I first latched on to the Sphere in mid-2021, when architectural renderings had already been circulating for a few years. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming.

My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate.

While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural.

Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend.

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