We heard it the first time when making love. Afterward, we lay on our backs staring up at the ceiling. “What is that?” asked Nate. “It’s not . . .”

“It’s coming from below,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s human.”

“Doesn’t it sound like . . .”

“Like a mewling. No, not a mewling. Like a . . .”

“Fat Archie’s dog,” I said.

“Like medieval surgery or something,” he said.

Fat Archie was our downstairs neighbor. I don’t remember which one of us gave him the nickname, but I remember the circumstances. It was summer. We were walking home from the subway along a row of brownstones, the streetlights cutting the darkness to illuminate the sidewalk, and ahead of us we saw a man of immense weight, forty, forty-five years old, walking a petite and adorable little dog. I thought it looked like a purebred of some kind. It had a flat black face and long white hair swirled with patches of burnt sienna. They were such a contrast, the fat man and his little dog, like an elephant and its bucket.

Nate and I must have been talking loud enough to draw the dog’s attention. It stopped, turned, and looked at us, and though Nate is not a dog person—he is not one for pets at all—he later remarked on how cute it was, what a cute inquisitive little face it had.

The fat man, once he learned that the dog had stopped, swiveled around. Both Nate and I slowed down a little. We thought, as the man began to speak, that he was addressing us. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked. “What makes that any concern of yours, huh? They aren’t talking to you. You don’t know those fucking people. Come on, keep moving.” He gave the leash a little yank, and the dog turned and continued walking. “Why are you always nosing around other people’s business?” the man asked, threading the leash a few times around his wrist so that he had better control. “You don’t know those fucking people.” They continued walking, the little legs of the dog moving easily to keep up with the fat man’s waddle.

Part of Nate found it funny, this guy who talked to his dog with the rough familiarity of a stereotype: the tired, long-suffering husband whose only taste of power in life is bullying his wife and kids when he comes home from work. As Nate imagined it, this guy was so fat and so mean that he’d never found anyone to marry him and so never had any kids. His bad luck just made him nastier, while his loneliness robbed him of any way to vent his anger. So he got a dog. And because he was a bully at heart, the man didn’t go in for one of those bigger, manlier breeds with teeth and claws. No, he bought the sort of dog that fit nicely in a designer handbag, that looked appropriate with barrettes in its hair, and that little old ladies could bear on their laps.

After hearing the man chastise the dog, I immediately felt bad for it, but later that night, when Nate drew up his imagined scenario, I couldn’t help feeling something for the man too.

“Don’t feel sorry for him,” said Nate. “That guy’s a son of a bitch.”

“But according to you, nobody loves him,” I said.

“He doesn’t deserve to be loved. Didn’t you hear the way he talked to his dog? He’s a son of a bitch. Nobody should feel sorry for that guy.”

After our first encounter, we began to see them everywhere: as we were coming home from work, from dinner, late at night after a party. His outfit never varied—a big-and-tall knit shirt that curved around and then dangled off the globe of his belly, tight-fitting slacks that bulged at the groin and tapered severely as they neared his ankles, and a pair of black loafers straining to keep his toes in. On our way out one evening, the elevator stopped one floor below ours and the man and the dog got on. Nate and I eyed each other in our corner. He lives in our building? We descended listening to his labored breathing. I worried that the dog would provoke the man, and for that reason I tried not to look down. But out of the corner of my eye I saw that the dog had turned to the side to stare up at me. When we stepped off, the man stopped to let us pass, then peered down at the dog. “Why do you always need to be looking at other people, huh?” he asked. “You think those people give a shit about you?”

“What an asshole,” said Nate.

That was in October, when the weather started to turn. Nate worked at Columbia as an assistant professor of climatology, and I had a job at a legal-defense fund. Nate worked long hours. In addition to his teaching duties, he was readying, with his colleagues, an expansive report on global warming, collating worldwide data, decades-long statistics and technical developments, expert testimony, commonsense analysis, and so forth, in an effort to contribute to the expanding alarm. That meant I usually got home before he did, and so I saw Fat Archie more frequently, walking the dog around the block or heading home from the grocery store. I trailed behind him once, slowly—slower than slow, as he moved with the chafing deliberateness of the morbidly obese, this time encumbered by several plastic shopping bags. The dog walked alongside him with an elegant and contrasting stride.

Then one night I heard something familiar coming up from below, so I lay down on the living room floor and suctioned my ear to the hardwood slats. Nate came in a half hour later, dropped his fall coat on his leather bag near the door, and had a seat on the arm of the sofa. He removed his glasses and kneaded his eyes without saying a word. Then he tossed the glasses on the sofa, put his hands on his knees, and let his head drop in a gloomy, defeated manner. “We’re all going straight to hell,” he said.

It was not unusual for him to come home and make extreme announcements whose sincerity would have been easy to mock but which nevertheless he felt acutely. It was unusual, however, for me to be lying on the hardwood floor when he made them.

“Aren’t you curious about why I’m down here?” I asked.

“I suppose,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter much, does it, since we’re all going to hell.”

“Fat Archie lives directly below us,” I said. “I’m listening to him right now.”

“You should be listening to me,” he said. “Everybody should be listening to me.”

I already knew what he wanted to say. It had to do with increased greenhouse-gas concentrations, the rise in average global temperatures, the erosion of permafrost and the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, the positive feedback loops in the Antarctic that reinforced the melting, the destruction that would follow from a five-foot rise in sea level, the droughts and floods, starvation and death, and how he and his colleagues and everyone in the scientific community felt like shrieking Cassandras. He was witnessing the destruction of the world—every day he went to work and read the testifying numbers—and there was no way for him to come home and forget about it and pretend that what we had in our apartment in Brooklyn was just another night together with some dinner and a bottle of wine. Even on beautiful days, when we had planned fun things to do in advance, he brooded on remote possibilities. This was why, maybe perversely, I loved Nate as much as I did, because his passion for the world overwhelmed him in selfless and, I thought, almost gallant ways. But it also made the day-in, day-out drift of our marriage, subject as it was to his bleak assessments and consequent moods, never an especially easy one.

I kept my ear glued to the floor. Nate was not so hopeless that he didn’t know that from time to time I needed a break from his preoccupations. He went into the kitchen and returned with a couple of pint glasses. “Use this,” he said, handing one to me and squatting to the floor. We put our ears to them and listened to the fat man talk to his dog, which we had started calling Edith. “What the fuck are you standing over there for?” he hollered at her. His voice was muffled but unmistakable. The poisonous tone leaked up through the glass. “What’s wrong with the couch? Get your ass over here. Come on. Hey!” We lay facing each other, and after a while Nate touched my face to comfort me.

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