Brother Odd

and he did not appear disposed to oblige the request.
        The Russian radiated not just the authority of an officer of the state but also moral authority. He removed his left hand from a coat pocket and made a hurry-up gesture.
        Closing his eyes, furrowing his forehead, Brother John imagined the floppy out of existence. Mercifully, the giggling stopped. Then the thing disassembled into rattling, twitching cubes. It vanished.
        When the scientist monk opened his eyes, Romanovich said, "You yourself noted that you have been obsessed with order all your life."
        "Any sane man sides with order over anarchy, order over chaos," said Brother John.
        "I agree, Dr. Heineman. But as a young man, you were so obsessed with order that you not only decried disorder, you despised it as if it were a personal affront. You abhorred it, recoiled from it. You had no patience for anyone whom you felt furthered disorder in society. Ironically, you exhibited what might be called an intellectual rather than an emotional obsessive-compulsive disorder."
        "You have been talking to envious men," said Brother John.
        "When your son was born, his deformities and disabilities struck you as biological disorder, the more intolerable because it came from your loins. You disowned him. You wanted him to die."
        "I never wanted him to die. That is outrageous."
        I felt a little like a traitor to him when I said, "Sir, Jacob remembers when you visited him in the hospital and urged his mother to let his infection run its course untreated."
        Atop his tall lanky body, his round face bobbed like a balloon on the end of a string, and I could not tell whether he was nodding in agreement or shaking his head in denial. He might have been doing both. He could not speak.
        In a voice no longer characterized by accusation, opting for a note of quiet entreaty, Romanovich said, "Dr. Heineman, have you any conscious awareness that you have been creating abominations that have materialized outside this room, that have killed?"
        At the school, in Room 14, Brother Maxwell stands tense, his baseball bat raised, while Brother Knuckles, having dealt with more than his share of wiseguys in years past, and having recently mowed down an uberskeleton with an SUV, is wary but not wound tight.
        In fact, leaning almost insouciantly on his bat as if it is a cane, Knuckles says, "Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain't got the guts to back up the brag."
        "This thing," says Maxwell, "doesn't have either guts or muscle, it's all bones."
        "Ain't that what I'm tellin' you?"
        Half the cracked pane breaks out of the bronze muntins, shatters on the floor.
        "No way this chump gets through the window, not with all them little squares."
        The remaining portion of the broken pane cracks loose and falls to the floor.
        "You don't scare me," Knuckles tells the dog of the Neverwas.
        Maxwell says, "It scares me."
        "No it don't," Knuckles assures him. "You're good, Brother, you're solid."
        A clutching gnarl of flexing bones gropes through the hole in the casement window.
        Another pane cracks, and a third explodes, spraying shards of glass onto the two monks' shoes.
        Toward the farther end of the room, Jacob sits with the pillow on his lap, his head bowed to his embroidery, exhibiting no fear, creating beautiful order out of blank white cloth and peach thread, while the disorderly creation at the window shatters two more panes of glass and strains against the bronze muntins.
        Brother Fletcher steps in from the hall. "Showtime. You need some backup?"
        Brother Maxwell says yes, but Brother Knuckles says, "Seen tougher mugs than this in Jersey. You watchin' the elevator?"
        "It's covered," Brother Fletcher assures him.
        "Then maybe stay beside Jacob, move him out fast if this chump gets through the window."
        Brother Maxwell protests: "You said it won't get through."
        "It ain't gonna, Brother. Yeah, it's makin' a big show, but the true fact is-this geek, he's scared of us."
        The stressed bronze muntins and rails of the casement window creaked, groaned.
        "Abominations?" Brother John's round face seemed to swell and redden with the pressure of new dark possibilities that his mind could