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a few miles north of here. Thirty miles or so to the east, the Dallas skyline glimmered, green and gold, in the early morning light. From my vantage point, the city appeared no bigger-and much less uniform and pleasing-than the toy city ringing my dome. A second plane passed. It looked like a sparkling silver skate key. The fields smelled of creosote and sage. Green smells. Black smells. Brown.
    I remembered, then, as I stood with the keys in my hand, last night’s dream. With minor variations, it was the same dream I’d had the night before. I was standing in a field very much like the one behind the planetarium. My father, wearing overalls and a green Mobil Oil cap, was lying in the charred ruins of a granite building. He got up, dusted himself off, and walked up to me, over broken, tinted glass. He was grinning. I took his hands. They were chalky and cold.
    â€œFather—” I said.
    â€œAll I wanted was my social security check,” he said.
    â€œFather—”
    â€œYour mother and I walked in the door … it was a beautiful morning in the city, remember?”
    I whispered, “You didn’t make it, Father. I’m sorry.”
    â€œOh.” He looked at his body, then back up at me. “Are you in touch with your brother?” he asked.
    â€œYes. Sometimes.”
    â€œHow is he?”
    I shrugged.
    â€œNeither one of you … you just couldn’t seem to grow up . Why not, Adam? Why did you stop? Was it your breathing? Never had many friends. I worried like the dickens about the two of you.”
    â€œI know,” I said.
    â€œAnd you—always trying to hold firm, keep things steady. You can’t do that, you know? Hell, you do know that, son, don’t you? You must.”
    â€œYes.”
    He turned, walked back to the ruins, and lay down again among the blackened stones.
    Before the kids arrived with Ms. Pickett this morning, I sat and watched plane after plane after plane angle for the airport. I watched the sun glide behind clouds (sloppy clouds, irregular, thick; in my sky, they would never, never do).
    Stepping to my left now, behind the console, I check the dissolve control on the slide machine, then the projection orrery, which will illustrate the motion of naked-eye planets around the sun on the dome. I reposition the meteor projector, then lower the A3P so it will display tonight’s sky, at our latitude, at approximately ten o’clock. The star ball buzzes faintly, a mosquito whine, as it moves. Now we’re ready for Glenn Gould.
    I dim the cove lights. Piano runs unfold, soft as whispers over the earthy thrumming of the bass notes. Anna watches me closely. I catch her eye and point to the east, where a hot air balloon made of cardboard and newspaper clippings hangs over miniature buildings. I fashioned the contraption, and fastened it with tape and slender wires over Dallas, after reading about an eighteenth-century architect’s cenotaph design: a huge, empty ball, illumined from within to resemble, alternately, the night sky and the sun. He wanted viewers, while contemplating death, to find themselves “as if by magic floating in the air, borne in the wake of images in the immensity of space.” The idea, he said, came from watching the Montgolfier brothers’ balloons, the first hot air balloons to sail over Paris, just before and around the time of Manet. Anna smiles at the funny blue sphere.
    It’s when people are around, and I first nudge the sun with my controls, that I’m most aware of the dome’s bleak and toneless color, a cool ceiling over all of creation. Alone in here at night, I relish the lifeless vacancy of my space, its beautiful, mechanical boredom that puts me at ease. It demands nothing of me. It doesn’t need my help.
    The star ball is like the jar I used to carry as a kid, with holes punched in the lid to keep captured fireflies alive, only this jar, the A3P, contains all of the