The first time I heard a P-3 Orion I was in a fiberglass tube with two men who did not speak English and a sonar display that told me only that water is water. The sound was a lawnmower in the sky — distant, rhythmic, getting closer. My pulse left the number I trust and went somewhere I do not measure. The two men looked at me. I looked at the display. The plane passed overhead. It did not come down. We were under the surface, moving, and the ocean was doing what the ocean does: being very, very big.
I had designed the tube to be a problem of displacement. In the dark it was a problem of breath. Condensation ran down the inside like a second, stupider weather. It found my collar. It found the place where the overhead met the curve and could not decide whether to drip or to stay. My knees knew the hull was sitting wrong before my mind found a sentence for it. One of the men put his palm on the overhead as if he could quiet a sky by touching plastic. The other unscrewed the thermos and did not pour. The thermos was dented on one side, the kind of dent a person makes when he sets a thing down too hard on a bench and then pretends he meant to. The cap hung by its little leash. He held the open mouth of it as if coffee were a decision he was not ready to make.
The humidity in that throat was not the humidity of a clearing and not the humidity of a rented room. It was a closed weather. It had nowhere to go except our clothes and the curve. I could smell diesel and wet wool and the particular sweetness of breath that has been used too many times. My shirt stuck to the place between my shoulders. The man with the palm had a dark half-moon of damp at each armpit. The man with the thermos had a cough he was trying to keep private, as if privacy were possible in a tube. Every few minutes the cough won a little and he swallowed it, and the swallow was louder than the sonar, which is a sentence I did not expect to live long enough to write.
The sonar ticked through a grammar I had trusted in yards that had inspectors. Here the grammar was a comfort animal. It showed us a circle of nothing and asked us to love it. I loved it anyway. I am that kind of coward: I will believe a screen if the alternative is believing my own ears.