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her warm, melodic voice, “do you have a question, sweetie?”
    â€œIt’s not fair that, just because it’s made of something different, it doesn’t get to be a planet. Is it?” In her voice, I hear the accusation: Little creep .
    â€œThis isn’t unprecedented,” I say, glancing at Ms. Pickett. Trust me, my eyes say, I didn’t want to follow this path, I wanted to keep things just as they were, but … “The asteroid Ceres was once counted as a planet until other asteroids were discovered, and its true nature could be understood.”
    â€œWe studied Pluto just this week, and the books all said I’m confused … are astronomers certain about it, or are they still deciding?” Ms. Pickett asks. “Anna raises an interesting point, I think.”
    Believe me. I’m just the man to resolve the impossible. But how? “A consensus has yet to emerge on the scientific definition of ‘planet.’”
    â€œBut now it doesn’t mean anything,” Anna says. Her face is deeply flushed, even in the dark. The death of an absolute. Hard to bear. Her freckles glow like embers in the fake green moonlight. “ My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us-what? Nothing. She served us nothing!”
    I look at Zero, thinking this might perk him up. He shivers, removes his cap, loses his grip on it.
    â€œThe Kuiper belt is a swarm of ice—” I say.
    â€œIt just isn’t fair!”
    â€œThousands of slushy masses, far from the heat—”
    â€œNo fair no fair no fair!” the kids all start to chant.
    Ms. Pickett frowns, as if I’ve knocked the heavens out of whack.
    Anna’s foot brushes Zero’s cap. She picks it up. He tugs it from her fingers. His eyes are wide. Now he rises. He covers his ears with his palms, turns to the group and announces, over the shouting, “Man presents himself as a being who causes Nothingness to arise in the world, inasmuch as he himself is affected with nonbeing.”
    Anna cringes. Ms. Pickett stands. The children get quiet.
    I’m sorry I lent him, last week, my copy of The Existential Moment . But he’d said he couldn’t sleep, and at the time it was the closest book at hand.
    â€œMan is the being through whom Nothingness comes to the world. Thank you and good night.”
    â€œYou’re drunk, sir!” Ms. Pickett says.
    He spins to face her and nearly stumbles into Anna’s lap. Anna screams.
    â€œGet away from her!” Ms. Pickett shouts.
    He falters again. Five or six kids dash from the second row.
    â€œPeople! People! Quickly! Come with me!” Ms. Pickett motions them toward the portal, as though the building were about to collapse. A scraping of notebooks, the roar of seats snapping up, milk-smell wafting through the not-alleys of Dallas. The kids’ sudden motion jostles my balloon; it careens toward Reunion Tower. Mayday! Mayday! My lungs constrict. The Murrah stone zips back and forth on its string. Zero stands still, chin on chest; it’s likely his brain chemicals have slipped off the charts. I’ve never seen him this bad. (What wastelands is he envisioning?) I’ll have to take him outside, sit with him until he calms down. At least twice a month, we perform a milder version of this little dance and I’m always surprised at how quickly he circles back to—what? Normalcy? Steadiness?
    â€œPlease,” I say, wheezing, but it’s too late. Ms. Pickett won’t look at me. “It’s not the end of the world.”
    Oh, but it is. It is. The world is ending every minute. Just ask Z. Ask my former lover. The night she left, she held me and said sadly, “You can’t save them, you know? Your comets? Your damaged friends? Adam, you can’t undo things.”
    Ask Marty. “It wasn’t true,” he told me, the last time I saw him, in OK City. He held our father’s Mobil Oil cap, recovered at the Murrah