Woman Submerged in a Car
by Lawrence Goeckel
Small bubbles headed up to television screens
from a submerged car broadcast in a diffuse gold. A beautiful
young woman calmly waved at a camera the rescuers had lowered
into the river. I drove down to where camera lights were blinding
the surface of the water and, because I cannot remember how one
thought leads to the next, jumped in. I touched the passenger
door that wouldn't open, cheeks bulging, my hair frantic with
effort. She tapped on the window as if I had traveled too deep
into exhaustion to be there. I surfaced for air and dove back
down. It was like trying to return to a dream lost in dark water.
Impossible.
Though life kept us apart, I occasionally saw her from the morning
bus, holding her robe together with one hand, the other hand picking
up a newspaper in a strange yard. Other times, I'd see her using
the reflection of the window to put on her lipstick as she passed
by my apartment in the bus at night. Out of these chance encounters,
we had a child. Evenings, I return home discouraged and sit with
my daughter on our blue couch smelling of cigarettes and spearmint
gum. We watch The Undersea World. "Mr. Cousteau, heee can find
her," she says, with her hopefully comic French accent.
After a while, I come to my senses. A car passes by outside with
its front end off the ground, dutifully following a tow truck.
Behind the apartment, blue lights practice Arabic on the bottom
of the swimming pool. A sea tern circles and skims, searching
for insects confused by the water’s surface. Like her mother,
my daughter disappears. As I click through the channels, I briefly
see her waving from an island in paradise with a single palm tree.
Unable to find my way back to her with the remote, I call out.
But my expression of love is as mute to her as if it were spoken
among fish inside an aquarium.
Lawrence Goeckel is a recently retired Air Force master sergeant. A few years back his family home was burnt down by a teenage arsonist. His writing attempts to recover the past from a blurred memory. One thing he is sure of is that “The fly drifts along the surface of the water as the trout watch warily below, calmly fanning their gills.” Recent publications include The Blue Mesa Review, Willow Springs, and the collection IN COMPANY: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960.
