She waited for a moment, to see if he had more to add before asking the question that reflected the elephant in the room. While she waited, she struggled with her pillow. “How come you got flat, lumpy old pillows, but in my room there are brand new ones?”
“I’ll have the housekeeper replace these in the morning,” he said.
“Are you going to win?” she asked, not really caring about the pillows.
“My numbers are better this time than at the same time in the last campaign. As long as I don’t screw up something, I should be fine.”
“Screw up as in getting abducted from a bathroom while taking a leak, like last time?”
“Yes, I’m so glad America knows that little detail.” He smiled and kissed her. “If only there had been photos.”
She pulled away. “But you have no idea of what happened after that?”
He shook his head. “The next thing I knew I was in an operating room of some sort, and they were getting ready to put me under. I wasn’t sure if I would ever wake up again, or even what sort of surgery they had planned. Everything after that was a blur until I showed up in that little hospital out in the desert. That’s when the Corps started shifting me from one place to another in some armored car.” He stroked the hair away from her face. “By then I had missed my chance. Millions of dollars in campaign funds out the window.”
“Then we met, in that travel trailer.”
“The heroic brain surgeon that saved my life, working against all odds.”
“I had a lot of help that night. But whatever.” June took a deep breath, worried about her next question. “I guess I’ve been wondering where I fit in all this?”
“I’ve been wondering that also,” said Jack. “There’s certainly plenty of room for you to fit into my life.”
“Yeah, into your life…”
“First things first, okay? We still need to get to know each other better than having weekenders together.”
“Very true, Mr. President.” She kissed his collarbone.
“And after tonight, the first thing we need to get through is tomorrow morning.”
“One day at a time, as they say.”
“And in a campaign,” Jack said, “it’s often one moment at a time. But what about your talk? Ready for it?”
“Yeah, and believe it or not, it has a lot to do with your surgery.”
“Brain surgery, Fibonacci, the Golden Ratio, and me,” he said. “This I gotta hear.”
“It’s the technique I use in the approach to getting to the third ventricle. To find the sulcus I want, I lay out on the side of the head the Fibonacci spiral, that shell-shaped deal, like a template for the exact spot to make the craniotomy. Essentially, if I arrange the five-eight arcs of the spiral along the top of the cranium, then the central block of numeric tiles is the section of bone I remove, and the access point for my tunnel into the brain is the very first tile of the spiral.”
Jack raised one eyebrow. “And it always works like that? Don’t we all have different shaped heads?”
June nodded. “Surprisingly, it’s been quite accurate. Of the two dozen cadaver heads I worked on in my research, including both genders and four different races, and of all the live cases I’ve done, it’s been spot on.”
“But what happens if you don’t find the fold you want after you knock the hole in the head?”
She pinched him. “I don’t knock holes in heads. I very carefully use a high-speed perforator and drill four holes in the skull, then connect them with a high-speed bit. Then it’s just a matter of popping that piece of skull bone off, without dropping it on the floor first of course.” She playfully pinched him again. “But to answer your question, if the access point I want is not right in the middle, I can always enlarge the hole I’ve made. Any more questions?”
He was quiet for a moment, before asking, “And that’s what you did to me?”
“Yeah, but I put everything back together again.”
They lay quietly for a while, June letting Jack absorb the information. From experience, June knew patients that had major brain operations took a while to come to terms with their surgeries. But it came time to push along the conversation.
“Interesting how in nature the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden spiral keep recurring,” she said. “Pine cones, asparagus, pineapples, sunflower seed arrangements, fern fronds, so many things. I suppose it’s the same for you in economics?”
He sighed contentedly. “My first degree was in mathematics, but I have to study whenever I go back to it. That all seems so long ago.”