TIMOTHY HENDERSON WASN’T a true Hoosier—not in the way an anthropomorphized ear of corn playing basketball was a Hoosier, or in the way every Indiana father who wished to name all his children born between 1974 and 2004 Larry Bird was a Hoosier. Timothy wasn’t even originally from Indiana. His claim to Hoosierdom came in the way it had to everyone who relocated to Indiana from someplace else and stayed in the “Crossroads of America”—by receiving mail. Once one started collecting bills and jury summonses in Indiana, they were technically Hoosiers. Timothy Henderson’s family started receiving mail in Bloomington during the summer of 1986, just before Timothy started fifth grade, just after they had relocated there from Atlanta.

Timothy was born in Egleston Children’s Hospital at Emory University at 7:43 a.m., April 4, 1976. After a six-hour delivery, he was ejected into a doctor’s gloved hands. His parents immediately began planning their son’s future, and during Timothy’s teenage years, they would worry their son wasn’t living up to his potential—or what they perceived his potential to be—and would console themselves by thinking, At least he doesn’t stay out late.

During his early years in Atlanta, on the surface, Timothy appeared to be a normal child. (When looking back, one could easily see the roots of his future tendencies. At the time, however, he was just a cute kid.) His favorite thing to do was look at pictures of planets in an astronomy book of his father’s. Most parents would have worried about grape jelly stains in their coffee table books, but Timothy’s parents encouraged his curiosity, allowing their inquisitive son to gaze at the illustrations of the celestial bodies.

Timothy’s parents, Douglas and Rita, had made a conscious decision not to own a television, feeling it would stunt Timothy’s early development. After witnessing the miracle of television in his neighbor’s basement, four-year-old Timothy would defiantly sneak next door every day at 2:00 p.m. to watch Buck Rogers reruns and dream of the twenty-fifth century. Realizing they couldn’t stop their son from watching TV, Timothy’s parents decided the best thing to do was buy a television set and control what programming would influence their son.

On a memorable Sunday in 1981, Timothy’s father brought home their first television. Timothy was playing with his action figures, pretending a pirate was on the moon of Titan, riding a plastic triceratops and slashing the moon’s tyrannical ruler, a decorative sixteen-inch Halloween skeleton. When Douglas plugged the television into the wall and fiddled with the antenna, Timothy dropped the pirate, ran into the room, and was entranced by its Technicolor glow. Timothy’s parents were prepared for their son’s infatuation with television and set strict guidelines for him: Timothy could watch only public broadcasting and only after school; evenings and weekends were family time.

When Timothy came home from school the next day, he plopped down in front of the RCA. Puppets taught him his ABCs and how to count to five in Spanish. A man in a sweater told him it was okay to have feelings and that these feelings made him unique. Then Timothy saw an explosion on an Air Force base. A wormhole opened, and the base was sucked into it. Then came a montage of clips introducing various characters. It was the opening for Cape Canaveral, and instantly, Timothy was hooked.

The cult-classic television show from the 1960s was known for many things: racial equality, an emphasis on intellect over violence to resolve problems, and the main character—Colonel Nathan Norris—having off-screen sex with extraterrestrial women. The plot of the television show was legendary, as were the off-screen antics and infighting. The open-ended premise—Kennedy Space Center being launched through time and space when an experimental defense system exploded, causing a wormhole to open underneath the NASA facility—enabled the series to broadcast campy yet socially conscious episodes from 1964 to 1967. For three seasons, the cast fought aliens, Roman gladiators, Nazis, tiger people, robots with meat grinders for hands, the living embodiment of unexplainable regret, and each other behind the scenes. Despite airing for only three years, its permanent impression on modern culture and passionate fan base made it one of the most iconic television series of all time.

While Cape Canaveral didn’t fit into the strict educational programming framework, the Hendersons still approved of the show. Rita, a professor of cultural anthropology, appreciated how the 1960s science fiction series portrayed its Black characters in positions of leadership. Timothy’s favorite character, Colonel Gregory Jackson, oversaw the Air Force Space Command’s 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base, the military wing of Kennedy Space Center. In moments of crisis, Colonel Jackson was often the show’s most composed character, thinking rationally even when an alien species was intimating their annihilation.

Timothy’s parents had already decided the neighborhood kids were a greater worry than their son watching too much television. Douglas and Rita feared the kids would hinder Timothy’s intellectual achievement and lead him toward drugs and gangs. They felt Timothy’s preference for watching educational programming instead of playing with a discarded tire in the abandoned lot on the corner showed signs of their son’s inclination to learn. This feeling was amplified after Timothy’s first-grade parent-teacher conference, when his teacher told them he seemed bored in class.

First grade was not a stimulating time for Timothy. His classwork was uninspiring; his homework was turned in incomplete with rudimentary doodles in the margins. Doodling was something Timothy did often, usually when his mind drifted from his dull schoolwork toward an obscure compartment of his imagination. At first, they were squiggles, the graphite’s random directions expressing his emotional state, his boredom or frustration.

Then one of Timothy’s classmates, Devon Thomas, showed him a book from which, if one followed the step-by-step methodology, they could draw anything: spooky cars, rocket ships, snowmen, or pumpkins. Timothy learned if he penciled an oval, this could be a character’s head. By drawing a lowercase T inside the oval, he had created the perfect placement for facial features—eyes on either side of the crossbars, the nose between them, and a mouth somewhere below the nose. He learned if he sketched mittens on a character, then etched slashes where the fingers should be, he had a shortcut for crafting hands. The instructional books were themed (the stock car book even demonstrated the step-by-step method for drawing an overweight race fan with his shirt open throwing up into a trash can). Out of the series, the book Timothy checked out most regularly taught its readers how to sketch extraterrestrials. The book’s techniques were keys to the handcuffs that bound Timothy to the banality of grade school.

He used what he’d learned from the book to recreate moments from Cape Canaveral. The scenes floated in his mind as he tried to sleep, elbowing their way into his consciousness, and Timothy would attempt to recapture these moments on the page. At first, his doodles were faithful recreations—stills of the show drawn in an uneven hand. Then, as the book’s techniques became imbedded in his fingers, the depictions evolved.

When Timothy was in the fourth grade, Tommy Jefferson brought a copy of Panty Weekly magazine to school. (After graduating high school, Tommy would be arrested for trying to coax some middle school girls into his car with the promise of NSYNC three-ringed binders.) His father worked in the local truck stop gift shop selling crystal meth and pornography to truckers. (Tommy had stolen the magazine while his father was preoccupied slipping a small baggy of meth across the counter to an undercover narcotics officer.) All the boys, including Timothy, had congregated around Tommy on the basketball court. He flipped through pages of black-and-white nudes of women with strung-out desperation on their faces. The boys ooohed and ahhhed and giggled at the grainy photos. The pictures looked like they had been snapped in a dank basement in New Jersey. Timothy stood outside the circle of boys. While he found the pictures interesting, particularly their anatomy, he wondered why he wasn’t magnetized by the images of the dead-eyed women and their untrimmed pubic hair like the other boys. It was only after several weeks of Tommy bringing pornography to school that Timothy discovered what aroused him.

One day in January, he returned from school and commenced his new television routine: an hour of cartoons, then his favorite show, Cape Canaveral. (His evening routine had changed as well. On Fridays, his parents let him watch Cop Patrol, the come-back series for David Porter, the actor who played Colonel Nathan Norris.) Timothy was surprised to see PBS airing an episode he’d only read about in the accurately titled Cape Canaveral: The Magazine.

The rare episode was Season 2, Episode 14, “The Berenician Ambassador’s Secret.” In it, the crew hosted peace talks between Coma Berenices and Lyra VII. They had been warned an assassin would attempt to infiltrate the meetings. Colonel Nathan Norris learned the assassin was one of the ambassadors but didn’t know which one. In pure 1960s fashion, he decided to seduce them both, figuring the assassin wouldn’t be interested in sex, only murder. To complicate matters, he successfully seduced both ambassadors. Timothy would never forget the scene in which Colonel Norris read the Coma Berenician ambassador, a creature made of coal, a love poem he’d written during the day’s negotiations while they lay in bed. The poetic ode ended with the line, “You may be made of stone, but you’ve softened my heart.” (This love poem had hung from the wall of the CapeCon chapel since its founding in 1982.) When Norris couldn’t figure out who the real assassin was, he devised a ploy and told them both he’d given them a space STD that only infects individuals with murder in their hearts, and the assassin had only two hours to live. In a plot twist typical of the show, the ambassador from Coma Berenices pulled out a laser pistol, intent on shooting the ambassador from Lyra VII. (The network’s special effects department dangled Christmas lights covered by blue gossamer from the scaffolding to make the Lyran ambassador look like a floating blue cloud.) Security Chief Colt Dagger wrestled the pistol from the ambassador’s coal-black hands.

The real twist came at the end of the episode, when Colonel Nathan Norris realized he had been in love with the Coma Berenician ambassador all along. Of course, the Lyran ambassador was furious—she had fallen for the colonel—and declared Kennedy Space Center an enemy of Lyra VII, even though it was later revealed in Season 3, Episode 17, “Child of Light, Child of Darkness,” both the Coma Berenician and the Lyran ambassadors were pregnant with Norris’s children. This episode was a revelation for Timothy, not because of the poorly constructed intrigue, but because during the scene in which Colonel Norris seduced the Coma Berenician ambassador, calling her “a diamond among the stars,” he became sexually aroused.

He’d seen off-screen sex before; Masterpiece Theater was famous for its innuendo, showing Elizabethan era couples twirling their moustaches and untying their corsets. But it was the first time he’d ever had a physical reaction to it.

That night, images from the show fresh in his mind, Timothy sat on his bed, pencil and notebook in hand. He sketched most nights after his TV time—an approved preoccupation that allowed his parents to have some quiet time before dinner to grade papers or work on other projects. (His mother was writing an essay about the misrepresentation of Black women in early cinema, and his father was giving Fs to students who invoked the law of conservation of energy as an excuse for napping in class.) Timothy made a few lines on the notebook paper, not thinking about what his hand was doing, letting it guide itself; this was how he began his illustration sessions when he didn’t know what to draw—by allowing his subconscious to guide his expression. He doodled buildings, then a street with sidewalks that led to high-rises. He furnished his city with circular, oblong, and star-shaped vehicles that hovered above the dashed lines on the penciled pavement. He crowded the street with people. He gave them elephant trunks and bug eyes. Some had round bellies; others had parasitic creatures growing from their spines. Despite their physical abnormalities, all the extraterrestrials Timothy had drawn had two things in common: they were all women, and they were all naked.

Energized by his sketches, Timothy almost tore the page as he flipped it, rushing to populate his notebook. His doodles became more extravagant and hyper-sexualized as he recreated images from Tommy’s stolen magazine but with a space-age twist. He drew women with anywhere from two to seventeen breasts; others had multiple butts, all large and round. He drew men on torture racks being penetrated by alien women wearing strap-ons—Timothy’s sexual education was greatly enhanced by Tommy’s shoplifted pornography—or men being beaten by women dressed as warrior queens, the women pregnant with their alien brood.

Around that time, puberty was striking a few of Timothy’s fourth-grade classmates. Cecelia Dupree had returned from Christmas break with small bumps on her chest and the training bra Santa had left in her stocking. The other boys, their observational skills enhanced by their hormones, noticed her development. Cecelia had never been popular. She wore glasses and had braces and was more interested in reading than playing princess. But suddenly, all the boys gravitated toward her as she roamed between the swing set, the merry-go-round, and the wooden shed where the groundskeeper kept the lawnmower. Timothy also followed Cecelia, partly because he felt pressured to do what the other boys were doing and partly out of curiosity. The other boys felt Cecelia was special; why didn’t he?

Timothy had just drawn three pictures—all masterpieces, he was certain—and was thinking about Cecelia Dupree when the gods of inspiration kicked him in the head.

Timothy had a desk drawer full of pictures from the girls in his class—one of the small class pictures kids would give to their classmates and then stand horrified as the recipient of their goodwill scratched scars, glasses, and stitches onto the photo. The girls had given their pictures to Timothy because he wasn’t like the other boys; he didn’t give them devil horns or deface their images in some voodoo ritual. They trusted him. Timothy pulled out a photograph of Cecelia. With a white bottle of glue, he pasted Cecelia’s headshot to the top of a blank page and penciled her body. He gave her tentacle arms, three legs, and a jet pack. He drew three breasts and covered them with a chain mail bra. But this still didn’t seem like enough. Then he remembered he had felt-tip markers in his desk. Timothy slid the purple marker from the pack and colored Cecelia’s body. He admired the contours of her body, the erotic alienness of it. He ran a finger along the curve of one of her purple tentacles. He caressed her face. An urge shook him. It was stronger than anything he’d felt before. Unable to resist this new instinct, Timothy propped his notebook on his pillow. Reclining on his bed, Cecelia transformed into an ambassador from another world. Timothy didn’t know any love sonnets, so instead he leaned over and kissed Cecelia’s picture, finally understanding why the other boys were giving her attention.

Timothy crossed his legs, his face warm. The sexual urges he’d experienced watching Colonel Norris and the Coma Berenician ambassador in bed returned. Part of him liked the feeling, its energetic urgency, and part of him felt embarrassed and guilty, as though sexual desires were dirty and should be suppressed. Despite this, Timothy was overwhelmed with the primal compulsion to draw more.

From his desk, Timothy pulled out more tiny headshots and a pair of scissors. He snipped the heads out of Melissa Smith’s and Amanda Cartwright’s photos and glued them onto a page in his notebook. His hand shook as he sketched their body; the two girls became a two-headed behemoth with lobster claws, robot legs, arms made of tires, a cheeseburger torso, and sixteen breasts. Despite the details, Timothy’s artist’s eye told him something was still missing.

Other photos loitered in his desk, photos his male classmates’ parents insisted they give to him so he wouldn’t feel left out. Timothy snipped off the head of Jimmy Hanson and glued it to the page. He pondered the negative space with the eraser of his pencil under his upper lip. Then he added a naked body strapped to a table, being tortured by two-headed Melissa and Amanda. He clipped out Tyson Dillings’s head, flipped back a few pages, and glued it onto the body of a man he’d drawn, who was being penetrated by an orange-skinned woman with a giraffe neck, her long tongue licking the man’s ear. Selecting from the pile of pocket-sized photos spread across his comforter, Timothy snipped and placed the heads of his classmates throughout his notebook, creating collages of extraterrestrial debauchery.

But something was still missing.

A white envelope in his desk drawer contained all the photos of Timothy his parents had paid eleven dollars for. Timothy slipped out the sheet of wallet-sized photos and snipped a square loose. He flipped back to the drawing of Melissa and Amanda torturing Jimmy Hanson. In a blank corner, Timothy glued his picture, then penciled his body, a canvas, and an easel. He added himself painting the scene: the artist as artist. He went through his notebook, page by page, and added his photo to every scene, watching, documenting, or participating. When his parents had given him the check for eleven dollars to take to school, they intended the pictures be used as gifts for his grandparents and aunts, not as tools for his self-expression.

Timothy slammed the notebook shut. Out of all the dirty magazines Tommy had brought to school—and there were a lot—none of them featured photos resembling what he’d drawn; none were titled Naked Alien Girls and the Torture Table. All the other boys at school found human women attractive. They’d think he was a freak if they saw his notebook. If his parents found it, they’d ground him from watching Cape Canaveral for two weeks.

Timothy was faced with a dilemma. He could either carry the notebook with him to school and protect it with his life, potentially having to fight his classmates if they tried to take it from him, or he could stash it in the basement behind their boxed-up Christmas tree. His parents wouldn’t touch the Christmas tree for another ten months, but someone might break into their house, find his notebook, and then be so disgusted by its contents that they’d leave it on the kitchen table for his parents to find. However, if he took the notebook to school, he could zip it up in his backpack and carry it with him all day. At least it would be in his control, protected.

Humming to himself, feeling good about this decision, Timothy glued more pictures of his female classmates, drew alien bodies performing fetish-level sex acts, then glued his own smiling headshot onto the men’s submissive bodies. When his mother called, Timothy shut his notebook, hid it under his bed, and went down to eat.

The next day at school, Timothy carried his backpack in front of him as he walked down the hall to the drinking fountain, the straps over the back of his shoulders, hugging it as though it held a baby or a Ming dynasty porcelain. He could feel his teacher and classmates staring at him as though they could see through his backpack.

“Is everything all right, Timothy?” his teacher asked, touching his shoulder. Her hand felt like an accusatory spark, and Timothy jerked his shoulder away.

“Yes, Mrs. Winston.” Timothy wiped water from his mouth. Some water ran down his neck, absorbed by the collar of his maroon Harvard University T-shirt. (Douglas had bought Timothy the shirt, hoping it would inspire him to go to an Ivy League college and become a constitutional law professor. When Timothy ultimately applied to only one university—not Harvard—his father locked himself in his study and wondered if maybe he should have bought a Yale shirt instead.)

“Timothy,” Mrs. Winston said, “you’re being awfully protective of your bag. What do you have in there?”

“Nothing.” Timothy hugged the bag tighter. The synthetic fibers wrinkled under his ten-year-old arms.

“Timothy, I want to respect your privacy, but the way you’re acting really has me concerned.”

“It’s just my schoolbooks.”

“Timothy. Let me see.”

“I said it’s just books!” Timothy shouted. The hall went silent as his classmates stared at him.

“You can open it for me or for Principal Daniels. Your choice.”

“But…” Timothy looked up into Mrs. Winston’s eyes. His fourth-grade teacher was unwavering, even as Timothy started to cry.

He unzipped the bag and handed it to her. Mrs. Winston pulled out the notebook, then started flipping through it. Timothy focused on the gray-tiled floor, smudged from miniature sneaker treads, and missed her reaction, but he knew she wasn’t an instant fan of his work when she said, “Principal’s office. Now.”

Timothy sat outside the office shifting over the orange seat of his hard chair. Next to him sat Adam Fordham. Adam had been caught kicking girls in the rear during recess. His father was a stockbroker; his mother, a former professional tennis player, sat next to him, her arms crossed as though she’d rather be perfecting her two-handed backhand. Behind the smoky glass door, Timothy’s father spoke with Principal Daniels, his calm voice betrayed by its concentrated intensity. The principal used words like menace, pervert, deviant, and ticking time bomb—all phrases Timothy had heard on Cop Patrol, reserved for captured serial killers or members of street gangs. He’d never expected to hear someone say those things about his drawings.

Douglas stamped out of the principal’s office, followed by Timothy’s mother, Rita.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Henderson,” Principal Daniels said, “but this is the way it has to be.”

Timothy’s father didn’t respond. He contained his indignation and, mustering all the dignity he applied when lecturing undergrads about volatility, walked out of the school’s lobby.

“Timothy.” His mother offered her hand to him.

“What’s going on?” Timothy asked, sitting on his hands.

“Timothy Xavier Henderson,” Rita said. She paused and sighed. “It’s time to go.”

“But…”

“We’ll talk about it at home.”

Timothy rose and followed his parents to their car.

“Mrs. Fordham,” Principal Daniels said to Adam’s mom. “How nice to see you. Will Mr. Fordham be joining us?”

“Yes. He’s coming straight from work.”

“Excellent! I’d like to discuss my stock portfolio with him.”

Timothy slumped on the couch while his parents lectured him about responsibility and public decency and his posture. Principal Daniels had expelled him from elementary school, citing public safety policies. (Timothy would later learn Adam Fordham had only received two hours of detention for kicking a girl at recess, and Principal Daniels’s stock portfolio gained 2 percent.) The principal was concerned Timothy might try to influence his classmates into recreating the immoral acts depicted in his obscene drawings, traumatizing the children and exposing the school to lawsuits. Timothy knew he should feel ashamed about the contents of the notebook, but he didn’t. He had spent hours in front of the television listening to a man in a cardigan tell him his feelings were natural and made him special. And now his parents were saying he needed to be cured of those feelings? Timothy felt as though he were the only person among five billion sentient beings who was aroused by the images of a cat woman with three vaginas and two tails cleaning herself, while a young, round boy—looking coincidentally like Timothy—slapped himself with a rolled-up newspaper. There wasn’t a soul in the world who understood how he felt.

Timothy’s father and Principal Daniels had arranged to keep the records of Timothy’s expulsion sealed provided he saw a therapist to address his deviancy. Being in the fourth grade, Timothy possessed a child’s understanding of time; he didn’t realize how rapidly the future would arrive. His parents, however, understood summer was not eternal. So they stressed the need for Timothy to find a cure. College, career, and his future as a functional adult depended on it. One of his mother’s colleagues had suggested a therapist who specialized in child development. His parents told him if he wanted to go to school again—another school in the district—he’d have to talk to someone.

The thought of going back to school didn’t appeal to Timothy. He’d just been caught with a notebook full of pictures of his female classmates depicted as aliens, doing disturbing things to the boys in his class. He knew the rumors would spread across the city via cousins and churches and winter basketball programs, and at whichever of Atlanta’s elementary schools he enrolled in, his reputation would be such that even that school’s Tommy—every school had a Tommy—wouldn’t talk to him.

Even so, Timothy found himself facing a strange woman in a chair. The pink sofa he sat on was soft; throw pillows with floral prints clogged the sides, leaving only a small gully in the middle for him. The middle-aged therapist, Jane Krantin, her bulky stone necklace clacking each time she moved, patiently waited for Timothy to answer her question, but there was something in her calm glare that made him hesitant to speak. His parents were waiting outside for the hour to end so they could speak with her about their son’s condition and find out if it was safe to enroll him in another school. Jane held a yellow legal pad in her lap, occasionally jotting notes when Timothy spoke, though he couldn’t imagine what she was writing since his answers were brief. Underneath her legal pad, Jane kept Timothy’s notebook. His fingers itched to hold it.

“I hear you like to draw.” Jane tucked her gray hair behind her ear, her dangling earrings swinging. To Timothy, this felt more like a question than a statement.

“I don’t know,” Timothy said, leaning against the couch cushion, its red roses like a watercolor, vague and harmless.

“I’ve seen your notebook. You’re quite the artist.”

“I guess.”

“They’re very creative. I’m just curious—what is it about alien women you find appealing?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re in some of these pictures too.”

“I guess.”

“Here you are.” Jane opened to the third page. Timothy’s head was glued to the image of a man scrubbing a toilet. In the foreground was a giant iguana with a photo of Mary Bellows’s head glued to it. The iguana had five breasts and was sodomizing a man with the photo of Timothy’s classmate Chris Taylor glued to him.

“You’re in almost every picture.” Jane flipped pages. She closed Timothy’s notebook and leaned forward, her hands folded on top of it. “Why do you repeatedly draw your classmates being sodomized?”

Timothy had never heard the term “sodomized” before. He knew the act by the playground-friendly phrase. The question made him feel uncomfortable, as though it were both dirty and scientific. He turned toward the armrest, crossed his arms over a pillow, and rested his chin on his folded arms

“I hear you have a favorite TV show. What’s it called, Cape something?”

“Cape Canaveral,” Timothy said, lifting his head.

“What’s it about?”

Timothy proceeded to tell Jane the entire cosmology of the Cape Canaveral universe. He told her the plot synopsis for the original series, then the movies. All the while, Jane scribbled notes on her pad, smiling and nodding. She asked him questions about the show, the characters, the alien species. She even asked him if he’d drawn any of the aliens from the show in his notebook. Timothy told her he hadn’t; he said with pride that all the creatures in his book were his original creations. Jane smiled when he said this, making Timothy feel as though he could trust her.

After thirty minutes of ambiguous answers, then twenty more minutes of a ten-year-old’s pontifications, Jane invited Douglas and Rita into the room. They sat on the couch, sandwiched by pillows. As Timothy was squeezed between them, his sense of security dissolved.

“Timothy is a very special child,” Jane said.

Timothy’s mother wrapped an arm around him and pulled him closer. He tried to wriggle free, but her python-like strength kept him close.

“After speaking with him,” Jane said, “and looking at his drawings, I can safely say your son has a rare sexual fetish: extraterrestrial sex fetish or ETSF, also known as extraterrestrialphilia.”

“A sexual fetish?” Timothy’s mother said. “He’s a little boy, not some trench coat-wearing pervert.”

“I take exception to the term ‘pervert.’ Referring to a person’s sexual preference with derogatory terms only stigmatizes the individual and limits our overall understanding of human sexuality. As for Timothy, while he is a child, these desires can start early. We’re still learning about—”

“At ten?”

“We never truly know when an individual’s sexual preferences develop.”

“This is ridiculous,” Douglas said. “Timothy hasn’t even gone through puberty yet, and you’re telling us he wants to sleep with alien women?”

“You’re confusing sexual desire with sexual preference,” Jane said. “While sexual desire develops during puberty as the child’s body is flooded with hormones, the roots of preference are more mysterious, more psychological. Keep in mind, we’re not talking about sexual orientation. There’s no doubt Timothy is attracted to women; these pages prove that. The only difference between Timothy and another heterosexual boy is that the women Timothy is attracted to exist in a rich fantasy world of his own creation with an elaborate mythology surrounding sex.”

“Where did this come from?” Rita asked.

“I never should have brought that television home,” Douglas said.

“For our purposes, I’m more interested in why he’s created this world. The answer to that will require many sessions. However, I can say this: the contents of this notebook are what your son thinks is sex. Most boys his age sneak peeks at their fathers’ pornographic magazines. It’s one of the many ways children, as they enter puberty, begin to explore sexuality. With Timothy’s condition, he needed something more. So he created this notebook.

“I do have some good news for you. Timothy’s condition, though unique, is not uncommon. After your call the other day, when you explained Timothy’s predilection, I did some research and found there have been similar cases of ETSF. The condition was first documented in the early sixties. Researchers noted it coincided with the advent of our space program, when we were regularly sending astronauts into space. Perhaps it has something to do with the shape of the rockets, those rockets penetrating the great unknown—there are many possible metaphors—but Timothy is not alone in his predisposition.”

“Rita and I talked about this, and the thing we’d like to know—what I’d definitely like to know—is can you cure him?”

“We don’t use the word ‘cure’ here,” Jane said. “It implies there’s something wrong with Timothy, and there’s nothing wrong with him. As I said, he’s special. With time and work, Timothy can learn to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. He can understand his condition and learn to live with it.”

“You mean there’s nothing you can do,” Timothy’s father said. “My son is stuck like this.”

“Timothy is a unique child with a very special condition. If I were to have time to study him, I could make remarkable progress.”

“My child is not here for you to study,” Rita said. “He is not here to be the subject of a book or for you to make a name for yourself professionally.”

“It’s so rare to come across someone as special as Timothy. I’d stop, of course, at taking him on Donahue.”

“That’s it,” Douglas said. “We’re out of here.” He rose and grabbed Timothy by the wrist.

“Ow,” Timothy said. “You’re hurting me.”

“You’re passing up on the chance of a lifetime,” Jane said, following them to the door. “It’s a billion-to-one odds someone else with Timothy’s condition, someone with extraterrestrialphilia, comes walking through my door.”

Timothy cried as his father, still clutching his wrist, dragged him to the car, his tiny sneakers scuffling on the parking lot pavement. Why did he have to leave? Jane said he was normal, that the sketches in his notebook were expressions of common desires, and she wanted to talk about Cape Canaveral, something his parents refused to do. (They referred to it as “that show,” as if it didn’t deserve a name.)

When they returned from the therapist, their answering machine was crammed with messages from angry parents, furious Timothy had included their daughters in his art project—or as they called it, “deviant behavior.” The parents assured Douglas and Rita they would do everything possible to ensure Timothy would never be admitted to another school in the greater Atlanta area, including testifying before the school board and writing letters to every private school in the county.

As the twelfth message played, Timothy’s father slid down in his chair at the kitchen table and slouched, the posture of the defeated.

This was in February. The Atlanta air was crisp, and ice storms froze the roads; spring was still distant but close enough to long for. While they waited for trees to bud, birds to chirp, and new life to make everyone forget the winter, Timothy’s parents looked for work at universities across the country, any place with open positions, and eventually found jobs at a school three states away, one with a tenure fast track. When the summer finally arrived, Timothy and his parents engaged in the grand tradition of running from their problems and sold their home, loaded up their car, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.