I Live Here Too

The Interview

The dog leaned. Sixty pounds of warm opinion pressed against my shins in a concrete room that smelled of bleach and other people's good intentions, and a decision I was not invited to make got made anyway.

I should explain that I had come prepared. I had come, in fact, with a list. Not a mental list — a real one, printed at the library for fifteen cents and run through the laminator at work so it would survive the weather of a serious search. I am not proud of the laminating. I am telling you about the laminating because it matters, the way the seatbelt matters in the story of the crash. I believed, that morning, that I was a man conducting a search. I had requirements. Hypoallergenic, top of the page, underlined twice. Calm. Low-maintenance — whatever I imagined that meant, as if an animal were a houseplant with a heartbeat. Quiet. I had written, and I want this read into the record exactly as it stood, ideally a cat that doesn't talk much.

A cat. Doesn't talk much.

Reader, I want to be the kind of narrator you can trust, so I will not pretend I saw it coming. I walked in believing the arrangement ran the way the brochures said it ran: I would look at the animals, and I would choose one, the way you choose a melon. Press here, sniff there, take it home. The shelter encouraged this delusion. They give you a clipboard. They give you a little laminate of your own, your name on a sticker, and they walk you down the row like you're touring a facility you might invest in. The whole performance is staged so that you, the human, feel like the buyer.

You are not the buyer. You are the product, and you are being inspected.

Here is what was actually happening while I strolled the aisle reading my own requirements off a card. Every animal in that building was running an interview, and I was the candidate, and nobody had given me the questions ahead of time. The orange cat who turned his back the instant I crouched — that was a screening, and I had failed it before I opened my mouth. The terrier mix who shrank to the corner of her kennel: a screening, failed, and fairly. The volunteer murmuring, "Oh, she's not usually friendly with strangers" — that is not small talk. That is a hiring manager telling you the previous candidates did not work out, watching to see whether you'll lower your voice or whether you'll lunge for the handshake. I lunged for the handshake every single time. I poked fingers through wire. I made the noise — you know the noise, the pspspsps that has never once summoned a cat in the history of the species and that we make anyway, helplessly, a sad little human birdcall. I was, in the language of the trade, interviewing badly across the board.

And then the dog leaned.

He was everything the laminate forbade. Loud — he'd been loud the whole time, a low conversational grumble he kept up like a man narrating a ballgame to himself in the next room. Shedding, visibly, a soft brown snow that drifted off him when he so much as sighed, and he sighed the way some people clear their throats, for emphasis. Opinionated down to the bone. Not hypoallergenic, not calm, not low-maintenance, and — this is the part that ought to have disqualified him from my life entirely — not a cat. He did not consult the laminate. He did not, I suspect, recognize its authority. He simply crossed the small distance the open kennel allowed, put the broadside of his whole body against my legs, and transferred his weight.

I want to describe the transfer of weight precisely, because everyone who has been chosen knows it and no one who hasn't will believe it. It is not a nuzzle. A nuzzle asks. This was the opposite of asking. It was a creature deciding that I was load-bearing and then resting on the decision. He leaned, and he kept leaning, and when I shifted — purely as an experiment, to see whether I still had any standing in the matter — he leaned harder, the way furniture follows you downhill. He refused to be un-leaned. There is no clause on a laminated list for refuses to be un-leaned. I checked.

"Huh," said the volunteer, in the tone of a woman watching a job offer go out. "He doesn't do that."

He doesn't do that. The four most expensive words in the English language. I have since learned that he doesn't do that is what they all say at the moment of hire, and that it is always, always true. He doesn't do that — for anyone but you, who he has just decided about, on grounds he will never disclose and you will never fully understand.

I would love to tell you I resisted. I would love to be the man who looked down at the brown snow already settling on his good trousers, consulted the underlined word hypoallergenic, and walked out with his integrity and his list intact. I did not. I stood there in a bleach-smelling room and felt the precise, unhurried weight of being someone's decision, and I want you to know that nothing in my careful research had prepared me for how much I would like it. Three hours later — and the three hours is true, the three hours of paperwork during which I told myself at intervals that I had not yet technically agreed to anything — I walked out into the parking lot with a loud, shedding, deeply opinionated dog leaning against my shins in the exact same place, as if no time had passed, as if the outcome had been settled in the first four seconds and the rest was just me catching up to my own life.

Which brings me to the contract. Because that is what it was, that parking lot. That was the signing.

I think it's only decent, this early, to read you the terms — the terms I did not read, that none of us read, that come printed in an ink that does not show up under ordinary light. Terms of Employment. Position: live-in staff, all departments. Hours: all of them, including the ones you were using for sleep. Salary: none. There is no salary. There has never been a salary; if you are waiting for the salary, sit down, this is going to be a long book. Duties: feeding, door operation, laundry-warming, and round-the-clock emotional support, escalating without notice. Benefits: full, and paid in a currency that does not appear on any statement, cannot be deposited, cannot be explained to your accountant, and is, against all sense, enough.

A word here, in the small print, where words like this belong. This is a book of jokes. It is not advice — not veterinary, not medical, not behavioral, not legal, not financial, not anything you could act on. I am a humorist, which is several rungs below a person you should listen to. Every animal I'll conjure in these pages is a hypothetical, a picture-a-household-where, an illustration drawn for warmth and never a case to copy. Anything that actually concerns your animal — what it eats, how it heals, why it's doing the alarming thing it's doing — belongs with your vet, that long-suffering, sleep-deprived saint, and not with me. I will make you laugh. I will not make you a diagnosis. We clear?

We're clear. Now lean back in, because I have a small assignment, and it's the only homework in the book.

Sometime soon, when no one's looking, write down the moment your animal picked you. Just for yourself — this isn't for sharing, it's for keeping. And I'll warn you the way I wish someone had warned me: it will be smaller and sillier than you expect. It will not be the day at the shelter or the breeder or the box on the porch; those are paperwork. It'll be a Tuesday. A paw set deliberately on the back of your hand. A spot on the couch surrendered, then reclaimed, then surrendered again. A weight transferred onto your shins by a creature who had reviewed the field, found it wanting, and chosen — improbably, permanently, without ever once asking how much you made or whether you were hypoallergenic — you.

Write it down. That ridiculous little moment is the real origin story, the true first page, the thing the laminate could never have known to ask for.

You're going to want it later. I'll explain why for the next sixteen chapters. For now it's enough to say that I came in to choose a quiet cat, and I was, instead, hired — and that I have never, not once, asked for my old life back.

A Rose by Any Other Name Would Still Ignore It

The night he came home he was attempting to climb inside the toaster, and we were at the kitchen table debating, in the hushed and serious tones of people drafting a constitution, what to call him. The person I live with had a legal pad. There was a pen that got passed back and forth. We were minting our first and only coin, and we wanted it to be good.

This is the Naming Committee, and every household convenes one. The Committee believes, briefly and beautifully, that it is in charge. It wants a Proper Name — something with gravitas, something with a little starch in the collar. A name you can say out loud in the waiting room of the vet, across a crowded room of strangers and their dignified Maxes and Lunas, without your voice doing the small apologetic thing it will later learn to do. We wrote candidates in a column. We crossed most of them out. We said each survivor aloud to test its weight, the way you'd heft a melon. And after a deliberation that outlasted two cups of tea and one minor disagreement about whether a cat could carry a surname, we arrived, gravely, at Sir Reginald.

Sir Reginald. You could announce that at a christening. You could engrave it. We wrote it on the form, on the little tag, on the inside cover of the book where you're supposed to record these things, and we felt the deep, founder's satisfaction of an institution properly established. We had named him. We were, clearly, running this.

The name lasted, in its pure original mint, somewhere under a week.

Here is the thing nobody tells you at the Committee stage: a name is a currency, and the moment you have one good strong coin, you cannot stop yourself from printing more. It starts honestly. Sir Reginald becomes Reggie, because four syllables is a lot to spend on a creature who has just fallen off the same chair twice. Reggie is sensible. Reggie is the responsible small bill you keep in your wallet. But then one evening he is asleep in a patch of sun with his paws folded under him like a little roast, and Reggie will not cover the transaction — the moment is bigger than Reggie — so out comes Mister Reginald Beans, and you have no idea, even as it leaves your mouth, where the Beans came from. You have issued new money against no reserves whatsoever. The treasury is now you, and you are not a serious institution.

After that it is hyperinflation, and you are the failing state.

Within a month I was addressing one ordinary house cat as Reg, Reggo, the Reggler, Sir, Sir Loin (only when food was involved, which was always), His Lordship, Lord of the Manor, Stinky Lord, the Beast, the Baby, the Big Baby, my good boy, my best boy, my only boy, who's a handsome man, and — for reasons that remain sealed in a vault no member of this household can open — Beans. Just Beans. The note got shorter and shorter the more of them we printed, the way it does when the money's gone soft, until we were buying nothing at all with a single muttered syllable, holding out a wheelbarrow of nonsense to purchase one flick of an ear, and not even getting the ear. None of these names meant a single thing to anyone outside our walls. All of them meant everything to us. And — this is the part the Committee never minutes — not one of them, from the dignified original down to the small daily denominations, was ever once honored by the cat.

You can stand in your own kitchen and run the whole catalog. Reginald. Reggie. Reg. Beans. You can go up the octaves into the special voice, the one you'd deny under oath, the one that turns a grown adult into a cooing fool. He will hold his position on the warm laundry — fresh from the dryer, the single most coveted parcel of real estate in the home, a property he has occupied without paying so much as a deposit — and he will regard the middle distance with the serene, total indifference of a landlord who has heard a tenant's complaint before and intends to lose the paperwork. I live here too, I have informed him, more than once, holding a fistful of his many names. He does not look up. The motion is filed. The motion is denied.

And then it got worse, because then I learned the truth, which is that he knows.

There is exactly one word in our entire shared language that this cat has consented to recognize, and it is not a word. It is the crinkle of a particular foil wrapper — a specific cheese, a specific resealing crackle, a sound I cannot reproduce on purpose and cannot make by accident without consequences. I can stand in the doorway and bellow the complete works of his nomenclature into three empty rooms and receive, for my trouble, the ambient hum of the refrigerator. But let me, two rooms away, behind a closed door, in another conversation entirely, so much as touch that wrapper — let my thumb graze the corner of it while reaching past it for something else — and he materializes. Not arrives. Materializes. He is suddenly, impossibly, against my shin, looking up with an expression of warm and total recognition, as if to say: there you are, you've been calling me, I came the instant I heard.

So it was never that he couldn't hear me. It was never that the names were wrong. He has perfect, surgical comprehension. He knows precisely who he is and which of his many titles are in play at any given hour. He simply declines to acknowledge a single one of them, because acknowledgment is a service, and he does not provide services; he receives tribute. The crinkle is real money. The names are the local currency he has quietly stopped accepting at the till. He turns at the wrapper the way a serious man takes a call he was actually waiting for, and ignores the rest the way that same man ignores a salesperson he can see perfectly well through the glass.

The dog, I'm told by the person I live with — who keeps her own list, longer than mine, and reads it to him in the bath in a voice she would die before letting a coworker hear — at least has the decency to pretend. The dog will come when called by approximately the right shape of sound, will answer to a name, a half-name, a wrong name said with conviction, will wag for the general idea of being addressed. The cat extends no such courtesy. He has audited the relationship and concluded that running the household requires fewer obligations than we were led to believe, and he is right, and the worst part is how much we respect it.

We never decided to call him Beans. That's what undoes me, looking back. We held a whole solemn committee, kept minutes, weighed melons, engraved the gravitas — and the name that stuck, the one I say a hundred times a day, the one I will be saying when I'm old, arrived without a vote, from nowhere, and means nothing. Beans. It's the realest thing I own.

So here is the only exercise this chapter will ask of you, and you should actually do it, tonight, with a pen. For one week, write down every single name you call your animal. All of them. The dignified one on the vet form and the one you would mouth at gunpoint before saying aloud. The food name, the sleeping name, the just-stepped-on-you name. The baby talk. The whole humiliating ledger. Don't curate it. Then, when the week is done, sit somewhere private and read the list out loud, top to bottom, in the voice you really use.

It will be long. It will be much longer than you expect, and far stupider, and somewhere around the eighth or ninth entry your throat will do the thing it does and you won't be able to finish the way you started.

That length is the measurement. That's the whole instrument. Not one of those names works — the animal will go on ignoring every last one and turning, instead, for a cheese wrapper and the sound of the can — and it doesn't matter even slightly, because the names were never for him. He already knows who he is. The names are the record of who he is to you, kept in the only ledger that ever balanced. We thought we were naming a cat. We were writing down, one foolish syllable at a time, exactly how far gone we are. Sir Reginald. Reggie. Reg.

Beans, come here. There you are.