MOST OF TIMOTHY’S Bloomington childhood had been uneventful. Playing video games with Harry and Keanna had distracted him from his crayon impulses. He was able to suppress his compulsion to draw naked alien women torturing his pubescent flesh. He did his homework, got good grades, graduated high school, went to college, did everything a normal midwestern kid should do after getting kicked out of elementary school for drawing obscene pictures in his spiral notebook.

There were always temptations. Halloween was particularly challenging, the young boys and girls of Bloomington escaping into the personas of werewolves, ninjas, zombie princesses, or cardboard box robots and trick-or-treating the rich neighborhoods. On his first Bloomington Halloween, Timothy stayed in the basement playing Who Framed Roger Rabbit. His parents wouldn’t even allow him to answer the door and drop bite-sized candy bars into the plastic bags of his costumed classmates.

When Timothy was a freshman in high school, his parents relented. He’d proven he had his condition under control and could be trusted around other kids. So they let him attend the high school’s costume ball with Harry and Keanna.

The trio decided to dress as their favorite Cape Canaveral characters. Harry went as Security Chief Colt Dagger from Cape Canaveral V: Escape from Cyber-City; he even donned Dagger’s eye patch. Timothy went as Colonel Gregory Jackson from Cape Canaveral IV: Return to Mission Control. He knew it was clichéd to go as the most popular Black character on the show, but Colonel Jackson was Timothy’s hero. Timothy identified with him in a way he didn’t with other Black TV characters. In the 1960s, Colonel Gregory Jackson was a groundbreaking television character. He was a genius, had three PhDs, and was a combat pilot and the commander of the Air Force Station, making him Cape Canaveral’s military commander. He had steamy romances with attractive extraterrestrial women. He was the show’s only character who could hinder Colonel Norris from doing something reckless. (In Season 1, Episode 20, “The Nomadic Way,” Colonel Jackson talked Colonel Norris out of dueling with the leader of a tribe of Fomalhautian space nomads with quantum pistols.) How could Timothy not want to be him?

Timothy’s mother dropped him off at the high school. He waved goodbye, the medals on the breast of his blue shirt flapping, many of which Colonel Jackson had received from alien species for heroic acts. At the entrance, a line of students waited to pay two dollars to dance to the sounds of Night Vibrations, the Bloomington-based DJ company. From the front of the line, Harry waved to Timothy. Timothy ran up, prepared to compliment Harry on his costume, but when he saw what Keanna was wearing, he stopped.

Keanna had dressed as Tyrina’Xy, princess of Ophiuchus IV. A green, see-through polyester dress flowed around her; underneath the dress, a pleather, one-piece dark green jumpsuit clung to her; and on her head was a wig of curly red hair. Timothy stood in awe of the near perfect reproduction. Keanna might have been missing the signature forehead crease, the antlers, and the headband made of Ophiuchus ox bone, but her costume was close enough to stir something in him.

“Nice costume,” Keanna said. “I like how you replicated the Lyranian Battle Cross.”

“Thanks,” Timothy said, her authentic costume making him sweat through his dress blues. “Nice eye patch, Harry.”

Inside the gym, orange-and-black streamers dangled from the ceiling, and fog hovered as students dressed as serial killer milkmen, a vampire baseball team, and disco mummies milled around the dance floor.

The intro to the popular song “I Touch Myself” blared from giant speakers. The DJ, a thirty-year-old former student, bobbed his head and pumped his fist to the anthem for female masturbation.

“I love this song,” Keanna said, grabbing their arms and dragging them onto the dance floor.

The overhead lights penetrated Keanna’s see-through dress, making her vinyl jumpsuit glisten. As she waved her arms over her head and swayed her hips, Timothy’s temperature rose. He stood motionless, sweat saturating his faux Air Force uniform.

Keanna pointed at Timothy as she sang along to the chorus. But Timothy didn’t see Keanna. Instead, under the crepe paper, balloons, and dizzying lights, he saw Tyrina’Xy, the Ophiuchusian princess, performing a mating dance. And Timothy felt something he hadn’t in four years.

“Ha! Look at this piece of shit.” It was the loud voice of Kevin McCallister, cheap beer on his breath. “He’s got a boner!”

Timothy spun around, mortified. The disorienting lights and discordant music whirled together. Kevin pointed and laughed, grabbing anyone who was standing nearby, adding them to the chorus of laughter. Timothy spun and spun, trapped in a circle of pointing fingers. It felt as though he were under a spotlight, his concealed inclinations on display.

Four years. He had been incident-free for four years, and one dance had made him feel like he was ten again, caught doodling in his notebook. His secret had been discovered. He’d have to move again, change schools; his parents would have to find new jobs. Once again, he’d ruined his family. As the song changed to “I Wanna Sex You Up,” Timothy shoved his way through the gyrating teenagers and sprinted from the gym, the sounds of Kevin McCallister’s laughter burying the song’s bassline.

Trees and cigarette butts lined the back of the parking lot. Timothy collapsed between two pines and lay on the grass. The medals on his chest heaved up and down as he panted, trying to catch his breath. Then finally, he cried.

“Timothy, are you okay?” Harry asked as he sat down next to him.

Timothy wiped his eyes. “What did Keanna say?”

“Who do you think sent me out here?”

“Who gets a boner—I mean, aroused at a high school dance? She’s going to think I’m a freak.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Keanna asked. “Everyone’s a little weird in their own way. Who cares?” Timothy tilted his head. The streetlamp backlit Keanna. It shined through the mesh of her synthetic dress, silhouetting her body-hugging, pleather jumpsuit. His face flushed. He collapsed back onto the dying grass.

“We’re just worried about you,” she said.

A weave of branches obscured the clear sky, the stars twinkling on that Friday evening.

Maybe they’d understand. They had followed him to the edge of the lot because they were concerned. His two friends—the only friends he had in the world. Maybe they’d understand.

Timothy sat up, took off his glasses. He didn’t want to see their reaction to what he was about to tell them. “When I was a kid”—he took a deep breath before continuing—“I used to draw these pictures.”

He told them about the notebook, about the grade-school photographs, about getting caught and expelled. He told them about how his therapist wanted to exploit him and the threats from the other parents. He told them about how his parents quit their jobs and moved to another state, and how they’d worried every day since then about him having a relapse and having to relocate, and how he fully expected, after hearing his story, that Harry and Keanna were going to leave him in the parking lot, go back inside, and never speak to him again. And as he told them his story, he cried.

“So I shouldn’t have worn the wig?” Keanna smiled as she tossed her curly wig into the woods.

“It’s not your fault,” Timothy said. “I’m sick. I have a problem.”

“Don’t say that! There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“You’re just different,” Harry said. “This is the nineties. Different is good. It’s called being a nonconformist. Nonconforming is cool.”

Timothy wiped his eyes. “That must mean I’m the coolest guy in school.”

“Maybe if you started playing guitar,” Keanna said. She stood, extended her hands, and helped Timothy to his feet. “Dances are lame. Let’s go get some donuts.”

Keanna was the only one of them old enough to drive, and they hopped into her 1988 Toyota Corolla, its bumper sticker reading My Other Car is an Eridanian War Cruiser.

“I want to hear about these aliens you drew,” she said. “Were they from the show, or did you make them up?”

As they drove to the donut shop, Timothy continued recounting the events that brought him to Bloomington and the secret his parents had prayed would never be spoken in public. With each truth revealed, Timothy felt as though he were an astronaut, buoyant among beautiful friends.

After graduation, Timothy attended Indiana University Bloomington, the obvious choice since his father taught there and he could receive discounted tuition. He roomed with Harry his first year. (Timothy’s mother had wanted him to room with a random undergraduate, saying it would be good for him to meet new people, but Timothy wanted a painless college experience. The thought of meeting new people terrified him. What if they judged him or bullied him?) Neither Harry nor Timothy liked dorm life—the loud music, kids throwing up in the bathroom Friday and Saturday nights. For their second year, they moved into an off-campus apartment. (Keanna had escaped from Bloomington two years earlier when she was accepted to Columbia University’s creative writing program. Six years later, Harry and Timothy were first in line to buy her debut novel—the story of a girl on an alien world who led a successful rebellion to topple a corrupt king, then establish a matriarchal-based democracy, only to be murdered by one of her power-hungry generals.)

During their sophomore year, they played GoldenEye 007 every morning before going to class. Timothy was happy during these two years, living on his own, gaming with his best friend. When Harry started dating Amanda, Timothy predicted a tumultuous lifestyle adjustment; he just expected it to happen after graduation, not after Harry and Amanda’s first date.

Timothy was parked on their soft drink-spotted sofa, clicking buttons on his video game controller, when Harry thundered into their apartment. Their off-campus home was a typical college condominium: a galley kitchen by the front door with a breakfast bar; white tile and beige particleboard cabinets; a small living room, its white carpet spotted with stains; a couch scooped up off the street; two bedrooms; and a bathroom with a bathtub in need of a scrub. Harry tossed his backpack onto his bed, then paced the living room. He ran his hands through his hair. Timothy had witnessed this behavior before when Harry was worried about a midterm or another academic benchmark. In the past, he would stop what he was doing and listen to Harry’s troubles, but after two years of watching his roommate freak out over grades, Timothy decided to ignore him.

“Fuck,” Harry said.

Timothy was engrossed in Resident Evil 2, fighting the level-three boss, and didn’t want to pause the game just because Harry needed attention. As he fired his submachine gun at the zombified monster, he was disturbed by how annoyed he was with Harry and marveled at how living with your best friend could eventually make them intolerable.

“I’m so fucked.” Harry gripped his hair. “How did I let this happen?”

“Okay.” Timothy pressed pause and set his controller on the coffee table. “What class are you freaking out about this time?”

“I’m not ready for this.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ve been studying for weeks—”

“I’m going to fuck this up.”

“And wind up acing it.”

“I’ve ruined three lives.”

“It’s just a test,” Timothy said, the movie poster for Cape Canaveral III: JFK Meets the Hydranian Swamp Monster hanging behind him. “How hard can it be?”

“It’s not…” Harry paused. “Amanda’s pregnant.”

“And?” Timothy wasn’t fond of Amanda. She was demanding and impatient, and she wasn’t interested in Cape Canaveral or video games.

“And it’s mine,” Harry said.

“Have you had any DNA tests performed?”

“When we started dating, she told me she wasn’t seeing anyone else.”

“We’re talking about the same Amanda, right?” Timothy crossed his arms.

“Are you serious right now?” Harry asked. “I came here because I thought you’d support me on this.”

In middle school, Timothy had been terrified of being blunt. His mother had cautioned against speaking before thinking, and he had been fearful his new friends would abandon him if he accidentally offended them. After a decade of friendship, comfort and trust existed between Timothy and Harry, freeing Timothy to be tactless.

“Support you on what? You just told me your skeezer girlfriend is pregnant.”

“Don’t call her that! She’s not a skeezer.”

“Harry, just think about this logically for a second. There’s a reason she has a reputation. That baby could belong to anyone on campus, student or faculty.”

“She’s only slept with two people, including me.”

Timothy closed his eyes, not wanting to see his friend fall for this scam. He’d been in English with her freshman year and had watched as she flirted with the frat pledges who bogged the back rows with overpriced musk and pink polo shirts—or more like he stomached their inane banter, a repellent blend of teasing, insults, innuendo, and giggles.

“She told me why she flirts with all those guys,” Harry said. “It gives her power over them. She likes knowing she can make them want her and not give them anything in return.”

“And that’s why she goes to all those parties, to gain power over drunk frat boys?” Timothy said, skeptical.

“She doesn’t even drink that much. Anymore.”

“I’d hope not. The science on fetal alcohol syndrome is settled.”

Dreams hovered in Harry’s eyes.

Timothy sank back into the couch, almost drowning in the yellow cushion, knowing what Harry had decided, knowing he couldn’t talk him out of it. “You’re keeping it, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to ask her to marry me,” Harry said. “I love her.”

“I guess this means I’m going to be an uncle.”

Timothy and Harry spent the rest of the day deciding the important things, like who’d introduce the child to Cape Canaveral and where Harry would store all his toys and memorabilia, because they both knew Amanda wouldn’t allow long boxes or collectible action figures in her home.

Timothy saw considerably less of Harry after the wedding. Harry and Amanda had bought a 600-square-foot starter home away from campus (the house Harry would later watch burn). Timothy spent the next several years studying for exams and playing video games. He graduated from college and first-person shooters to a PhD program and online role-playing games. With his newly earned PhD in chemistry, Timothy, like his father, accepted a teaching position at Indiana, not because it was something he wanted to do or because he loved chemistry, but because he was at a point in his life where he didn’t believe he had any options.

(When Timothy enrolled as a freshman, he had wanted to design video games for a living. He aspired to create a game combining the interstellar adventures of Super Metroid and the loose morals of Leisure Suit Larry. But his father wouldn’t let him major in computer science, believing it would limit him to IT work and helping office workers—the people who did real work—restart their computers or change toner cartridges in copy machines. At the time, the internet was a burgeoning tool, a crawling, dial-up infant that had yet to become a ubiquitous, economic powerhouse. His father saw this career choice as another example of his son wanting to play games instead of being serious. Relenting to unsympathetic tension, Timothy followed his family into academia, becoming a professor of the chemical arts.)

While Timothy didn’t find lecturing disinterested freshmen emotionally fulfilling, he found it did award him some extraordinary opportunities. In early 2003, he was selected to represent his department at the University Chemistry Professors Convention in Minneapolis. He was supposed to spend the weekend networking with other professors, discussing the current trends in collegiate education, but upon seeing the other convention attendees—burned-out faculty from underfunded state schools who only desired to find the bar—Timothy had decided to skip the conference and explore the Twin Cities. Minneapolis boasted the largest science fiction bookstore in the Midwest, and the opportunity to browse the aisles for some vintage paperbacks was too alluring.

Timothy pulled up to Bob’s Science Fiction Emporium. The bookstore was in a strip mall. It occupied a large space that had been a department store. For Timothy, the letters of its retro sign summoned memories of his childhood—a grid background with shiny, metallic block letters fading blue to pink.

Inside, creased paper spines filled bookshelves. Titles in genre-specific fonts and their authors’ names, usually containing at least two initials, adorned the spines. Timothy’s fingers caressed them, gently reminiscing. He recalled the days when he, Harry, and Keanna would exchange books: their private three-person book club. In addition to finding several of the books Keanna had authored, Timothy found paperbacks they’d read in middle school and high school, books that had helped him forget he didn’t have a date to the homecoming dance; books that had showed him virtue, morality, and heroism committed by outsiders who used their intellect to solve a planet’s problems; books that had exposed him to thoughts and ideas he wasn’t being taught in Mr. Walker’s sixth period social studies class. He drifted through the aisles dizzy with visions of all the worlds he had once occupied for 300 to 900 pages at a time.

As he wandered toward the back of the store, Timothy stopped pulling books from the shelves and instead let his hand slide along their spines, a sense of sadness descending. Ambling down the corridors of science fiction had started as a cheerful excursion into his childhood, but now the paperbacks screamed at him, not in the socially awkward voices of their authors, but in the authoritarian voice of his father. His father’s voice criticized genre fiction, saying it was for small-minded individuals who were only interested in violence and robots, adding that real fiction was about the internal struggles of human beings. Timothy had hated his father in those moments. He wished he had been strong enough to stand up to him. He had been petrified of the consequences of teenaged dissent, of not being able to hang out with Harry and Keanna, not being able to play video games, of being forced to move to another town and having to start over again, of being alone. Timothy knew he should have been stronger. He knew he would have become a happier adult had he stood up for the things he cared about when he was younger. As Timothy passed the titles, the loss of everything he could have been had he been confident enough to be himself pulverized him.

Muddled by sorrowful nostalgia, Timothy found himself in the back of the store, standing in front of a brown curtain sealing another row of lonely books. A cardboard sign marked with permanent marker had been taped to the top of the partition. It read Sci-Fi Erotica.

The sign awakened an ancient curiosity inside him. It was an urge he had muzzled as a child. An overwhelming urge. Timothy glanced around, making sure no one was watching him, then parted the curtains and ducked into the forbidden aisle.

The rows of books were indistinguishable from those in the rest of the store, making Timothy wonder why they were curtained off. He glanced at some titles. They seemed like romance novels he’d seen in the grocery store, books with titles about princes, pirates, and storms, alluding to uncontrollable lust but with a science fiction twist. He pulled a few off the shelf. Their covers also resembled those of romance novels. Shirtless, well-built men stood on strange planets while scantily clad women sat at their feet, one of their multiple arms draped around the men’s muscular calves. A crashed spaceship sat crumpled in the background, and somewhere on the cover was a robot. They all had robots.

Flipping through the pages, Timothy read flowery passages. He kept flipping, searching for specific yet unknown excerpts. Then he found it: the sex scene. Reading about the strapping young cabin boy and the two-headed space pirate transported Timothy back to his bedroom in Atlanta, where he’d drawn a picture of himself in an alien sex dungeon. The old impulse returned, the one his parents spent years suppressing, the impulse telling him the only woman who’d ever satisfy him was from another planet.

And in that moment, he felt the familiar conditioned response: guilt.

He was jeopardizing his career just by looking at these books. If anyone at the university ever found out about this, he would be out of a job. He’d have to start over at another college or, God forbid, teach high school. Everything his parents had warned him about. Timothy quickly put the book back, then wiped his hands on his pants. He slipped his fingers between the curtains, pushed the brown fabric aside, then stopped. What was he doing? He was a grown man. He had nothing to be ashamed of. So what if extraterrestrial women turned him on? There were far worse fetishes on the internet. (Recently, a professor in the math department was caught looking at images of a grown man dressed as a unicorn dipping his tail in paint, then attempting to recreate Van Gogh’s Sunflowers by wagging his rear at a canvas. And he wasn’t fired. He was just removed from teaching duties. To Timothy, that sounded like a promotion.) With sure and quick movements, Timothy grabbed a few books from the shelf. Then, with his chin held high, he walked to the counter, determined not to care if the cashier thought he was a pervert.

Timothy set the books on the counter, almost daring the cashier to say something to him.

“You know, this guy’s all right,” the cashier said, looking at the cover. “But if you want something really hot, you should check out the Cape Canaveral books.”

“There are…Cape Canaveral books?” Somewhere in the back of the store, a bell rang.

“Yeah, it’s a popular sub-genre. There are even sub-sub-genres within it. Alien on human, Cygnusian on Cygnusian, Colonel Nathan Norris on Captain Glenn Wilder. There’s a whole Security Chief Colt Dagger sub-sub-genre that has a massive fan base.”

Hearing the words “massive” and “fan base,” a dead star at the center of Timothy’s universe suddenly re-ignited.

“People actually read this stuff?” Timothy asked, almost breathless. His heart raced as though he’d been hit with an Ophiuchusian Coronary Disruptor Ray.

“Sure. There are whole conventions dedicated to it.” The clerk reached under the desk and handed Timothy a brochure. “This is for a FanFic fest next month. They have it every year at the convention center. We have a booth there. You should come by and check it out.”

The brochure glowed in Timothy’s trembling hand. It advertised a Cape Canaveral festival in Minneapolis dedicated to books written by fans. He had been handed a key to a sub-culture populated with people like him, people who shared his fascination. He felt as though he’d landed on an alien planet only to discover it was where he’d originated. He felt normal.

“There’s a website if you have any questions.” The clerk pointed to the bottom of the brochure.

“About those Cape Canaveral books,” Timothy said. “Can you make any recommendations?”

The clerk grinned like only a smut merchant could and took Timothy back to the erotica shelf. He handed Timothy five titles. Two of the books were by the same author, Dick Handstrong: The Concubines of Cygnus II, the cover of which featured Russian scientist Dr. Dmitri Petrov sneaking into the Sultan of Cygnus’s harem, and The Dick-Fingered Molemen of Tucana Minor. On the cover, Lieutenant Megan Strata stood in a dark tunnel aiming a laser rifle at several molemen as they flapped their dick-fingers.

Timothy bought all five books, then read and reread them until the covers deteriorated. He looked online, finding more books to order. Then the self-publishing craze exploded, enabling a new slew of Cape Canaveral FanFic authors to sell their sexually explicit stories. The books weren’t the best quality, laden with typos and plot holes. Timothy had to turn off his inner editor, ignore the poor grammar, and focus on the sex scenes—the reason he read these stories. He was particularly fond of one writer, Dr. Richard Buzzcock. (For some reason, all the male authors shared the first name Richard.) Dr. Buzzcock’s stories were usually between twenty and thirty pages. He ignored things like plot and characterization and focused on crafting the crudest, dirtiest sex scenes imaginable, all for $2.99. Because of this, Dr. Buzzcock was very prolific, with 237 novellas available online. And Timothy had read all of them.

Timothy also read blogs and watched videos online, all dedicated to his unique fetish—extraterrestrial sex fetish, ETSF, or extraterrestrialphilia. It made him feel as though he wasn’t alone and instead part of a community. When he walked down the street, he’d wonder if any of the people he passed were members of their secret club.

And then a game was released that combined everything he loved.