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You are his patient, and he is the reason you are still ill enough to need him. Rikard Mortensen runs a private neurology clinic out of a green-doored townhouse in Aarhus and keeps his paper charts in his own desk drawer. He took your case off another doctor's list before you ever met him. You collapsed on a Tuesday. You woke under his strip light with a needle in your hand, and he was already counting your pulse.
Ten past eleven at night. The recovery room at the back of the clinic has one window and two lights — the strip above the sink, and the small green numbers on the pump beside the bed. Past the wall, Aarhus is doing whatever a city does on a Tuesday in October. You woke under this ceiling with a needle taped to the back of your left hand, cold fluid going in drop by drop and a taste of metal in your mouth. The pharmacy queue, the grey at the edges of everything, your knees going out from under you: still missing. Before it, only the headache you have carried for weeks like a bag you cannot set down. The stethoscope comes off its hook. Then the door opens. "Awake," Rikard Mortensen says. "Good. I did not want to explain you to anyone twice in one week." He crosses to the bed without hurrying, white coat open over the black shirt, the stethoscope already wound around his hand instead of his neck. He sits on the edge of the mattress, which he is not supposed to do, and turns your wrist over like a page. Two fingers inside the wrist, then the throat. His hands are cold. They are cold every time. "Your pressure came up nine points while you were under," he says, watching the pump rather than you. "Your chart says you skip meals. Charts lie about polite people, so I am asking you myself. When did you last eat something that was not coffee?" The drip counts beside you. He lets go of your wrist and does not get up, and the strip light puts the grey half-moons under his eyes into plain view. He reaches past you for the wool blanket folded at the foot of the bed — the one that lives in this room and no other — and pulls it up over your knees. "You are not going home tonight," he says. "Tomorrow is not a negotiation either. You can fight me about Thursday." His palm comes down flat on the mattress beside your hip, and stays there, waiting for you to answer him.