sunday a priest will come to give me le pardon de Dieu—God’s forgiveness. Apparently structured to maximize monotony, the day is divided by prayers: lauds at 8:00 AM, vespers at 4:15 PM, and compline at 9:00 PM. Lunch is at noon and dinner at 7. Breakfast is any time before lauds and consists of a self-serve station in the kitchen, bowls of fruit and plastic-wrapped biscotte toasts and tea and instant coffee. I ask John if we’re allowed to take snacks from the bowls between meals, and the question seems to upset him. He purses his lips in contemplation, then concedes that I can take toasts to my room at night, as long as I eat them in the morning.
If you removed the plaster Virgin Mary, the kitchen is unremarkable, even corporate: a sink, a fridge, a microwave, a metal table, a whiteboard, a shelf of wooden crates. When John and I tour it, someone has set the table with three salad plates and three glass tureens of soup. On the whiteboard is a menu and a lettered grid. I’ve been assigned cell E, John says, and so to indicate that I’ve received dinner I must mark the space under E with a cross. I’m not sure whether he means an X or a Christian cross. There’s only one other mark on the board, under B, and B has either unintentionally drawn an X with a flourish that connects the upper and lower left points, or intentionally drawn a rudimentary ichthys, also known as a Jesus fish. John hands me a dry erase marker. I draw a Jesus fish too. John says nothing that might indicate whether this is the correct choice. Instead, he directs me to a wooden crate with the letter E marked on the lid and a dowel handle affixed to the top that makes me think of a cardboard cat carrier. The front panel of each box slides up to reveal two compartments, inside which are a set of silverware, a water glass, a small carafe, a ceramic cup, and a cloth napkin.
We take my crate of soup out of the kitchen and across the courtyard, through a set of imposing wooden doors and into a dark corridor thick with the primitive stench of moss. My suitcase slaps grotesquely against the uneven floors. And then we cross another threshold, and the hall is bathed in aquatic evening light: the inner wall has opened into a row of ceiling-high arched windows, panes sugary with age, that snake around an atrium of trembling apple trees.
John stops at a door marked with a scribble of Latin and, beneath the inscription, the letter E. He procures a heavy iron key. He demonstrates unlocking the door, which I find patronizing until I realize it’s a precise choreography: insert the key all the way into the lock until it passes clean through the door into the darkness beyond; pull it back slowly, halfway; make a soft scooping motion with your wrist as you turn it. I jiggle the lock futilely.
“Go slowly,” John says. “You have the time.”
After much embarrassment, the door to cell E jerks open into a narrow landing, the divider between upper and lower levels. Downstairs, what to the novice might appear to be an instrument of torture—a table with metal spikes and cranks and vises—is in fact a wood borer, John explains, with which monks once crafted the boxes in which Chartreuse liqueur is sold. From the craft corner, we step into a misshapen square of bricks and weeds, insulated by a high stone wall: my private garden.
Upstairs, a lachrymose plaster bust of Christ dominates the landing, head tilted so as to contemplate the floor. Through another door, what John calls the Ave Maria room: large and drafty, empty except for an armoire, three boxes of twigs and newspapers, and, on the boarded-up fireplace mantel, a wooden Madonna the size and shape of a bowling pin. “So when you walk in, you can pray to her,” John says. I thank him like I’ve had trouble in the past walking into a room and knowing to whom I should pray.
Finally, through the Ave Maria room: my bedroom. It’s less ascetic than expected. There’s a slender bed with a deflated-looking mattress, a bay window with a table fitted into the nook, a desk with a red ink blotter and a heavy blond wood Bible stand, and a woodstove. The hallway to the bathroom has been converted into a prayer portal, with a little bench for kneeling and a terra-cotta crucifix. John asks if I know how to operate a woodstove, and I say yes, even though I don’t. John asks if I need anything else, and I say no, even though I’m not sure. John leaves, and I’m alone.
The soup, now cold, is carrot, served with vinegar-laced greens. I try to consume it in small, mindful spoonfuls as I look out the window. The sky is the color of a nickel. There’s the garden wall; an expanse of grass, trimmed with another stone wall; a field of grazing horses; a forested hillside; and through the trees, a slice of road.
I’m always looking for an emergency exit. It’s the kind of neurosis based in just enough reason that you keep indulging it: compulsive preparedness for fires and earthquakes and murderers, some mix of gender conditioning and egocentricity. I suck soup between my teeth. I think about all the doors we passed to get here, all the walls, each of them solid stone two feet thick. The two-story drop from the bay window to the garden would be painful, but maybe survivable, if I hit dirt. Once there, though, my options narrow. The garden walls are too high and mossy to scale, even if I use the Virgin Mary prayer enclave as a foothold. My cell is separated from the rest of the monastery by an iron lock and a maze of stone chambers, and the rest of the monastery is separated from the world by untold miles of wilderness. I lay down my spoon and listen. Nothing but the echo of metal on glass.
A notice tacked above the woodstove draws attention to arson and carbon monoxide poisoning. Keep the windows open, add the last log before compline. I stick my head as far out the window as it’ll go. The garden wall slopes so that my cell is cut off from whatever lies on either side of it. If I set the room ablaze, or have a stroke, or am attacked by entities earthly or demonic, no one will come for me.
Back in the kitchen, the dishwashing sponge is limp and filthy. It has the texture of bread that has been soaked in milk, the green side smoothed to a felted matte from months of food waste frottage. The kitchen isn’t properly ventilated and so the sponge never dries, and bacteria swarm across it in rapturous orgies and then crawl onto my silverware. We return our clean dishes to the table, but the silverware and glassware we keep in our box; I picture my water glass sweating in its cubby, cloudy with germs.
A man enters the kitchen: a blur of dark clothing as I avert my eyes. We’re not supposed to interact, but I don’t know to what extent we’re meant to ignore each other. I face the sink and twist the tap so the water is scalding and wash my dishes quickly. When I pass him on my way out, the man has turned to the wall and stands perfectly still, like a Sim.
My first office—like mass, but somehow not—is compline, and when I arrive the chapel is dark. I bought a cheap analog wristwatch for this experience but couldn’t find a clock with which to sync it, so I wound it back ten minutes just in case. I dawdle outside the door by a table of dog-eared psalm books and laminated packets of prayers marked with sticky tabs. Across the hall, a second table holds cubbies and slips of paper for note writing. I wonder if anyone has ever abused the system—you could have a whole silent affair via erotic letters, if you wanted. Under the cubbies is a pile of incomprehensible maps. There’s the monastery in a nest of dotted and solid lines, and some cryptic slashes of pink highlighter. There’s the cross on the mountain, floating off to the left. When my watch reads twelve past, I make a move.
The chapel’s interior is a high school art history test: a squinched dome above the altar, a choir, a nave. You don’t sit in a pew, like in normal church; instead, the sides of the choir are lined with aisles, and the aisles have individual stations: fold-down seats separated by panels of thick dark wood, like they don’t want you to cheat off your neighbor. I choose a station and sit very still. The altar is all candles and Easter lilies under a colossal crucifix. Despite its heft, there’s something delicate about the carving—some suggestion of motion. One of Christ’s hands is nailed to the cross, but the other reaches out to brush the air.
Bodies trail in. I pretend to study my prayer packet. Strange, to assemble like this, in silence, in the dark. It feels very clandestine, which makes it feel very official. Everyone else bows to the crucifix before taking their seat, except a man who is maybe the man from the kitchen, who falls to his knees and touches his forehead to the floor. I pick out John, who unwraps a thick length of rope from the wall and tugs until a bell peals somewhere far above us. Fabienne, I gather, is the flickering slice of profile lighting candles. When our small circle is lambent, she settles besides John, and then she begins to sing. The word she sings is Hallelujah, silent H, four syllables stretched into a meandering path of a prayer.
There is a lot of sitting and standing and bowing. There are parts one sings, and parts one listens to, and intervals of silence. I can’t get a foothold on the melody, the pauses and pick-ups and held notes. Psalms are a somber affair, less sung than lamented. Ecclesiastical French is filled with words I wouldn’t know in English. John intermittently barks a number and I frantically flip through my psalm book, getting it right half the time. We sing Hallelujah again, and then Fabienne snuffs the candles and John leaves, and we trail out behind him. Everyone bows to Christ again, and so I do, too.
I wash my face for sixty seconds, like I read on Reddit. I push my moisturizer into my skin, rather than smear it—rolling my hands, reddening my cheeks—because a beautiful woman on TikTok showed me how. I let each layer of product dry for five to seven minutes before applying the next. I sit on the toilet and my hands feel empty and my life feels empty. I can’t google ivermectin azelaic acid correct order. I can’t google how to pray with rosary.
In the Ave Maria room, I whisper a Hail Mary and then I check the furniture to make sure no one is hiding in it. I shut the door of my bedroom and block it with my suitcase.
I wake clammy, panicked, reaching for something. Around me the dark expands like the eyes of a slug.
My anxieties are base and human, the sort of worries Jesus promises to fix on billboards along desert highways. Various people are various levels of mad at me. I inadvertently posted my breasts on the internet before turning off my phone. I didn’t pay my last dermatology copay, and when I get back my credit will be tanked. When I get back, I will be hacked. When I get back, I will be canceled. There are abandoned mines outside Vegas that are so deep that if you throw in a quarter, you’ll never hear it hit the bottom. There is someone in the history of time who has thrown a live animal into those mines. Several, probably. In my head, in the dark, a parade of doomed adorable creatures I’m powerless to save. I think if you jump off a building or bridge and it’s high enough, the air knocks you unconscious or maybe even kills you outright before you hit the ground. But still—before that—that fear. To suffer and not know why: the burden of limited consciousness. Blooms of dirty-sponge-induced bacteria overtake my coffee cup. My worst college ex-boyfriend will join the Italian American heritage social club and I won’t be able to go to the monthly pasta platter anymore.
In the face of anxiety, therapists will tell you to check the facts. The problem is, the facts are in my phone. Monasteries were early centers of Scholasticism; there’s no evidence to suggest that monks wouldn’t love the internet, that quiet, concentrated place to increase knowledge, to seek answers. If we are soft mysteries of flesh and voltage, pressing ourselves against the world to understand it, is it not sacred to access a cloud of information? It’s Wednesday morning, which means it’s Tuesday night in California, which means the Italian American heritage social club just held their membership meeting and have posted the new recruits in their Instagram stories. If I looked from my burner account, it would be like I was never even there.
When the sky lightens to a marbled blue I walk to the kitchen for a sachet of crystallized coffee and two packets of biscotte toast. Crystallized coffee tastes like an espresso fart with a gasoline finish. To minimize wear on my dinner napkin, I delegate a crumb napkin from the two extras I packed in my suitcase. For the nuns, I packed cloth napkins, bed linens, an assortment of modest long-sleeve tees and turtlenecks, two pairs of pants, two long skirts, the only bra I own that isn’t lingerie, an embarrassment of underwear, a freezer bag of skincare products, an alarm clock, my watch, and my first communion rosary. The rosary is made of tin and pearlescent plastic beads. I packed a knuckle-sized hunk of smoky quartz and a dozen types of medications and vitamins in a rainbow plastic days-of-the-week case. I packed nail polish, deludedly, because I thought maybe I could paint the nuns’ nails, and they would see my heart is pure.
I eat my brittle toast hunched over the crumb napkin and then, to clean it, I wave it out the window like a pale flag.
John yanks the chapel bell several times before it starts ringing, which is maybe how all bells work. I count the peals but find no pattern; the clangs don’t correlate to time, and every office the number changes. He loosens his grip and lets the rope run through his fist.
John raps the wood of his seat three times and we stand and he says a little something in French. We chant Hallelujah six times in various keys. Fabienne calls to us, and we respond. I hold my rosary limply in one hand.
In periods of reverent silence, I take in the others. To my left sits John, then Fabienne, who is slight and sensible-looking. To my right, just visible past my partition, there’s a woman with silver cumulous hair wearing a plastic slicker. Across from me sits an elderly man who leans on a cane and chants gutturally, and next to him is the man from the kitchen, who fascinates me. It’s impossible to know how old he is in the stormy morning half-light, but with his skinny jeans and square glasses and zip-up hoodie, he looks like he’d write for a music magazine in 2009. I try to imagine him engaged in Vatican II discourse with a Kierkegaard reading, eating disordered godpilled e-girl. He bobs and sways to the psalms like they’re songs with melodies and not atonal dirges, his eyes closed, his fingers laced delicately. Sometimes he drops his head into his hands.
The cloisters are an architectural enigma: spirals and dead ends, sudden precarious staircases, passages that twist into darkness. The atrium across from my front door turns out to be a cemetery. I tell myself, at four in the morning, that the monks are in heaven and therefore too busy to haunt me. Doors beget more doors, and all the doors stick so you can’t tell what’s locked and what’s stuck, and so it feels like you’re trying to break into everywhere. Which I am, I guess. I’m searching for a new sponge.
First, I find the wood room: metal pens of tinder and tree stumps studded with glinty hatchets. I find a barred metal door, like in a prison, and through the grate nothing but feathery black. I find, in a hallway, a basin of water designed to look like a grotto with stucco stalactites and in the center, a sinister Madonna and child. Her expression invokes a memory of calling to a kitten through a neighbor’s front gate, how its mother slid between us, ears back, unblinking. I find the library: a room of ancient broken Bibles, their covers torn, their pages bleached illegible. Too decrepit to use but too holy to throw away, the pages have crumbled to a powder that swirls in eddies on the floor. In addition to the Bibles, I find a mop, paper towels, and a few half-empty spray bottles. I consider washing my dishes with paper towels.
I find myself in the courtyard, spongeless. The cloister’s official entrance is all wood and iron and medieval bravado, but there’s a smaller, more practical door next to it. I slip out the small door and into the road. Halfway down the drive, I turn back to the monastery. The forest swallows it like a snake swallows an egg—peacefully.
Near the road, a sanguine iron statue of some saint rests at the base of the hillside. From the statue, two paths diverge. I take the left one, but almost immediately I hit an overflowing creek and turn back. Pearly water runs down the mountain and under the monastery. The rush of it creates an unsettling sort of white noise, a car forever approaching from behind. It would drown out my footsteps, though, if I had to run away. I could scramble to the tree line, burrow in a hollowed trunk, wield a branch in self-defense.
In my cell, I stuff newspaper rosettes into the back of the woodstove and cover them with twigs. My matches keep snapping against the strike pad so the burning heads ping back onto me. I’m struck by that syrupy animal smell that clung to John in the car: smoke, sweetened by apple bark and newspaper ink. I reek of it. I light match after match, tuck them into the newspaper until the twigs curl in on themselves and the logs catch.
I sniff my carafe, my water glass, my fork. The stench of old sponge makes my heart race.
Whatever quiet power allows me to lie in bed all day and absorb nourishment from the little blue light in my screen like a hydroponic plant should allow me to peacefully endure the passage of time anywhere. The bedroom, the tower, the sanatorium, the holy mountain: It’s all the same. I curl up in bed and direct awareness to my hands. Do they feel numb? Am I feeling faint? I can’t even google if it’s carbon monoxide or dioxide that’s poisoning me.
The praying part is easy. It’s comforting, to have a place to put my compulsions. I drop to my knees in the Ave Maria room. In the prayer portal in my room, I recite one of two psalms I’d written in a yellow legal pad because my friend Kelly—who grew up more Catholic than I did and is now a professional psychic medium, a one-two punch of spiritual authority—told me they’d help prevent demonic possession. In the chapel I dip my fingers into the bowl of holy water and wonder how long it’s been here, if they ever change it out. (Can’t google what makes holy water holy.) I ask God to protect my Instagram, and animals everywhere, and the membership list of the Italian American heritage social club. I take my medicine: Wellbutrin, pantoprazole, vitamin D, vitamin B12, L-methylfolate, black cumin seed oil, inositol, selenium, lion’s mane, magnesium glycinate.
I once watched a reality show in which women were sequestered while they underwent drastic plastic surgery. Separated from their jobs and families, the women weren’t allowed mirrors; whoever they were and whoever they would become was at the discretion of the production. In the end the transformed women competed in a beauty pageant. On a different show, contestants were scattered across a remote wilderness with ten items each of preapproved survival gear. It was filmed almost entirely with personal recorders and trail cameras, and the contestants’ goal was to survive in solitude the longest for half a million dollars. Some of the contestants openly lamented the strangeness of performing survival on camera, cutting saplings and eating squirrels, piercing the impassive harmony of the wild just to show we can. Monastic sequestration feels a bit like I’m on a reality show and the only viewer is God.
I watch my coffee crystals dissolve into hot water. I smooth butter onto biscottes with the neck of my coffee spoon and then wrap the spoon in a scrap of newspaper so it doesn’t touch anything. I experiment with holding a packet of biscottes out the window while I open it to keep crumbs off my desk, and the experiment ends when half a slice falls into the private garden. I watch a chemtrail blaze across the sky. I slowly—as wisps of atmosphere twist into a streak of white—identify the smell of melting plastic. On my knees I crawl to the woodstove, the electrical sockets, the kettle. The kettle smells melted. I can’t google whether this is an electrical fire risk or a European thing. I write water heater in my to-do list under sponge. But what would I even do if I found a sponge? Replace it, and pretend it wasn’t me? What if there’s a policy? What if it hurts John’s feelings? When I collected lunch the whiteboard was marked with a trio of ichthyses, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because I copied someone that first night, and now someone else has copied me. I unplug the kettle and open the window and lie in bed. If I hold my alarm clock close to my face, watching the second hand skim across its surface is almost as good as scrolling.
A theology of isolation is by necessity outside the bounds of formal education. It’s bodily, empirical, ineffable. The penetration of flesh, by sword or spirit, pervades mystical art: Julian of Norwich’s visceral, vulvic visions of Christ’s wounds; Teresa of Ávila’s seraph with his throbbing lance; Angela of Foligno pressing her face to Christ’s ribs to tongue his wound. I don’t know what to make of this tension between disappearance and embodiment, that the vehicle of sin—the body—might also be a site of divine experience. For Carthusians, the Virgin Mary—a woman marked by her surreal encounter with the divine—holds a particular place of adulation. Notwithstanding the whole virgin thing, one worships her with lush, corporeal language: the seed, the fruit.
It takes three days to find the big garden. It runs parallel to the road, cake-like terraces cut into the hillside behind a wall with a padlocked gate. In a fit of mindful wandering post-lauds, I pass the kitchen and descend a flight of stairs and wedge open a wooden door and then a metal door, and suddenly I’m on a pockmarked stone staircase.
The stairs are slippery with lichen. I scale them sideways to an overgrown terrace, send skittering two lizards who appeared to be—in my uneducated, googleless estimation—fucking ecstatically on a hot stone wall.
The grass in the garden is a dense, suffocating green shot through with new growth. The air is warm and smells like horses. Everything is awake: whorling buds and strobing butterflies and tiny black spiders that shiver across the ground as I walk. Across the meadow, a waterfall rushes around a statue of the Virgin, the iron pink with age, over a drop grown glossy with algae and into a round reflecting pool. What I thought was a petal floats upward—a powdery moth.
Catholic mysticism is apophatic: It approaches God by negation. There is an acceptance of—a reverence for—the limits of language; the divine is defined by what cannot be said. The 13th-century zealot Marguerite Porete wrote in The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, “So one must crush oneself, hacking and hewing away at oneself to widen the place in which Love will want to be.”
I wonder, in the garden, if what the apophatic theologists were gesturing to was boredom. Boredom: an experience defined by lack. A negative space in the human condition, emptier in some ways than oblivion because at least oblivion is cool. A nothingness that sparks creation. On the contrary: idle hands, devil’s workshop. Maybe a practice of extreme deprivation—an experience of radical tedium—is about confronting boredom, enduring it. The path to the waterfall is veiled with daisies and I walk it slowly.
The others and I haunt the cloisters together, passing like ghosts. When I encounter them, I’ve perfected an expression of deferent indifference: mouth tilted into a soft smile, eyes cast down and to the side. The only real threat of interaction is in the kitchen. The microwave is garishly loud and terminally slow, and when one person is using it there’s nothing to do but engross yourself in a teabag wrapper.
No one else looks like they’re addicted to their phones, and so they must be very religious or very troubled to be here. The cane-wielding man is cell A, the silver-haired woman is D, and my favorite, the 2009 music journalist, is B. One night, on a moody promenade through the courtyard, I see B photographing plants with a chunky DSLR, and even though it’s dark out he doesn’t use flash. He looks up and sees me watching him. Something defiant crosses his face before he turns away. A is grandfatherly and affectionate, by which I mean, if I am walking behind him, he will not close the door on me. D is the only one who doesn’t mark her meals with an ichthys. I think she’s judging my Los Angeles Apparel shirts. Sometimes I pray for them. I’m sure they pray for me, too.
Lunch one day is half a grapefruit and ragout Provençale: carrots, zucchini, eggplant, tomato, and finely chopped bacon, which I spend fifteen minutes mindfully picking out. A decade ago, I read somewhere that pigs can feel hope, and after that I couldn’t eat pork anymore. I know that removing the bacon is performative—it’s a stew, it’s saturated. And anyway, you could argue that the animal is already dead. Eating it is no worse than letting the body go to waste. But isn’t that what life is—finding a principle and sticking to it, even when it’s petty and pointless in the grand scheme? We’re propelled through this senseless and chaotic world by a delicate combination of ethics and willful ignorance in service to the big picture. Leftovers are scraped into a pot in the kitchen and fed to the chickens, John told me when I arrived, and I contribute my soggy bacon even though I haven’t seen any chickens.
I scrub my bathroom with an eco-cleaner from the library that I later realize is actually Windex. I wrap a ribbon of toilet paper around the base of the shower head to keep it at an angle, so it doesn’t flood the bathroom. I fill my sink with water and squirt in Woolite I’d packed in a travel shampoo bottle. I rub my socks and underwear furiously underwater until the water turns murky. There’s a peg for jackets next to the bed and a length of clothesline strung between the legs of the bathroom vanity; I use the clothesline for underwear and the peg for socks, because the peg is in the eyeline of the crucifix. My eyelids pulse with chemical cleaner and the nervous rash I thought solitude could fix. I find a new electric kettle in a closet in the Ave Maria room, but the burning plastic smell lingers. The inside of my mouth tastes like sponge.
At night anchoresses claw their way out of the graveyard and crabwalk up the stairs. Someone hacks my phone and posts a string of slurs. Am I considering that possibility because I want it to happen? Am I bigoted? Is that question indicative of smug liberal ignorance? More than discipline, the thing that keeps me from looking at my phone is a sort of counterdread: There will be so many notifications. In the quiet cell I imagine the numbers on my inbox icon going up and then I imagine throwing my phone into the waterfall.
Noise moves strangely in silence. It’s magnified and displaced, so you can’t quite orient yourself in relation to it. I keep making sounds into other sounds: The wind might be machinery, or I hear footsteps and then it’s just the clock. I catch snippets of phantom conversation. I swear I hear someone else’s alarm when the window is open, and sometimes when the window is closed, too. Creaks, drafts, the water heater, the stove: everything has a language. The click of the little brass box that holds my rosary. The deafening clamor of keys in my pocket. Footsteps; slamming doors; the thin, otherworldly buzz of the light fixtures. I add hearing test and hearing synesthesia to my list of things to look up later, which also includes how thick is soundproof, eye wrinkle normal for 30s, and blepharoplasty horror stories.
What I think is the sound of wings in the wood room is B shaving logs with a hatchet. His face is a mask of serene concentration. The wood splinters but doesn’t break. I want to laugh at B, and beneath that I want to protect him, and beneath that, I want to feel anything the way he feels.
D is gone. In vespers, a stranger with a crew cut and pants that zip off at the knee walks straight to her seat. He doesn’t know to bow to the crucifix, so throughout the office I move slowly for him. I decide he’s German and in love with me. Donnez vos corps aux langues de feu, we chant. Give your body to tongues of fire.
That night I build a fire in only six tries. I add heat until it turns green and growls at me, and then I shut the door. People make fire out to be this big masculine thing—structure, science, danger—but to sustain a fire, you have to nurture it like it’s an infant. Enough balled-up newspaper, and anyone can spark a flame. There’s a softness to knowing when to open and close the metal inlet, when to feed and when to withhold. You don’t want it to burn too hot, or you’ll waste time and wood keeping up; too cool, and it’ll blaze out. I’m starting to recognize burn patterns, the way flames sidewind from paper to brush, how different woods smolder, the gentle calibration of tinder and air. My knuckles are black with soot and my pants are white with ash.
The night before the priest comes, I arrive in the kitchen to wash up and find a basket on the serving table. A sheet of printer paper next to the basket reads, Brioche pour votre petit déjeuner. Brioche for your breakfast. A test. Am I supposed to take the brioche with me now, as I would biscottes, or am I supposed to come back for it in the morning? It might look anxious or greedy to steal a loaf back to the room. But if the brioche was meant to be collected in the morning, why leave it out now? Maybe whoever puts out our food knows that some people don’t go down to breakfast in the morning, preferring to stay in-cell; maybe they’re just letting us know, so that we’re aware we should come down to the kitchen in the morning. Complicating things, they haven’t left out any bread plates. I don’t know what a normal person would do in this scenario, much less what John and Fabienne expect me to do. No one else’s cubby is on the shelf, which means I’m the first one to wash my dishes, which means I must lead the group by example.
Life is endless little choices and their consequences. I’m still washing up when the new guy—C, per the whiteboard—walks into the kitchen, clocks the brioche, and immediately walks out again. He must also be experiencing a crisis of choice. I decide to clean my plate and then, instead of starting a clean plate pile for collection and reintegration into the kitchen, I’ll put a brioche on it and take it to my room. I move quickly, and am almost out the door when I brush past C again. Was he watching me through the window? His eyes lock on my brioche. By the time I get to my cell I know I’ve condemned myself to a night of insomniatic meditation on selfishness.
In the morning the brioche is hard as a rock, inedible.
The priest comes sometime in the afternoon, at which point I may request le pardon de Dieu. It’s unclear where or how. I write my first note, to John, asking him to ask the priest to visit me. John writes a note back to explain that I should leave a note for the priest, who apparently has his own cubby, with my cell letter. John’s handwriting is loopy and sweet and he signs the note with a doodle of a Carthusian cross.
Lunch is a pork chop. It wallows in soft onions and broken cream. It’s almost chicken, but it’s not. Are the lives of hogs in France more cherished than those in America? If this hog had an upbringing that was peaceful and free, would its consumption be more ethical than that of, say, chicken nuggets? Anyway, who decides what feels hope—if the only way we measure intelligence is against our own, the results will always be skewed. The cream sauce congeals in geothermic rings. I stab the cutlet with my fork and saw off a small piece and hold it to my mouth. The pale muscle reminds me of woodgrain. I feel ill. If I eat it I’ll feel bad while eating it, and then after, too, carrying around with me not only the pork but the conviction that I broke one of my few moral codes. It would be a sacrifice, then. Doesn’t that make it more noble?
A thin acid of self-loathing creeps up my esophagus as I cut the pork chop into little pieces and push it around the cream sauce. Sour with guilt, I slide the plate into my cubby. I don’t want to leave my cell and miss the priest, so I’m trapped with it, the sweaty hunk of innocent pig shut tight in the wooden box like a circus animal.
I’m not sure how far into my cell the priest will come. I shove the cubby under my desk and fold and refold my clothes. Plans to wash and air-dry my period underwear are postponed. In a panic, I shave my legs.
The cell is outfitted with what I’d presumed to be a purely decorative, historically accurate doorbell: a length of wire that runs from the outside corridor into the landing, with the corridor end bent into a noose-like handle. Inside the cell, the wire attaches to a jumble of Chartreuse bottle stoppers and scrap-metal crosses. When it rings for the first time, the sudden thrash of steel and stone is like an ice cube to the asshole.
The priest is short and slight and already peppering me with banter as I open the door. I unfold the slip of paper I prepared in case I got nervous. I recite my intentions: I don’t speak much French, but I’d like to receive God’s pardon. When I envisioned receiving God’s pardon, I thought maybe the priest would touch my forehead and deliver a brief incantation and I’d be on my way. Instead, he beckons me, impatiently, to walk with him.
He talks all the way down the corridor, pausing for responses I can’t give. My already conversational-at-best French devolves into a sort of stream-of-consciousness mélange of high school vocabulary words, homophonic approximations, and English words in a French accent. I feel stupid, slow, and potentially even evil. He asks if I receive pardons often and I say yes, every year, and then I realize I’ve lied to the priest, and I’m in Mrs. Mortar’s classroom again. This thought eclipses whatever the priest says next as he leads me into a small room above the welcome center.
The room is modern and cozy, with a velvety sofa and chairs that don’t even look handmade. He sits across from me and knots his fingers and smiles expectantly at me. I experience the distinct swirl of guilt and fear that only comes from a visit to the principal’s office. He says my name, or he says Hélène, which he thinks is my name, which is fine with me. What is it I want pardoned? I shrug and bite back a nervous little laugh. I didn’t think I’d be leaving my cell, so I didn’t bring a jacket, and I’m agonizingly aware that my nipples must be visible through my stupid soft bra and stupid slutty baby shirt.
I don’t know how to explain the situation with the pork to him, or the situation with the brioche. I don’t know how to tell him that it’s not even that I want forgiveness for doing the wrong thing, but that I don’t even know if I’m doing the wrong thing. Or I want blazing horny visions, divine contact, and that makes me feel ashamed because I know I’m not special. No emergency exit. What if I did turn inward—what if I found the center, and there’s nothing there?
I bet he eats pork. I bet he doesn’t even see the problem.
“Et?” He’s acting like I’m taking up his precious pardoning time with my idiot inability to ask for forgiveness. He seems to enjoy holding God’s mercy just out of my reach. He starts rattling off words—ego, violence, hatred, war.
“War!” I say. It’s true that I am deeply upset about war, as a practice and a concept. But the priest only shakes his head.
He says something that sounds suspiciously like, “But you can’t control that. It’s too far away.” Is he allowed to deny a pardon?
I don’t know how to explain complicity in French. Or the conviction I have that just because I don’t have control over something doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for it. I feel tricked. Why bring up war at all? You can’t uphold the abstract without reckoning with the real. Or maybe you can, and that’s what the priest is doing, and that’s what I’m doing here too. And even if I can’t control war, isn’t that the point—that we ask God to take on what we can’t handle ourselves?
In exasperation, the priest tells me to ask John to help me write a list of pardons and to come back tomorrow. Not just one; a whole list.
Outside the welcome center, rain falls in italics. I scrape cold pig into the leftovers pot. God’s forgiveness feels further and further away from me.
In my cell I update my list—lyrics to the songs that get stuck in my head, translations of psalms, laser vein removal—and sink into a rumination in which my cats run away and no one can contact me. Dinner is mashed potatoes. I eat sitting on the floor, watching the fire.
It’s a special mass tonight, with new prayer pamphlets and an incense that makes my rash flare. The priest swans to the altar in tiers of white and promptly goes off-book, either ignoring the pamphlet completely or reinterpreting its order in such a way that none of us can keep up. He has to tell us twice to kneel. It’s comforting to realize that he speaks like he’s bored all the time; it wasn’t just me. We line up for communion and instead of just cupping his hands for the priest, B drops to his knees and presents his tongue.
After communion the priest sings—not a chant, a real song. The thing is: He’s amazing. He’s got vibrato; he’s got range. A holy apparition, two words flash in my brain: demon twink. Is the priest camp? I ponder this as the Eucharist dissolves in my mouth, malty and not unpleasant.
In the caustic light of morning, John steeples his fingers.
“I thought it would be a quick blessing,” I say apologetically. It occurs to me that John is realizing, for the first time, that I’ve had no idea what’s happening all week.
“You need a . . .” John searches for the word. “Péché?”
“A sin?”
He brightens. “A sin!”
The prospect of identifying my flaws brightens him. He squares the scrap of notepaper I brought him and poises his pen over it.
There are many things wrong with me. I look at John and think about him tagging all the prayer booklets so it’s easier to locate the psalms, so we don’t feel lost and foolish. I tell him that after I leave the monastery, I’d like to be more present.
“You want God in your life every day.” John writes this down, then takes the pen to his mouth. “You still want something he can pardon.”
I think back to the priest listing off moral defects. “Ego?”
“Égoisme.” He writes, thinks, writes and finishes with a flourish. “May God be in my life every day. I ask for God’s pardon for ego, and to forgive me as I don’t love enough.”
John and I find the priest on the stairs to his study. He beams when he reads what John wrote for me.
“Bon, bon,” he says. He and John exchange an unintelligible rapport, and we head to the church instead of his office. In the chapel the air is foggy with incense. The priest is buzzing. He dons his whole outfit again. John seems bemused; I get the sense that the priest doesn’t put his pardoning robes on for just anyone.
The priest shoos John out of the chapel and leads me to the altar, where he sits on a small throne with lions’ heads for arm rests and pulls over a normal chair for me. He reads my pardon back to me. After each sentence I nod and say oui, and he nods and says bon. He talks at me, and I nod dumbly. He talks about the annunciation a lot—when Gabriel tells Mary she’s pregnant—and I’m pretty sure he says this is my annunciation. I nod although I find this deeply stressful. Then he holds his hands over me. He forgives me for not loving enough. He forgives me, he says, for everything.
All empires fall. C is absent from offices and I catch John guiding two lanky teenage boys around the microwave. I wonder if they’re brothers or friends, try to imagine entering monastic isolation with my friends. When the boys mess up in church I feel embarrassed for them, and then I feel annoyed, and then I feel guilty about feeling annoyed. Maybe they’re together because one is very shy, or has a disease, and this is his last chance to heal. The teenagers, with their thin silver chains and normal-width jeans, are a shock, an artifact of the outside world; everyone else here feels so self-contained, like they don’t exist outside of this. And as I know them, they don’t. I live in a hypothetical here, my life on hold, my relationships suspended. Everything I know about my fellow monks is assumption and projection; we part and the story evaporates. We’re strangers.
Shaggy pink peonies bloom in the private garden. I count my vitamins. My eight-day-old napkin disgusts me. I think I have been doing the sign of the cross wrong the whole time.
There is something beautiful in the human urge to build societies, no matter what container we’re in. I’m last to get dinner. On the white board the check marks are:
A: 
B:
C:
D:
+
E:
F:
I sweep the ash from my room. I select my train clothes and roll the rest into little bundles and wedge them into my suitcase. I seal my crumb napkin in a Ziploc bag. I walk around the room, checking for signs of myself.
My last supper is stewed nightshades, a wedge of camembert, and a waffle. I will never know why these meals are so lovingly and confoundingly crafted. Painterly clouds have settled over the valley, lacy at the edges and in the center blindingly bright and dense and white and brilliant. The sky darkens slowly, like someone is wrapping gauze around it. Or around my eyes. With dusk, something washes over me: I’m not going to remember this like it is. There’ll be some remnant—but it’ll be smaller, darker, like a disposable camera photo. Or there won’t be any remembering at all. The quicksand of consciousness will swallow this moment, the clouds sliding over one another, squiggling my vision with their vividness. The valley flickers at the edges. My vision narrows to a pinpoint of rapid motion, to the size of my screen.
When you see a tree moving, you know it’s being moved by the wind—but if you’d never seen a tree move before, it might be reasonable to assume it was dancing, or waving, or whatever. Acting of its own accord. You’d think it had agency. God, biology, anxiety, the internet—maybe I’m animated by some great external force, and I don’t even know it. Maybe what keeps me up at night is the illusion of movement when there is only being moved. I’m changing. On my thumb, a crescent of bare nail visible above the polish. In the kitchen, after dinner, lying in wait for me: a new sponge, clean and bouncy. It almost makes me sad.
I choose a seat on the train that faces my destination. It’s not yet noon in France; the rest of my world is asleep. I’ll be back on the map soon. This is the last place I don’t exist.
I turn on my phone. The solar eclipse in Aries is about to set things ablaze. Celebrate national stress awareness month. Linen is back. It shakes and shakes. It returns to me: indigestion, the throb of carpal tunnel. Some quiet sadness—not because I won’t be able to stand it, but because I will.
I search and search. I find the date of the feast of Saint Bruno and the exact location of the monastery and the year of its founding. I find the ten best steak frites in all of Paris. I find the names of birds and flowers in dead languages. This is how I know them. The wind is running its fingers through the trees. The sky blooms and withers, light and shadow. I am not paying attention. I find a translation of the words that marked my cell: Ecce elongavi fugiens: et mansi in solitudine. Behold, I fled away and remained in the wilderness.
Excerpted from You Have a New Memory. Copyright © 2025 Aiden Arata. Published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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