Another thing that mildly disturbs me is that we will always be linked. Spending seven years with someone links you to them. If they do something great and die, you will be mentioned in their biography. Or to say it a different way, you go to college for four years and for the rest of your life you are a graduate of blank university. When you are with someone for a long time I suppose it is like that. You are an alumni to that person. It is like your family, how you have spent so much time with them, learned all their quirks, seen them cry, seen their happiest and shittiest moments, seen them vulnerable and heard them fart and smelled their shit. Everyone has public identities, the persona they give to the world. But everyone also has that in-the-house persona, that what-they-do-when-no-one-is-looking persona. And if you spend a lot of time with someone, that public persona wears away. And the when-no-one-is-looking persona appears, which is always vulnerable and often silly. People always remember who they have let in to that persona, to that piece of them they don’t show, that is a fictionalized character fabricated to deal with the insanity of the world, so they can stay strong and determined to deal with everyday life. Which is probably the origin of the phrase people love to say concerning their lovers: ‘You don’t know him or her like I do.’ Which is true, we don’t. I don’t know if it is special or unique, or whatever Hallmark shit some people throw at it. But I know that those people you get to know closely live in your mind. They don’t leave you. They are always there, and you hope in some strange way that nothing bad happens to them.
VISITING MY SISTER
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 off 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. She 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
Transformers
, my favorite cartoon, 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 eight 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 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.”