'This chamber,' said Brother John with a curious mix of glee and solemnity, 'isn't merely a room but is also a revolutionary machine.'
To me, Rodion Romanovich said, 'This is always trouble.'
'If I envision an object and consciously project that image,' Brother John continued, 'the machine receives it, recognizes the projected nature of it separate from all other kinds of thought, amplifies my directed mental energy to several million times its initial power, and produces the object imagined.'
'Good Lord, sir, your electrical bill must be outrageous.'
'It's not inconsiderable,' he acknowledged, 'but it isn't as bad as you might think. For one thing, it's not volts that matter so much as amps.'
'And I suppose you receive a high-user discount.'
'Not only that, Odd Thomas, my laboratory has certain rate advantages because it is in fact a religious organization.'
Romanovich said, 'When you say you can imagine an object and the room will produce it-you mean like the cookies you have mentioned.'
Brother John nodded. 'Certainly, Mr. Romanovich. Would you like some cookies?'
Glowering, the Russian said, 'Cookies are not alive. You said you had created life.'
The monk sobered. 'Yes. You're correct. Let's not make a parlor game out of it. This is about First Things, man's relationship to God and the meaning of existence. Let's go directly to the main show. I will create a floppy for you.'
'A what?' Romanovich asked.
'You will see,' Brother John promised, and smiled knowingly.
He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and furrowed his forehead as if in thought.
'Are you doing it now?' I asked.
'If I am allowed to concentrate, yes.'
'I thought you would need a helmet of some kind, you know, with all kinds of wires trailing from it.'
'Nothing so primitive, Odd Thomas. The room is attuned to the precise frequency of my brain waves. It's a receiver and an amplifier, but only of my projected thoughts, no one else's.'
I glanced at Romanovich. He looked as bearishly disapproving as ever I had seen him.
Perhaps twenty seconds had passed before the air felt thicker, as though the humidity had abruptly increased, but this heaviness had no moist quality. Pressure pushed in upon me from all sides, as if we had been descending into oceanic depths.
On the Persian carpet, in front of Brother John's chair, arose a silvery shimmering, like a reflection of light that had bounced off a bright object elsewhere in the room, although that was not the explanation for it.
After a moment, tiny white cubes had formed apparently out of nothing, as rock sugar crystallizes on a string that is suspended in a glass of highly sweetened water. The number of tiny cubes rapidly increased, and at the same time they began to fuse with one another, as if I were watching a rewinding video of the incident in the garage.
Romanovich and I rose to our feet, no doubt motivated by the same thought: What if a 'floppy' is the pet name Brother John has given to the ambulatory boneyards?
We need not have been alarmed. What formed before us was a creature the size of a hamster. All white, combining features of a puppy, a kitten, and a baby bunny, it opened huge eyes that were as blue as-but less predatory than-the eyes of Tom Cruise, gave me a winning smile, and made an appealing, musical burbling sound.
Brother John opened his eyes, smiled at his creation, and said, 'Gentlemen, meet your first floppy.'
I was not present in the school to witness this, but following is what I was told of events unfolding parallel to Brother John's revelations in the Mew:
In Room 14, as Jacob does needlepoint, Brother Knuckles places a chair in the open doorway, where he sits, a baseball bat across his knees, and observes the activity in the hallway.
Brother Maxwell, fifteen years downriver from his journalism career, is perhaps hoping that he has not come all this way and time only to encounter the same mindless violence that he could have had without a vow of poverty, in Los Angeles.
Maxwell sits in a chair near the only window. Because the whirl of snow half hypnotized him, he has not been focusing on the fading day beyond the glass.
A noise more crisp than the wind, a series of faint clinks and squeaks, draws his attention to the window. Pressed to the far side of the panes is a shifting kaleidoscope of bones.
Rising slowly from his chair, as if a sudden movement might agitate the visitor, Maxwell whispers, 'Brother Salvatore.'
In the open doorway, with his back to the room, Brother Knuckles is thinking about the latest book by his favorite author, which isn't about either a china rabbit or a mouse who saves a princess, but is nonetheless wonderful. He doesn't hear Brother Maxwell.
Backing away from the window, Brother Maxwell realizes that he has left both his baseball bats beside the chair he vacated. He again whispers for Salvatore, but perhaps no louder than before.
The patterns of bone at the window constantly change, but not in an agitated fashion, almost lazily, conveying the impression that the creature may be in a state similar to sleep.
The dreamy quality of the kaleidoscopic movement encourages Brother Maxwell to return to his chair to pick up one of the baseball bats.
As he bends down and grips that weapon, he hears a pane of glass crack above him, and as he startles upright, he shouts, 'Salvatore!'
Although it had formed out of cubes, the floppy was as furry, cuddly, and floppy as its name. Its huge ears drooped over its face, and it brushed them back with one paw, then rose on its hind feet. The Pillsbury Doughboy might have something like this as his pet.
His face a portrait of enchantment, Brother John said, 'All my life, I've been obsessed with order. With finding order within chaos. With imposing order on chaos. And here is this sweet little thing, born out of the chaos of thought, out of the void, out of nothing.'
Still standing, no less wary than when he had expected one of the boneyards to rise up before him, Romanovich said, 'Surely you have not shown this to the abbot.'
'Not yet,' Brother John said. 'In fact, you're the first to see this… this proof of God.'
'Does the abbot even know your research was leading to… this?'
Brother John shook his head. 'He understands that I intended to prove that at the bottom of physical reality, under the last layer of apparent chaos is ordered thought waves, the mind of God. But I never told him that I would create living proof.'
'You never told him,' Romanovich said, his voice groaning under the weight of his astonishment.
Smiling at his creation as it tottered this way and that, Brother John said, 'I wanted to surprise him.'
'Surprise him?' Romanovich traded astonishment for disbelief. 'Surprise him?'
'Yes. With proof of God.'
With barely throttled contempt, more directly than I might have said it under these circumstances, Romanovich declared, 'This is not proof of God. This is blasphemy.'
Brother John flinched as if he had been slapped, but recovered at once. 'I'm afraid you haven't entirely followed what I've told you, Mr. Romanovich.'
The giggling, toddling, big-eyed floppy did not at first glance seem like a work of supreme blasphemy. My initial take was: furry, cute, cuddly, adorable.
When I sat down on the edge of my chair and leaned forward to have a closer look at it, however, I got a chill as sharp as an icicle in the eye.
The floppy's big blue peepers did not engage me, did not have the curiosity of a kitten's or puppy's eyes. They were vacant; a void lay beyond them.
The musical burbling and the giggle charmed, like the recorded voice of a toy-until I reminded myself that here was not a toy, that here was a living being. Then its utterances reminded me of the low muttering of dead-eyed dolls in nightmares.
I rose from the chair and took a step or two back from Brother John's dark miracle.
