“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.”
At once I regretted not having taken a second cookie.
He smiled. He looked at his watch. He looked at me. He shrugged. “See? The probability was low.”
“The anything that might happen,” I said, “supposing that it did happen, could it result in a lot of people dying horribly?”
“Horribly?”
“Yes, sir. Horribly.”
“That’s a subjective judgment. Horrible to one person might not be the same as horrible to another.”
“Shattering bones, bursting hearts, exploding heads, burning flesh, blood, pain, screaming—that kind of horrible.”
“Maybe yes, probably no.”
“This again.”
“More likely, they would just cease to exist.”
“That’s death.”
“No, it’s different. Death leaves a corpse.”
I had been reaching for a cookie. I pulled my hand back without taking one from the plate.
“Sir, you’re scaring me.”
A settled blue heron astonishes when it reveals its true height by unfolding its long sticklike legs; likewise, Brother John proved even taller than I remembered when he rose from his chair. “I’ve been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.”
Getting to my feet, I said, “Brother John … whatever this work is you do here, are you sure you should be doing it?”
“My intellect is God-given. I’ve a sacred obligation to use it.”
His words resonated with me. When one of the lingering dead has been murdered and comes to me for justice, I always feel obliged to help the poor soul.
The difference is that I rely both on reason and on something that you might call a sixth sense, while in his research Brother John is strictly using his intellect.
A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.
This monk’s hands, like his intellect, were also God-given, but he could choose to use them to strangle babies.
I did not need to remind him of this. I only said, “I had a terrible dream. I’m worried about the children at the school.”
Unlike Sister Angela, he did not instantly recognize that my dream was a lie. He said, “Have your dreams come true in the past?”
“No, sir. But this was very … real.”
He pulled his hood over his head. “Try to dream of something pleasant, Odd Thomas.”
“I can’t control my dreams, sir.”
In a fatherly way, he put an arm around my shoulders. “Then perhaps you shouldn’t sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.”
I was not conscious of crossing the room with him, but now the arrangement of armchairs lay behind us, and before me, a door slid soundlessly open. Beyond the door lay the antechamber awash in red light.
Having crossed the threshold alone, I turned to look back at Brother John.
“Sir, when you traded being just a scientist for being a monk scientist, did you ever consider, instead, being a tire salesman?”
“What’s the punch line?”
“It’s not a joke, sir. When my life became too complicated and I had to give up being a fry cook, I considered the tire life. But I came here instead.”
He said nothing.
“If I could be a tire salesman, help people get rolling on good rubber, at a fair price, that would be useful work. If I could be a tire salesman and nothing else, just a good tire salesman with a little apartment and this girl I once knew, that would be enough.”
His violet eyes were ruddy with the light of the vestibule. He shook his head, rejecting the tire life. “I want to know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said, and the door slid shut between us.
Polished-steel