The Planetarium

Raymond had not planned to go inside. He had driven past the building a dozen times since the construction fencing came down in the summer, had seen the shape of it from the road, the white concrete shell rising from the hillside at the north end of campus like something that did not belong in Reno or in Nevada or possibly on this planet, and he had thought about it the way he thought about most new things in this town, which was to notice them and keep driving.

But it was a Saturday in November and the building had been open two weeks and his cousin’s daughter Marlene had asked if he would take her, and Raymond did not say no to Marlene because she was eleven and because she asked so few things of anyone that when she did ask you paid attention.

He parked the truck on Virginia Street near the campus edge and they walked up the hill past the older university buildings, the brick and stone of a previous generation, and then the path curved and there it was ahead of them, the planetarium, the new one, the Fleischmann Atmospherium-Planetarium according to the sign, white concrete sweeping upward in a curve that looked like it had been poured from a single mold, which Raymond supposed it had been, more or less. He was twenty-three and he worked construction and he knew what concrete could do and what it could not do, and this building was at the edge of what it could do.

“It looks like a spaceship,” Marlene said.

“It looks like a shell,” Raymond said. “Like something you’d find on a lakebed.”

They went in. The lobby was small and bright and there were families with children and students from the university and a man in a suit who might have been a professor. A woman behind the counter sold them tickets, fifty cents for Raymond, twenty-five for Marlene, and pointed them toward the theater, the dome room, the room where the stars would be.

They sat in reclining chairs that tilted back so you were looking at the ceiling, which was the dome, white and blank and curved above them like the inside of an egg. Marlene sat very still. Raymond sat beside her and waited.

The lights went down.

The stars came up.

Not all at once. First a blue twilight, deepening, the dome becoming a sky, and then the first stars appearing one by one and then in clusters and then in thousands, until the entire dome was filled with them, sharp and white and steady, more stars than Raymond had ever seen from any real sky, even the desert sky over Pyramid Lake where his grandmother had taken him as a boy and pointed up and told him the names in the old language, the names that were not the names in the books but were the true names, the names his people had given them before anyone else came to this valley.

He looked at the sky above him and he knew it. Not this mechanical version of it, this projection, this trick of light through a machine in the center of the room. But the sky itself, the real one that this dome was trying to copy. He had slept under it. He had watched it turn through winter nights on the reservation when he was fourteen and angry and had walked out of his mother’s house and lain on the cold ground behind the community building and watched the stars wheel overhead and felt the scale of the thing, the age of it, the indifference of it to whatever small trouble was burning in him.

A voice came over a speaker. A man’s voice, calm and measured, explaining what they were seeing. The constellations. The planets. The movement of the earth around the sun. The voice used the Greek names and the Latin names and the names from the star atlases, Orion and Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, and Raymond listened and thought about his grandmother saying different words for the same lights, words in Washoe that meant different stories, stories about animals and water and journeys and the dead.

The dome rotated. The seasons passed in minutes. The voice explained the atmosphere, the weather, the way moisture moved over the Sierra and dropped as snow on the western slopes and left the valley dry. Raymond knew this too. His grandmother had known it without the building or the projector or the man’s voice. She had known it because she had lived in this valley her whole life and her mother had lived here and her mother’s mother had lived here, back and back, thousands of years of living under this sky and knowing its moods without a machine to explain them.

He was not angry about it. That was the thing he noticed about himself, sitting in the dark with Marlene beside him and the stars above him. He was not angry that the university had spent three hundred thousand dollars building a room to show white people what the sky looked like, what his grandmother could have told them for free. He was not angry because the building was beautiful and because Marlene was watching with her mouth open and because the stars were the stars regardless of who projected them or what language named them. The sky belonged to everyone. It always had. His people had never claimed to own it. They had claimed only to know it, and knowing was not the same as owning, and you could share what you knew without losing it.

The show ended. The lights came up slowly, the stars fading back into the white dome, the sky becoming a ceiling again. Marlene blinked and sat up.

“Can we come back?” she said.

“Sure.”

They walked out into the afternoon. The real sky was gray and flat, November overcast, no stars visible, nothing like the dome’s impossible clarity. Raymond looked north toward the hills and thought about the valley as it had been, as his grandmother had described it, the open meadow with the river running through it and nothing else, no buildings, no roads, no university, no planetarium. And then he looked south toward downtown, where the casino signs were just coming on in the early dark, red and blue and white, competing with whatever stars might show through the clouds later.

He had a job starting Monday. A construction crew was hiring for a project north of downtown, preliminary grading for something, a road maybe or a utility corridor, the foreman had not been specific. Raymond needed the work. He was good with a shovel and better with a grader and he did not complain about weather or hours and the foremen liked him for that. Whatever the project was, he would show up Monday and dig where they told him to dig.

“The stars were so bright,” Marlene said on the way back to the truck.

“The real ones are brighter,” Raymond said. “I’ll take you to the lake sometime. You can see them from the shore.”

“When?”

“When it’s clear. Couple weeks maybe.”

She nodded, satisfied, and climbed into the truck, and Raymond drove south on Virginia Street past the campus and the casinos and the river, the town spread out around him, still growing, still building, still naming the things it was only beginning to learn.

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