He grins. “That’s no big deal, you don’t smile much anyway.” He sits, ponders the situation. “There’s a bundle of facial nerves in the vicinity of the bullet wound. Damage to them could cause your headaches, but your lack of other symptoms makes me think that’s not the case here. There’s nothing readily visible wrong with you,” he says. “We need to run tests.”
“What do you think the problem is?” I ask.
“This is largely a process of elimination from the most to least likely causes. Let’s see if you have a brain tumor, then we’ll check for nervous system disorders.”
This alarms me. “Those are the most likely causes?”
“Little brother, you don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation or how very fucking stupid you’ve been. You need an MRI. The waiting time for an MRI in the public health system in Helsinki is nine months. You could die while you wait. It happens all the time.”
“The police have private medical coverage,” I say.
“Screw the system, both public and private,” Jari says. “I’ll twist some arms and get you as far up the line as I can. You’ll get the MRI in at most a couple weeks, and a blood test as soon as you leave this office.”
“Okay,” I say. Something occurs to me. “I thought you were getting rich in private practice. What are you doing here in a hospital?”
“The pay for public doctors is so abysmal that most of the good doctors have fled to private practice. So what you have left is recent graduates from medical school, some bad doctors, some older doctors, and lately an influx of foreign medical workers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but many of the foreigners speak poor Finnish and often depend on English.”
“But foreign doctors have to pass a language test in order to practice.”
“That doesn’t guarantee spoken fluency. Two parents brought a child with an ear infection in to see me last week for a second consultation. They’d seen a foreign doctor and his language skills were so poor that all he could tell them was, ‘It’s not cancer.’ And when, for instance, elderly people come in and don’t speak English, they sometimes feel that they can’t relate their problems. They feel neglected by the system. I come here two mornings a week to help out. I think of it as my civic duty.”
Jari always was a good guy.
“How’s your bum knee?” he asks.
“Worse every year. There’s not enough cartilage left to hold it together. I have to sleep with a pillow between my knees to keep the pressure off, or it starts to go out of joint in my sleep and the pain wakes me up. At least it used to, back in the days when I slept.”
“Getting kneecapped with a bullet has a tendency to do that. Have an orthopedist examine it again. Reconstructive surgery probably won’t fix it, but might improve it.”
“I’ve got a baby coming. Better to limp than not walk at all.”
We share an uncomfortable silence. I wait for him to ask the inevitable.
“Why have you been avoiding me?” Jari asks. “You don’t return my phone calls.”
I’ve been asking myself the same question. I discovered the answer but can’t share it with him. It’s about old hurt and anger. Dad used to beat the hell out of me. Jari is older than me, but never did anything to stop it. Maybe he couldn’t.
When Jari got out of high school, he told Dad he wanted to be a doctor. Dad asked him who the hell did he think he was, told him he thought he was better than his upbringing, to come down off his high horse and get a job. They argued. Dad punched him in the face. Jari left that night, and I didn’t hear from him for almost two years. He had moved to Helsinki and gotten into the university. He abandoned me.
“I don’t know why,” I say. “I didn’t realize I was doing it until Kate and I had been here for a few months and I hadn’t gotten in touch with you.”
He nods. “I get that, but I’m still your brother.”