When a second heedful hiss caused me to turn and look back, no trace of the door could be seen.
The buttery light radiated from the walls, and as on previous visits to this realm, I felt as though I had stepped into a dream. Simultaneously, I experienced a detachment from the world and a heightened reality.
The light in the walls faded. Darkness closed upon me.
Although the chamber was surely an elevator that carried me down a floor or two, I detected no movement. The machinery made no sound.
In the darkness, a rectangle of red light appeared as another portal hissed open in front of me.
A vestibule offered three brushed-steel doors. The one to my right and the one to my left were plain. Neither door had a visible lock; and I had never been invited through them.
On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
For ever and ever.
In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polished letters blazed.
Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.
I stepped into a round chamber thirty feet in diameter, barren but for a cozy arrangement of four wingback chairs at the center. A floor lamp served each chair, though currently only two shed light.
Here sat Brother John in tunic and scapular, but with his hood pushed back, off his head. In the days before he’d become a monk, he had been the famous John Heineman.
Time magazine had called him “the most brilliant physicist of this half-century, but increasingly a tortured soul,” and presented, as a sidebar to their main article, an analysis of Heineman’s “life decisions” written by a pop psychologist with a hit TV show on which he resolved the problems of such troubled people as kleptomaniac mothers with bulimic biker daughters.
The New York Times had referred to John Heineman as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Two days later, in a brief correction, the newspaper noted that it should have attributed that memorable description not to actress Cameron Diaz after she had met Heineman, but to Winston Churchill, who first used those words to describe Russia in 1939.
In an article titled “The Dumbest Celebrities of the Year,” Entertainment Weekly called him a “born-again moron” and “a hopeless schlub who wouldn’t know Eminem from Oprah.”
The National Enquirer had promised to produce evidence that he and morning-show anchor Katie Couric were an item, while the Weekly World News had reported that he was dating Princess Di, who was not—they insisted—as dead as everyone thought.
In the corrupted spirit of much contemporary science, various learned journals, with a bias to defend, questioned his research, his theories, his right to publish his research and theories, his right even to conduct such research and to have such theories, his motives, his sanity, and the unseemly size of his fortune.
Had the many patents derived from his research not made him a billionaire four times over, most of those publications would have had no interest in him. Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.
If he hadn’t quietly given away that entire fortune without issuing a press release and without granting interviews, they wouldn’t have been so annoyed with him. Just as pop stars and film critics live for their power, so do reporters.
If he’d given his money to an approved university, they would not have hated him. Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.
At some time during the years since all that had happened, if he had been caught with an underage hooker or had checked into a clinic for cocaine addiction so chronic that his nose cartilage had entirely rotted away, all would have been forgiven; the press would have adored him. In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.
Instead, John Heineman had passed years in monastic seclusion and in fact had spent months at a time in hermitage, first elsewhere and then here in his deep retreat, speaking not a word to anyone. His meditations were of a different character from those of other monks, though not necessarily less reverent.
I crossed the shadowy strand surrounding the ordered furniture. The floor was stone. Under the chairs lay a wine-colored carpet.
The tinted bulbs and the umber-fabric lampshades produced light the color of caramelized honey.
Brother John was a tall, rangy, broad-shouldered man. His hands—at that moment resting on the arms of the chair—were large, with thick-boned wrists.
Although a long countenance would have been more in harmony with his lanky physique, his face was round. The lamplight directed the crisp and pointed shadow of his strong nose toward his left ear, as if his face were a sundial, his nose the gnomon, and his ear the mark for nine o’clock.
Assuming that the second lighted lamp was meant to direct me, I sat in the chair opposite him.
His eyes were violet and hooded, and his gaze was as steady as the aim of a battle-hardened sharpshooter.
Considering that he might be engaged in meditation and averse to interruption, I said nothing.
The monks of St. Bartholomew’s are encouraged to cultivate silence at all times, except during scheduled social periods.
The silence during the day is called the Lesser Silence, which begins after breakfast and lasts until the evening recreation period following dinner. During Lesser Silence, the brothers will speak to one another only as the work of the monastery requires.
The silence after Compline—the night prayer—is called the Greater Silence. At St. Bartholomew’s, it lasts through breakfast.
I did not want to encourage Brother John to speak with me. He knew that I would not have visited at this hour without good reason; but it would be his decision to break silence or not.
While I waited, I surveyed the room.
Because the light here was always low and restricted to the center of the chamber, I’d never had a clear look at the continuous wall that wrapped this round space. A dark luster implied a polished surface, and I suspected that it might be glass beyond which pooled a mysterious blackness.
As we were underground, no mountain landscape waited to be revealed. Contiguous panels of thick curved glass, nine feet high, suggested instead an aquarium.
If we were surrounded by an aquarium, however, whatever lived in it had never revealed itself in my presence. No pale shape ever glided past. No gape-mouthed denizen with a blinkless stare had swum close to the farther side of the aquarium wall to peer at me from its airless world.
An imposing figure in any circumstances, Brother John made me think now of Captain Nemo on the bridge of the Nautilus, which was an unfortunate comparison. Nemo was a powerful man and a genius, but he didn’t have both oars in the water.
Brother John is as sane as I am. Make of that what you wish.
After another minute of silence, he apparently came to the end of the line of thought that he had been reluctant to interrupt. His violet eyes refocused from some far landscape to me, and in a deep rough voice, he said, “Have a cookie.”
CHAPTER 6
IN THE ROUND ROOM, IN THE CARAMEL LIGHT, beside each armchair stood a small table. On the table beside my chair, a red plate held three chocolate-chip cookies.
Brother John bakes them himself. They’re wonderful.
I picked up a cookie. It was warm.
From the time I had unlocked the bronze door with my universal key until I entered this room, not even two minutes had passed.
I doubted that Brother John had fetched the cookies himself. He had been genuinely lost in thought.
We were alone in the room. I hadn’t heard retreating footsteps when I entered.
“Delicious,” I said, after swallowing a bite of the cookie.
“As a boy, I wanted to be a baker,” he said.
“The world needs good bakers, sir.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking long enough
to become a baker.”
“Stop thinking about what?”
“The universe. The fabric of reality. Structure.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.
“I understood subatomic structure when I was six.”
“At six, I made a pretty cool fort out of Lego blocks. Towers and turrets and battlements and everything.”
His face brightened. “When I was a kid, I used forty-seven sets of Legos to build a crude model of quantum foam.”
“Sorry, sir. I have no idea what quantum foam is.”
“To grasp it, you have to be able to envision a very small landscape, one ten-billionth of a millionth of a meter—and only as it exists within a speck of time that is one-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.”
“I’d need to get a better wristwatch.”
“This landscape I’m talking about is twenty powers of ten below the level of the proton, where there is no left or right, no up or down, no before or after.”
“Forty-seven sets of Legos would’ve cost a bunch.”
“My parents were supportive.”
“Mine weren’t,” I said. “I had to leave home at sixteen and get work as a fry cook to support myself.”
“You make exceptional pancakes, Odd Thomas. Unlike quantum foam, everybody knows what pancakes are.”
After creating a four-billion-dollar charitable trust to be owned and administered by the Church, John Heineman had disappeared. The media had hunted him assiduously for years, without success. They were told he had gone into seclusion with the intention of becoming a monk, which was true.
Some monks become priests, but others do not. Although they are all brothers, some are called Father. The priests can say Mass and perform sacred rites that the unordained brothers cannot, though otherwise they regard one another as equals. Brother John is a monk but not a priest.
Be patient. The organization of monastic life is harder to understand than pancakes, but it’s not a brain buster like quantum foam.
These monks take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. Some of them surrender humble assets, while others leave behind prosperous careers. I think it’s safe to say that only Brother John has turned his back on four billion dollars.
As John Heineman wished, the Church used a portion of that money to remake the former abbey as a school and a home for those who were both physically and mentally disabled and who had been abandoned by their families. They were children who would otherwise rot in mostly loveless public institutions or would be quietly euthanized by self-appointed “death angels” in the medical system.
On this December night, I was warmed by being in the company of a man like Brother John, whose compassion matched his genius. To be honest, the cookie contributed significantly to my improved mood.
A new abbey had been built, as well. Included were a series of subterranean rooms constructed and equipped to meet Brother John’s specifications.
No one called this underground complex a laboratory. As far as I could discern, it wasn’t in fact a lab, but something unique of which only his genius could have conceived, its full purpose a mystery.
The brothers, few of whom ever came here, called these quarters John’s Mew. Mew, in this case, is a medieval word meaning a place of concealment. A hideout.
Also, a mew is a cage in which hunting hawks are kept while they are molting. Mew also means “to molt.”
I once heard a monk refer to Brother John “down there growing all new feathers in the mew.”
Another had called these basement quarters a cocoon and wondered when the revelation of the butterfly would occur.
Such comments suggested that Brother John might become someone other than who he is, someone greater.
Because I was a guest and not a monk, I could not tease more out of the brothers. They were protective of him and of his privacy.
I was aware of Brother John’s true identity only because he revealed it to me. He did not swear me to secrecy. He had said instead, “I know you won’t sell me out, Odd Thomas. Your discretion and your loyalty are figured in the drift of stars.”
Although I had no idea what he meant by that, I didn’t press him for an explanation. He said many things I didn’t fully understand, and I didn’t want our relationship to become a verbal sonata to which a rhythmic Huh? Huh? Huh? was my only contribution.
I had not told him my secret. I don’t know why. Maybe I would just prefer that certain people I admire do not have any reason to think of me as a freak.
The brothers regarded him with respect bordering on awe. I also sensed in them a trace of fear. I might have been mistaken.
I didn’t regard him as fearsome. I sensed no threat in him. Sometimes, however, I saw that he himself was afraid of something.
Abbot Bernard does not call this place John’s Mew, as do the other monks. He refers to it as the adytum.
Adytum is another medieval word that means “the most sacred part of a place of worship, forbidden to the public, the innermost shrine of shrines.”
The abbot is a good-humored man, but he never speaks the word adytum with a smile. The three syllables cross his lips always in a murmur or a whisper, solemnly, and in his eyes are yearning and wonder and perhaps dread.
As to why Brother John traded success and the secular world for poverty and the monastery, he had only said that his studies of the structure of reality, as revealed through that branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, had led him to revelations that humbled him. “Humbled and spooked me,” he said.
Now, as I finished the chocolate-chip cookie, he said, “What brings you here at this hour, during the Greater Silence?”
“I know you’re awake much of the night.”
“I sleep less and less, can’t turn my mind off.”
A periodic insomniac myself, I said, “Some nights, it seems my brain is someone else’s TV, and they won’t stop channel surfing.”
“And when I do nod off,” said Brother John, “it’s often at inconvenient times. In any day, I’m likely to miss one or two periods of the Divine Office—sometimes Matins and Lauds, sometimes Sext, or Compline. I’ve even missed the Mass, napping in this chair. The abbot is understanding. The prior is too lenient with me, grants absolution easily and with too little penance.”
“They have a lot of respect for you, sir.”
“It’s like sitting on a beach.”
“What is?” I asked, smoothly avoiding Huh?
“Here, in the quiet hours after midnight. Like sitting on a beach. The night rolls and breaks and tosses up our losses like bits of wreckage, all that’s left of one ship or another.”
I said, “I suppose that’s true,” because in fact I thought I understood his mood if not his full meaning.
“We ceaselessly examine the bits of wreckage in the surf, as though we can put the past together again, but that’s just torturing ourselves.”
That sentiment had teeth. I, too, had felt its bite. “Brother John, I’ve got an odd question.”
“Of course you do,” he said, either commenting on the arcane nature of my curiosity or on my name.
“Sir, this may seem to be an ignorant question, but I have good reason to ask it. Is there a remote possibility that your work here might…blow up or something?”
He bowed his head, raised one hand from the arm of his chair, and stroked his chin, apparently pondering my question.
Although I was grateful to him for giving me a well-considered answer, I would have been happier if he had without hesitation said, Nope, no chance, impossible, absurd.
Brother John was part of a long tradition of monk and priest scientists. The Church had created the concept of the university and had established the first of them in the twelfth century. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk, was arguably the greatest mathematician of the thirteenth century. Bishop Robert Grosseteste was the first man to write down the necessary steps for performing a scientific experiment. Jesuits had built the first
reflecting telescopes, microscopes, barometers, were first to calculate the constant of gravity, the first to measure the height of the mountains on the moon, the first to develop an accurate method of calculating a planet’s orbit, the first to devise and publish a coherent description of atomic theory.
As far as I knew, over the centuries, not one of those guys had accidentally blown up a monastery.
Of course, I don’t know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t know anything.
Maybe monk scientists have occasionally blown a monastery to bits. I am pretty sure, however, they never did it intentionally.
I could not imagine Brother John, philanthropist and cookie-maker, in a weirdly lighted laboratory, cackling a mad-scientist cackle and scheming to destroy the world. Although brilliant, he was human, so I could easily see him looking up in alarm from an experiment and saying Whoops, just before unintentionally reducing the abbey to a puddle of nano-goo.
“Something,” he finally said.
“Sir?”
He raised his head to look at me directly again. “Yes, perhaps something.”
“Something, sir?”
“Yes. You asked whether there was a possibility that my work here might blow up or something. I can’t see a way it could blow up. I mean, not the work itself.”
“Oh. But something else could happen.”
“Maybe yes, probably no. Something.”
“But maybe yes. Like what?”
“Whatever.”
“What whatever?” I asked.
“Whatever can be imagined.”
“Sir?”
“Have another cookie.”
“Sir, anything can be imagined.”
“Yes. That’s right. Imagination knows no limits.”
“So anything might go wrong?”
“Might isn’t will. Any terrible, disastrous thing might happen, but probably nothing will.”
“Probably?”
“Probability is an important factor, Odd Thomas. A blood vessel might burst in your brain, killing you an instant from now.”