An impromptu bar

Rock and his first cousin Bill, Crutch's twin brother, parked in front of a small lakefront church. It was a typical late summer morning in Arkansas—hazy, humid, and hot. They got out and placed bottles of liquor, buckets of ice, and a large beaker filled with a watery, dark blue mixer on the car's hood. Their impromptu bar faced the church, which stood a hundred feet away, in woods not far from town.
Rock began to mix drinks and noticed four men walk from the building. They were each dressed head-to-toe in black. Their outfits included cylindrical hats from which hung mesh veils, and they began to walk toward the car. Bill was no longer present, and Rock watched the men approach. As they moved closer, he could see their faces were cloaked by scowls that seemed to reflect ominously evil intent. When they reached arm's length, he feared they would kill him. Sudden and utter panic demanded he seek a different state of consciousness.

Little Rock's ruins

John Kahn and several other Little Rock Hashers with whom Rock was less familiar were way down on the southern edge of Little Rock, next to the ruins near the two-lane highway that led to Pine Bluff. Though Rock had been there many times, it was the first time John had seen this patch of abandoned skyscrapers, which sixty or seventy years earlier highlighted Little Rock's original downtown.
Now it looked similar to a war zone. Some of the buildings had collapsed long ago. Their upper floors, still somewhat intact, jutted out at random angles from deep piles of concrete rubble. Many others remained standing, but their walls had crumbled away in places to expose stairwells and entire floors packed full of desks and other furniture someone had surely planned to retrieve at some point.
John and his friends were there first, and when Rock arrived, he was concerned to see some of the men climbing stairs into the upper reaches of one of the buildings.
"You need to get those guys to come down," he said. "Those buildings are all due to collapse."
"I don't think they know that," John said.

Failure

Inside and out, it was exactly like his maternal grandmother's house, the one that still stood in Nashville, Arkansas, except Rock had this one built by the river in North Little Rock. All of the rooms were furnished just as they had been throughout Rock's childhood.
Mike Penney, Rock's roommate from his freshman year in college, had come to visit, and Rock was disappointed that Mike failed to remember the house, though he had stayed at the original version in Nashville for a summer weekend when they were in school, nearly forty years earlier. Nothing seemed familiar to Mike, even the middle bedroom, which Rock specifically directed him to. It was the spitting image of the one Mike slept in all those years ago.

Extraordinary change

Walt had lost at least two hundred pounds. Maybe two-fifty. Rock didn't notice it when he first saw him, perhaps because Walt was surrounded by a dozen or more people, including a handful of gorgeous women.
Nevertheless, it had completely escaped him until he saw Walt a few minutes later, alone outside the stadium where they had just watched a football game. Even then, it took a moment before he recognized the extraordinary change.
"Wait a minute, Walt, I just noticed this," Rock said. "Man, you've lost a ton of weight. You look great."
He was never sure why, but Walt responded with a look of contempt and silence before he turned and walked away.

Gunfire

Someone apparently recorded it all with their cell phone. A friend turned Rock's attention to the television, and they watched as a man with a rifle addressed dozens of hostages in what looked like the paper's library.
The man had his gun pointed at a middle-aged woman Rock didn't recognize. None of the people looked familiar to him. "No, that's not the library at the paper," his friend explained. "That's the city library downtown."
Rock and his friend heard the man speak. "I'm going to kill everyone here," he said.
The audio wasn't clear. It sounded as if it were broadcast from a tunnel or from far away, but the quality of the sound made no difference once the gunfire began. The middle-aged woman was shot first. Afterward, the man began to fire rapidly and randomly across the room.
It wasn't until later that Rock realized he hadn't seen any evidence that anyone was actually shot. Maybe that would help explain why he had reacted with an utter lack of emotion as the video unfolded.

Limited menu

Everyone spoke highly of the place. It was packed and festive, but Rock couldn't find anything on the menu that appealed to him enough to offset the roasted chicken breast that came with every order. He looked at plates on a table near the cash register. All the food on them, other than the breasts, were brown fried things, including shrimp, chicken wings, and French fries. Just to look at it all made him thirsty.

Hash precedent

He knew a run of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers would start near his house, but Rock was surprised to see several Hashers run through his yard at dawn. It was not yet seven a.m., so this was, by Hash precedent, hours and hours earlier than a typical run.
As he sat in furthest recess of his garage to put on filthy socks and running shoes so he could join them, he saw one of the Hashers drive a riding lawnmower through the garage door and into his yard, apparently in pursuit of a large group now running by on the street.
Rock wondered how he would get his mower back.

Things that matter

It seemed as if time had stopped and that perhaps Monday would never arrive. Something had gone haywire with the clocks and calendars and everything else Rock could possibly think to use to measure concepts of when things that mattered to him had or would occur.
There was a mystery underway that frightened him, and these were unthinkable circumstances beyond his ability to imagine, though he suspected an answer was somewhere nearby. He wanted to go back to sleep, but first, he needed to drink some milk.

Back in place

The auto shop returned Rock's '09 Chevy Impala, but when he walked out to look at it, he saw immediately that they had replaced its broken steering wheel with the steering wheel from the '94 Toyota Camry he had totaled and given away for scrap two years earlier.
Rock always liked the old wheel's style and still did. It was from a classic design, made of wood and leather and chrome, but whereas it fit the Camry perfectly, it was far too large for the Impala. Its top was right in his line of sight in the newer car. Regardless, someone from the shop had apparently come to get it. When Rock woke back up at daybreak, he walked out again to see the original steering wheel was back in place. He thought it would have been nice had they put a new one in, since the old one was worn through to the steel in places, but he didn't want to mess with it anymore. For one thing, he needed to leave an hour or so later to cover a road race for the paper.
He wondered why anyone had even bothered to get his car in the first place. Perhaps he needed something to eat.

Leaves

Someone put all the leaves on the Arkansas Tech campus into a canvas bag the size of a professional basketball coliseum and placed it on a parade ground in front of the school's administration building. Rock was out for a jog and thought the bag was no more than a hill, but when he tried to run across it, he kept sinking in to his knees. He figured it out when leaves began to pop out of the bag's seams.

Bobbi

Moments after Rock watched an air show at a nearby college airport, he walked into a lounge close to the school. Once inside, he saw a young woman he had known thirty-five years earlier when they were classmates at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. He had not seen her since and, in fact, had scarcely thought of her, but he remembered that her name was Bobbi and that she was from Star City, Arkansas, a small town between Pine Bluff and Monticello.
Here she was, seated alone under dim lights in the middle of a large corner booth, and as always before, she wore elegant makeup, perfectly bobbed brunette hair, and significant jewels on her hands and wrists. She was dressed in stylish athletic wear, but what stood out most for Rock was a beige canvas bag on the table beside her emblazoned with a Bel-Air Country Club logo.
"Have you played at Bel-Air?" Rock said in a tone that bespoke his high regard for the prospect.
"I'm a member," she said.
Her statement stunned him. Bel-Air was as exclusive as any private club in America, and it seemed nearly unimaginable to Rock that this college student had been sought out as a member. Nevertheless, he asked the inevitable.
"Is there any way I could play it with you?"
"You know what, Rock, you don't want to play there," she said. "I've only played it once, and it was too much for me."

Lucky landing

The small single-engine airplane had clearly been in trouble. Rock stood with his father, brothers John and Jim, and Jim's wife Karen in an open field on the northern outskirt of Arkansas Tech University. They were there to watch the flight, but Rock's attention had been drawn to a commotion at a nearby maintenance shack, and he missed whatever had forced the plane to make an emergency landing in the field.
A moment later, the pilot explained to him that the plane had begun to stall during a steep climb and that he was left no choice but to land as quickly as possible.
"I'm lucky I made it out alive," he said.

Smart cars

There were two vehicles parked beside an old, white two-story house. One had the general design of a subcompact, except all of the angles of its frame were at ninety degrees, so that it had a box-like appearance. The other was a large SUV and was parked behind the smaller car. Both were covered by white polyester fabric, stretched tautly to their frames.
Though there were no people in either vehicle, Rock watched the SUV begin to push the car in front. Within a minute or two, it had pushed it around the block. Shortly after the vehicles had returned to their original position by the house, the SUV pushed the car into the lawn.
That was when the vehicles' owners arrived, each longtime acquaintances of Rock's. The car belonged to Mark Bison, a forty-year-old sportswriter who worked for a chain of small weekly newspapers near Little Rock, and the SUV to a couple named David and Christine Maloney.
Rock told them what he had seen, but they reacted as if it were not at all surprising.
"That's one of the problems with this smart-car technology," Bison said.
David laughed. "It's as if they have minds of their own," he said.

Boiled shrimp

When Rock walked into the all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant, his attention was immediately captured by large, clear plastic bags filled with what looked like at least twenty pounds of boiled shrimp. Two overweight women sat before them at separate tables, apparently working their way through the contents of the bags.
Drawn by curiosity, Rock sat down on the opposite side of one of the women's booths. He saw that the shrimp varied in size but were in some cases as large as bananas. They were alive and unclean and Rock was disgusted.
"What are you doing here?" the woman said. "Please leave me alone."
As Rock stood to get away, he noticed the woman wore nothing below her waist but a pair of pantyhose. He thought she looked terrible.

Too much

It was predictable. Rock and Jeff were joined by a young woman from the UALR golf team for a round at First Tee, and she laughed as Rock pulled out his driver for the third hole, a 210-yard Par 3.
She turned to Jeff. "Is he really going to use a driver?"
"Yes, and so am I," Jeff said.
"So, what are you gonna use?" Rock said. "A lob wedge?"
She had a six-iron in hand. "I'm using this, but it might be too much."
Rock tried to explain Jeff's and his choice, but she was clearly disinterested. Meanwhile, Rock's attention was drawn to his driver's shaft, which was made of leather similar to that of a new baseball glove.

On Dickson Street

Years earlier, Rock had worked for a day at this fantastically complex gas station on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. It also served as an automobile repair center and had a large kitchen in which rows of women prepared sandwiches they packaged in plastic and cellophane containers for resale in minimarts across the country.
He remembered that in his one previous day there, he never learned enough about the facility to so much as find his way in and out of its maze of rooms, each littered with stacks of oil-stained automotive refuge.
"Try to figure your way around here, Rock," said one of the men he remembered from his last experience there. "We're really going to need your help today."
Rock knew he had no chance, and that knowledge left him panicked. This job was important to him, but for the time being, all he wanted was to find a route out to Dickson that didn't cross paths with the man who had just spoken to him.

Cops

It had been weeks since Rock had drunk anything, but there was a police car parked behind his at a row of gas pumps, and when he got out to fill up the tank, he became nearly paralyzed by self-consciousness. His paranoia caused him to lose his balance, and he began to fall forward. Fortunately, he fell so slowly that it was if someone had gently placed him on the asphalt. He looked at the cops and could tell they hadn't even noticed him.

A can of corn

Someone set a run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers that ended in Rock's maternal grandmother's backyard in Nashville, Arkansas. They all gathered around an old, rusted swingset under the massive white oak Rock and his cousins climbed as children.
Rock was exhausted from the run and so thirsty that he opened a can of corn just to drink the water. He then walked across the back porch to the kitchen, where he put the open can into the refrigerator.
Don Chaney, Kayce Hall's recent groom, stepped into the kitchen as Rock closed the refrigerator door.
"Rock, why don't you just throw that corn away?" he said. "No one in the history of the world has ever made anything out of an open can of vegetables someone left in a refrigerator."
The kitchen looked just as Rock remembered it from twenty-nine years earlier, the last time he was there.

Crystal Lite

In did not seem plausible to Rock that Michele and Elizabeth truly thought he was drinking his urine. They had gathered with about twenty-five other Little Rock Hash House Harriers at the end of a run, and whereas almost everyone there drank beer from cans provided by the person who had set the run, Rock brought his own lemonade and drank it from a half-liter glass laboratory beaker.
Michele and Elizabeth approached him with their faces scrunched in a way that indicated they were disgusted by something. The reason became clear when Michele asked, "Rock, why are you drinking your own pee?"
"Do what?"
"C'mon, Rock," Elizabeth said. "That's gross."
As he tried to explain, Elizabeth turned and walked away to tell the others.
"No, this is just lemonade," Rock told Michele. "You know, it's Kroger-brand Crystal Lite lemonade. Here, taste it."
Michele did and announced to the group that Rock was not drinking his urine, which pleased him.
He took a moment to examine the beaker and realized why the two women had been mistaken.

No help

Nothing in Rock's writing career had confused him more than his attempt to title a book he had written about a man from Japan. He was sure he needed to title it in Japanese, but it was a language he was unfamiliar with. A woman he knew from the Lahman Library in North Little Rock tried to help, but all she did was add to his confusion.

Rukus

The powerfully built man was well over six feet tall. His thick mustache stood as the highlight of his unshaven, ruddy face, and he had drawn everyone's attention along the festive street. Unfortunately for Rock, he attempted to walk past this example of masculine totality without any way to know why it was there.
All he was trying to do was find his hotel room. Rock had been directed by a clerk in one of the many large luxury hotels to find a row of auxiliary rooms somewhere along the perimeter of this powerful and crowded pulse of tourism and enterprise, and though it was long before bedtime, Rock was already concerned about the volume of this self-sustained, perpetual, ritualistic ruckus.
He hadn't even noticed the actors at work, not until he tried to walk past their focal point. As he did, the large, strong man, dressed in weathered western wear, placed his hand on Rock's arm. "Please, help me out," the man whispered. "All you have to do is stand here for a second or two and act as if you're listening to me, just like you are right now."
Rock agreed with a nod. He didn't know what else to do.

The maneuver

Everything moved in slow motion, but Rock felt endangered despite his perception of speed. He drove west down an I-630 exit ramp near War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock and was about to reach the eastbound lanes of the urban interstate.
He hoped to slow enough to turn the car around once he reached the highway, but he couldn't get the breaks to work. Thus far he knew he had been lucky in terms of traffic, but ahead, toward University Avenue exits, he saw a line of cars approach from the horizon.
Somehow he managed to point the car in the right direction, but the maneuver made the matter worse. Now he was headed toward the traffic in reverse and had lost all control of his car.

The Leadbetters

There were two teenage boys and a girl out by the driveway of the house that belonged to the Leadbetters when Rock was in high school. They told him they thought he had come to mow the lawn, but Rock didn't know what they were talking about.
The Aikmans lived two houses east on Harrel Drive, so Rock called to tell his cousin Crutch that some kids at the Leadbetters' wanted to borrow his parent's lawnmower. In the next instant, Rock was in the Aikman's den, where he had spent a good deal of his youth. Crutch and several of his school friends were there. They all looked just as they had when Rock lived in Russellville forty years earlier.

Untrustworthy

Several of Rock's neighbors wanted him to chip in on the purchase of a mid-1960s Dodge Fury, which was an opportunity he did not quite understand.  He nevertheless road with them to look the car over, and it took no more than a glance for him to recognize the nearly perfect quality of its renovation.
It was a full-size sedan with an interior as large as an average recreational vehicle, complete with a kitchen, bathroom, and several bunks. Rock was impressed, but he did not like the vehicle's sky-blue paint job nor the idea of joint ownership with his untrustworthy neighbors.

Another cat

There was another cat in the guest bedroom. As Rock walked in he saw his cat Jo, which in itself surprised him, but a second later a second cat walked past that he thought at first was Samantha. After a careful look, he realized it was Pam and that she looked as fragile and emaciated as she had the day he thought she had died.
She ran under a bed, an evasive maneuver common to Pam throughout her long life. As he watched her, Rock wondered why he had brought his cats to his cousin Jill's house in the first place. It seemed odd that he had forgotten they were with him.

Unselfconciousness lost

This was all new to Rock. He had been asked to address a convention of comedians, and there were hundreds of them seated before him in a banquet hall. So far, he was on a roll. Laughter rang out after each of his lines and continued as he moved seamlessly from one topic to the next.
Rock would later reflect that he had performed in a perfect state of unselfconsciousness, the hallmark trait of all successful live performances. However, that quality was put to an end when his attention was suddenly drawn to a woman who approached the stage along the hall's middle aisle. Rock thought she looked confused, and he paused to offer what he could.
"How can I help you?" he asked.
She was clearly embarrassed, which was evident to Rock as she turned her head left and right toward the front rows of the people behind her.
"I think I'm lost," she said. "I was looking for the teachers' convention."

Wings

The list of food preferred by entrants in a 100-mile footrace Rock covered for the paper was seemingly infinite, and in this particular race, Rock interviewed a racer who ate nothing but fried chicken wings. That was new.

Golf

Rock's game had never been sharper. He was on a roll late in a round at a Little Rock tournament when he approached a tee box that was set on a wide sidewalk. There was no place near the markers to tee up a ball, so Rock examined his choices and recognized an opportunity a few feet back. He noticed that grass and a bit of soil appeared between sections of the walkway, and he easily placed a tee in the gap.
Before Rock could hit his drive, a longtime golf associate of his approached the tee box. Rock knew him from New Orleans, and the man asked whether Rock planned to play there again.
"You know what, I do," Rock said. "In fact, I want to see if I can qualify for the Zurich Classic next summer."
The man paused for a moment before he responded.
"Just so you'll know, the Zurich's in February," he said.
"Oh yeah, I don't know what I was thinking," Rock said. "February should work."

Waiting for Rock

Though it was never clear to Rock which of his relatives had died, he was pleased to see so many of his first cousins from the Crutchfield family gathered at Carol Crutchfield's house near Russellville. There were even a few members of the Aikman family there, aunts and uncles and cousins of Rock's cousins from the Crutchfield side, Crutch and Jill.
Rock stood next to Rob, an Aikman about Crutch's age, who pointed out a blonde who had just arrived. "I can't remember her name, but I think she's the head of state parks and tourism," Rob said.
Rock thought she looked exactly like a writer from Economist magazine he had seen on Charlie Rose the night before. She was tall and slim with small, simple features and a universal sort of loveliness that turned heads across the room.
Moments later, as she spoke to a nearby group, Rob tapped Rock's arm. "Hey man, take a look at that pad she's holding," he whispered.
There was a yellow legal pad tucked under her arm nearest them, and among the notes handwritten on it, one stood out: "Ask Rock out or wait for him to ask you out."
Rock was immediately confused. The message made no sense to him. "That's crazy," he said. "I've never seen her before."

The world's billionaires

Someone connected to the United States government had traveled to the mid-nineteenth century, apparently to reconstitute the financial system in such a way that no one could possess a billion or more dollars. There was no one around who could explain this to Rock, but he theorized it was an attempt to limit the power and influence of individuals rather than to redistribute wealth.
He imagined this news would shock the world. It seemed incredible, so much so that by the time he googled a list of the world's billionaires, he knew what he would find.

Hard to imagine

It was hard for Rock to imagine that this man had ever been a champion runner. He spent a day with him, mostly wandering around trails that connected small, rural communities north of North Little Rock, near Gravel Ridge and the Little Rock Air Force Base.
Thus far, Rock had learned that there was nothing at all organized about the way this man conducted any facet of his life. It was apparent that he tried to maintain a healthy lifestyle, yet the night before he had eaten half a carton of strawberry ice cream as he watched a baseball game that would not end before he fell asleep in his favorite chair. He told Rock he had been busy with work and consequently not at all interested in much else.

Open water

The narrow inlet was crowded with watercraft, including Rock's ski boat. Severe weather was on the way. Heavy cloud cover had begun to churn and give off a bold yellowish hue Rock had never seen before.
There was a specific reason all the boats and barges and ships had taken to the open water, but Rock couldn't remember what it was. Neither could the pilot of the boat beside Rock's, but they figured the odd sky and harsh weather about to begin had something to do with it.
As they discussed the matter, a party barge with a large, enclosed cabin, suddenly roared past them. It was going at least fifty miles an hour when it slammed into a stationary craft so large that it barely budged when it was struck.
Rock turned to the man in the boat beside his. "There's no way he survived that," he said. "Right?"
"No, there's not," the man said. "He's dead for sure."

Central High

Brick-covered columns all across the top of Little Rock's Central High School are among the building's trademarks, but for Rock, they had become an impediment to his progress. His sense of balance had recently limited him. In this circumstance, it made him hesitant to make so much as a simple maneuver around the columns. He knew that, despite the simplicity of the steps required, a failure of balance would likely result in a fall of fifty or more feet to the concrete walkways below.
Rock was overwhelmed by fear and frustration. He wasn't sure how he would ever get down from the top of this building.

Democrat Football League

There was an NFL game underway about which Rock had forgotten. He went to bed thinking he had easily defeated his Democrat Football League fantasy opponent, Dave Holzman, but Dave had another player going, and that player—Vikings running back Jerrick McKinnon—was having a break-out game, racking up touchdowns as a runner and receiver.
Rock wasn't sure what to think when he woke up Tuesday morning. He had to turn on his laptop to confirm that McKinnon played for someone other than Dave. It took a moment longer for Rock to remember that no game could possibly have been underway early on a Tuesday morning.

A silver-plated revolver

Rock stood on a downtown sidewalk with several overweight gray-haired out-of-town Hash House Harriers he met in a bar a few minutes earlier. Everyone was in good spirits as they watched a man approach from the other side of the street. He fit Rock's general impression of the men beside him and he thought at first he was part of their group, an impression that dissolved the moment the man pulled a silver-plated revolver from his waistband.
Someone in the group wisecracked that this fellow didn't have the guts to shoot anyone. It seemed to Rock that none of them were particularly concerned about this circumstance, though he himself was somewhat panicked.
Then the man pointed the gun toward the Hasher to Rock's left and fired into his abdomen. He began to shoot the other men, who tried to duck back into the bar. Rock held the slumped body of the first Hasher shot as a shield in front of him. As the shooter continued to fire into the others, Rock knew he would have to make a run for it. He turned and sprinted to an alley no more than twenty feet away. He covered several blocks before finally hiding under a large dump truck parked in a fenced construction area.

A gray fox

Turbulent, dangerous water washed across the bridge no more than a hundred yards in front of Rock. He was on foot, attempting to walk to an island a mile off the coast, but the sky had darkened and wind from the sea howled across him. It was obvious he would have no chance, so he decided to return to the beach.
Before he moved to turn back, he felt what seemed like an animal's tongue run across his left calf. He looked to see a gray fox that in an instant ran past him in a downhill sprint toward the water. Rock assumed it wanted fish, and he thought a few would likely splash across the bridge.
He wondered if this frightfully beautiful scene was a product of climate change. A pretty woman stood beside him. Rock thought he knew her, but he wasn't sure from where or when. "Do you think global warming caused this?" he said.

Our cat

It was a hot, hazy afternoon and weathered colors of dust and asphalt rose in heat waves from the barren four-lane highway. Rock and his young brunette girlfriend or wife were fifteen miles from their house, about to merge onto an interchange when they saw a gray and white cat roughly the size of a school bus jogging along the access road near their car.
"That's Jo, isn't it?" Rock's significant other said.
"You know what, it is," Rock said.
He stopped the car on a vacant patch of dry weeds and dirt beside the road.
"Don't you think we should just let her get home on her own?" the young woman said.
Rock didn't know the name of the woman seated beside him. He had never seen her before, but he carefully considered her question. He recognized its logic, something about the importance of cats finding their way, but they were a long way from home, and this was an awful place for a cat. Rock stepped out of the car, picked Jo up, and they drove away.

The worst trip

This was like no interstate highway Rock had ever seen. He was in transit from Little Rock to Los Angeles, and his itinerary required him to rent a car and drive between airports somewhere in the midwest. On his drive, the busy eight-lane thoroughfare suddenly narrowed to a single lane. It had no shoulders and was composed of a series of sharp, steeply-banked turns.
It seemed insane. The passage was entirely too narrow to support the kind of speed its turns required, so to compensate for his car's lack of centrifugal force, Rock reached out and pushed down on top of it. He was almost stunned to find that his effort worked.
After he reached the airport, Rock literally ran onto the plane he thought would take him to Los Angeles. Once aboard, his two carry-on bags tore apart from the weight of their contents, which spread in a jumble across the floor and his and an adjacent seat. As he began to pick up the dozens of things he'd packed, most of which looked completely unfamiliar, he heard a man's voice call his name.
Rock turned to see an old acquaintance named Dan, a former Hash House Harrier. It had been at least fifteen years since they last met, but they had always been on very pleasant terms. Rock was delighted to see him. "Dan, how are you, man?" he said as they shook hands.
"I'm doing great, Rock. It's good to see you."
"It's good to see you, too. So what's up? You going to LA on business?"
"LA? No, we're going home."
"Home? Don't you still live in North Little Rock?"
"I do. That's where we're going."
Rock didn't know what to think, but he suspected the worst. "Wait a minute, Dan," he said. "Isn't this flight going to Los Angeles?"
"No. It's going to Little Rock."

A new, old restaurant

Rock rode every night on a local light railway from his apartment across a river to a downtown assortment of restaurants and bars scattered throughout old but solid stone buildings typical of many European cities. On this warm evening, he stepped from the train and was immediately drawn toward a place he hadn't seen before.
It was a modern restaurant that stood alone in a large parking lot. Rock assumed it was part of an American chain, and at first its incongruity rung out, but then he noticed it was built into the ground floor of a building clearly as old as the rest in that part of the city. As he looked more closely, it became apparent that the only difference between this business and the rest nearby was its bright interior lighting. It was crowded, and cars were parked all around it on the narrow streets.

Hunger

Several men and women discussed how to best remove the contents of Rock's back bedroom and bathroom without disturbing his cat, Jo. It was an undertaking Rock did not at all understand. He stood in his bathroom and watched Jo as she looked on from the hallway. It seemed she shared his confusion.
Earlier, Rock had discussed with two women of undeterminable ethnic origin their possible purchase of a large wooden box they found in the storage area of a department store in an abandoned shopping mall. There might have been money at stake, but he remembered they were offended when he told them how fashionable he thought their look had become. It appeared to him as if they were spawned from a genetic mix of people from several regions, possibly including Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Iberian Peninsula, and perhaps Africa. There was no way to know where they were from outside of asking, and even then, he imagined they might not know. Either way, it was clear from their disdain that they found the topic inappropriate.
Rock wondered whether he should clean some before the people returned, and then whether or not they were ever there. All he knew for sure was he was hungry and Jo wanted out.

The fire

A sheet of fire extended from the living room of Rock's father's apartment through the kitchen and front wall and across a ridge of tile to the street. Rock didn't know whether he or his cats Pam and Jo would make it out alive.
This circumstance had evolved in mere seconds.
Minutes before the fire started, Rock had found the cats slathered in old, filthy cooking oil. They apparently had waded through a frying pan in the kitchen. Rock used a kitchen rag and water from the sink to clean them and then carried them to the living room where his father—Richard, who was away for the morning—kept a somewhat exotic dryer. It was a shoe-box-sized, hard black plastic machine from which stretched a flexible hose of steel and mesh and a nozzle that combined to look and work exactly like a kitchen-sink sprayer.
Rock sat on a couch and used the device to blow hot air across his now soggy but clean cats, but within seconds, water rather than air began to spray from the hose. Next, the handle became so hot he could no longer hold it. He dropped it on the couch as sheets of water sprayed through the apartment's immaculate front rooms. Just as it occurred to Rock to concern himself with Richard's expensive, suddenly water-damaged stuff, he saw that the sprayer handle had become so hot that it ignited a quilt on the couch, which almost immediately exploded into flames that began to spread everywhere.
No more than a second later, it was clear that the fire was already beyond his ability and resources to stop. He knew they all needed out, but there was no obvious way. The fire had engulfed everything between them and the street. Even the tile-covered lawn was aflame.

Contrasts

The contrast seemed bizarre to Rock. Just two or three years earlier, he had been at the epicenter of a political investigation so complex and far-reaching that it was the talk of the world. It boggled him as he attempted to recall the details, most of which neither he nor anyone was ever able to connect. Hillary Clinton was tied in there somewhere. He remembered that and how the hosts of conservative radio talk shows had hounded him. His house and garage remained littered with files and other evidence, much of it jammed into a chest of drawers in his back bedroom.
All of that was in his near past, but it had begun to dawn on Rock that all he needed to concern himself with on this particular Monday were two interviews scheduled for noon in Conway, twenty-five miles away. He would talk to a football coach and a defensive lineman. Otherwise, there were incidental matters of his fitness, his golf game, and the performance of his fantasy football team. He had nothing to worry about.

No idea

Hundreds of people Rock had never met appeared at his birthday party, including a reporter from the paper, an approximately twenty-five-year-old named Luke. Rock overheard him talking to another young man, dressed as Luke in khakis and a casual wool sports jackets.
It was soon evident that they were engaged in a heated conversation and that Luke was on the defensive. The other man had been a world-class distance runner whose career was cut short by a severe knee injury, and Luke had written a story about his demise. The runner's complaint was that Luke had left out any mention of his past. "You don't even know where I'm from, Luke," he said. "You never asked."
Luke appealed to Rock for help, but Rock had no idea who the runner was.
"Man, I'm sorry," Rock said. "I used to really keep up with track and field, but I haven't for years."

Miller Pete

It was early in the morning. Rock had slept on a living room couch at the house of the Marion and Kim Waugh family and was awakened to find everyone in preparation for a tribute to his birthday. Kim had spent the previous evening making high-top basketball shoes that resembled cans of Miller Lite—mostly white but with the traditional navy blue Lite label, except the word Lite had been replaced by Pete, Rock's most common nickname.
All the Waughs and several of their neighbors would wear them in a benefit basketball tournament scheduled for later that day. Marion seemed very excited. He also was clearly pleased by Rock's favorable reaction to the shoes.

Age restrictions

It seemed odd to Rock that people as old as Bill and Elaine were participants in a climb to the top of Mount Pinnacle. He wondered whether there were regulations against such behavior.

What to do

A junior-high basketball game was underway in the school's gymnasium. Rock stood outside with the coach of the home team and listened to him fret. The score was tied 10-10, and neither team had made a field goal.
"I don't know what to do," the coach said. "Our guys can't make a shot."
Rock knew a lot about both teams, even though he had never seen either play.
"Your guys like to shoot," he said. "They particularly like to shoot from the outside, but in a game like this, you probably want them going inside."
"That's what we should do, yes. We're making our free throws, but that's not what got us here."
Rock smiled.
"Well, coach, this is why you get paid so much."

Straight up

The trick-shot specialist put a golf ball on a foot-long tee and instructed Rock and another man from the crowd to lie next to it on their backs. Once they were in place, the golfer hit a drive straight up into the sky and completely out of sight.

When the ball came back into view, it was headed for Rock, but it was moving very slowly, as if it were the product of a soft pitch shot to a green. By the time Rock caught it, the ball had slowed to the point it was barely moving at all.

Steph

There was a large group of Hashers, several with spouses and children, gathered at a banquet hall near Rock's maternal grandmother's house in Nashville. Plentiful food and drink were scattered about on long tables covered with white paper table cloths. As Rock walked in, he saw his blonde-headed friend Steph talking with B.J., a long-time Hash leader he had known and admired for nearly thirty years.
This facility was new to Rock, as was a large, old, stereotypically cluttered general store on the opposite side of North 4th Street, Nashville's second-most trafficky thoroughfare that runs from the WalMart Super Center on the south side of town to the high school on the north.
Rock thought he had good news for Steph. As he approached her and B.J., he reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. "Hey, kiddo, guess what," he said. "I got the Wisconsin game on my radio. We can just exchange cars for the day if you want."
She eagerly took his keys and, within seconds, was in Rock's car. As he explained to several Hashers about the Wisconsin game, they watched as Steph drove the car into the general store parking lot. None of them could figure out why its hood was up or how she could see to find a place to park.
"I forgot to tell her about the weird noise it makes," Rock said. "It's probably got her freaked out."

More hopeless knowledge

Rock and his cat Jo were on an afternoon rock-and-roll radio show with a lady disc-jockey and the standard radio fare of contemporary hits combined with a mix of oldies. Years had passed since Rock last sat near a radio control board, but he remembered all the inner workings and without asking permission started a song called More Hopeless Knowledge www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-ZvV5icOIU, performed by an obscure band from the early 1980s named Eye to Eye.
The host listened for a moment but turned off the song long before it ended. "That's nice," she said. "I like it, but it just doesn't fit with what I'm trying to do on my show."
Rock thought it was cool that the woman let Jo in her studio.

The change

There was a significant change in the game of golf underway, and golf authorities and experts had made clear to Rock that he might serve a central role. He was doing all he could to clear his hallway of everything, including the rug, which he placed on his front bedroom bed. It was critical that he trim the time golfers spend in transit from greens to subsequent tee-boxes.
He swept the floor with all the precision he could muster, despite his nearly overwhelming fatigue and sleepiness. He wanted to lie down but was afraid a delay might alter the changes so dramatically that golf traditionalists would blame him for revisions so acute they rendered the game unrecognizable.
Rock began this process as everything about a hole he was playing suddenly turned different. Its length shrunk to less than that of his back bedroom. The green became tiny and made of hard plastic. Change was afoot, charging toward two-hour rounds, and like it or not, it was apparently up to Rock to oversee the process.

Babble

Each of the hundreds of ships under Starfleet Command was buoyed in dark space within Rock's sight, and he watched as they expanded in size at an incredible rate. A craft no more than twenty feet deep from top to bottom would stretch for miles within seconds. What's more, the minds of the crew on any particular vessel grew at a similar rate. The crew members spoke to Rock in such rapid sentences that he had no chance to decipher their babble.
Someone in some sort of leadership role with Starfleet sat with Rock in what looked like a stadium press box and began to speak of the significance of what unfolded before them. He adopted the tone of a sportscaster: "Nothing like this has ever been seen before. The crafts continue their exponential growth at a heretofore unimaginable pace. We are all stunned, absolutely stunned."

Bugdetary alarm

Walt and his wife Amy and two daughters were somehow included in Rock's budgetary considerations. A mutual friend named Jason set up a computer program that calculated their monthly financial allotment, and Rock read the report on an alarm clock in his front bedroom. It said they could spend a total of twenty-six hundred dollars a month drawn from their combined income.
Using a calculator in his den, Rock saw that meant they would have, on average, a little less than eighty-seven dollars a day available to them. He wasn't sure that would be enough, but the alarm continued to sound every few minutes. Rock assumed it was a sign of urgency. It rang at least twice before he turned off its snooze function, which was theretofore unfamiliar to him.

Good humor

His father and a young woman were with Rock to help him select clothes for an event that required he dress up a bit. He left it to them, and they selected a pair of khakis, a red plaid shirt, and his navy-blue sports jacket. Both were amused by the limited wardrobe in Rock's front bedroom closet and his indifference to their choices.

The woman was perhaps thirty years old. She had short butterscotch blonde hair and the trim figure and ruddy complexion of an endurance athlete, but what attracted Rock most was how pleased and humored she seemed by her current circumstance.
He handed her a pair of scissors so she could begin to trim the nearly endless threads that dangled from each button and button hole on his shirt and jacket. She and his father laughed, and Rock was delighted by the underlying spirit of the teasing that radiated from them.

"You can tell how often he dresses like this," his father said.

"This is the first time, right?" she said as she squinted to isolate one of the threads.

Pizza

A group of new agers opened a pizza restaurant in Rock's house. Whereas the perk of plentiful pizza appealed to him, he wasn't sure he liked the idea of people dining in his living room. For the time being, no one was there, but Rock knew this would have to be resolved. He couldn't have a restaurant in his house.

He wasn't sure who these people were or what gave them this crazy idea.

Out of place

Whenever Rock was around this ultra-distance crowd, he felt a bit out of place. He had volunteered to help along a stretch of a race somewhere near Little Rock and recognized many of the participants and other volunteers, but no one acknowledged him.
He and several others were in a small, old house along a highway on the course. Its rooms were cluttered with tables and fold-out chairs and boxes full of assorted supplies. Rock was in a bathroom when he suddenly noticed he was naked from the waist down. Before he could find a towel or anything else to wrap himself with, several volunteers walked in, including his longtime acquaintances Stan Fergusin and Paul Turnor. They quickly turned away as Rock picked up a stray dish towel and attempted to cover himself.

Super Bowl bust

The very idea that almost an entire nation failed to watch the Super Bowl stunned everyone. Most blamed the mass oversight on a failure of scheduling. Whereas the game had been televised with a kickoff sometime between five and five-thirty p.m. central for the previous forty years, Super Bowl LII started at seven-thirty, and most of the U.S. was asleep.
Rock woke up at halftime. There was a small table with a blender and bowls of ice beside his back bedroom bed, but the ice had begun to melt. A couple from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers slept in his front bedroom. He wasn't sure who they were. He briefly considered waking them but fell back to sleep and was out for the night.

Addled mind

It was nearly nine-thirty in the morning before Rock became conscious enough to get out of his front-bedroom bed. Within the first minute, he thought that perhaps he had forgotten something scheduled for nine a.m. He wasn't sure how important the matter was but began to worry after he noticed a check from the paper on his desk. There was no way for him to calculate the significance of his financial responsibilities, certainly not in his currently addled state of mind.
Rock's cat Jo wanted out. That was all he knew for sure.

Scout and Soccoro

A woman from out of town showed up for a run of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers and was consequently required to submit to a down-down, a Hashing process in which visitors—among others—are required to consume a cup full of beer or else pour its contents over their heads. She stood near Rock and wore a flimsy pasteboard crown that looked as if it may have come from a Burger King.
Before the visitor drank, she and Rock were suddenly pounced upon by two large, friendly dogs Rock knew as Scout and Soccoro. Rock looked up to see Erin, one of the dogs' owners, standing by and laughing at this slapstick before her. Rock and the woman were also clearly amused.

Cat trouble

Randy Smith and Rock had worked together at a talk radio station thirty years earlier and just happened to meet in the lobby of the Arkansas Democrat building as they prepared to leave. Rock carried a large canvas equipment bag with him, partially filled with paperwork from his desk and old mail that had gathered for years.
Shortly after Randy and Rock walked out of the front door, as they stood by the steps to the ancient castle next door to the Democrat Building waiting for traffic to break, Rock suddenly became aware there was something alive in the bag. He thought immediately of his cat Pam.
"Holy shit, Randy," he said. "There's something in this bag."
"What do you think it is?"
"I don't know. I think it might be Pam."
Rock felt compelled to check. Perhaps some animal from the paper had climbed in, though he knew how crucial it was to not let out Pam if it were her. He slowly unzipped the bag to check, but Pam was too quick for him, and she wriggled out through the opening. This was trouble. Pam ran to the corner of the nearest intersection and into a drain opening before he could react, and Rock knew he faced the potential of hours spent downtown in search of his cat.

Excessive sanitation

Someone involved with a group organized to protest excessive sanitary measures had placed small piles of dirt all over North Little Rock. Anyone who removed them or put them elsewhere would find that the piles were replaced each half hour throughout the night.

Rock found one, approximately a foot high, between his commode and bathtub. He removed it at approximately 8 a.m. but kept an eye on his bathroom through 8:30 to make sure no one brought another. He couldn't wait to ask the other members of his walking group if they had similar experiences.

Exhausted and hungry

Richard and his son Rock had driven all night and were in a town somewhere in Missouri about which neither were even remotely familiar. They were both exhausted and hungry. It was not yet daybreak when they walked into a department store that Rock thought seemed closed. There were no more than a few employees there, and Richard and he were the only customers.
Apparently, someone knew they wanted food and brought out a plate heaped with pork chops, fried potatoes, and eggs. An overweight, bearded young man handed it to Rock, who placed it on a card table near a display of televisions and laptop computers. They sat at the table, and Rock pushed the plate toward Richard.
"Here, man, I can wait," he said.
"I wonder if they'll bring more," Richard said.

New digs for Walt

Walt and Rock rode in a helicopter as it flew at dusk over a vast plot of pricey houses. They were oddly exotic, perhaps to the point of weirdness, Rock thought. They were all one story, trimmed in stainless steel and glass, each with glass ceilings that exposed gatherings of young adults dressed in casual evening wear.
"What do those houses go for?" Rock said.
Walt had arranged the flyover. He apparently was in search for a new place to live.
"They're asking for about two-fifty a year," Walt said.
"Two-hundred fifty thousand a year?" Rock was incredulous. "Fuck, man, how much are you going to make as a truck driver?"
Walt explained earlier that he had recently begun to consider a career change.
"Most drivers make at least eighty thousand a year," he said, as if that were plenty adequate to cover expenses in the neighborhoods below. "Rock, you're too satisfied. You're like a lot of people I know, just perfectly content with your boring life."

No hope

Years earlier, Rock remembered being in exactly this circumstance: He was in a van with several of Jenny Devine's school friends from Harrison (Arkansas) High School. Jenny was behind the wheel. As before, the van was careening along a very narrow, winding road like the one that leads to Hindman Park Golf Course, except that it was high in the Ozarks, above a deep river.
Unlike before, Jenny suddenly turned the van directly down a wooded slope into the river. No one, including Rock, seemed at all fearful. This reaction changed for Rock when the van reached the river bottom. It was clear to him that they were pinned in with no hope to escape. Death appeared imminent, and Rock was indeed panicked.

No way

It seemed like nonsense at first, but Rock was eventually persuaded to at least consider asking thoroughbred trainers at Oaklawn Park about the inner workings of their horses' minds. It was late in the afternoon, and somewhere among the track's barns, in a particularly dusty spot crowded with pigs and cows and several small farm animals, he saw trainers Wayne Lukas and Steve Asmussen. They each nodded through scowls in silent greetings.
Rock knew there was no way he would ask them anything about the psychological bearings of their horses.

Restaurant on the corner

It seemed as if everyone who had worked with Rock thirty years earlier at a restaurant on Fayetteville's Dickson Street were still on staff. Rock sat at the restaurant's bar late at night, well after closing, with two waitresses he remembered and a cook named Kevin he had known well.
One of the waitresses reminded Rock of how badly his brief stint as kitchen help had gone.
"I remember that," Rock said. "I couldn't get anything right."
"No kidding," Kevin said. "Almost everything you sent out got sent back

The whole idea

United States congressmen were expected to carry some sort of American flag with them for the day. Senator Rock's aides had given him several handkerchief-size flags, one of which he hung from a front pocket of his dark plaid golf shorts before he even got out of bed that morning.
It was very early, just past dawn, and Rock wasn't sure of anything, but he thought this matter somehow pertained to the previous night's long health-care debate.

By the time he reached his den, Rock couldn't find any of the small flags. There were two handkerchiefs on his desk he had used to wipe sweat from his face and hands as he walked or golfed during the week, but they were plain white. He explained to someone that he was patriotic enough to not care who or who did not see him with a flag. The whole idea seemed silly to him.

Medical attention

Medical equipment filled Rock's back bedroom and den. He had undergone some sort of treatment overnight, overseen by several nurses and emergency medical technicians. Surely a doctor was there at some point, but mostly Rock had been aware of the constant attention of the nurses.
It was very early in the morning, just past daybreak. Rock wondered if all of the medical personnel had left and whether or not he could go back to bed. He felt fine, but obviously something was wrong with him.

A weird ride

Rock's mind was consumed by the urgency of his task set for early the following morning. It was late at night, and he had just ridden a borrowed and very odd-looking bicycle from a drive-through window of a Sonic near his hotel room in downtown Memphis.
He stopped in the parking lot with the salad he ordered. It was all he could eat since he had left his insulin at his home in Levy. Rock knew he had to return for it, but he had no available vehicle with him, and he was committed to a week-long stay for a basketball tournament the paper had assigned him to cover. The only option Rock could imagine was to rent a car, but not until this very moment had a clear idea formed of how he could get to the nearest rental agency.
Now he knew. He could tell that none of the Sonic staffers—overwhelmed as they were by the long line of cars—would notice if he rode away on the bike they lent him. Though it was made of hard plastic shaped into the form of a child's mini bike, it seemed sturdy and functional enough to serve his need.

An unscheduled run

This would take some work. Somewhere in the middle of a night of revelry with sportswriters and photographers in a huge suite of rooms at a Memphis Hotel, Rock knew his insulin was back in Levy. He didn't even have to check his bags. He knew.
A basketball tournament they were there to cover would start the next day, and he had traveled to it in a rental vehicle with the other journalists. Several were in the van at that moment, down on Beale Street he assumed. They would all need it in the morning for trips back and forth from the tournament site. After brief consideration, Rock decided he would need to rent a car for the four-hour round trip to retrieve his insulin.
The suite was furnished and dimly lighted as if it were a modern night spot. The walls and ceiling were black, and all the significant surfaces were glass framed in chrome, including an L-shaped bar around a large kitchen area that surrounded transparent tubs of beer and several large platters stacked high with hors d'oeuvres. Rock thought it was beautiful and certainly nothing he wanted to leave.

Rock's new house

Rock's new house was right across the street from the medical school. It was perfect for him and his cats. Jo and Pam seemed to love it there. He particularly liked the curtains. It was small but immaculate, a rectangular masterpiece of bachelor comfort.

Nothing to remember

Despite the bitterly cold night, no one was surprised by the huge crowd gathered at Eagles Stadium for the Vilonia Eagles-Greenbrier Panthers rivalry underway late in the playoffs for the first time since 1989. Rock told everyone around him how he had been the radio voice of the Eagles when these teams last met in this circumstance, all those years ago on Greenbrier's home field.

President Trump seemed unimpressed. He, as Rock, had attended both games.

"There were many more fans at the first one," the President said. "Who could ever forget the way they were lined up five and six deep all the way around the field?"

Times had changed. Those kinds of crowds rarely showed up anymore for high school games, Rock explained. There was also the matter of the high temperature and humidity. The sun was out, and the few people gathered with Trump and Rock were miserable in the thick, damp, nearly soupy air.

Few would reminisce about this meaningless game.

Birth defect

This was unlike any birth defect Rock had seen. Someone emailed him a photograph of the three referees scheduled to officiate a high school basketball game he would watch the following evening, and he was immediately nauseated by it.
One of the referees had what looked like a human hand attached palm down where his right ear should have been. Rock's first thought was that it had grown there, but his friend Tim Cooper, who assigned many of the events Rock covered, explained that the man was born that way.
"At first, doctors said they thought the merger developed in his mother's womb with his head pressed against one of his hands, but then they noticed he had two perfectly normal hands at the end of his arms," Tim said. "Later on, they worried that perhaps they had overlooked a twin child. I mean, they couldn't imagine any other ways to explain the extra hand."

Games

Games involved were baseball, tennis, and golf. Rock considered each as he lay in his front bedroom bed. There was also a matter of time, which seemed disjointed from and perhaps unrelated to any of the matters at hand.
It was odd to Rock that a fastball he threw months ago from his den was only now about to arrive in a bedroom no more than twenty-five feet away.

An escape route

Nazi troops were spread across a broad expanse of dry, rocky prairies, and Rock had to rely on stealth to avoid them. It was simple enough to say out of sight; indeed, he was somewhat bored, but he knew a need for water and food would at some point supplant the significance of his immediate task.
All at once, Rock was at the top of a very tall, abandoned office building that was coated with white stucco. He had seen it several times before, though it had been years since he had been inside. Its base was at least a thousand feet below the Nazi-strewn prairies, so Rock considered it a nearly surefire escape route. He walked through the top floor to find it filled with what looked like desks from a former newspaper office and instantly wondered if anyone had hidden a gun anywhere.

Substitutes

No one knew exactly what substitute teachers in North Little Rock earned for a day at one of the city's schools, but Jeff Lukas told Rock the school system had stopped paying them anything but fruit-flavored cigars.
Rock could not remember ever having substitute taught, but he had apparently done so four times. He received four cigars in the mail, each in a colorful wrapper symbolic of whichever fruit was the basis of their flavoring.
One of Rock's neighbors said he thought the cigars were delicious. Rock agreed.
"I smoked half of one this morning, and it was really good," Rock said.
"They are good, but wouldn't you rather get a paycheck?" the neighbor said.

Fishing

From ten feet above the water, Rock could see it was filled with old, jagged iron machinery and boat parts. He sat on a pier, fishing with a friend, and shifted in an attempt to get more comfortable, but all he managed to do was lose his grip on the concrete poles that he had pressed his feet against.

Rock struggled to regain his hold, but it seemed unlikely he would. He wasn't sure he would survive a fall into the debris below.

The Hash race

Two three-person teams composed of Little Rock Hash House Harriers were engaged in a relay race around a paved 3.25-mile loop in Burns Park. Rock got there late, in time to see Lacey cross the finish line several minutes ahead of the other team's anchor.
Something about the result disappointed Rock. For one thing, he was clearly dismayed by Lacey's celebratory posture. Apparently, his support had been behind the losing team, for which Josh Barnhorst had run the second leg.
Josh explained that the race had been even through the first two laps, but that Lacey had pulled away to the wide final margin.

To Canada and back

It didn't seem odd to anyone that Rock was about to step outside for a jog to the Canadian border and back. That was his plan for the day, but at the last minute, he noticed on television that there was a snowstorm underway on the northern edge of border states he might need to run through. Even though it had been hot and humid out for weeks, Rock went back to his bedroom to look for a sweater to take with him.

Nashville

He couldn't explain it, but Rock was at his maternal grandmother's house in Nashville, Arkansas, across the street from the old high school grounds and gymnasium. Several Little  Rock Hashers were there, too, including couples Zach and Lacey and David and Christine, each of whom wanted to ride with him to a restaurant for dinner.
Rock had to clean out his car's back seat to make room. Lacey knocked on the passenger-side back door for his attention. She wanted in, but as Rock reached up to find the door lock, he saw nothing but the blue wall beside the bed in his back room. Daybreak had arrived, and he needed to go to the bathroom.

Two crimes

It was difficult for Rock to determine which of his two misdeeds would be judged more significant if he were apprehended for them, though he was somewhat troubled by both.
Rock had stolen a garbage can from a house several blocks from his. He couldn't explain even to himself why he had taken it, but what troubled him most was that he had dumped its load of garbage into the front yard of the house. His guilt bothered him, but he was more concerned that his action had been recorded by a security camera.

John's material excess

Rock's former neighbor John Lukas, a scrawny, scraggly, bearded fifty-year-old who had always exhibited survivalist tendencies was now deeply into the movement. Rock was among a group of a dozen or so invited by John to a ceremony at his house near Bigelow, a town of just over three-hundred people on the northern banks of Lake Maumelle and the Arkansas River near Conway.

They each arrived to watch as John leveled his fifteen hundred square-foot cabin down to its substantial rock crawlspace.

John told everyone he planned to move into the bordering forest and live off the land. Most of the people there, including Rock and his friends Casey Hall and Jeff Krupshaw, were supportive of his cause. Each had brought manila folders stuffed with examples of material excesses they had eliminated from their own lives, but none were willing to go to John's extreme.

Rock asked John why he stopped his destruction at the foundation.

"I don't know for sure," John said. "I think it just goes back to the way I was taught. Someone might need a house here, and they'll have to have a foundation."

What to do

Whereas life on earth was not at stake, Rock felt sure he was now responsible for every advance mankind had made since the advent of western civilization. He didn't know what to do other than turn off the oven, let Jo out, and find his glasses, but he at least imagined there was a possibility that man's level of knowledge could regress to complete ignorance.
The outcome of a basketball game mattered greatly. Rock knew that much. He also knew he was hungry and that all of what was at stake depended on his consumption of food.

Podcast problems

Broadcast and podcast interests had never been higher than they were for John Frostop's and Rock's round of golf scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday at Hindman Park Golf Course. Rock was in charge of production for a podcast he and John had arranged. He planned to direct operations from his back bedroom but for the time being was both confused and panicked.
It was nearly 9:30 and everything was set up. Rock's only problem was that he couldn't find his host Meaghan on any of the dozens of screens in his room. His alarm clock was ringing. Screen options kept popping up. He remembered he was supposed to golf and could not imagine how to fix the technical problems his podcast faced. It was time to go, but Rock knew he needed something to eat.

Another story idea

It wasn't yet daybreak, but at least a dozen Oaklawn Park employees were gathered in the cluttered hallway that runs through the racetrack's business offices. Rock had been summoned there, but he was disappointed to find there was nothing more for him to see than the world's most expensive go-cart.
According to Jason, the track's media liaison, a high-tech company had lent it to the track as a promotion of some sort. It was clear to Rock that either a great deal of technology had gone into the go-cart's construction or that someone had put considerable effort into making it look that way. It was no larger than a child's toy wagon and made of what looked like common computer components, each connected by intricate and colorful wiring.
Rock was disinterested.
"I hate to tell you, Jason, but I'm not going to write a story about a million-dollar go-cart," he said. "I mean, it is noteworthy, but it doesn't belong on a sports page."

Doomsday

Doomsday was inevitable, and for the first time in Rock's experience, the outcome was beyond his control. Someone, perhaps a producer or director with Hollywood connections, had arranged what at first appeared as a fictional presentation that involved the end of God and the heavens, followed by all mankind.
In the drama, the fate of Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Bible's New Testament, was in the hands of its audience, though no one watching knew what hinged on the result. Viewers' boredom was evident to Rock, and they chose to turn off the program, which was a cinematic reproduction of what seemed like a live stage play.
Once the audience had made their choice, they saw Mary's head exposed in an all-black room, extended through a small opening in the floor. Her head was shaved bald, and Rock and the audience watched as it dissolved into a pool of blood and flesh.
Rock wondered why there was still traffic on the street in front of his house. He knew the world was done. Perhaps a tube of Gu would help him feel better through the final hours.

A common assessment

Pam followed Rock's other cat Jo onto his bed as he lay reading late one afternoon. It seemed as if he hadn't seen her for a while. She remained frail, but after he petted the top of her head, it was obvious to him that she had put on weight.

Rock's buddy John Frostop had stopped by after their round of golf. He stood at Rock's bedroom door and laughed.

"Man, I gotta tell you," he said. "You and Jo act exactly alike."

John's assessment was common among Rock's acquaintances. 

A victory for skepticism

All the stuff Rock has to face while teetered on the edge of daybreak and consciousness had begun to wear thin. On this particular morning, he sat on his couch and resolutely refused to participate in a game that involved edible playing cards.
He had seen this one before. To start, the dealer would spread flavorless cards all around, but by the time Rock had begun to question the worthiness of his cooperation, the cards had turned hot in a spicy way that made them seem actively aware of their role in his living room. A loud, rhythmic chirping sound from his back bedroom signaled their heat.
It had become too silly to consider. Rock turned off the alarm and made coffee.

The legend of Ault Ferguson

No one found anything out of order in this high school basketball championship game, though the court was dirt and set outside in the nearly abandoned downtown of Armorel, Arkansas. Rock sat next to a two-man radio crew who represented the visiting Pulaski Academy Bruins, and neither they nor anyone else in attendance was affected by the setting.
There was clutter all around the block-long court, dominated by rusted farm machinery and broken-down cars and pickup trucks. Fans crowded both sides of the street on boardwalks in front of ramshackle, vacant stores.
Everyone there, regardless of which team they were for, was mesmerized by Armorel's three-point specialist Ault Ferguson and the nearly unimaginable comeback he had orchestrated since halftime.
Rock wanted to tell the broadcasters about an Armorel sharp-shooter he had watched back in the spring of 1994 at the Class A tournament in Scranton, but he couldn't remember the player's name. He wondered if Ferguson and the player from all those years ago were related.

Disguised

There was no rule against owners betting on their own horses, but Rock felt as if a disguise was necessary. He put on a pair of paper sunglasses he recently bought to watch the coming solar eclipse and couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, he was confident no one would identify him as he tried to walk to a nearby wagering terminal.

No escape

Without investigation, there was no telling whether the world Rock found himself in was the real thing or merely a product of some website. He had already been through several of those, each easily distinguishable from either of the two bedrooms in which he most commonly awoke.
Rock was fully aware of the snares of internet life, the way their complexity at first appealed but later so fully consumed him and everything in and around his life that there was no escape.
After a moment, Rock knew his back bedroom floor was no longer composed of the wet, slick clay he and a friend had encountered the day before at Little Rock's Hindman Park. Everything looked in place.

Worthless change

All Rock had was a twenty-dollar bill, which he placed in the banknote validator of a stamp machine. Shortly after the machine dispensed the four stamps he needed, it also began to dispense change in the form of silver-dollar sized gold-colored coins. There was soon a pile of heavy, shiny tokens on the counter top.
Rock looked up at the smiling postal clerk. "Please tell me you can cash these for me," he said.

The only people left

Hard rain fell throughout the St. Louis Cardinals' victory over their World Series opponent, and whereas it had not affected the game played in an indoor version of Busch Stadium, the dressing room and adjacent media facilities were flooded.

Rock and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Cardinals beat writer—the only reporters there—waded through a foot of water. Lights remained on, but Cardinals media personnel were unable to print box scores or play-by-play sheets. It was a nightmarish circumstance, particularly for the St. Louis writer, who seemed put out by Rock's lack of concern.

"Man, I'm just here to write a follow-up," Rock said. "We'll probably use your game story."

It seemed as if he and the other reporter were the only people left at the stadium, and Rock realized that even a feature story for later in the week would be difficult to complete. He also began to worry that the paper might have expected a game story from him. It was late, at least eleven o'clock at night, and he couldn't remember a single play from the game. Indeed, Rock knew he had failed to watch any of it.

Half-naked

A large gold shipment had arrived and Rock and several other reporters had watched heavily armed agents escort it from an armored car into an old four-story office building near downtown Russellville, Arkansas. They were there in a government van, and each had been required to strip naked and cover themselves with robes made of particularly coarse burlap.
The gold had been moved perhaps a half an hour earlier, and the original reporters, other than Rock, left the van moments afterward. Two were replaced by women, each of whom Rock assumed wrote for large east-coast newspapers. They were fully clothed and did not acknowledge him in any way, though he was sure they were aware that he wore nothing but a polo shirt just long enough to cover his crotch, and that his blue jeans and red boxer shorts were on the floorboard at his feet.
Rock had rarely felt this sort of discomfort or embarrassment, having become familiar enough with government inaction to know that no one had bothered to explain to these women why they had been placed next to a half-naked man.

Lying

Years earlier, Rock and an old girlfriend had sat in the bleachers of this same softball field, the one across Cantrell Boulevard from Cajun's Wharf where he and his workmate Todd Trobb now sat.
Rock remembered that his girlfriend had said something about how fun it might be to have sex on the plush grass of the outfield, perhaps late at night as a band played on the deck of Cajun's.
Rock's memory was accurate, but he told Todd of the product of his former girlfriend's imagination as if it had actually occurred.
Todd seemed skeptical.
"Really?" he said. "That seems like something you would've told me a long time ago."

Doomed

Life on earth was doomed unless Rock could find an antidote to whatever contagion had begun to overrun everything. He was not in any way qualified for his task, but there was apparently no one else left who had any chance to help.
There was something else he had agreed to do. Elaine Gimblet had tried to tell him something about it, but surely this saving-mankind business was more critical than anything she would have arranged. Rock wasn't certain of anything, except that he needed something to eat.

J.T.

Much to Rock's surprise, James Taylor appeared at his house near daybreak. There was no way Rock could've anticipated this. He and James had been close friends through college and for the first few years after they graduated, but over the last twenty to twenty-five years, they had seen each other sporadically, by coincidence if at all since the early-1990s. When Rock last saw him, at least ten years earlier, James sat in a restaurant in Little Rock's River Market with his then two-year-old son.
Not long after, a mutual friend told Rock that James had moved to Fayetteville. He was apparently doing very well at his work as a videographer for the University, but here he was, out of the blue, in Rock's living room. He looked just the same, Rock thought.
"It was time for me to come home," James said. "Before I left, I knew my music had turned stale, and I was in dark places. I had to shake it all away. The pain finally faded while I was in Fayetteville, and I felt I was ready to start over."
"Well, heck," Rock said. "It's great to have you back."
"You're one of the main reasons I returned," James said. "I'll tell you, Rock, I've watched you over the years, and the simplicity of your life has inspired me."
It seemed perfectly normal to Rock to have this aging pop start in his house.

A racing disaster

It was impossible to tell exactly what was happening, but Rock knew a racing disaster was underway. He watched on a monitor under the Oaklawn Park grandstand and found from the track announcer's voice and the jumble of fallen horses on the screen, a few of them lying flat and unmoving, that this was unlike anything to have ever occurred at Oaklawn or anywhere else.
"This is terrible," the announcer said. "I don't know what else to say."

The trouble with deadlines

Rock wasn't sure, but he thought he had agreed to write a preseason prospectus on UCA's football team. He was somewhat panicked, particularly when it occurred to him that most of the players were out of school for the summer.
The story was due by nine o'clock that night. It was late in the afternoon, and Rock had nothing. He got out of bed and considered driving to Conway.

Who cares?

It was the end of the semester and Rock suddenly realized he had never attended a physics class he enrolled in at UALR. What was different from all the times before when he had panicked about such oversights is that he didn't care. Furthermore, he was fully dressed.

Ron and his machine

A group of Little Rock Hash House Harriers, including Rock, drank beer in the corridor of an abandoned split-level shopping mall in North Little Rock after a five-mile run.
There were more Hashers still out, and Rock walked to a rail that overlooked the lower level to watch them come in. He was interested to see how they reacted as they approached three nearly verticle rows of escalators. The steps were gone, so there was nothing but a smooth surface to negotiate. It was clear that runners and walkers would have to find a different way up, but Rock saw three Hashers approach the escalators on snowmobiles.
Two were on large, powerful machines. The other, Rock's longtime friend Ron Gimblet, rode an older, smaller model, and Rock could hear it sputter as Ron began his nearly 100-foot ascent. The first two snowmobiles easily made the summit, but Ron's failed near the top, and he and his machine were nearly instantly in a backward freefall. Rock was horrified to see Ron bounce on the tile below, come to rest, and lay motionless. He turned back toward the Hashers in the corridor and yelled, "Someone call 911! There's been a fall!"
He began to run toward the top of the escalators but stopped short. "It's Ron! Tell them to expect head and neck injuries!"

Butch

It was Butch. Rock had no doubt. Butch had been dognapped from the Walsh Estate on 35th Street twenty-five years earlier, but here he was, a gray, thirty-one-year-old Boxer plopped on a couch next to Rock's brother Jim.

There were a half-dozen new-age flower children gathered in the old living room Rock had shared with Tall Bob and Tina all those years ago, and they watched as Rock sat on the couch and Butch curled against his ribcage, placed his front paws on his shoulders, and licked his face.
Rock was overjoyed.

"Butch," Rock said. "Where the fuck have you been?"

Horse people

Rock had written a story about a thoroughbred owner and breeder from a ranch in northern Arkansas near Marshall. The next day he received a series of emails and text messages, all of which read: "Rock, I am a lot richer than you think."
Rock wasn't sure how to respond, but considered, "I'm glad to hear it", and, "It's too bad everyone can't say that."
All he knew for certain was that he had exactly twenty-five minutes to get to the War Memorial Golf Course parking lot. Fuck these horse people. Get outa my way, douche bag.

The Presbyterian Red Skin

Presbyterian College recently opened a branch in Russellville, Arkansas. It was near Crawford Elementary—where Rock attended third and fourth grade—about three-quarters of a mile east of the Arkansas Tech campus.
Rock had walked there from a fast-food Mexican restaurant on El Paso Street and found it looked remarkably similar to the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, with the same rolling hills he remembered from graduate school. The school's athletic teams were known as the Red Skin, which reminded Rock of the main campus, Presbyterian College in South Carolina, whose mascot were the Blue Hose.
On his way back to the Mexican Restaurant, Rock got lost in a maze of city streets and dense woodlands. He at last came upon a cliff from which he could see the neighborhoods near Tech, but to get to them would demand he leap into the top of a one-hundred-foot tree. As dangerous as he knew that would be, the climb from the top and height of the lowest branches would also put him in peril. Rock did not believe he was likely to survive this descent, but he knew of no other route back to civilization.

Softball

It was close to midnight, the deadline for the state of Arkansas to execute a man found guilty of murder. Rock waited with a large group of reporters in the parking lot of the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, where the prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection.
One of the television anchors, Greg O'Neil, a man Rock had known since the late 1970s, opened his car trunk, which was filled with softball gloves, balls, and bats.
"Anyone interested in a game?" O'Neil said.
It was a hazy, hot afternoon, but everyone seemed eager to play.

Bleeding

Rock was dressed in a new pair of red racing flats, and red running shorts and singlet. He ran fast onto what he thought and hoped was a loop off the main highway outside of town and past a young boy and girl. He wondered whether they could tell him if he was indeed on a loop that led back to the highway, but they didn't know.
The girl commented on his dress. "Is your favorite color red?"
Rock continued on his way until he passed four men in their early twenties. He could tell they were each intoxicated. One of them, clearly the group's leader, let Rock know he was on the proper path back to the highway.
It took a minute before Rock saw evidence that these young men had been in a car wreck. One was bleeding profusely from his right arm.

Rachel

There was a rumor going about that Rock and actress Rachel Welch had engaged in an inappropriate relationship, perhaps sexual in nature. It was spurred by several sightings of the two walking together on a rural state highway north of the Little Rock Air Force Base, not far from Vilonia.
Rock said the whole idea was ridiculous. "Just go check," he said. "I was in the middle of a fifty-mile walk, and we just happened to cross paths for a while."
Someone reported they had seen Rock and Welch kissing.
"I have no memory of that," Rock said.

The way it works

A light warm mist fell across the gray daybreak and backstretch barns of Oaklawn Park as Rock and his new girlfriend walked toward the stables of Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas.
Rock's cat Jo was there when they arrived. She knew all there was to know about horse racing, so Rock let her guide his date around the barn. Jo was wide-eyed and seemed thrilled by this opportunity to demonstrate her expertise.
After a bit of furniture upheaval, Rock ate a tube of Gu and realized that Jo, an otherwise remarkable house cat, knew little to nothing about the training of racehorses.
He was momentarily disappointed.

Firecracker

The time had come for yet another advance story for the Firecracker Fast 5K, and as far as Rock was concerned, the most notable element of this year's race was that, two days before the Fourth, only fifty people had registered. He began his story with the contrast between last summer's Firecracker, when a record crowd of over sixteen-hundred ran, and the present race, which had thus far generated sparse interest. The only thing Rock needed was to find the name of the fiftieth person to register.
Early on race day, it was clear that a late rush of entrants would put in place a field more typical in numbers of recent Firecrackers. The new oddity was that the race would begin and end indoors, in what looked like an old school building. Rock helped his friend Tom Zaloudek construct wooden banked curves around several tight hallway turns.

Russellville won

Russellville and Greenwood played for the Arkansas Class 6A football championship, but days later, Rock still didn't know which school won. He spoke of his frustration to a group of apparently homeless people in the hallway of the Democrat Building basement, from whom he got one response.
It came from a young man with shaggy blonde hair, dressed in old jeans and a tattered, wrinkled polo shirt, who said he was a Greenwood High dropout. He told Rock that all he knew was that Russellville won. "I don't have any idea what the score was," he said. "I heard your guys have a great quarterback."

Daylight savings time

As crazy as this sounds, Rock woke up scared that there was a chance daylight savings time might result in the death of everyone who lived in the American central time zone. There was, in his hypoglycemic dream, a cushion that covered the entire zone, and its support consisted of poles and rods that would replace actual human arms when humans slept or were too cold to come out from under the covers. That was all that would prevent the heavy cushion from collapsing on this section from western Kansas through Tennessee, Alabama, and Illinois.
Rock was convinced that he had figured the matter correctly, so much so that he debated the relative importance of arranging sweatpants and golf clubs to keep himself warm and his house intact against making the tee-time he and John Czernecki had agreed to for a round of golf at War Memorial Golf Course.
He gradually began to wonder how this could be. Surely no one would have ever accepted this arrangement.

Ridges

A clerk at Nevada Bob's showed Rock the latest in driver technology, and Rock couldn't imagine how it worked. The driver's very wide, shallow club head had hard plastic ridges inserted into the grooves that protruded about a quarter of an inch from the face. Rock was baffled and not at all surprised when he took it into the shop's indoor range and scattered shots all over the room. This bit of technology made no sense to him.

Out of place

Somehow Rock had worked his way into the Country Club of Little Rock and all the way to the small banquet hall in back, where a former U.S. president was scheduled to address invited members and a few preferred guests. At first, Rock thought he had a chance to get away with this charade but soon noticed that everyone else who entered the hall wore formal wear. Rock, on the other hand, wore khaki slacks and an untucked polo shirt. He was in running shoes with no socks.
Before anyone asked him to leave, Rock walked out of the hall and into winding hallways that led to countless paneled rooms with dark hardwood floors and old, perfect furniture.
The problem was that he couldn't find a door to the outside. He wasn't sure there was one. At some point, he knew he would have to ask someone for directions, which sounded awful.

Coiled thoughts

Few matters would ever become as mysterious as this. Rock was in some sort of loop that united a large rock—the one near a trailhead by the Covered Bridge in Burns Park—with the nightstand of his back bedroom. He was caught in someone's imagination or dream and there seemed no escape.
There was a matter of religion stirred into these infinitely coiled thoughts. It seemed for a moment that Rock was to believe he was a savior of some sort. To accomplish the goal set before him, whatever it was, he would need to remove an invisible cord that bound him to the rock. He wasn't sure, but he suspected that the survival of man might hinge on his effort.
He was momentarily crippled by a tremendous cramp in his right calve, and his faith wavered, but only until he opened a maroon package of blackberry Gu.
It was dark out. Rock looked at his watch to see it was close to daybreak on Wednesday morning.

The flying building

Rock had selected a table on the deck of a Mexican restaurant in Little Rock's River Market, and he and the group with him fit with the festive spirit of almost everyone there. He was joined by friends Chris and Erin, Erin's father Paul, Rock's maternal grandmother, and several of her friends who, like she, had been dead since the 1990s.
The deck overlooked the Arkansas River, and as Rock ate, he tried to describe the Mexican TV dinners his grandmother had kept throughout his childhood in her back-porch deep freeze. "They had two big tacos, with two enchiladas and a hot tamale all smothered in chili, and of course beans and rice," he said. "I'm telling you, they were great."
Paul laughed and said he wished he could change his order, but as he spoke, Rock suddenly saw something absolutely startling fly by above North Little Rock. It looked like a skyscraper, apparently propelled by the red glow at its base. He was for a moment too stunned or frightened to speak. He sat with his grandmother's friends Jo Baker and Miss Clyde on the south side of the long table, which gave them a clear view of the river and the flying building. He was almost scared to find out what it was.
"Look at that," Rock finally said. "What is it? For Christ's sake, it looks like one of the Twin Towers."
Before he could get anyone save Miss Clyde's attention, the UFO had disappeared behind the downtown skyline. It would reappear at brief intervals between buildings, but before Rock could point out this nearly unimaginable sight, it was obscured by a bank of clouds.
"How was that possible?" Miss Clyde said in a tone that clearly bespoke astonished fear. "Do you suppose someone like Bill Gates, or maybe the U.S. government had something to do with it?"
"I don't know," Rock said, his eyes still glued to the dark orange sunset for another glimpse. "Maybe Elon Musk was in on it."

A globe

Pam and Jo watched as Rock sat in the main chair of his back bedroom and watched a clone of himself attempt to isolate everything he owned into a large, glowing globe that spun in the darkness near books shelved on a rack in his closet.
Rock was a bit groggy, but it was clear to him that Jo wanted out.

Basketball news

One of the nurses told Rock that his father had taken up basketball, which seemed borderline unbelievable.
"The thing is, he's really good at it," she said. "And he's really seemed happy since he started playing."
Rock already thought it was incredible the way his father had parlayed a room in Nashville Nursing and Rehab into a budding Howard County real-estate empire, but this basketball news topped everything.

Big money

A breakthrough seemed very close, yet Rock still struggled to grasp its significance. He had imagined from the start that dollar bills might have been the primary keys in the emergence of the British Empire, an area of research he had engaged in for years. Now he faced a bill the size of a door mat and it wouldn't fit into the instruments available to him. He suddenly had a large stack of ridiculous-looking dollar bills that were of no purpose or value to him. It might have been funny, but this project was too critical to his subsistence to bear humor. It wasn't a life-or-death dilemma, like so many others, but it was crucial nevertheless.
Rock stood confused in his den. He wasn't sure what to do next. It was five in the morning and still dark outside. He wondered if a tube of Gu might help.

Art

A large, joyous group of elderly men and women walked from a yellow school bus toward a grocery store in Sacramento, California. Rock was looking for a place to park, but it was plain this slow parade of retirees would take a while to clear his only route to any of the spots up close. He parked where he was and watched as one of the women smiled toward someone walking from the store who she and her friends obviously knew.
"Hey, it's Art," she said.
Art looked up and laughed, and Rock knew in that instant the significance of this man's stature in the group.

The long run

There was no doubt this run of the Little Rock Hash had gone too long, but even so, Rock couldn't explain the divergence of landmarks he and his friends had passed.
The start was in Little Rock's River Market district, near downtown. The large group would later pass through Levy and eventually reach Russellville. Rock and several others ran by the old Wonder Burger, right where it had always been, about a half mile south of the Arkansas Tech campus on El Paso Street. Rock remembered it closing more than forty years earlier when he was in junior high school. It had remained there as an abandoned, ramshackle ghost of itself as long as he could remember but now was in full operation.
They were headed on El Paso south toward Main Steet. Rock still felt strong, but when Skip and Cassandra complained that they had been out too long, Rock couldn't resist the opportunity for humor.
"Yeah, this thing better not be any longer than another two or three feet," he said.
Skip laughed and said,  "Right. Otherwise I'm gonna go back to the Wonder Burger."

Stories

There was a wad of loose paper stuffed into an envelope that also contained Rock's paycheck. He pulled out the check and tossed the envelope and paper into a dumpster without consideration.
Rock was second in line at a bank drive-through, next to the dumpster, and eager to deposit his check as quickly as possible. His friends Keith Brown and Donna Falkenhain were in town. They, in fact, stood beside Donna's car in the bank parking lot and seemed as eager as Rock to hook up for the day.
As Rock prepared to endorse the check, he noticed a newspaper clipping on the edge of the dumpster. He recognized it as a story he had written. After concluding in an instant that all of the paper in the envelope had been cutouts of stories he wrote, Rock debated whether to dig through the dumpster for the other stories.
Keith and Donna were no longer factors in his thought process.

Prize winner

It was a groggy yet dazzling awakening for Rock. Though he immediately detected a sense that his privacy had been breached, he remembered that moments earlier he learned his house had belonged to Thomas Wolfe and that his back bedroom had remained perfectly unchanged from Wolfe's literary heyday.
In fact, Rock had watched as a man interviewed the caretakers of Wolfe's estate, which was one and the same as Rock's, or else overlapped it in every detail. At first, Rock was concerned someone might report on the general messiness of the room, but his brief worry was overridden by mystery and joy. Also, he was pleased to know Jo and Pam were now parts of the story.
Rock later remembered that his first thought revolved around a digital television antenna pressed against a window of the cold, dark bedroom once inhabited by Thomas Wolfe. Surely it did not conform with historical accuracy. Of course it didn't.

The mouse

It was black and shaped like a computer mouse, and Rock rolled it back and forth on a card table. He hadn't played cards of any sort in at least twenty years but sat in the back room of a house at a family reunion attempting to justify his purchase of this device designed to enhance the chance of success in a game of poker.
He was joined by a sixty-year-old gray-haired man, dressed in black jeans and a crewneck sweater, who looked exactly like NBC reporter Keith Morrison.
"Those things work really well," he told Rock. "But why do you fidget with it so much? That will wear it out in a hurry, and I know how expensive they are."
Rock explained that his behavior with the mouse was a byproduct of his high-strung nature.
The man left for another engagement, and Rock walked to the living room to rejoin his father, stepmother Lilian, and several aunts and cousins to try the beer the gray-haired visitor brewed.
"I hope y'all like it," he had said. "I'm proud of it."
Someone poured a pint or so of it into a Mason jar and dunked it in an aquarium filled with water and ice cubes.

Something amiss

Central Arkansas's quarterback walked past Rock near Estes Stadium and barely acknowledged him. He resisted eye contact and muttered no more than a semblance of hello as he walked past. A feature story about him by Rock ran as the front center package in the paper that morning, and of course, Rock worried that something about it was amiss.
"To tell you the truth, we were all laughing about it and giving him a hard time this morning," an offensive lineman explained to Rock.
"You know, I haven't even seen it," Rock said. "What was wrong with it?"
The lineman handed a copy of the sports page to Rock, who placed it on a picnic table near the front door of the coaches' offices and the players dressing room.
"It just seemed a little flowery or something," the lineman said.
Rock read the first three paragraphs and found them packed with adjectives and adverbs he had never used. The story read nothing at all like anything he had ever written.

Tree rider

It was impossible to understand. As Rock and an overweight blonde friend of his stood on the back deck of her apartment, they saw a man on horseback desperately gripping a rope slung over a branch at least 150 feet above a dry, rocky riverbed. Submerged in the mystery of this circumstance for Rock was how the horse kept from falling from between the rider's legs, but most of all, he had no idea how the man's strength was possibly adequate to support his own weight and that of a thousand-pound horse.
Obviously, there was more. "What's happened here?" Rock said. "How did he get in that position?"
"I don't know," his friend said. "All I know is that if he lets go, he's dead."
The man screamed for help. Rock could think of nothing to do. The man fell, and he and his horse smashed into the rocks and gravel below. They both lay still as Rock reached for his cell phone.

No escape

Man's time was short. Rock learned from an old college friend that a wave of fire had already begun to spread around the earth and that it would reach them by evening, an hour or two hence.
They were in a small Indian town north of New Dehli in an old abandoned filling station. Rock and his friend stood in what was once the office, but a large group of the friend's former fraternity brothers—men Rock vaguely recalled from Wyoming—was gathered in an adjacent two-bay garage.
Rock was immediately impressed that they seemed at ease with the coming flames. One of them said he heard the fire would miss higher levels of the Himalayas, but Rock subsequently learned the mountains were more than four-hundred miles away and that they would not spare anyone from death anyway. People there would be instantly frozen.
"We found out too late to make it," Rock's friend said. "I mean, I think I'd rather freeze to death than get burned up."
"Same here," Rock said. "This is awful."

The hospitality cabin

There's a long hospitality cabin, painted white with a green roof and shudders, next to the Burns Park Golf Course driving range. It sits in front of an old, battered range-ball dispenser that has dropped yellow golf balls into green plastic buckets for as long Rock can remember. He had seen the cabin there since 1986, thirty feet below and two parking-lot levels away from the clubhouse, but he had never once been inside. Best he could recall, he'd only seen anyone in or around it one time, maybe twenty-five years earlier.
Now he waited there for his cousin Crutch and sat at a long wooden table with platters of dinner rolls and fried pork chops stacked on it. Crutch was supposed to come in from Russellville, seventy-five miles away, but Rock didn't know when he would arrive. He wondered how long he would have to wait and how well pork chops freeze.

The stray big leaguer

It didn't seem at all odd to Rock that a stray Siamese cat from his neighborhood had made the roster of a Major League baseball team. The cat was clearly fit and well nourished. Rock was happy for it.

A blowout revisited

Rock was on the sideline early in the first half of a Dallas Cowboys game at Cowboy Stadium. Dallas was already so far behind that Rock was reminded of the one-hundred-and-six-to-nothing loss he and his Worms Titans teammates experienced in Heidelberg, Germany.
He spoke of it to an overweight, balding middle-aged man who stood beside him. "Man, we played that game more than forty years ago," he said.
The man's eyes widened.  "Believe it or not, I think I know the game you're talking about," he said. "Was it in the fall in of—let me think—1972, or maybe 1971?"
Rock was stunned. "That's incredible," he said. "It was 1972. Don't tell me you were there."
"Well, not that year, but I played there the next two seasons. The guys were still talking about it."
The man told Rock the coach of those Heidelberg teams had retired to Fort Worth.
"His house can't be more than a few miles from here," he said. "As far as I know, Coach is still there."