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pointed this out to Dom Anthony as some sort of defense, but it had not saved him. If you were going to be heretical and get away with it, you needed to be dead long enough for people to get over the heresy and rediscover you.
    He tried to recall the most damning parts of the notebook. Probably the questions that woke him in the night. He’d sat with his window open, listening to the buoys out on Bull’s Bay make their sonorous music, and he’d written them all down. Questions about evil and whether it could exist without God’s collusion, about Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead, even theories that God is not a being in heaven but merely some guiding aspect in the human personality.
    He felt a rush of dismay at the thought of the abbot’s reading this. He wanted to get up and find him, to explain. But what would he say?
    The wind rose outside, sweeping in from the bay, flapping over the roof. He imagined it tearing the surface of the water. The monastery bell clanged, calling the monks to sleep, telling them the Great Silence was beginning, and he wondered if the abbot had forgotten about him.
    The church had filled up with shadows, the long slits of pale glass in the windows completely dark. He thought of the chapel behind the chancel, where the mermaid chair sat on a carpeted dais. He liked to go and sit in the chair sometimes, when no tourists were around. He always wondered why Senara, their famous little saint, had been carved on the chair in her mermaid form, a half-nude mermaid at that. He didn’t object to the portrayal; he rather appreciated it. It was just so unlike the Benedictines to highlight her breasts.
    From the moment he’d seen the mermaid chair, he’d loved Senara, not just for her mythic life in the sea but for how supposedly she’d heard the prayers of Egret Islanders and saved them, not only from hurricanes but from golf courses.
    In the beginning he’d sat in the mermaid chair and thought of his wife, of making love to her. Now he could go weeks and not think of her. Sometimes when he thought of making love, it was simply with a woman, a generic woman, not Linda at all.
    Back when he’d arrived as a postulant, it had not been hard to give up sex. He did not see then how he could make love to anyone but Linda. Her hair spread across the pillow, the smell of her—that was gone. Sex was gone. He’d let it go.
    He felt a tightening at his groin. How ridiculous to think sex would stay away. Things would hide out in an underground place for a while, they would sink like the little weights the monks tied on their cast nets, but they wouldn’t stay down there forever. Everything that goes down comes up. And then he almost laughed at the pun he’d made without intending to.
    The past few months, he’d thought of sex too much. Doing without had become an actual sacrifice, but it didn’t make him feel holy, only denied, more of a normal monk chafing at celibacy. In June he would take his last vows. And that would be that.
    When the footsteps came at last, he closed his eyes, then opened them again when the sound stopped. He saw the toes of a pair of shoes, Reeboks, and the hem of a robe brushing against them.
    The abbot spoke in his Irish brogue, not one bit of it flaked away after all these years. “I hope it was productive time.”
    â€œYes, Reverend Father.”
    â€œNot too harsh, then?”
    â€œNo, Reverend Father.”
    Thomas didn’t know how old Dom Anthony was, but he looked ancient gazing down, the skin of his face drooping from his chin and cheeks almost like ruffles. Sometimes the things he said sprang from such a timeless old world. Once, during a Sunday-morning chapter meeting, sitting on his thronelike chair holding his crosier, he’d said, “The same time St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, he changed all the old pagan women into mermaids.” Thomas had thought that quaint—and a