Went in the morning to pick up my last paycheck from my former employer. This involved taking the Transmilenio to its furthest point north (Portal Norte), then hailing a cab. We ride over the terrible road back behind some fields to the school. I tell the cabby to wait for me as I run in for the check. We go back out the way we came. I disembark at the autopista, right next to a stop where I can catch the alimentador (Transmilenio feeder bus) that takes me back to Portal Norte where I catch a bus home.
I have just enough time for some lunch and a shower. As I begin to eat lunch, thunder rumbles, and a huge rain and hailstorm falls out of the east hills. After my shower, I dress hurriedly, as I’m running a bit behind. The rain has let up. I head out, grabbing my umbrella, the one Ambar found in the taxi on my birthday. I take the same bus route to the same northernmost station but this time get on a different alimentador that takes me to within a ten-minute walk of my work.
It’s not raining that hard, now. There are many children getting out of school and making their way home through the drizzle. I’ve been feeling a bit off today, since waking; like half in a dream where the thought keeps nagging at you that you’ve forgotten to do something that could be important. I’m almost to the jobsite, a mental health facility, when some kids ask me the time, saying ‘Tienes horas?’ I’m walking the last half-block along the road before I turn right. I’m walking on a cement curb. There is a thin, muddy path beside a drainage ditch by way of a sidewalk. The curb is broken ahead, and I step down into the trickle dividing the mud of the path. There are little green stripes of grass running along the edges of the mud.
What transpired, just as I was about to arrive at my job at the institution, is not altogether clear. I think I was looking back over my shoulder to see if any large trucks might be approaching that would discourage me from climbing back onto the curb. I must have turned back to the path, deciding against ascending to the curb, but taken a bad step. What I do know is that a sudden slippage ensued. There was one chance to stop the slide, I felt my foot catch on the slope, but that damned mud and wet grass, and my damned tractionless shoes could not sustain me. I splashed down into the drainage ditch and bounced out as if off of a trampoline, so startled and repulsed were my legs splashing into the knee-deep black water. I jumped out of the ditch, sort of throwing my body onto the slope and then scrambling to my feet.
I remember uttering some utterly obscene, nonsensical curse in English, something like ‘You sick #@$!-O,’ almost as if I were simultaneously accusing myself, the drainage ditch, the rain and the strangeness of the day as having concocted a plot against me. It is then I notice the mother standing on the corner with her young son, whose slightly awe-struck face tells me they must have witnessed my descent. I turn the last corner onto an honest to goodness concrete sidewalk, walk a bit down from the main street and begin to wring myself out: stepping out of my shoes and pouring the black water out, squeezing out the dark-brown water from my socks, and the cuffs of my filth-stained corduroys. I think, before I went to the door, that could not have helped but laugh at myself.
…
I’m sitting in a waiting room with staff, family and patients make their way about. One woman—a patient, I feel confident—swings her body about bizarrely but with enough regularity that I interpret it as part of her natural gait. She points at things, and others, and mostly watches the rain. An older, deaf woman bids her family farewell. One of the staff, apparently, cuts her finger on an umbrella and proceeds to approach every other in the room telling them some variation of what she has just told the previous one. I sit and drip. I notice my smell, taking solace in the recognition that the wreak is only wetly organic, not fecal, nor chemical, as I had feared. Eventually the barely wounded young woman sits next to me, asking me if I’m a family member. I explain to her that I’m here to teach a class. She looks nonplussed but nonetheless shows me her finger, explaining that she cut it on an umbrella that she was opening for someone else. I remember seeing her do this and telling everybody else about it. I look nonplussed, but try not to immediately look away.
An orderly, dressed all in white, walks about, at some point spotting a woman outside in the rain. He decides that she needs to come inside and calls her name repeatedly. Eventually, he motions for the doorman, Gérman, to come and help him put the woman inside by force. They take the small, old woman by the arms and guide her to the doorway. She begins to yell ‘Auxilio! Auxilio!’ but she can’t struggle very hard. I sit dripping, waiting for someone who told me they would go to get the people for the class.
The class is cancelled after 45 minutes or so. A short man, one who’d been in a class with me the previous week, leads me to an office through a doorway, down a short hall. The ceiling is too short for me to stand upright. The man, named Manuel, stands comfortably, and explains that there has been a scheduling change, and that well, they’ll call me in the morning to let me know about tomorrow’s class. I’m not too sad about the cancellation.
I walk the ten-minute walk back to a small bus stop where the alimentador will carry me back to the Portal Norte, where I can get a bus that will take me home, and I laugh again.
