The Visitors

When the animals came knocking at my door.

It was sunny and cold, one of those liar afternoons in March where through the window it looks like winter is over, but it isn’t. I had plans for my day. What plans? I don’t remember now, so they couldn’t have mattered much. What matters is that the visitors came.

There was a scuffling sound at my door. I recognized it as animal—imprecise and arrhythmic. What made it unnervingly human was the act of visitation itself. Why, a reasonable person might ask, would there be animals knocking at my door in my apartment building in Brooklyn?

I peeped through the eyehole. Sure enough: two dogs, lovable idiots just past puppy phase with tongues hanging out of juvenile smiles, and a cat, a perfect orange cat, a cat one might draw if commanded, “draw a cat.” They stared up like Jehovah’s witnesses, expecting and hopeful.

The human overpowered the animal, and I opened the door. I felt it’d be rude not to. I stepped outside, careful to keep the dogs from getting in. The second human thing I did was take out my phone.

I’d seen the viral videos that littered Facebook—whales breaching much too close to a kayak, a moose of alarming size striding down a highway—and always wondered how people thought quickly enough to record them.

But now I know there’s a palpable ripple just before the algorithm of life produces something aberrant. Routine is a sturdy, constant thing, until it very suddenly isn’t. It wasn’t strange at all, it was second nature, really, to take my phone out in the hopes of capturing it in a jar.

I was working for a nonprofit at the time along with running my advice column. I had a decent platform on social media, and I was used to sharing things without thinking too much about it: pictures, my writing, my shower thoughts. This didn’t feel too terribly different from that.

In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t pulled out my phone. But I did, mostly because it didn’t occur to me not to, and the subsequent act of sharing the footage on Twitter felt altogether intuitive, one fluid motion.

“There’s a... cat and two dogs knocking on my apartment door?” I wrote. “Like inside the building.”

I uploaded the video, where I saw that the orange cat, unbeknownst to me, had slipped right past me into my home. I added this to the thread, and it didn’t take but a few minutes for it to gain traction and for me to understand I had a viral moment on my hands.

But I also had a situation to deal with. The cat was in my room, the dogs were wandering the corridor, and I didn’t know where their owners were. I only vaguely knew the owners, a young couple that looked like they hiked. We’d never formally met, another odd fact of living in a city where neighbors need not be more than accommodating strangers.

I continued to document my sideways experience while piecing things together: the door to the apartment above mine was open. The animals must have come to me because in their little minds my unit rhymed with theirs. Their apartment was sparsely decorated, every door unlocked except for one bedroom. The dogs had only recently grown to a decent size, so I figured they’d been pawing at the door and turned the lock.

I checked my phone to find I had more visitors of a different sort: thousands and thousands of strangers replying, quote-tweeting, and engaging. THIS IS THE ONLY THREAD THAT MATTERS. DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND LOOK AT THIS. LET THEM IN, COWARD. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF A PROBLEM. My Twitter app was nigh unusable. It was, I admit, exhilarating. If social media is a game, then isn’t attention the reward?

Most people, even if only subconsciously, think there’s something uniquely interesting about the mere fact of themselves: the private peaks and valleys that arrange themselves into a life. The desire to share these contours on some meaningful level is deeply human, I think, and motivates all manner of phenomena. The advertising of astrological charts, the taking of personality quizzes, the insistence that “INFJ” means something, anything at all.

These items aren’t meant to exist in isolation. They’re meant to, as a matter of synecdoche, imply that they are in concert with other and yet undiscovered features. They are meant to communicate something profound: my soul has a unique geography. I am a hidden world of admirable things, and I’d like it if you glimpsed them.

Here are some admirable things strangers directly and indirectly affirmed about me in the midst of my thread going viral: I am kind. Animals like me and want to be around me. I’d be a great pet owner. I take things in stride and have a healthy sense of humor. I’m witty and can handle being put on the spot.

The affirmation poured in, and the animals were perfect collaborators to the point of thespianism—I’d get the dogs back in the unit, and they’d open the door again. I’d get one inside, and he’d lock it from within. The cat was climbing on my shelves, cleverly ducking back into my room whenever I herded him out of it, a little burglar. I recorded all of this.

If the owners had returned right then in the middle of it, then maybe I would have a different opinion of the experience in the present. But they didn’t, and so I don’t, because it was at that time that more visitors arrived on the scene: the critics.

Has it occurred to you the owners might be dead or incapacitated in the locked bedroom and the animals might be looking for help? Why haven’t you called the police to do a wellness check? Why don’t you just let the animals in your apartment until their people come back? Why is your room so dirty? Why does your voice sound like that?

Having to start somewhere, I honed in on the most urgent point: Indeed, why hadn’t it occurred to me that the owners might be dead?

Anxiety, in my experience, is the not altogether unrealistic practice of entertaining hypothetical dreaded realities. Wasn’t it possible that the owners were dead behind the locked door of the bedroom, a sheet pulled over their faces like a funeral shroud?

Wasn’t it possible that one had murdered the other and fled the scene, possible that the animals had left their unit as an act of desperation, because their entirely dead owners had been neglecting them due to being dead? Yes, of course, it was technically possible.

That was to say nothing of the other critiques—my messy room, my voice that some people didn’t like. I wanted to rebut these: I’m depressed and gay, okay? But it seemed a bad idea; seemed like giving them fodder.

Fodder? Was I fighting anyone? Well, yes. I felt I was being unfairly judged, being summed up based on fragments that didn’t represent me as a whole, which, of course, I had been more than okay with when it had been skewing in a more positive direction.

Where before I had been thrilled at the idea of being seen, I now felt naked, as one might be in a bad dream where they realize they’ve been naked all along but conducting their public business as if they weren’t. I didn’t like the idea of these thousands of strangers analyzing the corners of my room. I didn’t like the idea of their presence, which I had invited and allowed inside.

Is it the worst thing in the world for anonymous people on the internet to judge you? No. But I don’t think it’s about that. It’s about the other side of wanting to be seen: when we lend others the power to affirm our suspicions that we are special, we risk the possibility that they will instead confirm our worst fears. They might say, “No, you are bad.”

What I’ve come to realize about the internet is that we are not merely trying to convince others of who we are. We are also earnestly asking: Who am I? We are imperfect witnesses to the daily phenomenon of our being. We draw crude maps. We explore the terrain and scour the depths, but in the end can only reach partial conclusions. We need others, and need makes one vulnerable.

The trauma is not in strangers saying mean things. The trauma is in being reduced: a life reduced to a site of errors, a complicated being reduced to a disposable object. It is an existential horror. It is, as Tim Kreider and many shitposting Tumblr teens have put it, “the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

Afternoon turned to early evening, and I was certain, utterly certain, that the owners were dead, and that this morbid fact would soon be discovered.

This wholesome narrative of a frazzled Good Samaritan being pestered by adorable pets would soon turn dark, and the internet would turn with it against me. Even their fawning approval had a reckless energy to it, an unspoken threat that I better deliver the story they wanted.

When the police or whoever kicked the bedroom door down and the headlines came out the next day, I would deserve every repercussion. I had whipped my phone out and hit record while two people were dead. Such negligence. 

From there, the possibilities forked like lightning: I could call the authorities on the off chance that indeed someone was deceased in that bedroom. I didn’t like the idea of calling the police in Brooklyn in the first place. It was not inherently the “right” choice.

I could do nothing and hope the owners would come back, as I suspected they would, but it was a risk nonetheless. I already had reporters asking me for comment. If the story ended on anything other than a positive note, there was the possibility of me being destroyed. I knew from personal experience that the story, deliciously subverted in this way, would be too good to pass up.

I knew how the internet worked. I knew better than to expect mercy if it turned out I had done the wrong thing, any wrong thing. But what was the right thing? Terror snaked through me as I checked the endless flood of notifications. Not knowing what else to do, I set my account on private, which, of course, was the wrong thing to do.

Friends immediately texted me. “Is everything okay?” They thought, not unreasonably, that all the extra attention had led to someone finding old tweets of mine that had landed me in trouble. I assured them that, no, that wasn’t the case.

But then, wait, couldn’t that also happen? And if my friends saw me locking my account as incriminating behavior, then wouldn’t the legions of strangers also think so? I checked in. During that brief period of going private, hundreds of people had asked to follow me.

I unlocked the account, having reached something like acceptance: if the owners never came back, or if they were dead, or if this flood of attention ended up with my reputation in tatters, I would have to be okay with that. Or if not okay with it, then I would at the very least have to maintain a dignified flexibility about it: we’ll deal with it when it comes.

Sure, I could “log out.” Logging out earlier, say, years ago, certainly would have helped. But it wouldn’t fix the headlines, or my name being associated with them, or keep any strangers from associating me with this one, terrible fact. And besides, the people who offer advice like “log out” are rarely logged out themselves.

I entertained the idea of becoming a complete heel. Some people did that after the internet ate them up and shit them out. They found some kind of freedom in being hated, and maybe it would be a relief in some way. Maybe I wouldn’t have to worry so much about being loved.

My neighbors across the hall, not the neighbors I needed, arrived home from work and helped me corral the animals upstairs into their unit. Their lack of urgency calmed me. “Oh, how funny,” one said. “You’ve been dealing with this all day, huh? I wonder where the owners are.”

We tied the doorknob with a string so that it wouldn’t turn and the dogs couldn’t get out. I sat cross-legged on my bed, weighing the potential lives ahead of me; each vividly detailed to inflict maximum pain.

What struck me most was the shame. I was a hypocrite. I thought about having to plead the case of my humanity to the internet: that I was an imperfect person who had tried his best, who never meant any harm; that I was a sensitive person with debilitating anxiety, and I was being crushed, and could you please, please consider that I am a thinking, feeling thing. Please, have mercy.

But I’d been on the other side of that. I’d seen people try to make exactly that argument whenever they found themselves in the eye of a storm, and at best I’d said nothing while watching it happen. To expect such unprecedented empathy was mighty silly.

It would be more prudent of me to gear up, to anticipate the mocking headlines and the giddy torment. It could be worse. Someone directly above me, after all, was dead. Perhaps even two people were dead. How selfish, how self-absorbed was I? I deserved this after all.

And then, “What in the world?” The voice came from upstairs. It was the woman, one of the owners. She’d said it laughingly, like a child had played a creative prank on her. “Oh no,” a man’s voice said, the other owner. “What did they get into now?”

I bolted upstairs, barely giving my eyes time to adjust to the fact of their blessed presence. I opened my mouth and loosed: “Your dogs got out because I think they unlocked the door from the inside so I was watching them to make sure they didn’t get out into the street but they’re all in your apartment now oh thank goodness you’re back. I’m so glad you’re back I was so worried about them.”

“Oh!” the woman said. “Well, thank…”

“I’m so glad you’re back,” I repeated, a dolt who could only say one thing, and I didn’t ask for the animals names, or the humans’ names, or anything else. I felt embarrassed by the whole affair, by my anxiety that had conjured such ridiculous scenarios, by the fact that these two people had been dead in my brain mere moments ago. I thought that was rude of me, to have killed them.

I turned around and went downstairs, diminished and humbled by my own devices. The story ended on a positive note. It was compiled by websites like The Dodo, which posted a recap of the story: two dogs and a cat knocked on a Brooklyn writer’s door, and hijinks ensued. I gave my comments to the reporters. When all was said and done, I gained at least 10,000 new followers.

I heard from these followers from time to time. Most of them weren’t like my other followers, who were there for my writing. They thought of me as the dogs and cat guy. I would post something unrelated, and they would ask, “Have you visited your friends? Can you update us?”

To some people out there, I am a static being, trapped and defined in the glassy amber of one experience where I am still acquainted with the animals and we see each other from time to time. This idea makes some people happy, and so I’ve never said anything to dispel it. I like that it makes other people happy.

But the reality is that I never saw them again. I only heard them every night until I moved out, scampering around on the floor above me, keeping me awake at night.