Under the Water (ARC)

by Paul Pen

  A DVA NCE R E A DER’S COPY — U NCOR R EC TED PROOF

  PRAISE FOR PAUL PEN

  For The Light of the Fireflies

  For Desert Flowers

  UNDER THE WATER

  o t h e r t i t l e s b y p a u l p e n The Light of the Fireflies

  Desert Flowers

  UNDER THE WATER

  PAUL PEN

  TRANSLATED BY SIMON BRUNI

  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

  Printed in the United States of America

  CHAPTER ONE

  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 onto 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.

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  “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 with-

  out 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 an adapter 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?”

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  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 channel 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, 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.

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

  “Amigo,” said Ray, showing that he did in fact remem-

  ber 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 con-

  firming 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 that 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.

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  “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 plug adapter, 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.”

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  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 abandon-

  ment. 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 ques-

  tion. 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 some-

  thing filling.”

  Ray expressed his disapproval with a snort. He grudg-

  ingly 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

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  down her cheek, and she dried it with a finger. Luis sud-

  denly 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 in-

  stant 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.

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  “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 he
r 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 noticed the way she was wagging both 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.

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  “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 work-

  ing 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