I don’t know what to do. I walk to the corner, where there’s a large clinic, a green building with multiple entrances. I go in through emergencies, tell the nurse I don’t have anywhere to go, that I’m waiting for my sister, but she isn’t answering her phone, I tell her my hips hurt and I’m pregnant and she says OK, stay. Then I sit down and watch the injured people coming to the emergency room, waiting for the miscarriage to happen or my sister to appear. A woman arrives with her foot shredded by a glass that fell as she got out of the shower. The woman screams, and I think about the man I recently ran over. The image of the man flying through the air comes back to me, I imagine he’s an acrobat, that he leaps and does flips in the air and then stands up and keeps walking. It occurs to me that it’s possible he broke his collarbone and is now recovering alone in a room like the ones I visited the night of the accident, in the south of Quito. Then I think maybe he died and has been reincarnated in this baby, and that thought makes me laugh so much the receptionist hushes me with an icy look. What most surprises me about the emergency room is actually that woman who could be a doctor or a nurse or just a receptionist but certainly is the boss, there’s no doubt about it. I remember that sometimes my husband called me boss lady or referred to me as Superwoman, then I laugh again, and she again looks at me suspiciously. When someone arrives, for example the woman with the cut-up foot, she asks for details that seem unnecessary to me. Her questions derive from matters that have nothing to do with the medical chart, then she arbitrarily decides how many people can accompany the injured person and how long they’ll have to wait, and she does it all while scrubbing her hands or scrubbing her fingers or twisting her braid around her finger. And people respond to every question with no problem, they tolerate the pain and answer. I amuse myself for a while by watching that woman, her fingers, the tiles, and by reflecting on the shower accident and the car accident in particular, which makes me think about time, about moments, and I sense a connection between the word moment and the image of the cut-up foot on the woman waiting for the doctor who in that moment discovers she’s being watched, a strange connection between the word and image. While I’m caught in that thought, my sister calls and apologizes and tells me that she’ll come see me soon. When she arrives, she tells me an unrealistic story about that night, and once in her apartment, she tells me she’ll massage my body and undresses me and starts with my hips and I give in to her touch. I also adore this woman, though I don’t know her very well, and then I think about how love has nothing to do with knowing someone, or with time, but it also isn’t arbitrary, it has secret modes of selection, of association, of generation.