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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