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.