I didn’t enter the hospital immediately but remained in the car, my hands on the wheel, my head resting on my arms as if between two rails. I don’t know if I saw it then or if it was a discomfort against my head; whatever the case, as the engine made its cooling noises I became aware of the watch on my wrist. It was a gold Omega Seafarer, inscribed as a gift from my mother to my father for New Year 1967 – the year, I think, of my birth. My father gave it to me on the night he disappeared. It had stopped working somewhere on the journey over. I wear it every day. It stopped at 3:17, though whether am or pm is impossible to say.

While I waited for the words to come together so that I might approach the woman who sat behind the glass wall, a figure covered loosely by a blanket, with a tube coming out of its nose connected to a small cylinder, its wrists and ankles fastened with leather straps, was wheeled in on a shining metal gurney by two ambulance men. There was blood visible in the figure’s hair, and dark blotches on the blanket around its stomach and chest. Beneath the opiate glaze of its eyes I could see the distress, like one of those tiny bugs caught in amber. It brought to my mind in that sudden mode of transport peculiar to memory the smash repair yard I used to drive past every morning on the way to school in Katherine. I think it might even have been owned by my foster mother’s brother. It was certainly the place for death: elegies of plastic and steel stretching as far as the eye could see, left to the weeds and to rust. I remember one car, a silver Mercedes, in the drive by the gate where my foster father told me to wait while he talked to his brother-in-law in the office, drops of blood dried to resin on the dash and flecks of hair and scalp behind the twisted steering wheel. Accidents do impossible things to human bodies. I have walked around wreckers’ yards since, imagining space backwards from the wrecks, like a film running in reverse, sucking the pieces of body back through the glass and making the passenger whole again. Even with a hydraulic ram you couldn’t simulate a head at speed. As if all the unlived life concentrated in that instant before death, and exploded.

I didn’t approach the woman behind the glass. The words never came. Even if I told her I thought I might have hit someone, what could she say? No one was going to give up that kind of information to a stranger who’d just walked in off the street. Especially at this time of night.