We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

  I am also very dependable and incredibly loyal, which some might read as a lack of motivation to better myself or make anything other than a lateral move. But I was twenty-two when I started this job. And you know what? Sometimes it really is okay to just have a fucking job. Not a passion, not a career, but a steadfast source of biweekly income deposited directly into a checking account from which food and medicine and apps one totally forgot about having downloaded will be paid for. A job you are good at, that makes you feel like you’re doing something good in the world. I’ve had a life: I have been a dropout, a deadbeat, and a student; I have lived on Damen, on Central, on Hoyne, on Lunt, on Albion, then back to Lunt again; I’ve purchased ten pairs of glasses, added at least a dozen trash tattoos, read hundreds of books, watched countless hours of television, lost old friends, made new ones, and had my heart broken approximately 289 times. I’m moving away and it terrifies me to leave the one constant I’ve had in my entire life, but it’s time to start a new chapter. So I need a new job, and I’m available to start immediately.

  Feelings Are a Mistake

  I am trying to adjust to living in a house where there is such a thing as a limit on “screen time.” This is a new concept for me. My original plan for once I’d made the move east on I-94 had been to get an office space or—in line with my misguided, unrealistic fantasy of myself as an artist—a studio space. The kind of place in which I would hang tapestries and burn sage sticks and surround myself with real artwork and plants. This is not the kind of person I have been so far in my life, one who “clears energy”; I just push the towers of books and trash on my desk aside to make room for my battered, gravy-splattered laptop and mine the cloud of negative energy above my head for material. My new fictional office involved an artful desk, the kind you’d find in a hip design magazine, and one of those computer monitors that’s as big as a garage door and wholly unnecessary for someone who writes about scowling at nature on the Internet. But in my pretend world I also dabble in, oh, I don’t know, Web design? Espionage?! Something that requires a big, fancy monitor.

  In reality, I’ve scrolled through the listings for tiny office spaces in abandoned-looking buildings with the sole intention of escaping there to watch R-rated movies uninterrupted, ones with fucking and curse words. Then I wouldn’t have to sit with my finger hovering over the pause button as I listen for tweenage footfalls banging down the hall to ruin the fun I’ve earned for staying alive this long. I want to eat room-temperature soup while watching entire seasons of The Real Housewives of New York, free of questions like “Who is that?” or “Why is this show interesting to you?”

  I mean, I’m 137 years old—I can have screen time whenever I want! I bought twelve handheld computer devices, and, yes, I absolutely must have them on my person at all times; I pay the Internet providers so I can connect to all of the GIFs and memes I need; I stood by awkwardly as the gentleman from DirecTV connected these 2,469 channels. And sure, I’ll probably be so busy watching a video on the laptop and listening to the new James Blake record on my phone that I’ll forget about that CSI: Miami marathon I wanted to watch on the True Crime channel, but it’s worth a hundred dollars a month just to know that if I wanted to watch it, I could.

  Maybe I could put my headphones on and enjoy last week’s episode of Black-ish on the iPad despite the screen detox imposed on this house’s smaller people, but can I really enjoy it when a floppy-haired ball of angst with preteen emotions is glaring at me over the top of the book his mother is forcing him to read?! No, I cannot. This must be what it’s like to grow up with siblings your own age; you did all your spelling homework and got moist, delicious cake after dinner, but your brother didn’t, so his was followed by a side of jealousy and rage that he projects onto you and your delicious cake. And it stops tasting good, because homeboy has leeched the sweetness from it with his beady, resentful eyes. This is my life on “Turn Off Those Cartoons and Read a Book” Tuesday or “You Didn’t Clean Your Room, So the iPod is Going on Top of the Refrigerator” Sunday.

  Last Tuesday there were friends over. I didn’t even stop to ask who the little blond heads belonged to as they whizzed past me (into our house, out of our house, pounding up the staircase to the second floor, thundering down another into the basement). There are too many of them, and everyone under the age of twenty-seven looks alike to me, so why embarrass myself or them by confusing an Adeline with a Madeline when they don’t give a shit about talking to me anyway? Whenever I hear the screen door slam shut, I cock my head for the indistinguishable cacophony of high-pitched squealing, then barricade myself and the cat in the nearest room full of boring adult shit (bank statements, topical analgesics) until they all run away to terrorize some unsuspecting neighbor’s tranquil home.

  Beelzebub and I were sitting on the bed, debating whether to apply for a reverse mortgage, when I heard the unmistakable feedback of the karaoke machine followed by a Taylor Swift song crackling through its tinny speakers. Moments later, three high-pitched voices warbled through the air-conditioning vent. I nudged Helen awake. “Should we waste a bunch of energy dragging all our shit downstairs or do you wanna just murder-suicide right here?” She considered it for a few seconds, glancing warily around the room, her eyes coming to rest on a pair of recently laundered compression stockings hung out to dry on the back of a chair.

  She sighed. “Is our enemy list up-to-date?”

  I pulled a faded sheet of crumpled graph paper from where I’d hidden it deep within a dresser drawer and quickly added 543 names to it. “Now it is. Help me find something sharp.”

  Helen nodded toward the at-home blood pressure cuff propped up on the desk. “Is that thing sharp?” She smirked.

  “Get out!” I screamed, and she heaved herself off the bed and slowly lumbered down the stairs in search of the sharp knives we kept out of reach of tiny pink hands.

  —

  Helen made her (half-)white-flight pilgrimage first. I was out of town for a few days and returned to find my dining room covered in shattered drywall after a radiator pipe had burst and partially collapsed the ceiling. I knew something was off as soon as I opened the door and was greeted by a surge of moist heat. My first thought was that I’d left a Lean Cuisine smoldering in the oven and that no one had noticed because I never replaced the battery in the carbon monoxide detector after it died six years ago. But then I rounded the corner to find Helen, coated in a fine layer of asbestos dust and glaring at me from next to the empty bag of food I had left for her to eat while I was away. I immediately threw her in a box and surveyed the ruined landscape. Eighty percent of my considerable trash library was a warped, pulpy mess; there was condensation beaded on practically every surface; the clothes hanging in my walk-in closet were damp to the touch; and my lipsticks oozed wetly from their shiny cases. It was too overwhelming to even think about, so I didn’t. After cutting some air holes in Helen’s box, I hauled her down three flights of stairs, then stood on the curb googling “how many months can I skip paying rent over some straight-up bullshit” while we waited for an Uber.

  After depositing the Antichrist in a dog-size kennel at work, I went back to sort through the wreckage of my life. I’m pretty much a scorch-the-earth kind of dude, so I spent the night dragging bags of waterlogged pillows and damp clothes down to the dumpster. As I was attempting to dry my mattress with a neighbor’s borrowed hair dryer, my landlord let himself in to tell me he’d *shrug emoji* “have some guys take a look” in the coming week. Like there wasn’t a giant hole in my fucking wall. Like the goddamned ceiling beams weren’t goddamn exposed. Honestly, I’m not smart enough and this thing about my dead cat probably isn’t the place to get into it, but what is life when you work a hundred hours a week in order to live in a dump with a toilet that leaks shitwater every time you flush, and the guy who cashes your uncomfortably large checks (which still don’t feel quite right, considering the neighborhood you live in) looks at the child-size hole in your wall and is like, “WOW, THIS SUCKS”
?

  Helen lived at the hospital for a few weeks while our decaying apartment was torn apart and put back together again. She loved it, man. The techs would just leave the cage door open and let her walk around like a queen, one who occasionally let her subjects pet her lustrous fur. Helen didn’t give a fuck about dogs and would just sit there, daring them, as they were brought back for shots or treatment. She got really good at laying on stuff and rolling her eyes every time I walked past her perch to grab a box of Heartgard or drop a urine sample in the lab. She was having as much of a blast as I imagine the King of Babylon can when forced to mingle with the mentally inferior inhabitants of earth, while I was spending every night alone in my empty apartment sitting in front of a television that had shorted out because it wasn’t equipped to deal with junglelike conditions and still feeling kind of guilty about my miserable cat all alone in a cold, sterile cage. So I asked if Mavis wanted her in Michigan.

  “What is ‘Michigan’ again?” Helen asked, eyeing the atlas I’d handed her warily.

  “It’s beautiful! They have trees there! And squirrels for you to watch!” I grasped for some enthusiasm.

  She turned her nose up at the idea that she could be bothered to pay attention to anything, let alone a “squirrel.”

  I tried again. “Um…apples? Deer?!”

  Helen sighed grudgingly, then wrapped some catnip and a handful of salmon treats in a hobo bindle before demanding I carry her out to the car. She cheered up as soon as we hit Lake Shore Drive, emerging from her travel box to sniff cautiously at the lake breeze wafting in through the car windows. She sat on the armrest between us for the entire trip, alternately napping and shaking herself awake solely to express her displeasure at the outfit I’d chosen for the drive. We pulled up to the house in the early evening, the sidewalk dotted with children playing as they waited for dinner.

  “I hate it here,” Helen announced, peeking out the window at a girl jumping rope next door. “Take me back to the place where I know I can get good ribs.”

  But she adjusted. The morning after we got there, she’d already peed on the welcome mat by the door, eaten 90 percent of the other cat’s food, and was basking in the sunroom, chattering angrily at the birds who dared graze at the feeder hung outside the window. I sat on the couch, watching her perched on the chair she had sneezed on to mark as her own.

  I was thinking that Mavis and I could maybe pioneer a new type of marriage situation, one that some relationship expert would eventually dissect in The New Yorker. Mavis could continue to hang laundry on a line and churn her own butter in rural Michigan, and I would spend the days counting down to my early death in my dark, refrigerated Chicago apartment, scowling out my peephole at neighbors who made too much noise getting their groceries off the elevator. Mavis could keep picking her own blueberries to make jam under the blazing sun and knitting socks to sell at the Christmas bazaar in the church basement, while I could bankrupt myself ordering $17 cocktails at rooftop bars and waiting four hours for a brunch table downtown. We’d meet up occasionally to talk about married stuff (uh, property taxes? which big-box retailer has the best deal on economy-size containers of soup?!) and pretend we were still interested in having sex. Sounds like a dream, right? But oh no, fam—apparently marriage involves a little thing called compromise, a concept of which I’d been previously unaware. For Mavis, this means having to wake up to a framed photo of Ice Cube on her bedroom wall, but for me, it apparently means GIVING UP EVERYTHING I EVER LOVED.

  Everything here is dangerous and/or irritating: mosquitos the size of a fist bite through my winter-weight hoodie (I will never change) and leave itchy, egg-size welts in their wake; loud-ass frogs in our backyard pond croak all goddamned night; bats flap their leathery wings hysterically while trapped in the woodstove; squirrels in the branches over the deck hurl walnuts at our heads maniacally as we grill farm-stand corn for lunch. Sick raccoons fall out of trees, fat groundhogs chew through the fence to snack on the okra and tomatoes I refuse to help harvest, and young cats disembowel field mice and leave them in the middle of the dining room at dawn. Gas is thirty-seven cents a gallon. You can buy shoes at the grocery store. The farmers’ market is full of actual farmers instead of bearded hipsters in distressed flannel pontificating about peak asparagus season. This week on Americana Horror Story.

  But the Serpent of Old was learning to love her new life, or at least pretend to love it just to spite me whenever Mavis hovered nearby to get a picture of her to post on Instagram. By the time I packed my good cassoulet pan and a bag of assorted sensible cotton briefs and joined them in the Wolverine State, it seemed that Helen had adjusted quite nicely, mastering the art of intimidating the other cats with a punishing look and learning to use stairs for the first time in eight years relatively quickly. After a couple of weeks of giving me the cold shoulder, she busted open the door to my bedroom and sat at my feet demanding to be picked up and placed on my pillow. “Are you happy that I’m here?” I asked tentatively after she placed her moist butthole right on the spot where my eye had recently been.

  “LOL NO.”

  “Of course you’re not.” I shoved her off the bed and started counting the twenty-nine assorted vitamins and medicines I have to take every morning. “Why did you even bother coming in here?”

  “I enjoy watching you suffer. Hey, did you know that these people eat three different vegetables with every meal? Also they don’t consider milkshakes a food group. You could learn a lot by following their example.” And she sashayed out of the room with her tail swishing lazily behind her and an unidentified human finger between her teeth.

  I have followed their example, okay? Under Helen’s mockingly watchful eye, I started doing healthy things like “eating roasted cauliflower” and “deciding to read a book even though there is a television in the room.” Which brings us back to my newest adversary: days with a limit on screen time. Helen doesn’t care. I mean, she’s a goddamn cat, so why should it matter if I’m two weeks behind on Queen Sugar? I’ve learned that every child in the neighborhood can feel a television’s electromagnetic waves from three blocks away and will wander into the room on some “Hey, whatcha watching?” shit just as it reaches a crucial point in the episode.

  But then she bit a kid. I didn’t even see it coming until it was too late. One minute we were settled on the pointless couch in the room with no TV, watching as tan legs in postage-stamp-size shorts whizzed past us to grab precut vegetables and other snacks at the bottom of the food pyramid from the kitchen, and the next, Helen was pressed into the couch’s corner with her ears flattened against her head. I tossed the book I was pretending was an episode of Survivor on the floor, hooked my hands under two scentless armpits, and lifted Addison? Madison? out of harm’s way, only to be caught off guard when Helen latched on to my arm instead. After I wrestled my arm away, we sat looking at each other for a second, her eyes angry and mine surprised, my blood smeared across the tiny patch of white on her chin. “What has gotten into you?” I asked as what sounded like an entire third grade trampled up the stairs to get away from her. Helen responded by bear-hugging the smooth, slender ankle of a mom who’d just arrived to collect her Caitlin and plunging her teeth into the softest part.

  —

  Later that night, at midnight, Helen and I were sitting alone in an exam room at the emergency vet. The harsh yellow lights overhead made the cat hair stand out in sharp relief against my faded black hoodie and pajama pants. Helen, in her carrier on the table across from me, was seething. It had taken snow boots, two pairs of fireplace gloves, three old towels, and a folding chair to trap her in the hard plastic case. The doctor entered shaking an X-ray, disconcertingly cheerful considering the time of night and the severity of my situation. Maybe he was nervous. He told me that Helen’s chest cavity was small (I know) and her lungs were constricted (mm-hmm) and her heart was abnormally small (FOR SURE), and while none of that explained why she’d lost her shit, fainted, then rose up to launch herself in my ge
neral direction again, it definitely was the reason for her labored breathing and a possible cause of her “emotional breakdown.” Helen snorted at that.

  The doctor droned on about her poor quality of life, how she had suffered from a URI and a compromised immune system since she was born, how I might have to chase her down and put her in a headlock every day to force Prozac into her, how he couldn’t guarantee that her behavior would ever go back to normal. I started adding up all my credit card balances in my head, trying to calculate how much I was willing to pay for this cat. “Well, why don’t we start with—?”

  “I’m ready to die,” Helen interrupted, tapping the bars of the cage. “Get the paperwork ready, I want the shot.” The doctor excused himself and left us alone.

  “Well, that was abrupt.”

  She rolled her perpetually leaky eyes. “It’s embarrassing seeing you wash kale and floss your teeth every day. I don’t want to go back to that. If I don’t die now, I definitely will after another week of your natural deodorant and wholesome family entertainment.”

  “I was watching porn this morning on my phone!” I scoffed.

  She started making slashing motions across her throat.

  “Fine. Do you want a hug or something before I go?”

  Almost imperceptibly, Helen moved her head to the left. Not a nod, but not not a nod. I unlocked the carrier. She stepped dubiously onto the table, then climbed down into my lap. I hadn’t held her since she was a little baby. Every time I’ve moved to lay a hand on her in anything even resembling an affectionate way, I have been met with everything from mild resistance to misdemeanor assault. I felt her relax in my arms, her body warm and liquid, and I patted her head with the tip of my index finger. She closed her eyes and rested her head gently against my mangled and oozing arm. I tried to remember whether I had brought with me to Michigan the old bottle of amoxicillin from when I’d gotten my tooth pulled. I stroked Helen’s back and heard the faint rumble of a purr coming from her throat.