“Oh my God, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Martina says, “they’re falling off and swimming till they drown from exhaustion or they’re fighting each other to the death for the last patch of ice.” She has that strained, distraught look that makes him back up six inches.

“Whoa, what are we talking about here? The play-offs?” Justin says, plopping his bike pannier against the wall and peeling off his rain jacket as he looks at her computer screen. He’s in the mood to watch blood sports to take his mind off the latest rumor of downsizing at work. His stuffed-shirt boss told his department that morning they were generating more costs than revenues. “I’ll watch and learn some dirty tricks so I can fight the intern for the last paycheck.”

“No, the polar bears,” she says in exasperation. “Why must you trivialize everything I say? They’re dying.”

“Could you please hang the skull-and-crossbones flag out front next time so I know what I’m walking into when I come home?” He grabs a tea towel, rubs his wet hair and tosses it in the general direction of the laundry hamper.

“Look! Look at this!” Spittle from her mouth dots the screen as she taps the video showing a close-up of a wet, panting bear.

He leans near for a quick peck on her cheek, but she brushes him away. His lips don’t quite touch her skin, although his nose is close enough to register the strong scent of cannabis that clings to her hair and neck. He gets it; she uses it to manage her anxiety. But when she smokes it so close to dinnertime, it’s like she’s becoming anxious about him. He watches the short video that’s got her upset. In his peripheral vision he notes her scruffy hair, her half-open, stained bathrobe with the stained PJ’s underneath.

She clatters impatiently on the keyboard of her laptop. “This, this is what I’m talking about!” Her screen fills with another video showing bedraggled polar bears crammed onto a bobbing piece of ice. They are thin bears, pitiful. They remind Justin of Rufus before he ran away, after they switched to the new vegan dog kibble that looked more like Styrofoam. Justin automatically glances at the door. Rufus’s door.

She watches the video open-mouthed as if seeing it for the first time.

“Meanwhile, the polar bear devastation is being filmed by a production crew,” he says, “that is floating beside them on a luxury yacht kitted out with the latest technology. The crew of seven have jet-setted in from all corners of the globe.”

“Don’t you just wanna weep? Look at those poor beasts,” she says in the fragile tone he’s come to know is a warning—before she flies into a rage.

He unpacks his work things, rummaging for used lunch containers in the bike pannier, and piles them on the overflowing counter. The dishwasher stinks like it has not been run in days. She kept insisting, “I’ll do it… when it’s a full load. Let me handle this.” He cocks an eye at the stove clock. She is fighting off exhaustion and he estimates she won’t last the hour.

Justin recalls the bear they encountered in real life years ago. They were hiking in the Rockies and came upon a huge, scary fur presence. Maybe it wasn’t so huge; it was a blur because they were so afraid and felt rooted to the spot. They dropped the tin bucket of berries and the clanking scared it away while Justin and Martina hightailed it back to their canoe. The next day they crept back, armed with pepper spray, and found the bucket with the berries mashed and half uneaten and a large mound of bear dung nearby.

“We’re forcing these majestic animals into tiny places where they can’t find enough food,” Martina says, scratching her armpit. He can smell the sharp odor of her anxiety-sweat. Damn, she’s not off her meds again, is she? He goes to the pen drawer, where she hides the pills, assuming he’ll never find them. A dozen now. He does not say a word; he only scoops ten of them into his pocket.

“So hey, why don’t we draft the polar bears for the Ice Bucket challenge,” he says. “Lazy bums. We’ll put ‘em to work earning money for a good cause.”

“The hell you will!”

“Well, that’s what your videos are doing—making money for the polar bears.” He crosses his arms.

“I’m the one caring about climate change and you keep tearing me down,” she says, bottom lip quivering. “Why, I’d like to go and be den mother to those poor bears.”

He tries to imagine her among the dozen wet bears, this woman who complained endlessly about the smell of one friendly wet dog. “I’m sure you could develop a system, Martina. You could set out twelve feeding stations, sort of like the Last Supper, so the bears could all eat at the same time without fighting each other. Or how about this? How about the Teddy Bears’ Picnic system—a treat for every well-behaved bear?”

She stands, gaping. “Ridicule! That’s all I get!”

From this new angle, he can see the tangles in her hair sticking out in clumps like bearded gargoyles on her skull. Because why spend time on personal hygiene when the world is ending?

He marches to the front room to pull the drapes closed. Evening has fallen and the rain is subsiding. The drapes will conserve the warmth and hide the garbage-y look of their front room from the neighbors’ view—and will hide the empty doghouse outside from Justin’s view. A small pain pinches his heart. They loused up with Rufus. The care and feeding of Rufus was supposed to be the test of readiness for parenthood, wasn’t it? Martina either doted on Rufus or ignored him, depending on her mood. Justin tried to compensate, but that only made things worse.

It is time, he tells himself, to stop compensating. And to stop going with the flow. Or the floe, as the case may be.

In the hall, he straightens a leaning pile of books and flyers and unopened mail. Yes, he should look through the pile—but no, not now. Not when his stomach is rumbling like a train in a tunnel. But the pile starts to lean precipitously, almost falling over, and he’s forced to investigate. A plate of her crackers, half eaten, is stacked among the items, giving it a precarious tilt. He lifts the top layer of mail from the plate and examines the leftovers forensically. Three days old, he guesses. Half-eaten Triscuits spread with hummus, now dried and cracked. No wonder the bugs scuttle around the house. He makes a face, but she is oblivious, and he wonders just how stoned she is. He removes the plate and dumps the food in the compost, interrupting the fruit flies dancing around its lid.

He warms two mugs of oat milk in the microwave to make cocoa for them. He mixes kaopectate, a nausea suppressant, into her cocoa and adds extra sugar to hide the chalky taste.

“Awww, and now they’re fighting.” Martina watches one bear cuffing another, the strength so great the smaller one is pushed off the ice floe.

“Maybe they’re ‘hangry’,” he says pointedly. “I can relate.” He slides a warm mug toward her, careful to position it away from her mousepad because the last time something spilled on her laptop, she slapped him so hard his nose bled. Blamed it on her reflexes.

“Here, have a sip while I rustle up some Beef Wellington,” he says.

“That’s disgusting,” she hisses.

“It’s a joke.”

“Don’t even mention Beef Wellington.” She greedily slurps the mug of cocoa. “You sadist.”

He wonders if the kaopectate is noticeably bitter. Apparently not. Who knows, tonight might be his lucky night.

He wonders idly if beef would be tasty anymore. It’s terrible, he knows; every steer has a carbon footprint as big as a brontosaurus’s. It’s been years since he has eaten beef. He wonders if he could stomach it, or if he’d be puking in the McDonald’s bathroom.

In the fridge, he finds the leftover rice and beans from two nights ago. There’s also a can of dogfood, real dogfood, growing mold. Because Rufus ran away about a week ago and Justin hasn’t had the heart to throw it out.

He knows he should get rid of it, but this is like admitting defeat. Doesn’t she notice how empty their lives are without Rufus? Is he living in a new house with new, consistently attentive adults, and a couple of kids whose noses he loves to lick? And getting decent food from the owners?

Eliot warms up two bowls of rice and beans. Placing the bowls on the table he says, “R&B Tonight… Greatest hits,” and thumps the jar of salsa between them. “Dig in.” He used to say this to Rufus. A fresh wave of loneliness hits him.

“How can you eat?” she says, “at a time like this? When polar bears are wasting away?”

“I agree. We should all go on a hunger strike and send our food to the North Pole. I’ll send this bowl of R&B to Santa, and he’ll make sure it gets to the starving bears.”

“Very funny.” She nudges away the food.

It strikes him that “very funny” is the absolute dead-last funny phrase in English. And yet “very sad” is indeed a sad phrase. Why is this? Every once in a while, these small thought-nuggets appear, the kind of musings they used to share with each other. Words, words: they swam in them day and night.

But now, he has no one to share them with.

She pokes at the warmed-up food in a fastidious manner, lifting a corner of her lip as if to say, “You expect me to eat this slop?” and he is already mustering a defense of the plain diet, the “whole earth diet.”

But no, she surprises him.

“I’ve decided to rewrite my novel,” she says. “Polar bears are facing an existential crisis. I can’t ignore them any longer.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be hard to squeeze in,” he says, playing along. She was offered a handsome sum to write an adaptation of her novel, The Barcelona Connection. He knows if he points out that polar bears don’t belong in a thriller set in urban Spain, she will dig in her heels.

“They just want an adaptation of your wonderful novel,” he says, trying not to sound sardonic. “Not a whole new book. You can’t change horses mid-stream.” They used her advance to partially pay down the mortgage, but then discovered electrical problems and a leaky roof. It’s already spent. Moreover, they are counting on her income from royalties after Barcelona Connection becomes a hit.

“But that’s the problem,” Martina says. “Criminals in Spain, drug kingpins… a dime a dozen. But nobody’s talking about the polar bears.”

He motions to her untouched bowl. “Don’t you like rice and beans?”

“Sweet—sweet—I’m craving sweet,” she says. “And stop trying to change the subject.”

Justin begins opening and closing cupboards, looking for ready-to-eat. Cookies, granola bars, frosted Pop-Tarts? Nada. When did she last buy groceries? In tight, clipped tones he continues. “The real subject is not polar bear survival; it is our survival. We’ve already spent the advance. You’ve got to pony up a script—or pay back the advance.”

“The polar bears are literally not surviving.”

He gets a saucepan, measures dry oatmeal, sugar, and water. He sets it on the gas stove. The striker does not work to ignite the flame. “What the hell’s going on here?” he says.

“I haven’t used that burner in a very long time,” she says. “Try the kettle burner.”

“Didn’t we have a repair guy come last year?” he says. It’s a rhetorical question because he knows she wouldn’t or couldn’t remember such mundane facts. He moves the saucepan to the kettle burner and simmers her oatmeal.

Martina is back to scrolling through the polar bear crisis pages. “Only 30,000 polar bears are left. In the world, Justin. That’s a town about the size of Flint.”

Her nose and eyes are reddened, moist, quivering. She wipes the mucus on her pajama sleeve. When they were backpacking through Spain, they would find a boutique hostel and hang the Do Not Disturb sign for the entire day. He prided himself on getting her to the reddened, moist, quivering state. Nothing had made him feel like more of a man than their intense, rambunctious lovemaking. And then they’d get up, shower and wolf down fresh pan con tomate and a few cups of café con leche as they sat, scribbling together, passing their work back and forth. They loved to swap notebooks. He would pick up the thread of her early thriller tales mid-sentence and invent plausible new obstacles for the character. She would continue his travelogue essays—he was writing deadpan nonfiction to sell to airlines—and insert promos for suggested side trips or hype the colorful history of little-known places.

The co-writing was a deeper form of connection with someone than he had ever felt before. Alone, his writing was too workman-like, too pedestrian. And hers? She wrote explosive, brilliant prose, but often had trouble staying on task. The plot would veer wildly out of control, and only with nerve could she bring it back, usually in a knock-’em-dead plot twist like the one in Barcelona Connection. Even then he knew she had ADD and crazy mood swings but assumed it was love-induced. Or hormonal.

He gives the oatmeal another stir, and spoons in more sugar. At the computer she whispers, “5191.” It’s her way to concentrate. Those are the first few numbers of their credit card. He sees the donations page is open.

“No, Martina, we are already two months behind on the payments,” he says. He would cancel that card, but autopay connects it to all the household bills; what a drag to have to reset. “We are not sending money to the polar bears until you send Saul the script that he needs.”

“Who said anything about a donation”? Her eyes widen. The pupils are unnaturally big and dark, a stoned look he used to associate with post-coital bliss, or at least some entertaining high times with the raffish crowd they used to hang out with.

“Any sign of Rufus yet?” he asks. “Have the shelters posted the ‘dogs found today’ pictures?” It’s a tactic of distraction, guaranteed to befuddle her and thus interrupt the donation process.

He gets out the mortar and pestle. Very discreetly, he grinds the pills that she refuses to take. To the noise of the grinding is added another noise. Justin’s hand trembles. He drops the pestle he’s been grinding the pills with. It’s a scratching noise. “Guilty conscience,” he thinks to himself, “begone with you!”

To her bowl of oatmeal, he stirs in the powdered pills. And lots of brown sugar and cinnamon. He sets the bowl in front of her. And waits.

He plans to “discover” the manuscript of the adaptation of Barcelona Connection. He has worked with Martina before; he knows the novel well and could have written the adaptation twice over in the time Martina’s been dragging her feet. He will send it to Saul, explaining Martina was slaving away on it right up until the last minute when she had that little drug mix-up.

While Martina is recovering, Saul will forward the script to Netflix, who had requested the adaptation for a nine-part series. That will take care of the economic pressures—and it will serve as a wake-up call to her and her doctor, who has not been monitoring her very seriously.

He hears the noise again.

The door. The scratching is at the door.

He opens the door.

Rufus looks up at him. Although bedraggled, the dog is wagging his tail furiously and heads inside, where Martina is slumped at the counter.

“Look, look,” Justin says, deciding to make the best of an incriminating situation. “Rufus is back.”

She slides to the floor.

Rufus starts licking her face. His paws are all over her.

Justin gets on the phone. Dials 911. “I’d like to report an accidental overdose…”

The End