The lights were low, just a visual buzz of fluorescents above the deli counter. Mark lit candles and a sandalwood stick. The Windham Hill mob was history. The tape machine played real music. Their music.

He brought an earthenware pot and two matching mugs on a tray. He almost tipped the assembly onto the floor, slopping fragrant herbal tea on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth as he transferred the pot to the table. Kimberly sat and watched him with a smile that held no mockery.

He spilled only a little of the pale amber liquid as he poured and handed her a mug. She sipped. Her face lit. "Celestial Seasonings and old Bonnie Raitt." She smiled. "How sweet of you to remember."

"How could I forget?" he mumbled into the steam rising from his mug.

A rustle of beaded curtain, and they looked up to see Sprout standing in the gloom at the back of the store. "Daddy, I'm hungry-" she began. Then she saw Kimberly and came flying forward again.

Kimberly cradled her, telling her, "Baby, baby, it's all right, Mommy's here." Mark sat, absently stroking his daughter's long smooth hair, feeling excluded.

At last Sprout relinquished her hold on Sunflower's neck and slid down to sit cross-legged on the scuffed linoleum, pressed up against her mother's black-stockinged shins. Kimberly petted her.

"I don't want to take her away from you, Mark." Mark's vision swirled. His eyes stung. His tongue knotted. "Why-why are you doing this, then? You said I was doing well."

"That's different. That's money." She gestured around the shop. "Do you really think this is any way for a little girl to grow up? Surrounded by smut and hash pipes?"

"She's all right," he said sullenly. "She's happy. Aren't you honey?"

Wide-eyed solemn, Sprout nodded. Kimberly shook her head.

"Mark, these are the eighties. You're a dropout, a druggie. How can you expect to raise a daughter, let alone one as… special as our Sprout is?"

Mark froze with his hand reaching for the pocket of his faded denim jacket-the one that held his pouch and papers, not the one with the Grateful Dead patch. It came to him how great the gulf between them had become.

"The way I've been doing," he said. "One day at a time."

"Oh, Mark," she said, rising. "You sound like an AA meeting."

The tape had segued to Buffalo Springfield. Kimberly hugged Sprout, came around the table to him. "Families should be together," she said huskily in his ear. "Oh, Mark, I wish-"

"What? What do you wish?"

But she was gone, leaving him and her last words hanging in a breath of Chanel No. 5.

The stuffed animals sat in a rapt semicircle on the bed and in shelf tiers along the walls. The light of one dim bulb glittered in attentive plastic eyes as the girl spoke.

Mark watched from the doorway. She had not pulled the madras-print cloth to, indicating she didn't want full privacy. She spoke in a low voice, leaning forward. He could never make out what she said at times like this; it seemed to him that the length of her sentences, the pitch of her voice even, were somehow more adult than anything she managed in the world outside her tiny converted-closet bedroom, in the presence of anyone but the Pobbles and Thumpers and teddy bears. But if he tried to intrude, to come close to catch the sense of what she was saying, she clammed up. It was one area of her life Sprout excluded him from, however desperately he wanted to share it.

He turned away, padded barefoot past the dark cubicle where he had his own mattress on the floor to the lab that took up most of the apartment above the Pumpkin.

Red-eye pilot lights threw little hard shards of illumination that ricocheted fitfully among surfaces of glass and mechanism. Mark felt his way to a pad in the corner beneath a periodic table and a poster for Destiny's gig at the Fillmore in 1970's long-lost spring and sat. The smell of cannabis smoke and the layers of paint it had sunk into enfolded him like arms. His cheeks had become wet without his being aware.

He pushed a cabinet on casters away from the wall, untoggled the fiberboard rear panel. The compartment hidden inside contained racks of vials of various colored powders: blue, orange, yellow, gray, black, and silver that swirled together without mixing. He stared at them, ran a finger along them like a stick along a picket fence.

A long time ago a skinny kid with a crew cut and highwater pants, who had just dropped LSD for the first time ever, had stumbled into an alleyway in horror, fleeing a People's Park confrontation between National Guardsmen and students in the dark angry days that followed Kent State. Moments later a glowing beautiful youth emerged: an ace for the Revolution. Together with Tom Douglas, the Lizard King and doomed lead singer for Destiny, he had stood off the Guard and the Establishment ace Hardhat, and saved the day. Then he partied the night away, with help from the kids, Tom Douglas, and a beautiful young activist called Sunflower. He called himself the Radical.

In the morning the Radical disappeared. He was never seen again. And a certain nerd biochem student stumbled back out of the alley with a head full of the strangest memory fragments.

Becoming the Radical again-if he'd ever really been the Radical-had become Mark's Holy Grail. He had failed in that quest. The brightly colored powders were what he had found instead. Not what he was looking for-but a means to acceptance all the same. To having, at least for one hour, a dose, what a long-dead Egyptian scribe once prayed for as "effective personality."

He felt stirrings down around the back of his skull, like the voices of children on a distant playground. He pushed them back down, away. From below the racks he took a bong with a cracked, smoke-stained stack. Right now he needed chemical sanctuary of a more conventional kind.

He soared upward from the roof, upward from the smog and squalor into blue morning sky that darkened around him as he rose. The Village dwindled, was subsumed into the cement scab of Manhattan, became a finger poking a blue ribbon between Long Island and the Jersey shore, was lost in swirls of cloud. Clouds hid the shitbrown garbage bloom from the bay into the Atlantic: a blessing in his present mood.

He rose higher, feeling the air chill and attenuate around him until it was gone, and he floated in blackness, with nothing between him and the hot healing eye of the sun.

He stretched, feeling his body fill with the wild energy of the sun, the lifegiver He was Starshine; he needed no air, no food. Only sunlight. It hit him like a drug-though he knew the rush of cocaine and sizzle of crystal meth only at one remove and unwillingly, through the experiences of Mark Meadows.

From the Olympian height of orbit you could barely see what a splendid job man was doing of fouling his own nest. He ached to spread the word, the warning, to help the world to its senses with his poems and songs. But the moments of freedom were too few, too few…

He felt the pressure of other voices within, dragging him back to Earth, in thought if not yet in body. Meadows had a problem, and he knew that this brief liberation was Mark's way of consulting him. As he would the others.

Changes are due in your life, Mark Meadows, he thought. But what might those changes be? If he himself could do no more, he wished Meadows at least would involve himself more in the world, take a stand. He wished Mark would give up his habits of drug abusethough he couldn't escape irony there, since if Mark went completely straight, it would be in effect the end of him, of Starshine in his golden body stocking, floating up above the world so high.

He gazed off around the molten-silver limb of the world. A gigantic oil spill was fouling the coast of Alaska; for all his powers, what could he do? What could he do to halt acid rain, or the destruction of the Amazon rain forest?