Watcher Nadia Hsu

Watcher

“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” - Margaret Atwood

Oftentimes when the air around me is very still I can feel a man watching me. He hides behind the soft white of my eyeballs, squeezed between the slices of my skull, watching me from just outside of my vision. He writhes into my forehead and makes a home in the tender flesh there, I can feel him in each pore and in each goosebump.

I sense something in my reflection in the window, I glance up quickly to catch him off-guard but all I see is myself. I catch him in the reflection of the shower spout when I am shaving my legs. I brush my hair and feel him behind me, coming out of the bathroom mirror. I sit taller and cross my legs or don’t cross my legs, knowing he is watching. I feel him carving away chunks of my temple as I pull down my hems or pull up my hems. Every time I exchange a knowing, laughing glance with my brother or father when my mother misses the point, her voice lilting up at the end of sentences, I can feel the hair of the invisible man’s arms against the inside of my skin like a Russian nesting doll. Slowly I can feel the topography of his face get bigger and bigger inside my hollow body, I can feel him pushing my eyes out of their sockets, slowly.

I see him, sometimes. I saw him today when I was reading Lolita in the park and a man in khakis my father’s age asked how old I was. I see him in my aunt’s glance as I pull down my skirt, I see him in Humbert. I see him in Gaugin the way Gaugin’s subjects, bare backs turned and ready to be painted, couldn’t see the painter standing behind them. As I put on my lipstick in the mornings, he whispers in my ear, telling me to comment on how beautiful the clouds look today, how picturesque. He is beside me when I cut my hair

or when I grow it out, he weaves his red sinews into my braids. He wears my grandmother’s fur coats and guides my hand as I paint, I can feel myself becoming more hollow, with every fragile step I take I am surprised when I feel my foot hit the ground.

He is Buddy Willard and Esther both, he is Humbert and Dolores and even Nabokov, he uses my blood to ink the words on the pages I read. And I let him, I let him sometimes. I let him guide my limbs and dress me like a baby at a christening, I let him rest inside the cavity of my body when I sleep, he watches my red insides, and he paints pictures of this body landscape— red and green and brown. And I smile sometimes, feeling him behind my shoulder.

As I get older he grows with me, he watches me watch the minutes and he watches me watch my wrinkles. He is the hand drawing my crow’s feet with a scalpel when I look in the mirror.

When I birth my alien baby I can smell the scent of red rot, veins and roots of pungence, but in the middle of it all she is pure and clean, the spot of vinegar in a puddle of oil. She has slimy grey scales, and no lipsticks or hems, and he cannot see her yet.