Watergate
by Ash Wu
Woke up in my ex-girlfriend’s bed. The slat of light under her door was bisected by a pair of feet clad in dark boots. It was 2 am on a Wednesday and the two of us went to bed angry after an argument.
It was one of those conversations that wasn’t colored by ire or passion per se, but rather a slow difference of opinion that colored the air metallic between us. I wanted to have sex, she didn’t — and the ramifications of this when we used to fuck all the time made me silly with a whole cadre of emotions I didn’t dare name.
Our attempts at friendship always devolved in this way — skeins of spider silk tangling into one another then ripping at the seams. This time I could be better, I whispered to myself. She could be better. We could coexist in the world without bitterness. John Lennon’s “Imagine” was written about this: not class war or racial division, but my head in the crook of her arm, unsure of whether it belonged there.
The boots struck through these thoughts with a resounding slam. I shook her awake, said hey look, there’s boots under the door.
She woke up groggy, unhappy about being roused. I pointed at the boots. She peered at them through half-open eyes, then sat up with a startle.
Could it be one of your roommates? I asked. No. One is in Asia and the other is in Europe, she said. The boots began shifting. Hey, hey, hey, the wind whispered through her keyhole. The heys increased in volume until it was clear that it was not, in fact, the wind, but the voice of the specter whose feet remained planted on the wood.
The boots disappeared. My breath coagulated in my throat. Both feet were replaced by a hand — orange and pulpy with veins — that reached under the door into the darkness where I held my ex, shell-shocked, then reached into the room where we were both stunned into camaraderie at the sight of the end of the world.
With a shy, screeching affect, another hand reached through, then held onto the bottom edge of the door and started pulling a body — clad in denim and thinner than paper — out from the underside. The body unfurled from the back to the front, the hind legs unfurling first, then the torso. The stumpy feet unrolled into overall-clad legs, then into a striped sweater, before culminating into the sneering red head of a tall, oblong man with blue eyes.
I screamed. My ex screamed. The man started to speak in a calm, matter-of-fact type of way. Watergate was a conspiracy, he rasped. It was a Deep-State plot executed by the Dems to frame Nixon and oust him from power for good.
Woodward and Bernstein were both bad faith actors, he continued. I screamed again, but the Watergate conspiracy theories wouldn’t stop. As he spoke, he swept over our clasped bodies with his scary blue eyes, tiptoeing closer and closer to the bed with the kind of fervor reserved for the moments leading up to intense sexual violation.
Right as his pinkies began to graze our nipples, I snapped out of my slumber with sweat slicking down the back of my neck and forehead. Oftentimes after the breakup, when I woke up in her bed, I was disturbed to find my arm wrapped around her chest like a long bracelet, the way we used to sleep. In an unconscious state, our bodies reverted to old patterns that our conscious minds were not privy to. I disliked how little control I had over my actions. I woke her up.
Did you just see a man in here with terracotta reddish hair who wouldn’t stop talking about Watergate? I asked her. It might’ve been a dream but it felt so real.
I just had the exact same dream, she told me. He was just about to get into Martha Mitchell’s involvement. And his pinkie was right on the tip of my nipple when you woke me up.
I’m scared, I said to my ex, slipping my thumb into the hotdog bun she made with her fist. I told her I was sorry about the previous night and she said she was sorry too. We stayed like that for a moment before waking up again. Now it was morning, and we found ourselves on opposite sides of the bed, curled away from each other like centipedes or yin yang signs. She went to the bathroom to take a shower, and when she got back, her hair was wet and smelled like freshly mowed grass. I wanted to ask her again whether the Watergate man was real, but I knew it was a trite question that would be met with a trite answer.
I acted cold as she slung on her sweater, her heavy black coat and backpack. I acted cold as she kissed me on the cheek and closed the door behind her to go to work. Sunlight leaked from behind the blue curtains. When I opened them, I could see the spires of the old Gothic church whose bells never tolled.
The hallway was empty and her roommates weren’t home. The bed was empty. No one was in it anymore. I laced up my boots and walked out into the blinding sun.
Ash Wu is a mysterious Asian woman. Find her on Twitter @ash_wuu.