12. Postal Service, chapter 2 continued from Sonic Youth

When the hilarity subsided, I told Chunk and Max to go home, leaving myself languishing in the banality of closing shop. I was sweeping the floor and listening to Such Great Heights by the Postal Service when the phone rang.
It was Kara, "Hey...I'm sorry about today, I want to work on things, I do...lets just take it slowly OK?"

My acknowledgment was absolute evasion, "OK".

I found it curious that the dissolution of my relationship with Kara never induced panic or incited melancholy. Somehow, I had a feeling that things would work themselves out.

"I have to warn you that the next few weeks are going to be a bit rough for me. The one year anniversary of my father's death is coming up. I'm gonna be a basket case".

I had never met Kara's father in life and in all frankness knew nothing of the man.

July 27th, birthday of Miles Hunt from the Wonderstuff. Sitting at a booth, I noticed that Max was absorbed in conversation with someone who seemed dispossessed and had every semblance of a bum. Max had exhausted his tips to buy coffee, food and cigarettes for some derelict who sort of resembled Christ. I neglected to appreciate why Max was beguiled by somebody so unkempt and sullied, Jesus similitude aside.

While I admire the romantic notion of extending care to the displaced and unfortunate, I am ashamed to admit that an unsympathetic part of me was concerned about latent and imagined repercussions from clientele.

Max substantiated his intrigue for the derelict he would soon dub the Messiah Bum by regurgitating suppositions on the fragility of mathematics and science. Unknown to me, I would soon be indoctrinated as successive evenings were consumed by lectures on physics and mathematics by the king of kings himself.

As Max and I weren't exactly adept at advanced mathematics, we weren't completely sure if our perceived edification was effected by a psychopath or prodigy.

Explaining to you what was told to us is very difficult. My recollection of details are deficient due to the constraints of technical comprehension. I do remember conversation fragments where the Messiah Bum postulated that physics and math were flawed in corporeal application due to the fallacy of zero.

"There is no such thing as zero, every part of the universe is occupied and connected by something smaller and smaller in comparison. The spot occupied by zero in an equation has a value. This is proven by its simple presence on a page or in a formula. More importantly, the negative and positive numbers preceding and following zero respectively are dependent on it's existence. There is reliance in that connection. It demonstrates the interconnectedness of what we perceive as independent."

Messiah Bum continued, "If we were to combine the sum of every positive number, then combine every negative number that sum would be zero thus equaling infinity. Zero may appear to separate positive values from negative ones on a scale but zero is also the sum. All other values in actuality are smaller. It is definite yet infinite."

Messiah Bum rendered an algorithmic remedy for the zero fallacy in architecture and engineering. You'll have to accept my apology as I can't recall the exact details of the ameliorative formula. Besides, the whole thing has given me a headache.