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stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. "Jesus Christ," I shouted, "he's been beaten! He's your son! Don't you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!"
    Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.
    So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.
    And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.
    John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.
    I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.
    I heard the bath water running upstairs.
    After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.
    "Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?" Leona said.
    I didn't answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs ? I started to say something, and then knew … Oh, God … no !
    I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don't know what it was, and ran for the stairs.
    Jeffty's parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.
    I fell twice rushing up the stairs.
    •
    There isn't much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a second-hand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don't use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn't work. I've sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn't look as if it's moving at all sometimes.
    But I can't find Captain Midnight or The Land of the Lost or The Shadow or Quiet, Please .
    So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can't hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn't such a terrible thing.
    It's a good world, all things considered. It's much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it?
    Isn't it?
    Tell me.
    Somebody please tell me.
     
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How's the Night Life on Cissalda?

 
Introduction
    Writers take tours in other people's lives.
    As I write this, I'm sitting on an American Airlines flight between Toronto and Los Angeles. I've just come back from delivering a lecture at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, about 265 kilometers from Toronto and I'm sitting here at 37,000 feet above Bryce Canyon annoying the other passengers with the tippy-tap of my portable Olympia.
    I tell you this because it happened again in Kingston:
    Some wiseass took a tour through my life.
    The feep in question is Gary Crawford, an otherwise nice guy who attempted to encapsulate me for a female housemate of his by quoting out of context one line from the introduction to my collection Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled.
    Her response to that line, when Gary suggested she attend my lecture, was something akin to this: "Go see that sexist pig asshole? Forget it."
    For the introduction to that book, I wrote an essay in which I attempted summarize everything I thought I knew for sure about love: everything I'd learned in the forty-one years I'd been around at that point, five years ago. It was not a