When I awoke, I scrambled to find any evidence to contradict my dream. The letters from Janet were not where I thought I put them. How could that be? I rummaged through a pile of papers that had been accumulating for the past few months. Finally! There it was, the first one anyway. I recognized the airmail envelope. I retrieved the delicate onionskin note.

It was not exactly the letter I remembered. Janet was friendly but dismissive about my plan. That part hadn't changed. She mentioned her father, but this time said nothing about his musical interests. I wondered now if I was really losing my mind. Had I imagined the recent developments? Skimming through magazines in the same stack, I read that Hendrix's Cry Of Love tour had proceeded from city to city through July as originally scheduled. He would probably be in Europe by now and I had done nothing.

I wondered if I still had time. There might yet be a way to get some people with more sway to create the diversion I needed. But if I couldn't trust my recent memory, then how could I expect any of it to work?

For that matter, I considered, what if it had worked already? I felt certain all the recent events were real. Nothing about the past few months seemed delusional. All the evidence of my new job, from pay stubs to dinner receipts, were around me in my apartment. Could I have functioned every other way while hallucinating one part of my life? I could not dismiss my successful hunches, but trying to change the course of history may have sent me over the edge.

Another possibility was that someone or some other force had interfered to cancel my changes. The interference idea was the craziest yet, piling one impossibility on another.

If not interference, then maybe some restorative factor. Anything I knew from my other life would happen no matter what I did. That fluctuation in the time line had been corrected perhaps by something as simple as sheer inevitability. But then why had I been strung along thinking I could make a difference? I had been tantalized into using my power and then it all came to nothing.

I gave up thoughts of fighting. I knew now that September and October would bring bad news in close succession. And after that... well, it was a turbulent time in many ways. The world would live through it. The only difference is that I would see it coming.

There had already been days when my hints of the future seemed less intense. The more I focused on the present, it seemed, the more I could free myself of this connection with the future, and I wanted to. The knowledge had been a gift, no question, but it was now a curse, and not something I needed. I was good at my work. I liked it and was paid well. Hell, people would kill to have my job. I might as well enjoy it.

There were times when I still thought I had squandered something very special. Those bands I found for Harold, how were they doing? I eased my worries by recalling they were all sure things. That's why I picked them, though I no longer remembered the details. Maybe I was just a tool of destiny. I had shown up to get some artists on the right track and now I was no longer needed. I could go on to a well-earned and normal life. As much as I told myself this, I didn't believe it.

Sleep was getting harder, and I was using help. I had a doctor's prescription for sleeping pills, nothing illicit, though the prescription did not include the mix of a night's drinking. I wasn't treating my body well and sometimes it showed in my mood. Occupational hazard, I told myself, just your typical harried music guy. I was far from the worst case even at my office.

I'd usually put a 45 on the turntable to relax before sleeping. Chosen well, it could carry my thoughts far away. If it saved me from taking an extra pill, so much the better. One night, on a whim, I picked the B side of a Donovan single from a year back. It had charted briefly and was far enough from my usual fare that it seemed like a good distraction. My mind drifted as I listened to the Scottish-accented monologue.

"The continent of Atlantis was an island which lay before the great flood in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean..."

On it went about painted sails, Egyptian, antediluvian something something. Without denying its appeal, I still couldn't fathom what he was going on about. I should ask Harold. Heh, I bet he'd have a lot to say.

"On board were the Twelve: The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist, the magician, and the other so-called ..."

What? That's only five. Who were the other seven? How can he leave out more than half? That part always bugged me, but right now it got my mind off more troubling things.

And finally the chorus.

"Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be, Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be"

Again and again like a kind of incantation. As I listened, I fell into a deep sleep.