Visiting my Sister

by Noah Cicero

On the way back to Youngstown we pass the cemetery where my sister is buried.  My sister Lizaveta killed herself three years ago when she was thirty-three  She slit her wrists in a bathtub and let herself bleed to death while listening to Metallica’s Fade to Black on repeat.  We weren’t really that close.  I remember when I was little around seven or eight:  I was bouncing a tennis ball of the side of the garage on a normal summer day and Lizaveta ran up from behind and grabbed the tennis ball before I caught it.  Then held the tennis ball in one hand above my head and yelled while laughing in Russian, “Get the ball Vasily, get the ball Vasily, get the ball Vasily!”  I kept jumping and jumping, but she wouldn’t give me the ball.  Then she started hitting my head with the ball while laughing.  Another time I was alone in the living room watching my favorite cartoon Transformers and Lizaveta came in and took the remote controller from me and switched the station.  I yelled, “Put that back on!”  She yelled back in Russian, “What are you going to do about it!”  So I got up and tackled her but she was eighteen and I was five so she won.  Then to top it off she gave me a wedgie and laughed hysterically as I walked around the house tucking my underwear back in my pants while crying.  Lizaveta and I had a lot of good times together. 

             “Turn into that cemetery,” I say.
             “Why?”  Chang says.
             “I want to visit my sister.”
             “Oh.”

             Chang turns into the cemetery.  I tell him where to go.  He drives slowly amongst the gravestones.  The ground is covered in snow and it is two degrees outside.  The wind is blowing hard and it feels like twenty below. 

             “Stop here.”
             Chang stops the car.
             “Do you want me to come with you?”  Chang says.
             “No, just give me a minute.”

             I walk on the frozen snow, it crunches beneath my feet.  I walk up to the grave.  It says her name.  In movies people talk to the grave.  I don’t talk.  I can’t just talk to stone.  I don’t believe in an afterlife.  Lizaveta is dead.  That is the context of the situation.  I am alive and lizaveta is dead.  I can still move, my heart still beats, and Lizaveta’s heart has stopped.  Lizaveta is no more.  Lizaveta can no longer influence the course of events on the earth.   She lives in the past tense.  I is, and she was.  Those are the facts. 

             I think I am standing at her grave because it reminds she is dead.  Some days I think I will see her, like I will walk into my parent’s house and she will be sitting at the kitchen table drawing little pictures in a notebook smoking a cigarette, or I will be sitting in the Waffle House and she will just walk in and sit down next to me, some times I look into other cars while I’m driving to see if she is one of them, when the phone rings I think it might be her, or when I hear a knock on the door.  But it is never her.  There is no more Lizaveta.  I will never see her open a Christmas present again, I will never hear her yell at me in Russian again, I will never walk into a bar and see her sitting at a table having a beer.  No, death has silenced her.  Her existence is absolute silence.  The earth does not speak of her.  The earth has swallowed six feet below.  Lizaveta is dead.  And death means your existence is silenced.  You can never speak again.  You can never influence or affect the way of the world again.  You can never enjoy again. 

             To be honest I didn’t really know my sister.  When I was born she was ten and was moving on into puberty and had things to do.  She began living her life when I started walking.  She was predominately more Russian than me, when we came over I was five and still a child and she fifteen.  She had friends in Russia; she had a life and a world back in Russia.  I had nothing back in Russia.  I don’t even remember that place.  But she did.  She still spoke Russian regularly and never bothered to learn the English language well. But it doesn’t matter now; she doesn’t speak at all anymore.  Lizaveta is dead.

             Before she killed herself times were getting rough for her.  She started getting weirder and weirder.  She started talking to herself in her room.  She kept getting paranoid that people at work were out to get her, that they were devising huge complex plans to get her fired.  She thought the government was watching her.  She thought her house was bugged.  She told her boyfriend of eight years to go fuck himself without any real reason.  She started not leaving her house, she would go to work, do the work demanded of her, and return to her house to not speak to anyone.  We all knew it was weird.  We all knew that something was wrong.  That perhaps she went mad.  But we couldn’t say it out loud.  How do you say out loud, “My sister has went mad.”  And to bring it farther, how do you tell your sister or any family member to their face, “Honey, you’ve gone crazy and we need to do something with you.”  You can’t say things like that to people.  You can’t tell people to their face they’ve gone crazy.  It is like when you see your friend date some horrible person you can’t just be like, “Joe, your girlfriend is a horrible bitch.”  You can’t do it.  Or when one of your friends gets pregnant and you know for sure they aren’t ready to have a baby and that perhaps through little messages they show they don’t really want one, you can’t say, “Sherry, don’t have that fucking baby.  Get a damn abortion!”  You can’t do it.  You just can’t do it.  And even if you did, they wouldn’t listen. 

             I once saw this nature show about zebra migration patterns.  The zebras had to cross this river in Africa to migrate but crocodiles knew that zebras would be there.  And all the crocodiles sat there in the water waiting for them.  The zebras began to cross the river and the crocodiles started snatching them up, killing dozens of them.  A lot of zebras made it across the river but a lot died.  The nature show host said something like, “I hate to see these zebras get killed like this.  And we could do something to help them as humans.  But this is nature.  This is how things are done in nature and we can’t intervene.”  That is how I feel when I’m in that situation.  My friend dated the horrible person, the girl having the baby, and Lizaveta.  It is nature and I cannot intervene, either they would be eaten by crocodiles or they would make it across the river.  Sometimes people wake up and see what they are doing and how it is leading to pain, or they don’t, and they get eaten.  Lizaveta was eaten.  She killed herself.  Her madness led her to death.  We tried, well some of us, my mother didn’t try, and my father doesn’t have a clue how to be gentle.  But Sasha and I tried to hint to her to get some help, to find some way of making her life better or something.  But you can’t tie someone done and make them do the right thing.  You can’t force other people into being happy or being normal or caring about themselves.  There’s that phrase, “No one even said life would be easy.”  Which is true.  No one ever said that to me.  No teacher ever said after teaching me how to do division, “Now class, nine divided by three is three, and life will be easy.”  No, no one ever said that.  A philosopher didn’t say that or a novelist or a poet, it was probably some guy working at some shitty job, and someone started bitching and he said in response to that guy’s bitching, “No one ever said life would be easy.” 

             As I stand here on frozen snow with twenty below wind chill chapping my cheeks I’m thinking, “Life is not fucking easy.”  Lizaveta is dead.  I want her alive.  I want her to stand by me and say something.  I don’t care what, just something like, “Hey bubblefuck.”  That would be enough, “Hey bubblefuck.”  But she isn’t.  She says nothing, nothing but silence comes from her grave.  She is down there rotting in a little expensive box.  I am up here standing on frozen snow.  The world has gone on without Lizaveta.  We remain above ground working and paying bills, she remains underground doing nothing. 

             A week before she killed herself she wrote me an email.  I don’t know why she wrote me an email.  She rarely ever communicated her feelings to me.  It said:

             Dear Vasily,

             I’m not sure, people, they want things.  Things, things, things, they want them.  People, not bad, I don’t know.  They are always trying to get what they want, they move toward their goal, if it be great, or small, or just to be lazy.  They move to it.  They don’t care if you are in their way, they walk over you. They bump into you, making people hate- themselves.  They hurt my feelings.  My feelings Vasily.  My feelings are everywhere, scattered, bursting, exploding, deranged, on the floor and up on the roof, my feelings.  I can’t find them anymore, they appear under the seat in my car, at red lights, and while eating an ice cream cone.  My feelings flowing, popping up and down, and out there in the stores and at the jobs, on sidewalks, they, like scorpions, like stones, cinder blocks, and reptiles, they come and chew at my feelings.  We are bursting with emotion, but we pretend we are shells.  Everyone that has ever pissed me off, ever rejected me, ever dropped a grenade into the core of my heart feels like I do.  I know they do.  They are out there right now, feeling, the emotion, the anguish, the fear, the fear, the fear, the fear, the fear, there is so much fear, it is like a fog, a mist, an engulfing smoke that filters into our pores,  into our bodies, giving us constipation of Being.  My feelings Vasily, I have them, I am your older sister and I have them, you are my younger brother, you have them, we go down, in hell, in the land of snow and pig iron, humidity, and gun shots, the end is nigh, I’m being poetic, but I have to hide my emotions, while sharing them.  I have to reveal and not tell, but I want to tell.  I want to say like Rimbaud, “I’m suffering, I’m really suffering.”  Where is Rimbaud?  Dead, underground, one legged.  At least he had one great love; I’ve never loved, with passion, with wild nights and thrills.  Us, postmodern children cannot love like that.  All the cars are broken; the junk yards are full, guarded by men with grease under their fingertips.  We are there, like rusty metal, no one is coming, no happiness can be found now.  I chose to love nature, to let the sun shine on my face, to look up at tall trees, to be fascinated by the trot of the deer.  To be enthralled by the beauty of the human face, not by expensive watches, expensive cars, expensive dresses, haircuts that make me look a certain movie star.  I do not know how to cook.  I’m a Russian woman, I’m equal.  American women say they are equal, but they bow, they give up their arms and legs and allow chains and servitude to wreck their Being, oh, the night, and the darkness, will it not consume me, take me, my eyes, and my mouth, give me something besides the look of gloom and want of something expensive to show their friends on these faces.  Their faces devoid, empty shells, faces that have memorized how to act in certain situations to appear normal, to get through days, to appear like they are people driven by the American Dream, by the Dream to own forever and ever, history has ended and it ends with the word expensive.  I swear these humans, and they are humans, there is something human about all of them, when no one is looking, it comes, but when someone enters their presence, the gestures of a robot return.  These humans would wear shit for eye liner if it was expensive.  I cannot bow before this earth, I will not debase myself before these humans who have chosen the adjective expensive as a God, they have deified celebrities and ruined their own emotions.  They degrade themselves and call it happiness.  Oh, Vasily, I am here, still on this earth, amongst humans that have chosen against happiness.  I am an insoluble person Vasily.  I cannot mix.  You stick me in a crowd of thousands and I make not one friend.  Everyone is scared of me because I have emotion, because I am not afraid to admit that I am human, that I shit and fart, and have wet the bed.  I go into public, stand and say, ‘I have wet the bed!’  And they run, they run from me like the boogie man.  To people the boogie man is truth.  Children realize in the middle of the night alone in their beds that their parents do not love them, that the world is unfair, cruel, and that the world, the only world they know is trying to grind them down into unimaginative workers who love the expensive above all else.  That is the boogie man, that first fear of anguish, of knowing that you have been condemned to a life that is out of your control.  They have freedom, but modern life is structured in such a way that you can only use freedom to choose what soda you drink and what to order at restaurants.  But everything else has been chosen for you.  Who your parents are, where you are born, how your parents treat you, what school system you go to, what economic class you are from, what neighborhood you grow up in, all chosen for you.  And those are the things that make us who we are.  We get our reality from the outside, and we don’t get to choose the outside until we’re older, and most of us are destroyed by that outside before we get a chance.  Oh, chance, oh emotion, I’m not making sense, but who’s trying to make sense here.  People even if they are trying to make sense, go as far as the cause, and as they approach the reason, the core of the problem, they realize they are part of the reason, and give up, they stop at the cause, because the cause is simple.  The reasons, terrify them.   I decided one day to go to the reasons, to smash all nonsense and grab the reason and pull it down and hold it in my hand, and let it terrify me.  And I have been alone ever since. I have been alone for so long, so long without anyone that can understand what I’m trying to explain, trying to get out of this Russian body of mine.  But I have received only silence.  A silence that screams at me, ‘Just die please, you are ruining my day.’ I cannot take it anymore.  I cannot take this anymore, I cannot, I cannot, I cannot, I cannot, this world, these people with their expensive faces have demolished me, have made me falter and now my legs have given out, my Being sways like the willows, and the swamp has engulfed me, there is nothing left to give, I have given and not received, I wanted happiness.  I swear, there was a piece of me that woke up every morning and said, ‘I want to be happy today.’  Then they would send their dogs out and they will attack me, bite, scratch, tear at my Being until there was nothing left but to resign myself to this misery.  I’m not alone in this suffering, in this bleakness, but what hurts must, is that they won’t admit it in unity, they won’t just say to each other that they feel it too, and that is what hurts most, is that I’m alone, but I’m not.

See ya sometime,
Lizaveta.

             Chang walks up behind me.  I hear his feet crunching the snow.  He stands beside me, puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “She’s dead.”

             I stand there for a minute and say, “Yeah, it’s cold, let’s get out of here.”
             We walk back to the car, in silence. 

One Response to “Visiting my Sister”

~ This piece was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 and was filed under Blog, Writing, Short Story, Featured. You can make comments on it below. ~