Chapbook Entry: The Housekeeper and the Professor

I looked at the food I had just finished preparing and then at my hands. Sauteed pork garnished with lemon, a salad, and a soft, yellow omelet. I studied the dishes, one by one. They were all perfectly ordinary, but they looked delicious- satisfying food at the end of a long day. I looked at my palms again, filled suddenly with an absurd sense of satisfaction, as though I had just solved Fermat's Last Theorem. (p.135)

"I feel empty when Root isn't here," I said.
I hadn't really been speaking to him, but the Professor murmured in reply, "So, you're saying that there's a zero in you?" (p.140 continues on into the passage about the discovery of zero)

In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth. (p.124)