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and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.
    I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty's hand. "Kiddo … listen to me … get out of here right now!" He still couldn't focus properly. " Jeffty ," I said as tightly as I could, " listen to me!" The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. "Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I'll be right behind you." The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. "Yes sir," I said, straightening up and facing them, "yes, ma'am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you'll just step back here with me…"
    There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn't tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.
    •
    Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the manager's office.
    "Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair … he was waiting for me?"
    "Oh, I think that's the little boy those kids beat up?"
    "What!?! Where is he ?"
    "They took him to the manager's office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents—"
    A young girl wearing an usher's uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.
    I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office. She looked insulted and snorted something rude, but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.
    He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren't opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let's Pretend, The Land of the Lost , God only knows which one it might have been.
    He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station … and they'd been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn't exist for anyone but Jeffty.
    They had beaten him badly … as everyone watched.
    And then they had run away.
    I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21" Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.
    "Shhh, it's okay, kiddo, it's Donny. I'm here. I'll get you home, it'll be okay."
    I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don't know why I didn't. I should have. I should have done that.
    •
    When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn't move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. "A couple of kids beat him up at the theater." I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They