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.”