the lines on the wall look like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey (IV)

On this weekend he did not eat. She read about Richard Nixon. He dumped the last of the coffee down the sink and she threw out the bananas that had gone bad. He was sick with bloom. She marveled at how many elections Nixon had won. Nixon was the son of a grocer.

Hunger made his fingers tingle. He held his hands beneath the warm water streaming from the faucet. It would be little reflected in the water bill, if at all. There were no dishes in the sink. The warm water did not stop the tingling. He waited for it to pass to his toes, but it did not. He wondered if heart attacks were signaled by fingers tingling. A co-worker had told him that once, or maybe it was if your arm went numb. He couldn’t remember. Last week in the produce section he stared at the carrot bunches for almost ten minutes. The produce clerk asked him if needed assistance. He felt like crying but did not tell that to the clerk. Now he felt like crying again, holding his hands beneath the streaming water as if praying to a forgotten deity.

She marveled that a man as flawed as Nixon could have accomplished so much. They didn’t believe he had phlebitis after Watergate. She wondered if anyone ever believed him about anything. She was yet to be born when Nixon was president. Perhaps people back then believed what politicians said. Perhaps there was less cynicism. She didn’t know and couldn’t know. Memories cannot be trusted. Memories are crooks. Nixon created the EPA. Nixon would have been impeached. Nixon believed in keeping his troubles to himself. Yet his troubles were the most transparent of any president. She didn’t like carrots but could never know if Nixon had liked carrots.

The water continued to run. Nixon’s body will take decades to decompose.