I have a crush on a dead man. Carl Sagan has long since left the Earth when I first hear the rich whale-hum of his voice, its emphatic plosives, its rounded vowels floating starward like ideas rising from his superterrestrial brain. What doesn’t he know? What can’t he explain?  Brilliant: light years at his fingertips, and the way his dark hair gleams like ringshine around his ears, his profile haloed by the neon light of planets on the viewscreen. He’s piloting the TV spaceship on whose bridge my imagination always finds him, in his red turtleneck, his tan corduroy blazer. His hands caress its crystal controls: touch me like that, and I would light up, too.  He smiles shitfaced at the stars the way I want him to smile at me. Then a hard blink, and I’m on board, just where I’ve been longing to be. He seems unsurprised to meet another life form. “I’ll take you on a tour of the galaxy,” he says. “I know you will,” I say. “You always do.” I don’t have to be an astrophysicist to know where this is going. On the viewscreen, the Milky Way wraps its sugary arms around itself, like a girl dancing alone. I shiver. He swings his jacket over my shoulders; it smells metallic, like the stars, and musky, like small forest creatures, like the seventies. He turns away to drop the needle on his Golden Record; a Peruvian wedding song plays. “I’d rather hear Vangelis,” I say. I’m flirting, and he knows it. He does not refuse. Piano notes twinkle away from each other into a vast, synthesized moan.  He draws me close. “I can tell you about the greenhouse effect on Venus,” he whispers. “I think I already know,” I say. He skims a dandelion he got from somewhere along my neck, and that’s it: we’re red-gliding, blue-gliding across the window in the middle of the floor, like a clear trapdoor. Beneath us, the stars pile like all the billions of nights that led to this one, and all around us, the universe is expanding and expanding, faster and faster--just I always wanted it to, just like I always knew it would.