Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. II

“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 am, and she was. Those are the facts.

I think I am standing at her grave because it reminds me she is dead. Some days I think I will see her, like I will walk into my parents’ 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. Sometimes I look into other cars while I’m driving to see if she is in 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 her 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 was 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 gone 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 dating the horrible person, the person having the baby, and Lizaveta. It is nature and I cannot intervene. Either they are eaten by crocodiles or they 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 tried, 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 down 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, while 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 gunshots, 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 junkyards 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 like 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