When the drink cart passed, she ordered a Bloody Mary—I, a scotch. Our pygmy bottles arrived with roasted nuts. I reached across the cello case and touched her plastic cup.

To your cello, I tried again. Does it have a name?

She nodded tepidly over the rims of her glasses.

Actually, she said, it does.

I couldn’t place her accent. Something Slavic. Romanian perhaps. She wore a lot of eye shadow. She returned to her music. I could just make out the title of the piece: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses: A Study for Twenty-three Solo Strings.

Over the Gulf of Maine, the moon glittered below us. I wanted to point out to the cellist as I would to my wife, Ana, that the moon hung actually beneath us. I wanted to tell her we were near the tropopause, the turning point between the stratosphere and the troposphere, where the air is calm and good for flying; tropo from “turning,” pauso from “stop” (I prided myself on my college Latin). And surely she’d know these musical terms. But the woman was counting bars now. Across the aisle, a man in a wine-colored sweater lay snoring, his mouth opened wide.

Somewhere over the Bay of Fundy the cabin lights began to flicker. The video monitors went dead (they’d been showing a map of the Atlantic, with our speed, altitude, and outside temperature). The cellist looked up for a moment, her lips still moving with the sheet music. Then the cabin fell entirely dark, and a strange silvery light poured into the plane through each oval portal and lathed the aisles in a luminous, oddly peaceful glow. One by one, people tried to press their dome lights on, not yet in alarm but bewildered, to be up so far in the atmosphere, bathed in that frozen blue moonlight. A flight attendant marched up the aisle and told us to keep our seat belts on. The clouds lay effulgent below, edged in gold; another attendant shouted that there was nothing to be alarmed by. The lights blinked, faltered, turned on again. A sigh rose from the seats, and the cellist glanced at me with nervous relief.

The captain came over the intercom then. He apologized and mentioned we were going to make a “short stop” in Halifax “before we get on our way.” He was trying to sound unfazed, but in his Dutch accent—we were flying Netherland Air—his comments sounded clipped and startling. He got back on the intercom and added that we might want to buckle our belts for the rest of the ride and—incidentally—not to get out of our seats.

The cellist turned to me.

What do you think it is? she asked.

I don’t know, I shrugged.