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.