Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  OTHER TITLES BY PAUL PEN

  The Light of the Fireflies

  Desert Flowers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Paul Pen

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Simon Bruni

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Un matrimonio perfecto by Plaza y Janés in Spain in 2019. Translated from Spanish by Simon Bruni. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542042062

  ISBN-10: 1542042062

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1.

  The young woman appeared with the rain. Luis saw her turn the street corner the moment it began to pour down, when the drops were visible in the bright halos of the streetlights. Soon puddles formed, reflecting the light from the same streetlights, from the green traffic lights, and from the burger-shaped neon sign above Luis. The woman walked along the opposite sidewalk, skirting a large block of apartment buildings. At this time of night, the lights were off in almost every window. Even the bars that occupied the ground floors had closed a while ago. Her pace was slow. She didn’t bother to take cover from the rain under a roof or protect herself with an umbrella.

  “You’re gonna get soaked!” Luis yelled from where he stood at the counter under the neon burger sign.

  Beside him, with a spatula in his hand, Ray laughed when he saw her jump. She put her hood up, as if she’d just remembered that her sweatshirt had one. The light gray of the cotton darkened as the rain soaked it. The woman looked at them from the other side of the street. Her silhouette was bent over, her hands in her sweatshirt pockets as if she was holding on to them to stop herself from falling. They couldn’t make out her face in the shadows under the hood—only a bright spot that emerged from them that could have been her nose.

  “Drunk or high?” Luis asked in a low voice.

  “Drunk,” Ray guessed, his elbows on the counter. “And a little crazy. But fuckable, and that’s what matters.”

  The neon, or perhaps the smell of the onions on the grill that seduced the hungry drunks who came out from nearby bars, must have caught the attention of the woman, who turned to cross the street. She did so without looking. A car avoided her with an angry blast of the horn. The driver yelled an insult at her through the window, stopping under the traffic light whose reflection in a puddle dissolved when the girl trod in it in her black Converse shoes.

  Seeing her approach, Ray straightened.

  “Good luck,” he whispered, before escaping to the grill.

  From there, the cook would shoot his mouth off about customers who couldn’t see or hear him. The idling generator, the hum of the neon, and the music from the radio on the counter insulated them from him, so they could hear none of the offensive remarks Ray made about them for Luis’s supposed enjoyment. In reality, Luis did not find them very funny. His coworker sometimes forgot that he was a son of Mexican immigrants.

  Before the young woman reached them, Luis turned a wet handle to unroll the awning that covered the bar and two stools on the street. Water that had gathered on the canvas trickled onto a power strip on the counter, to which the neon sign and the radio were connected. Yellow and blue sparks crackled and gave off a burning smell, different from the one coming from the grill.

  “Welcome to the best food truck in Seattle. Those were fireworks to celebrate your arrival,” Luis joked to play down the dangerous wiring. “Little wet, huh?”

  The woman didn’t respond. She sat on one of the stools without drying it. Luis wiped the counter, the bar, the laminated menus, the ketchup and mustard bottles. She sat looking at the ground with her hands between her knees. She was clutching her sweatshirt’s cuffs with her fingers, hiding her hands as if she was cold.

  “You all right?” asked Luis.

  The light inside the van softened the shadows under her hood, revealing her face. She was much prettier than he’d expected. The neon created an optical illusion on her pale skin, like makeup outlining her cheeks in orange and accentuating the curvature of her top lip, the volume of her lower one. Her pronounced nose didn’t make her ugly in the least—it only added character. Luis guessed she was around his age, about twenty-five.

  “Told you she’d be fuckable,” Ray declared from the privacy of the grill at the back of the truck.

  The stream of obscenities had begun. The sound of the rain would hide Ray’s off-color commentary even more, but to make sure the girl didn’t hear it, Luis turned up the radio. In the early hours, they tuned it to a station that played melodic soft classics that helped make the atmosphere more relaxed and dampened the spirits of passersby wanting to carry on the party. Now it was playing something by the Carpenters. On tiptoes to reach the set above him, Luis’s eyes flicked to the open zipper on the woman’s sweatshirt. He discovered that she had nothing on underneath. Her hair, divided into two parts on either side of her neck, dripped water onto the material over her breasts. The way the wet cotton clung to her nipples confirmed her nudity. Her hair seemed wetter than the rain would have made it—it hadn’t been raining long enough to soak it this much.

  “Hey, seriously, you OK?” he persisted.

  “Amigo,” said Ray, showing that he did in fact remember Luis’s Mexican heritage. “You need to stop worrying so much about everyone else.”

  Luis could easily imagine a group of the girl’s friends wetting her head in the bathroom of one of the bars that had closed an hour ago, to sober her up. Then they would’ve dried it for her with her own T-shirt and put the sweatshirt on her so she didn’t have to wear wet clothes. Of course, if they were such good friends, they could have walked her home instead of letting her go on her own, at the mercy of a ravenous alcoholic stomach.

  “Hungry.” It was the first word she said, almost confirming Luis’s thoughts. “I’m hungry.”

  The young woman looked at him with eyes of a blue so light it seemed gray. Luis wondered if that was how she saw the world right now: gray and plunged into some profound state of gloom. Luis could smell a few beers on her breath as she spoke. A few chasers, maybe. Some shots of tequila. A year serving late-night burgers on the street refined one’s ability to detect alcohol. No wonder she was acting so strange, if she’d had tha
t much to drink.

  “Then you’ve come to the perfect place,” Luis said.

  He offered her two laminated menus, one with pictures of burgers and the other of milkshakes. She gestured at the former without letting go of the sweatshirt’s cuff. She didn’t let go to pick up the menu, either, preferring to let Luis leave it on the bar. After glancing at the options, she chose the regular burger.

  “You can’t go wrong with the classics,” he said.

  He informed Ray of the choice. Ray had already chucked a disc of meat onto the hot plate.

  “Always one step ahead of you, buddy,” he boasted with a smile. “I told you she was drunk, and she is, because if she was high she’d have gone for something sweet. I also told you she was crazy, and you can see I was right.”

  He gestured at the girl, who at that moment was wringing her cuff out onto the power strip, watching new sparks crackle.

  “Hey, hey, stop that.” On tiptoes behind the counter, Luis held her wrists. “Behave. My boss will kill me if the neon blows.”

  She freed herself from his grip as if it bothered her a lot that she was being touched. Ray flipped the burger on the grill, pressing it down with the spatula, making it hiss in its own juices. The smell of cooking meat filled the food truck.

  The girl rested her sad gaze on Luis. “Are you a good person?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, are you a good person?”

  She was the first customer to ask him such a question. He doubted even his mother, or his girlfriend, had asked him something like that.

  “Er, well, I think . . . I’d say so.”

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve done in your life?”

  Luis gestured toward his greasy clothes and then toward the inside of the truck, and Ray at the grill, and the clock that showed three in the morning. A gloomy summary of the only job he’d managed to find in the last three years.

  “Probably leaving school,” he explained.

  “Have you ever hurt anyone?”

  Luis thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, I guess so. I’ve let one or two girls down, for sure.”

  The tiniest hint of a smile appeared under the hood, as if that was precisely the damage she was referring to. In the story Luis was forming in his mind about the stranger, he imagined that this was why she was drunk—a breakup. The worst pain anyone feels, that of abandonment. A pain that was as much a classic as the regular burger she’d ordered.

  “And the worst thing someone’s done to you?” she asked.

  Ray emerged from his hiding place to interrupt the conversation.

  “Hey, you, I have an easier question for you: Do you want cheese on the burger?”

  She looked at him as if she was surprised to find there was another person in the truck. Her eyes scanned the cook’s plump anatomy, but she didn’t answer the question. She dried her face with her sweatshirt’s sleeves, closing her eyes.

  Luis pushed his coworker back toward the grill.

  “With cheese,” he whispered. “Let’s give her something filling.”

  Ray expressed his disapproval with a snort. He grudgingly laid the cheese across the meat.

  “Are you sincere?” she asked when she’d finished drying her neck. She’d also wrung out her hair. “Truly honest?”

  “Quite the philosopher when you’re drunk, huh?” said Luis. “My coworker here’s kind of rude, but he’s right: we’re here to serve burgers, not have these deep conversations. Overdo it on the tequila shots, or what?”

  The woman lowered her head, rubbed her hands together between her knees. A tear or a raindrop rolled down her cheek, and she dried it with a finger. Luis suddenly regretted his comment.

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. But what’s happening here is you’re coming down from a night of partying hard, right? You’ve done something you regret? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Message your ex, fight with a friend, make out with a stranger in a restroom . . . something like that, yeah? Well don’t worry, in a couple of days all you’ll remember is what a good time you had. And there’s no better remedy for the blues than a good burger.”

  “Chicks don’t know how to drink,” was Ray’s contribution.

  Luis rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “Seriously, there’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine.” He massaged the wet cotton of her sweatshirt. “It’s not like somebody died.”

  Another tiny smile visited her face, and she fixed her eyes on Luis’s.

  “It’s just that really I am dead,” she said without blinking. “I should be.”

  A cold tremor ran down Luis’s back, and for an instant he thought it was in fact possible he was talking to a ghost, squeezing the shoulder of a woman who would now disintegrate, leaving a puddle of wet clothes on the ground and etching into his soul the supernatural memory of the girl who appeared with the rain.

  “What the fuck?” he heard Ray say. “Now we’re in an episode of The Walking Dead.”

  The comment pulled Luis from his phantasmal trance. He let go of the shoulder of the girl who was still in front of him. A normal shoulder, of muscle and bone.

  “Yeah, right.” He gestured at her from top to bottom. “I’d say you’re pretty alive.”

  “Although now that she mentions it,” Ray broke in, “she does look like the typical girl who’d cut her veins open in the bathtub because some guy dumped her—”

  Luis was about to challenge Ray’s statement when he realized it was quite a reasonable explanation for all the strange things about the girl. Her hair being so wet. The fact that she was naked under her sweatshirt. The way she didn’t let go of her cuffs for a second, perhaps to hide the cuts she made on her wrists. The night out getting drunk with her friends that Luis had imagined had really been a solitary intake of alcohol to give her the courage to use the blade she would’ve left on the edge of the bathtub.

  “Do you want us to call someone?” he asked, fixing his gaze on her eyes so she knew he was being serious. “I know there’re numbers you can call if you’re feeling depressed. Or you can stay with us tonight if you need company.”

  “Great, let’s have every lunatic in the neighborhood here,” Ray chimed in again.

  “Do you need a phone?” She didn’t seem to have one. “Take mine.” He took it from his pocket and offered it to her.

  “She’ll swipe it,” Ray warned him.

  But the girl didn’t even take it. She shook her head. “I just want to eat. Really.”

  Luis could hear her tapping her feet on the stool’s footrest. He sensed her unease. She obviously didn’t like being told how to behave, or the patronizing tone that Luis’s voice had taken on—a tone that even he found unpleasant. He put his cell phone back in his pocket and laid the burger Ray had just finished on the bar.

  “Then eat is what you’ll do.” He moved the sauce bottles and a pile of napkins closer to her. “And it’s on the house, so you can see that the world’s a happy place worth being in, with friendly guys who buy you dinner.”

  “Hey, shithead, you’re paying for that—I’m not working for free.”

  The girl neither smiled nor thanked Luis for his kind gesture. She just picked up the burger, using her little fingers to keep the bread in place. She bit into it with her mouth wide open and bit again before swallowing the first mouthful. Luis almost told her to slow down but stopped himself. The rain fell harder, and the images reflected in puddles resembled pointillist paintings. The pitter-patter on the awning was as loud as the generator. Dolly Parton’s Jolene was playing on the radio.

  The girl continued to eat, slowing down. She paused to take in air and sniff. Luis didn’t know whether she was cold or really crying. He couldn’t decide whether the drops running toward the corners of her mouth were tears or rainwater. And her irritated eyes, red around the edges, could have been the result of either silent sobbing or the early onset of a hangover, now that she was filling her belly. Luis turned
to the hot plate.

  “What should we do?” he whispered. “We can’t let her leave like this.”

  “What do you mean, what should we do?” Ray raised his eyebrows. “Burgers, compadre, that’s what we do. And as soon as that chick’s finished hers, she can go back where she came from. She probably lives in one of the apartments over the road if she got here so quickly after . . .” He mimed cutting his wrists with the spatula.

  Luis grabbed his hand to halt the performance, which surprised both of them because he never stood up to Ray, who was the food truck owner’s son. That was also why Luis tolerated the constant abuse directed at the customers. But making fun of a girl who might be suicidal was too much.

  “You’re too good, buddy. You should never trust people.” Now Ray used the spatula to scrape the burned cheese from the grill. “We’re all selfish pigs deep down.”

  The girl finished her burger. She folded up the greaseproof paper with drops of ketchup and the remains of a pickle inside and left it in the plastic basket in which it had been served.

  “Did you like it?” asked Luis.

  “It tasted like soap.” She clicked her tongue, as if unsticking an unpleasant flavor from the roof of her mouth. “Everything tastes like soap to me.”

  “Come on, hombre.” Ray’s spatula scraped harder against the hot plate. “Get her out of here now.”

  A drop of water from the awning landed on the adapter, making a spark float in the air before disappearing. The girl followed it with her gaze.

  “Have you ever felt so sad you no longer feared pain or death?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the wiring.

  “Hmmm . . . no?”

  She smiled, her lips outlined in neon pink.

  And she took the plug adapter in both hands.

  She began to shake, seized by a violent electric shock. So violent that she looked as if she would collapse from the stool to the ground, but the current kept her hands clamped to the adapter. The neon sign blew, exploding like a broken lightbulb. The music on the radio turned to smoke. When the girl finally managed to take a hand off, she held it out to Luis. He grabbed it without thinking. The electricity passed through his body in a brutal spasm. With his eyes lost in the young woman’s brokenhearted gaze, Luis couldn’t work out whether she had stretched out her arm wanting help or with the perverse intention of sharing her pain with him. Of passing the pain to him, in some way, albeit transformed into electricity.