Strike zone

It shaped up like a pressure-free relief opportunity for Rock, but it had turned into the makings of a nightmare. When he took the mound to start the ninth inning, his team led 11-4. Now it was 11-9 with two outs and runners on second and third. Rock was the last available pitcher and his arm was through. The ball seemed odd in his hand, and the strike zone had become impossibly small.
Shortly after the game, Rock said it felt as if he were attempting to pitch an old cell phone, one from the mid to late 1980s, back when they were the size and shape of dumbbells. He had walked consecutive batters on four pitches, each with tosses well over their heads.
"I just couldn't keep them from sailing on me, but I didn't know what I was doing," Rock said. "I'd never tried to pitch a cell phone before."
Apparently, the last batter popped out to end the game, but Rock remembered nothing of that. All he could recall was his panic.

Computer trouble

Rock had accidentally clicked on a Safari icon on the row of browser options at the bottom of his laptop screen, and there were now three boxes labeled Safari on his screen, each nearly two square inches in size. He almost always relied on Chrome as his browser, and he needed it to search for information he had agreed to deliver to several acquaintances, but now the function of his screen was limited by the three large boxes he couldn't seem to do anything with.
Matt, a neighbor from a block away who still worked full-time at the paper, came by to help. Rock showed him how he had tried to move the boxes back into the icon that had at some point shifted to the top of the screen. He could move them to it, but the icon rejected them each time.
"They're too big," Matt said.
"I thought that, too, but I haven't been able to shrink them down," Rock said.
"Have you tried this?" Matt said as he reached to touch the screen with his right index finger. Rock watched as he shrunk the boxes with his fingertip.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't know you could do that with this computer."
Although Rock was pleased to learn of that function, it failed to help. Matt still couldn't get the icon to accept the Safari boxes.

Lou Peyton

Lou Peyton, a woman Rock had known since college, was parked beside him at a state high school track meet near Little Rock. Lou had been noteworthy throughout his experience with her as perhaps the most significant of founding members of the state's running community, but he had also known her as a wine connoisseur. It did not seem at all unusual when she handed him a bottle she said she had recently found in her house.
"Have you ever heard of this?" Lou said.
The bottle was the size, shape, and color of an old quart of Michelob. Rock could see it was open and half empty and clearly dated 1986.
"No, I've never seen this before," he said. "Have you tasted it?"
After Lou said she had not, she found at Rock's request a used disposable cup of some sort and handed it to him. Rock poured a bit the red wine and tried it to find a smooth, rich flavor.
"This is fine," he said. "Really, it's surprisingly good."

Dust devils

Dozens of dust devils began to spin across a large city park crowded with women and children. Rock chose the park as a shortcut from where his car had broken down a few minutes earlier, and shortly after he began his trek toward help, he found a broken pen in a front pocket of his khaki slacks. Ink flowed from it, and it had spread on his hands, arms, and face, and now dust blown up from the barren grounds around him stuck in the ink.
Rock paused to smear the now-black grit on his hands as the women and children looked toward him through the wind-tossed dust.

Weeb

Rock's friend Erin asked him who he thought was the best radio sports play-by-play announcer. He did not mean to mislead her when he said the best ever was Weeb Eubank.
"He did the New York Jets games back in the 60s and 70s when Joe Namath was playing," Rock said. "No one ever called a game as well as he did."
Later that day, Rock remembered that Weeb Eubank wasn't the announcer but rather the Jets' head coach through most of Namath's career. He couldn't imagine why he had confused that matter. In fact, he was fairly certain he had never so much as heard a Jets radio broadcast.

Cobwebs

Rock had fought a battle with spiders and their white strands of refuse since he moved into his house in Levy, but suddenly these drooping, bug-littered cobwebs seemed geared to take over. His entire bathtub and shower were littered with them, even though he had showered late in the afternoon the day before, no more than eighteen hours earlier.

Trial results

One of Rock's neighbors, a pretty woman of middle-eastern descent, was on trial for murder. Apparently, someone found her boyfriend or husband dead in her house in Levy.

No one on Orange Street could understand why she had been arrested. From at least Rock's perspective, there was no way this woman could have killed anyone.

He watched the judge declare her guilty, which elicited gasps throughout the courtroom. Moments later, the same judge said she was innocent, but shortly thereafter reinstated his guilty verdict. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

A correlation

Few matters had ever been as meaningful to life on earth as the one before Rock at the foot of his back bedroom's twin bed. Its complexity was almost beyond his ability to understand, but he knew he must. Everything—absolutely everything—depended on him.
Nothing about any part of this puzzle was clear, but he suspected a correlation between the hundreds of multiple-digit numbers emitted from a quilt on the bed and a song on his alarm-clock radio that had played nonstop for hours might provide a clue.
Rock's cat Jo looked on quizzically, a common posture for her in his experience.

Odd names

The Arkansas-Little Rock men's basketball team played a home game on the night after a pop concert was held in the same Little Rock arena. When the game was over, Rock stepped into a banquet hall and therein was introduced to two young women who apparently starred in the concert. Someone in the hall turned on an audio device that played one of the women's songs, and it was exactly the kind of contemporary music Rock liked most—a sort sung ever-so-slightly off-key, usually by women.
Rock estimated these singers were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old, both cute but of the emo ilk, with bright colors dyed into their hair and multiple tattoos. One of the two was clearly drunk, and she handed Rock a small plaque. It was an award, something like an Emmy, Rock assumed, and when he read it, he was surprised by the oddity of their first names. He saw that the drunk woman was named Myok and the other Shiebold and knew those names had to have been changed from whatever their birth names were. He turned to Myok and asked, "What does your mother think about that name?"
Myok laughed. "Not too much," she said. "In fact, I think she hates it."

Number one

It was clear that Rock had created the number most English speakers learn first—the number one—and, as a result, had acquired all of the world's wealth and power. He let his cat Jo out a little after midnight and sat to contemplate this new circumstance.
He wondered where his bifocals were and how all of this would affect a round of golf scheduled for Sunday morning.

Lakeside

Rock sat in the back seat of Ron's and Elaine's four-door Jeep, with the top removed, as they rode in a caravan of Little Rock Hashers and dozens of their vehicles on a winding lakeside road. Everyone behaved as if they were in the festive sorts of spirits typical of any Hash outing, and Rock was engaged enough to not have noticed Ron's wide right sweep onto an observation platform near the edge of the lake.
Ron suddenly veered left, and Rock looked to simultaneously see why he had made the adjustment and that it had come too late. In the next instant, the Jeep rolled down a ridge and into the lake. Water and panic washed across Rock, but he was easily able to swim away from the vehicle and saw that Ron and Elaine had also escaped. His fear vanquished, Rock swam to shore with Elaine by his side.
"What is Ron doing?" someone on the shore said.
"I don't know, but it doesn't look like a good idea," a Hasher nicknamed Amy Winehouse said.
Rock stood on the slick rock face of the shoreline and watched Ron dive straight down underwater toward his Jeep, which had come to rest at least fifty feet below.

Mass arrest

Lists were handed out that included the names of several people Rock knew. Each were wanted for questioning by several state and federal agencies, and some feared this might preface some sort of mass arrest. One of the men listed told Rock it reminded him of the days that proceeded Yugoslavia's collapse into Serbia and Croatia nearly thirty years earlier.

The San Francisco treat

Like a holiday scene from Rock's childhood, there were ten or more festive people in his maternal grandmother's kitchen in Nashville, Arkansas. Among them were several newcomers, including Rock's friend Erin, who walked in with her arms around two brown paper sacks stuffed with groceries.
Rock looked through one after she placed them on a counter near the oven and was surprised to find a box of Rice-A-Roni.
"Rice-A-Roni?" he said. "What, is this part of the holiday tradition for Chris' family?"
"It is," Erin said. "He really likes it."
She agreed to let Rock help with the preparation, and he was pleased to see ways in which she had doctored the ingredients. Erin told him when to add the piles of shredded carrots and diced celery and onions as a large pot of water came to a boil.

Hole in the wall

A platform of old, rotten wooden cylinders was built on the back of Rock's house. The cylinders were about the size of large cans of chunky soup and seemingly served no purpose.
The back walls of the house faced an alley that served as a route for service and utility vehicles, most commonly garbage trucks in Rock's experience. In this case, he looked out of his kitchen window to see a Levy city pickup crunch along the alley's gravel surface. Among the bearded men on board, Rock saw one he had known fifteen or twenty years earlier from the gate crew at Oaklawn Park, a racetrack in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He couldn't remember his name but recalled he had admired him and figured he would know exactly what to do with the crumbling cylinders.
This man from his past stepped from the truck and walked to the platform with a sledgehammer. With four or five swings, he knocked away the cylinders and, to Rock's horror, nearly twenty square feet of his back wall.
Infuriated, Rock ran into his backyard and tried to scream at the men on the truck, but he had lost his voice and could manage no more than a raspy whisper. Apparently, he was heard. As the truck rolled away, the man he remembered yelled back, "You're not going to sue anyone, motherfucker."

Far too long

A pretty nurse with short, frosted blonde hair and an eastern European or Russian accent ran down the stairs behind Rock as he tried to hurry out of the downtown medical clinic. It seemed to Rock he had sat in the waiting room far too long. He thought he had a cold, but it cleared up as he waited, and he had fallen asleep beside the nurse.
When Rock heard her shoes click on the marble steps as she descended toward him, he remembered he was supposed to pick up some medication.
"You have to get your medicine, sir," the nurse said.
Another nurse behind the countertop of a small pharmacy handed Rock his prescription, which was a plastic bag filled with pills and what looked like a three-dimensional puzzle of some sort, with shiny metal pins and white cubes about the size of Captain Crunch cereal bits.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Rock asked his doctor.
"Just follow the instructions," he said.

Dick and Nance

Rock's longtime friends Dick and Nancy Lewis were in town from their home in Bellingham, Washington. They chose to stay at John Czarnecki's modest home in west Little Rock, and Rock drove over from Levy to jog with Dick and his five-year-old daughter.
Dick and Nancy were about forty-five years old, same as when Rock met them in the summer of 1980, which seemed about right.
When Rock arrived, Nancy asked him if there were local ordinances in place that concerned exercise routines for children. "I'm not aware of any, Nance," he said. "Obviously, child welfare is far more regulated than when you raised your boys or when we were kids, but I don't know anything about any jogging rules."

End of time

A multinational information technology firm had launched a system of enormous satellites and nearly planet-sized orbital telescopes designed to gather every bit of data from the entire known universe. It had been turned on the night before, and the result was a backlog of information so infinite that it began to shut down computers around the world, in itself an unprecedented calamity.
It was all too much. Everything that had occurred over the previous 13.8 billion years, every detail since the instant of the Big Bang, would eventually crowd out the present universe. Nothing would be the same. Life itself would soon have no room to function.
When Rock turned on his television just before daybreak, he was surprised to see that reports of this end of time were not on every channel.
Bit by bit, he began to understand that nothing was out of order. He knew that every media outlet would have no choice but to broadcast nonstop news of the most significant cosmologic event since the start of everything, particularly in light of its manmade origin.

Running

It had been years since Rock had felt this good while running. Indeed, he had never felt better, and it had been this way throughout his trip for the paper. He was at a racetrack somewhere in Texas. The people in the press box and racing office were the same he worked with at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, and he explained to one of them how he had learned to appreciate airports.
"They're great for running in," he said. "I had never noticed that before, but in a lot of them you can go miles without getting in anyone's way."
Shortly thereafter, he ran along a highway that connected the track to the airport and felt great, as if he were floating.

A former Hasher

Rock's tiny one-room house shook from an explosive collision. It sounded and felt as if it came from a block or so away, and as Rock walked toward his back door to investigate, someone knocked loudly.
Rock opened the door to see a middle-aged, overweight man who had attended a handful of Little Rock Hash runs ten to fifteen years earlier.
"Hey, man," Rock said. "You're Rick, right?"
"That's right, Rock. It's good to see you."
"Same here. Did you hear that noise?"
"As a matter of fact, I just ran my truck into a house back there," Rick said as he pointed toward a row of houses obscured by sheds and garages along the alley that ran past Rock's back door.
He later explained he had rented the main house of the property Rock had shared with several people over the proceeding ten years.

Some things

A Little Rock Hasher named Ben, also known as Amy Winehouse, asked if he could have access to Rock's car. He reminded Rock that he had left some things on the driver's side floorboard of the back seat during the Arkansas Traveller 100-Miler a month earlier, and Rock readily granted him permission to look.
Rock was engaged with others in the front yard of a working-class-neighborhood home near the UALR campus when Ben returned to say the things were gone.
"Man, I'm really sorry, Ben," Rock said. "What did you leave back there?"
"Well, it was some pretty important stuff."
It was clear to Rock that Ben was angered.
"What was it?" Rock said. "Was it very valuable."
"Yes, it was," Ben said. "It was worth about two-thousand bucks."

Story idea

There was a game, early in the season, during which Rock watched a fantastic first play run by the Texas Longhorns. The play involved such intricate timing that it was clear the team had rehearsed it hundreds of times, and it worked perfectly against whoever Texas played that day. Rock agreed to write a story about it, but he realized this story idea would require too much effort, particularly on a Saturday morning in the middle of a college football season.
He would have to talk to somewhere between five and ten players and coaches, almost all of whom were no more than a few hours away from game times. Besides, he couldn't find the play anywhere on the internet.
Rock was immeasurably frustrated. He was furthermore fearful the paper would no longer offer him assignments.

A bad turn

It was as though Rock never stopped dipping snuff, though he indeed had more than eight years earlier. He put in a dip of Copenhagen as he waited for halftime interviews in the University of Central Arkansas men's basketball team's locker room. He placed the can of snuff on a random surface, perhaps a table or desk. Unfortunately, he would soon forget.
The team's starting point guard walked in during the closing seconds of the half and spoke to Rock of the opposition's point guard. "He's really good," the player said. "Their whole team is good."
Rock had all he needed and walked out of the locker room, headed toward his courtside workstation. As he did, he passed the rest of the team and its coach as they left the court, and it suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten to retrieve the snuff can, which seemed to him direly problematic.
Somehow, Rock imagined a scenario in which the coach erupted in anger toward his players, as in, "I want to know right now which one of you brought this snuff in here."
He believed this could only turn disastrous.

An Italian holodeck

Rock and his friend Tim Cooper were in an Italian restaurant located near the top of an old New York City skyscraper. It was dimly lited and packed full of people seated at heavy dark wooden tables and surrounded by burgundy velvet wall covering. From the start, the scene seemed stereotypical to the point it reminded Rock of something from a Star Trek holodeck.
When they arrived, Rock and Tim were with several older friends and extended family members, some of whom complained the restaurant was too crowded. They all agreed to leave within a few minutes, but neither Rock nor Tim could remember where the exit was. As they looked, it soon became apparent that they were stuck in some sort of bizarre maze.

Service cat

All Rock had to do to begin to collect five-hundred and forty-nine dollars a month from the federal government was to have his cat Jo declared a service animal, and that would take him no more than to sign into his Macintosh operating system and fill out a service-animal form on a government website. He didn't think for an instant that this sounded too good to be true. The notification was right there, plain as day, on his laptop computer.

The only problem was that his MacBook Pro insisted at daybreak Saturday that he change its operating system from Sierra to the new Mojave, and he couldn't remember any of his passwords. Besides, Rock began to worry about the legality of declaring Jo a service animal and decided the best thing was to let Jo out, eat a PayDay bar, and go back to bed.

Solid contact

It was as if Rock had never before golfed. He had no chance to make solid contact with the ball on any of his shots, and he didn't know what to do about it. He couldn't remember having played any particular hole or course, but he knew his game had fallen to pieces and that it was the worst thing that could possibly have happened to him.

Reality TV

Rock's cat Jo had become the runaway winner of some sort of reality-TV gameshow that Rock didn't understand at all. It seemed to involve plastic clothes hangers. The best Rock could tell, the final episode had been televised from his house, but Jo didn't seem affected. Rock wondered if she was even aware of her success.

Tensile strength

It seemed absolutely incredible to Jeff Reid that anyone would pay him eighty-five dollars to photograph them as they served tennis balls, but Reid told Rock that the money just kept rolling in.
It rolled in until someone noticed that Reid's pictures were out of focus and not of anyone hitting anything at all like tennis balls.
Rock investigated long enough to see that the underpinnings of Reid's attempts were caught in some sort of suction. It was impossible to get off the floor. Rock was suddenly bound by polyester straps weaved in such a way that he had no chance to overcome their tensile strength, and he needed to use the bathroom.

Rock knew

Everyone counted on Rock to solve this fundamental problem with structure. Buildings had begun to crumble and collapse all over Little Rock. Roads and bridges turned to powder before Rock had a chance to get anywhere he needed to go. At some point, he knew, he had the knowledge to solve this problem, but now had no idea what to do. Calls were beginning to come in from all over the country.
"The entire world is going to need you soon," Elizabeth said. "You do know that, don't you?"
Rock knew, and he was panicked beyond reason. This was as bad as it had ever been.

Infinity

This would be intolerable, surely. Rock said the word, "Infinity," and it began to repeat itself again and again. It would not stop, and it was loud beyond reason. There was talk that it might echo forever and that mankind might be unable to endure such a circumstance. Rock hoped no one would know he was the man who ignited this insane oddity.

Lunch

Rock stopped by Russellville High School in Russellville, Arkansas, to have lunch with his twin first cousins, Bill and Crutch Aikman. They were joined by Keith Ledbetter, a boy their age who grew up two houses west of theirs. Rock's cousins and Keith were still in high school, whereas he was a 59-year-old sportswriter in town from Levy to watch a high school football game for the paper.
Bill, Crutch, and Rock ate the standard school-lunch fare—meat of some fried sort, green beans, and corn, but Keith had a feast in front of him. It looked like a meal from the Faded Rose, with trout almondine, featuring a whole trout,  a soaked salad, and steamed vegetables with a cheese sauce.
Rock had never seen anything like it on a school lunch table. "Keith, do you always eat a lunch like this?" he said.

Early October

Rock's professor was a cute, perhaps thirty-five-year old Asian woman. He had only seen her a once or twice, or however many times he had attended her class, which he remembered as something from the advanced biological sciences. There was one other student in the lab when Rock walked in.
He approached the professor, and it suddenly occurred to him that this wasn't the only class he had so frequently skipped. It was the first day of October and he knew he was enrolled in three or four others that he hadn't attended since the first week of the semester.
The time had come to turn things around, and Rock hoped to find a sympathetic ear in this pretty and smiling young professor.

Jen One

Jen Reynolds appeared out what seemed like nowhere to Rock. He hadn't seen her in nearly twenty years, but there she stood in the backyard of his tiny, one-room house on 35th Street. She held three kittens, one of whom would become the mother of his longtime pet cat Pam.
Rock didn't know what to say, even after Jen asked how the Green Bay Packers would play in the coming season. She looked like the twenty-four-year-old he remembered from so long ago.

It worked

It was the same scooter Rock had ridden thirty-five years earlier when he was in graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Now he was back in the same environs, inhabited by the same faces he remembered from his mid-twenties.
He found the scooter, a lime-green Honda with eight-inch tires, parked in the back of the old Razorback Pub on Dickson Street, and it started right up. As he rode it up toward and into downtown, he noticed it had become unbalanced. The hand grips were loose, and it tended to stall at low speeds, but it worked, and it was still fun to ride through the halls of the Aransas Democrat Building in Little Rock.
Rick McFarland flagged him down on the ground floor, which had the dusty, barren, and unfinished look Rock remembered from his first year or two at the paper. Several of the old men from the print shop were with him.
"Rock, we're putting together a Classix ticket," Rick said. "You want in?"
Gamblers had to pick winners of six consecutive races to cash in the Classix at Oaklawn Park. Rock always tossed in a few bucks.
"Of course," Rock said. "What do y'all need?"

A puppy

Erin couldn't understand why Rock had agreed to keep Tommy Smith, a local radio personality, as a house pet.
"He isn't housebroken?" she said. "What were you thinking?"
"I know it seems crazy, but it's not as bad as all that," Rock said. "He just doesn't like to be outside. I mean, he's not going to go on the floors or anything."
Later, just as dawn began to break, Tommy was a puppy—a boxer who seemed eager to dash out of the front door with Jo the cat.

How to fly

Rock had just left a large group of friends and acquaintances in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was on the way to his car, parked on a lakeshore close to the hotel. His legs had felt particularly strong and springy throughout the morning, and he felt compelled to run as he proceeded along a sidewalk. Shortly after he began to run, he jumped to see how long he could remain airborne. To his pleasure, he immediately knew he could float as long as he wanted, but as he approached a wide flight of concrete steps that descended to the street and beach below, he decided to opt for safety and land just short of the stairwell.
Rock guessed he had experienced this ability to fly a dozen or more times over the course of his life, including at least once in 2014. Unlike those times, though, this time he knew he wasn't dreaming. He was disappointed no one had seen him. https://hypoglycemicdreams.blogspot.com/search?q=jump+phase

Pam's place

Other students were fully aware of Rock's cat Pam. She had become somewhat of a fixture on the walkways and the mezzanine near White Hall, a dormitory on the southwestern edge of the University of Wyoming campus. It was still warm out, and Pam was as pretty as she had ever been, and she looked on fearlessly as students hurried past between classes.
Rock watched her walk up a short, wide concrete stairway and leap onto the base of its guardrail to make way for a group of coeds passing through.
"You have a beautiful cat, Rock," one said.
Rock was of course delighted, but he had already begun to worry about Pam's place in the cold weather to come.

Crazy

Rock and a literary professor friend of his walked together at dusk in the downtown of a major American city. They had just learned that The New Yorker agreed to publish an excerpt from Rock's novel A Different Closet and to pay him eight-thousand dollars.
"Has any student of yours had a story published in The New Yorker?" Rock said.
The professor considered for a moment.
"Yes," he said. "One, a long time ago, but I don't think they paid him eight-thousand for it."
"That was crazy," Rock said. "Heck, I can't understand why they paid me anything. I don't think I will ever write anything worthy of The New Yorker. I hope I'm not embarrassed by this."

You're dead

Someone decided to take a shortcut through Rock's apartment, which was easy since Rock left the kitchen door unlocked. He watched from the parking lot as the overweight man walked right through.
The solution was simple enough; Rock walked in and to the back door in the kitchen and engaged both its doorknob and bolt locks. He then returned to the living room and locked the front door, but as he stepped away, he saw through his front window a handful of Latino men and boys approach the door and knock.
Rock considered ignoring them, but he figured they had seen him through the window, so he unlocked the door. "What can I do for you?" he said.
"We hoped you would let us walk through your apartment." The man who spoke was the oldest of the group, perhaps thirty years old, Rock estimated.
"I hate to tell you, but I don't think that's a good idea," Rock said. "I hope you understand, but I just don't think it's a good idea to let people use my apartment as a shortcut."
Just then, a teenage boy appeared from behind Rock. He held a handful of small black plastic electronic equipment of some sort and was smiling.
"Look what I've already stolen," he said.
"Wait a minute," Rock said. "What's going on?"
The thirty-year-old smiled. "We're robbing you."
The group forced its way past Rock, and their leader shoved him against a wall. "You're dead," he said. "There's nothing you can do."

Shorthand

She was cute in a boyish sort of way, perhaps lesbian, Rock thought. He had come to the Arkansas-Little Rock sports information office at the Trojan Fieldhouse to interview her for a feature story he planned to write about one of her teammates on the school's women's basketball team. This particular player was no more than five feet tall and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds. She had short brunette hair, with bangs she frequently swept from her eyes.
Before Rock began the interview, he realized he had forgotten to bring a quote pad, but it occurred to him that he may have a left one years earlier in an office closet. He looked to find he indeed had. It appeared at a glance, and he opened it to see the names Tony Chime and Fred Summers scribbled on the first page. They were players from the early 1990s.
Rock was stunned. "Wow," he said. "Take a look at this."
He handed it to the player seated before him. "Have you ever heard of Tony Chime?"
Of course she hadn't. "How do you read this writing?" she said. "Is this shorthand?"

The mountain

Shortly after people in the Ouachita Baptist University football stadium press box became mesmerized by freakish lightning bolts seemingly wrapped in clear plastic bubbles, the mountain approximately two miles west of town began to rumble. It had long been a landmark for press box personnel, rising as it did from the barren, desert landscape before them. It was shaped somewhat like a volcano, and now, in the middle of a violent electrical storm, it began to act like one.
Rock thought he had heard that the mountain was in no way volcanic. He had always believed it wasn't, but as he watched, the top suddenly cracked open, and it exploded with such violence the entire stadium shook.
Fire and rock blasted up and outward. It seemed as if the stadium was in dire jeopardy, but the large boulders launched from the explosion landed in a nearby practice field. The only remaining risk was the vast amount of water that had begun to rush from the obliterated mountaintop. It poured like lava toward the stadium, but it soon became clear that it would not endanger anyone there.

Lightning

Lightning appeared across the horizon, and Rock and everyone else in the Ouachita Baptist University football press box watched with wariness as it approached, though Rock thought it was frighteningly beautiful.
Mixed in with normal strikes, common to Rock's experience, were bolts that looked as if they were wrapped in plastic tubes. These oddities increased and soon became the talk of the press box.
"What could possibly cause those?" a young writer seated next to Rock asked.
"I don't know," Rock said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Rock's only chance

The object of the game was to toss wads of notebook paper into a wastepaper basket within an allotted time. In Rock's case, he had eleven seconds left on the clock and needed to throw in somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty wads to win.
He was in Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There was a sparse crowd, but Rock felt pressure and knew he had little chance. Nevertheless, he hoped things could work in his favor, particularly matters in his own hands. Moments earlier, he had explained to retired University of Arkansas sports information director Rick Schaeffer that his only chance was to wear nothing but a light synthetic short-sleeve T-shirt and a pair of short pants.
"You don't want your clothing to get in the way," Rock said.

The way to Walnut Ridge

The bus driver was on an apparent back route to their destination, Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. Rock was on board, seated near two of his first cousins, twin brothers Bill and Crutch Aikman, and a few of their friends from high school. They had all decided to tag along with Crutch, who had left his car in the parking lot of the football stadium at Walnut Ridge High School. Crutch arranged for the bus to pick all of them up from the Crutchfield house in Nashville, Arkansas.
Rock had never driven from Nashville to Walnut Ridge but knew the towns were about a four-hour drive apart. He also knew the two ways to start the trip, either north on the highway to Murfreesboro or west to Prescott, but the driver headed out of Nashville on Main Street, which turns into a maze of dirt roads a couple of miles north of town. Rock was confused, but they wound through the countryside no more than a few minutes before the driver pulled into the parking lot of Walnut Ridge High's stadium, distinguished by it's rugged, mountainous backdrop.
"I never knew Walnut Ridge was so close to Nashville," Rock said.
"I didn't either," Crutch said. "Does anyone remember the way we just came?"

A roadblock

There was a roadblock ahead, manned by Arkansas State Troopers and an assortment of current and former high school coaches. All sorts of vans and trailers were parked around it, all located inside a large—indeed cavernous—modern high school basketball arena.
As Rock approached, perfectly sober, he felt uneasy, as if this was all set up with him in mind. This odd notion gained credibility when he saw that among the coaches was Henry Hawk, North Little Rock Ole Main High's football coach in the 1970s. Hawk knew Rock ran with the Hash House Harriers, a group known for heavy drinking.
Rock stepped from his pickup and was strapped into a chair attached to a crane. He was told to drink from a small beaker that contained about four ounces of beer. The crane then swung him in wide and high arcs around the gym, from one end to the other and from top to bottom.
Rock protested vigorously as he stepped from the chair. "This is bullshit," he said. "Who came up with this? I haven't had anything to drink in months."

Long and straight

If there was any particular significance to a golf tournament held in Rock's living room-den, he didn't know what it was, but it was apparently meaningful to someone. There was a five-wood on the floor and best he could figure, he had hit it long and straight, perhaps back into the kitchen. The event was the talk of the room.
The course was a mess—furniture out of place, a wastepaper basket knocked over, day-old coffee spilled on the rug. Rock ate two tubes of Gu and tried to stand as Jo watched.

Another cat video

Rock and his cat Jo were entered together in a golf tournament for former Arkansas Razorback football players and a few media representatives, but they were separated shortly after the event started. The course was just west of Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville. Rock knew the grounds well but could not find Jo anywhere.
He later watched a video presentation of her experience in which she found her way to the cart of a middle-aged erstwhile linebacker, but shortly thereafter the player became lost in woodlands off a highway not far from a former grocery store Rock had recently reminisced about as he and an old friend drove through. "The first thing I got worried about was finding some food for the cat," the player said.
Apparently, he eventually found his way to Rock's house, miles from the stadium and golf course, and Rock was relieved beyond reason to find Jo eating from her yellow food bowl behind the couch. All he could figure was the football player let her in before daybreak.

Out of room

There was nothing more important to Rock or those associated with his former baseball team than his attempt to alphabetize their all-time roster and then put together short biographies of each player. He had worked on it from time to time but was unaware until early Sunday morning that all mankind depended on the immediate completion of his work, parts of which were scattered throughout his house.
He remembered his last attempt and how difficult it had become. As before, there were too many names and he was out of room.

Chimpanzees

The Crutchfield cousins were packed into their grandmother's house in Nashville, Arkansas. What's more, they had all brought their pets, and dogs and cats were everywhere. Nita Nichols asked Rock if would go to the kitchen and get a bag of dog food for her. He agreed, but as he walked from the back porch into Pop's old bedroom, he heard a loud chirp from the darkness. He turned on the overhead light to see a chimpanzee on the cast-iron twin bed.
There were baby chimps all over the room. Rock was afraid he might have harmed one when he opened the door.
"Nita," Rock said. "Where did all these monkeys come from?"

A connection

There was a connection between the television in Rock's den, his laptop computer, and his cat Jo. They had combined to instruct him to let Jo out and dress for company on the way. Rock wasn't sure where to go for his next signal, but there was something on television about something he needed to find in order to figure all of this out.
He wondered if he should just go back to bed.

An intruder

Rock awoke to see a man standing beside his bed. His immediate reaction was to swing his pillow, perhaps in an attempt to swat the intruder away. "Take anything you want!" he screamed.
Fully awake, he checked his house to make sure he was the only person inside. He left a hallway light turned on.

Sebastian Coe

A seven-year-old gelding named Sebastian Coe was set to become the star of the Oaklawn Park season. Rock had to explain to others in the press box that the horse was named after the English miler who won gold medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.
Oaklawn director of racing Jason Miller was among those unaware of the name's background.
"It didn't mean anything to me," Miller said.

Indifference

There was a block-long fair underway in Tuckerman, Arkansas, right on Main Street where downtown once stood. Rock was headed south toward Levy, about a hundred miles away, an easy drive he had made close to fifty times over the course of his life, but this fair confused him. Tuckerman was too tiny for back routes. His only choice was to drive directly through town and the festivities. The problem was, booths on opposite sides of the street were no more than twenty feet apart, and hundreds of people were packed between them.
It soon became clear that no one wanted to move out of his way. Rock was halfway through the crowd and stuck amid indignity and indifference.

Chain reaction

Heavy traffic way out west on Asher Avenue seemed odd to Rock, particularly on a weekday night. He was there with a group of friends from the paper to eat at a Mexican restaurant he remembered from his childhood. As they stood in the parking lot, their attention was drawn to two cars headed west at high speed, apparently in a race up the gradual incline of Asher en route to businesses packed around the intersection of I-430 and Colonel Glenn Road.
One of the cars tried to pass through traffic on the eastbound lanes, but it was clear to Rock and his cohorts that the attempt would likely lead to disaster, which it did. They watched the car smash head-on into a city bus to start a chain reaction of collisions and destruction unimaginable in its violence and noise.
Though Rock stood at least a hundred feet from Asher, it soon became apparent to him that he and his friends were in jeopardy as the jumble of demolished vehicles began to spread in their direction.

The injury

Rock's left arm was so severely broken that the world-wide-web was inundated by reports of the injury. No one had ever seen anything like it.

Too much mustard

Rock knew at once that his wedge shot had gotten away from him. He looked up to see it fly over the top of his house and into the backyard. "I put a little too much mustard on that one," he said.
Rock was with Tommy Smith, a friend he'd known since his radio days thirty years earlier.
"A little?" Smith said.
They both laughed. "Fuck," Rock said. "I was trying to hit it twenty feet."
Rock later found the ball on the flat end of a small vertical branch he had once trimmed. It was at least fifteen feet off the ground and perched on a surface roughly the size of a quarter. The result was so improbable that he couldn't get anyone to bother to look for themselves, not even Smith.

Undefeated

It was one of those stories Rock occasionally stumbled upon that demanded a detailed explanation. In this case, there was a high school near the Arkansas State Fairgrounds, in Little Rock's most impoverished district, that fielded a boys basketball team that had never lost a game.
Rock met the team's coach in a small makeshift, cluttered office just off Roosevelt Boulevard. It was built into an old, grubby minimart, with malnourished men and forty-ounce bottles of beer gathered together in the parking lot. He sat on a clipboard someone had placed across a dormant, rusted radiator heater as the coach spoke of the previous night's game, a lopsided victory over a school Rock had never heard of.
"One of our guys scored a hundred and forty points," the coach said.

A city of significance

It was Rock's second shift at the nuclear power plant control site. During his first, no one there knew where the plant was, but this time his coworkers seemed and appeared far more expert. A man in a white lab coat told him the facility they controlled was located in Columbus, Ireland.
Rock had never heard of Columbus, Ireland, but he could tell from aerial photographs on display in the office that it was a city of significance. He was particularly impressed by photos of the sprawling, massive plant.

The enormous bird

An eagle had just flown into the den of the Aikman's house in Russellville. Rock was there with several members of his extended family, including his Uncle Jim, who was in the middle of an NFL game as a linebacker. In fact, Jim had just run up the stairs in pursuit of the opposing quarterback when the enormous bird flew in.

It had typical moose-like antlers common to bald eagles, one of which Rock took hold of to begin his attempt to extract it. The eagle struggled mightily to free itself, but Rock managed to avoid its sharp claws as he carried it toward the back door.

Registration

The crowd of sportswriters, fans, and conference officials reminded Rock of race-day registration on the morning of significant marathons. He was there with hundreds of reporters to get his credentials for the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament already underway. The problem was, he didn't know how to get to the arena and no one there could help him. He wandered through the excited, energetic throng and couldn't find directions anywhere.

A simpleton

A sad, humorless young man, perhaps twenty years old, had assumed a significant status in Rock's house, despite his nearly complete lack of mental acuity. For a reason Rock had no chance to figure, this simpleton wanted to clean under the back bedroom bed.
Rock could tell that his housecat Jo was confused.

Lost

Rock remembered when the apartment at the top of his climb belonged to Frank Broyles, the former University of Arkansas football coach and athletic director since deceased. It was on a ridge that separated the school from Dickson Street, home to a dozen or more bars and restaurants within walking distance of the campus.
In those days, when Rock was a graduate student, he could simply walk around the complex, but on this nighttime trip, it had become the only portal he could find from the dark cliffs to the food and beer. With no other apparent option, he stepped onto a deck adjacent to the apartment that he hoped was uninhabited. He figured he might be able to kick in the back door or find a way through what looked like a kitchen window, but before his thought progressed further, a young woman stepped from the door. As he watched her turn his way, he worried that she would panic or scream when he came into view. Instead, her only discernable reaction was one of disinterest. She said hello and nothing more.
Rock told her he was lost. "I'm just trying to get home," he said.
She escorted him through the apartment toward the front door, past another woman who seemed as unmoved as the first.

A place to stink

Few things pleased Rock more than to have made people laugh, and this had worked well. He sat with a group of men somewhere and told them about a nook he had seen near the rear of a movie theater. It was adjacent to the main hall, furnished and decorated in the same peach-colored theme of the entire auditorium, but dimly lighted by two accent lamps.
One of the men asked if it was reserved for smokers.  "I wondered the same thing for a minute, but there was no way," Rock said. "I mean, the smoke would've spilled right out into the whole room. There's no way anyone would've let anyone smoke in there. I don't know. Maybe it was a place where smokers could just sit and stink together."
Rock later questioned what the men had found so funny.

Two existences

The latter of two existences had begun to envelop Rock's house from front to back. He knew that once it reached his bedroom, it would sweep him from his current circumstance into a sort of no-mans land from which there was no likely return.
Rock knew this wouldn't end, so he chose to hide from the inevitable. He let his cat Jo out and climbed back into bed.
Later on, it occurred to him that he had seen cars across the street from his house, which let him know he was still in the present. He turned on the TV in his back bedroom and was relieved to see a contemporary newscast.

Crackers at Miss Jo's

There was nothing to eat but square Ritz crackers. Rock and his mother were at the house in Nashville, Arkansas, that belonged to Jo Baker, or Miss Jo as Rock had known her since the 1960s, but she was apparently out of town.
Rock was hungry, and his mother told him he could eat anything he wanted.
"Have you ever seen square Ritz crackers?" he said.
"I've never even heard of them," his mom said. "I wonder where she got them."
There were slices of ham and small chunks of cheese on sandwich plates all around the kitchen.

A nap

Rock's new recreational vehicle, with no one at the wheel, was traveling along I-40 near Fort Smith, Arkansas, and quickly approaching a slower vehicle in front. He noticed as he awakened from a nap, but he felt nearly paralyzed in the RV's rear bunk and before he could do more than budge, the vehicles made contact.
The collision was slight, but Rock was panicked. He could not see past the wreck and had little idea what to expect next. He knew he needed to pull over or come to a stop, but he couldn't get up.

Arkansas State

Rock sat with his mother on the home side of a football game at Ouachita Baptist University. A woman from the school with a handheld microphone was attempting to interview a man near Rock over the stadium's public address, but the sound kept breaking as he tried to answer her questions. It seemed there was a short in the system. but whatever the cause, the man was clearly frustrated by the interruptions and finally gave up. As he sat, the woman turned to Rock.
"Sir, would you mind if I ask you a few questions?" she said over the PA.
Rock cringed. It was the last thing he wanted, but he knew he had been put on the spot and consequently he had no choice. As her first question, she asked how old he was when he first attended a game at Ouachita.
"I was probably five or six the first time I saw ASU play..."
No electrical shortage arose to interrupt that faux pa. For the sake of the home crowd, Rock had just confused Ouachita with Arkansas State. He recognized his mistake the instant he made it, even before the seemingly good-natured boos began.

Hawg

One of the sports guys had arranged for a football game between several older retired men who once played for the Arkansas Razorbacks and a dozen former football players on staff at the paper.

Rock stood beside one-time Razorback and Green Bay Packer lineman Hawg Hanner in the dusty attic of the old Democrat Building. It was where they planned to play, on a wooden floor made of warped, splintered boards in a vast room lighted only by whatever sunshine could cut through windows turned translucent by an accumulation of years of dead bugs and dirt.
This was the first time Rock had seen Hanner since he interviewed him twenty years earlier.
"You guys don't stand a chance against us," Hanner said. "You know that, right?"
It seemed to Rock that Hawg had been dead for at least ten years.

Perfect order

This was new to Rock. His house was full of freshly polished antique furniture. Everything was in perfect order. He had never owned such substantial beauty, and it was clear that his father was truly impressed.
The only problem was that Rock felt suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of debt. He sat in dread on a new chair in his back bedroom and worried about the financial burden of it all. He couldn't remember what he had paid for the red baseball hat in his lap, but surely it was too much.

High stakes

Rock wasn't sure who these people were or why they wanted him to tell them what he thought about the long run he took the night before, but it was critical he figure out a way to let them know. The coming daylight depended on it, perhaps even existence itself. The stakes had never been this high.
Fortunately for Rock, he found a tube of energy gel on his nightstand. He ate it and half crawled from his sleep to a bag of PayDay bars in the kitchen.

Legal issues

He couldn't remember how he did it, but Rock had arranged things so that his fantasy football team would receive credit for points scored by a player on his neighbor Tom Jenning's team. He knew this subterfuge gave him a significant financial advantage, but it suddenly occurred to him that what he had done involved theft and that perhaps there were legal issues to consider.

Rock wanted to win, sure, but he did not want to steal money from Tom or anyone else. Also, indeed primarily, he hoped he wouldn't be arrested, and for the moment at least, the matter left him somewhat panicked.

Perfect flaws

Someone had arranged in advance for Rock's stinky feet. As the huge Hash House Harrier party neared its conclusion, Rock found his white hightop Chuck Taylors near one of the massive columns on a concrete walkway that led to the capitol building's banquet hall. After he sat to put them on, a former Little Rock Hash matriarch named Barbara Sutherland picked up a slip of paper, apparently torn from one of Rock's reporter notepads and placed on the walkway beside his shoes. She glanced at it and laughed as she handed it to Rock.

Someone had written a reminder on it to have him change into a new pair of Chuck Taylors before he headed home.

"Change your shoes," said Barbara, as a crowd complicit in the humor of Rock's hygienic flaws gathered near them. "You gotta know how bad your feet stink, right?"

Everyone laughed, which served to make him feel adored.

Too Late

Rock agreed to write a story for the next day's paper; he knew that, but he couldn't remember what he was asked to write about. It was midnight, and he had just awakened unsure of much, but he thought he must have fallen asleep when it was still daylight. His TV was tuned to the channel on which he had watched a spring-training game, but he knew the game had ended before sunset—it was played in a park without lights—and now the screen was blank except for an MLB.TV logo.
He was supposed to write about the game. He knew that now, but it was too late.
It seemed odd that he didn't know what day it was. His watch said it was very early Tuesday morning, but that didn't seem right, even though his laptop confirmed it. He wondered where Monday had gone and why he would have possibly agreed to write about a spring training game that he watched on television.

Pine Bluff

It was sad to everyone. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Golden Lions football team had fallen on such hard times that it no longer played games on a regulation field. In fact, the Golden Lions were limited to eight-man football, a game designed for tiny high schools with student bodies too small to field eleven-man teams. Their games had been moved to the former site of Pumphrey Stadium, now a vacant lot of grass and weeds and a football field eighty yards long and forty yards wide.
Rock remembered playing peewee football as an eleven-year-old on a similar field in Huntsville, Alabama, nearly fifty years earlier. He shared that with Ronnie, Arkansas-Pine Bluff's sports information director, who could only shake his head.
"I don't know what to tell you," Ronnie said. "We can't even get the band to come to our games."

Short shot

Comedian and actor Martin Short was a member of the PGA Tour, and Rock was not at all surprised to see him in contention late in a tournament he was assigned to cover for the paper.
On the final hole, Short's approach landed in a greenside bunker and was pinned in behind a standard, dark green, U-channel signpost. He had no shot at the pin but hoped he could get his ball out of the sand to the front of the green. Unfortunately for Short, the signpost limited his backswing to mere inches, and he managed to move his ball no more than a foot from where it landed, and it remained in the trap.
Afterward, he and Rock both tried the shot again. Neither could improve on Short's first effort.
"That's just a hard shot," Short said. "I figured it was beyond me when I first saw it."
"No kidding," Rock said. "There really isn't much you can do with that."

Potential ruin

Some sort of minor deity had taken control of Rock's house and, among other odd acts of subversion, had robbed it of its internet connection. This mysterious being, perhaps no more than a misinformed utility technician, also set things up so that Rock couldn't find a way to check his laptop or telephone. Furthermore, his television didn't work.
There was a saucepan of canned blackeyed peas on Rock's stovetop, and he considered eating a bowl. Rock hoped that perhaps that alone would reverse this potential tragedy. He also wondered if a failure to eat the peas in the first place had led to all this. For several minutes, Rock feared his life was ruined.

In print

The worldwide reaction to President Rock's written statements surprised and confused everyone, from those involved in their delivery to the leaders and their followers who felt or appeared most threatened by them. It seemed the president could say whatever he liked without particular or significant repercussions, but once the words appeared in print, all hell would break loose.
This odd difference had become the talk of the world, and no one could explain it.

Perfect timing

This process had turned tiresome for Rock. Each night, he had to park his car as close as possible to Tucker Coliseum in Russellville, Arkansas, so that audio equipment mounted in its trunk could record a few of the songs played by whatever musician or musicians were there.
On this particular night, he timed everything perfectly and was able to capture each note of the song Africa, played by original members of the 1980s band Toto. A bearded audio engineer on site was clearly delighted. "You can go on home, Rock," he said. "We got it. That was great."
Though Rock recognized the accomplishment as a gem in his otherwise tedious routine, he wished he could do something else with his evenings.

A bad break

Something was wrong with his brakes. Rock had just backed his car out of an apartment complex parking space, but when he stepped on the brake pedal, it offered no resistance and depressed to the floorboard. As his car rolled backward, downhill toward a row of parked cars, Rocked pumped the pedal as rapidly as he could. He began to feel pressure build and his car had begun to slow, but it seemed there was no way it could possibly stop before it struck one of the parked cars. Nevertheless, he continued to pump the brake until his car stopped inches from the trunk of a black sedan.

Faster

It had been years since Rock last ran this way. He was clearly fastest among the many runners on the trail loop that wound through woods for a mile so near the Pinnacle Mountain Visitors Center.
Running had never felt easier. He wondered if the golf iron in his left hand helped explain this new and unexpected level of fitness.

The timeline

A woman had been sent back in time to assist Rock in his effort to clean his house, but something about the time-travel process had caused her to lose her glasses. They were missing when she appeared in his back bedroom, and there was no way for her to work without them.
Rock knew they were somewhere along the timeline, but the complexity of this puzzle was beyond his intellectual ability to decipher. He soon gave up and returned to bed.

Light beer

Rock's old friend Marion drove them toward a minimart in Sarasota, Fla. Rock was there for a visit and rode in the front passenger seat. Marion's twenty-five-year-old son Grady sat in the back.
They walked into the minimart and headed directly for the beer cooler. As Rock studied the vast selection of thirty-packs, Marion walked up with a large cardboard box that he placed beside a single-door cooler packed with forty-ounce bottles. He began to fill the box, and within a minute, he and Grady had packed away at least twenty bottles of Budweiser and Miller High Life.
"Man, could we get at least a couple of bottles of light?" Rock said.
Marion and Grady both laughed and began with a stereotypical condemnation of light beer and light-beer drinkers common among their ilk since the introduction of Miller Lite forty years back.
"I forgot to tell you that Rock's a big pussy," Marion said.
Rock had been exposed to the routine so long that he was immune to it.
"Fuck you guys," he said. "Just get some goddamn light."

A crowded diner

It was among Rock's favorite kind of places, a crowded old southern American diner full of banter and the smell of fried food. He sat at a booth table with three of his minor league baseball teammates, one of whom had become a concern. They had all drunk several longneck bottles of Budweiser as they waited for their orders, but a scrawny seventy-year-old African American player Rock barely knew was apparently drunk before they walked in and seemed angered by something.

Rock watched as the older player stood, by then clearly enraged, and threw a beer bottle across the restaurant. The bottle ricocheted off a window frame and into a bucket of beer and ice at the table of several large African American men. One of them reached for Rock, grabbed him by an arm and pulled him up from the table.

"I'm gonna kick your ass," he said.

Rock had no doubt he intended to.

Supplements

Rock finished far back in the Olympic marathon, but just enough attention was given to him that he later worried someone would criticize his nutritional claims. Before the race even started, he told anyone who would listen about the supplements he had taken, several in some way connected to something derived from oysters. He specifically wondered whether or not he would have to explain to his primary care physician Bill Joseph why he had given any credit whatsoever to bottles of pills.

Trail system

There was a system of trails that wound through Levy. Rock found its epicenter near his front bedroom bed but couldn't decide whether to stick with those most familiar to him or to roam along some that might have some historic provenance.
It was a very difficult decision, and he wondered what his older walking friends would think. He imagined a scenario in which Bob McKinney walked the trails with him and loved them all. At the same time, it occurred to him that he was supposed to meet someone for a round of golf.

Alternate shot

Instead of golf balls, they were hitting nearly flat, triangular shaped, two-inch sided pieces of particle board. Their wooden clubs were no more than three feet long and weighed less than a pound each. Rock's partner in an alternate-shot format had apparently hit a roughly fifty-foot drive. Rock found the triangle stuck in the fairway, which ran through the front yard of a house in Galveston, Texas, where Rock had lived with his family as a child.
"Those things are hard to hit," Rock's teammate said.
Rock could tell from the feel of his warmup swing that he faced an impossible task. He took a full, weak swing, devoid of any force whatsoever, and the triangle traveled two feet at most.
"Wait a minute," Rock said. "I'm calling bullshit. There's no way you hit this fifty feet."

The near or far past

There had been a robbery at a minimart near the Aikman's house in Russellville, and Rock and his cousin Crutch stopped by for gas and a bag of ice in time to witness its aftermath. Rock was surprised to see that the state trooper on the scene was an old high school friend named Ben Hawkins.
Rock talked with Ben about a college football game everyone watched the night before, and then he and Crutch walked across the minimart lot, turned behind the store, and cut through the Aikman's backyard to the house. As they expected, everyone was there — Aunt Jean, Uncle Jim, Uncle Bob, Rock's mother, all the cousins, everyone.
It was as if they were somewhere between 1975 and 2005.

A big bed

In a neighborhood of freakishly large beds, Rock found the biggest. He and Zach, a friend from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, were doing yard work when Zach noticed the first of the extreme beds through a random bedroom window.
"Man, check this out," Zach said.
Rock looked in to see a bed at least fifty feet deep and thirty feet wide.
"Jiminy Cricket," he said. "That's a fucking big bed."
Late in the afternoon of the next day, Rock had worked his way through toward JFK Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through the expansive Park Hill neighborhood, when he noticed an almost warehouse size extension built onto a house near the intersection of F Street and JFK. It had a large, open bay door through which Rock could see a bed the size of a basketball court.

Dinnertime

Two students from Rock's elementary school class were at his house, and both were confused by his toaster oven and the proper time to use it. Apparently, neither of them knew how to read or understood how inappropriate it was to begin meal preparation at four a.m.
One, an African-American boy perhaps eight years old, had moved the oven from Rock's kitchen to his front bedroom. The other—a short, overweight, balding middle-aged white man with Down syndrome—was in the kitchen, where he had opened a can of cat food and spooned its contents into a saucepan on the stovetop.

earth

At last, Rock's documentary film was complete, and the time had come for him to see what the producers had named it. He stood in his hallway and turned on the light to find that the title was  simply "earth," spelled with a lower-case "e."
Rock loved it. Everyone else did, too, though he was the only one not surprised. He thought it fit perfectly.
Lots of people would be by soon. Except for the back bedroom, his house was ready for company.

Unreal

All Rock had to do to confirm his victory in the British Open Golf Championship was complete a ceremonial process in which he was required to bounce a golf ball off a row of piano keys and into a cup. He had won the actual tournament the day before, but darkness caused a delay in the apparently essential awards presentations.
Rock had stayed up late to write a story about the tournament for the paper. As he worked to finish it, someone tried to show him how to bounce a golf ball off of a piano keyboard, and suddenly, it all began to seem unreal to him. After all, the quality of his game was far, far removed from that of anyone who would even so much as dream of winning an Open Championship. Furthermore, there was the matter of the piano keys. He couldn't figure out how to include it in his story.

Two cats

Two cats burst into Rock's living room the instant he opened the door. It was late at night, but they were full of energy, especially the feral kitten Rock remembered from several years earlier. Just like before, she wanted nothing to do with being handled. Rock was lucky to have not been bitten.
The kitten dashed down the hall and into the back bedroom, and Rock wondered how he would ever get her back outside. Meanwhile, Samantha, the cat who entered with the kitten, just wanted food. She appeared famished, but she looked lovely, Rock thought. She had the heft and thick, lush fur from her youth.

The paper

The announcement seemed to stun no one but Rock, but he had never believed the paper would shut down in his lifetime. Nevertheless, he heard the news as he walked through the newsroom.

A midlevel manager named Stacey met Rock in a small, dark room near sports. "I've known about it for the last couple of days," Stacey said. "I didn't see any reason to tell anyone."

The sports guys sat around in the office and told stories about the old days. No one seemed particularly troubled.

Racehorses

There was an alphabetized list of racehorses lost somewhere in a pot full of water in Rock's kitchen sink. It was in a digital format, and as Rock sloshed through the water with his hands, he found bits of horses' names that began with the letter A, but he was never able to find the other letters he needed to safely return to sleep. Moreover, he also needed to wear a specific pair of pants in combination with specific undershorts. Rock made a brief attempt to combine two pairs of sweatpants and some old khakis with two pairs of shorts he found on a chair in his front bedroom, but he could tell he had not come close to the proper combination.
At last, he surrendered. There were too many pants in his house. When he climbed back into bed, it seemed as if Jo the cat approved of his choice, which he thought confirmed that he had chosen correctly.

Denver

Rock would never know why anyone had asked him to cover a road race in Denver, but here he was, freezing in the midst of the sort of early-morning cold absolutely idiosyncratic of every mountain landscape he had ever experienced, complete with its blue-capped ring of cloudless haze. He couldn't find the results, but apparently some people he knew from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers had done well.
At some point, he found a computer on a fold-out table near the finish line. The results were there, but he couldn't figure out how to find who had broken four minutes for the one-mile race. That was all he needed.

Miller Barber

It seemed as if it were a hole Rock and his frequent golf partner John Czarnecki had played many times before. The long par-three demanded an accurate shot into the green, since the surface between the tee box and the front fringe was uneven and muddy and heavily littered with all sorts of garbage, including beer, soda, rusted old cans and machinery, and various other pieces of rubbish common to landfills.
Rock shanked his tee shot into slop and shallow water near the tee box, and as he began to search for his ball, immediately noticed several other balls in a pile, stacked behind some rocks on the edge of a pool of murky water. Several were nearly new, including a Top Flite with odd ridges running along its dimpled surface that Rock thought he had heard about somewhere. He might try it out, he thought.
There was an old man playing by himself a couple of holes ahead. Out of the blue, John told Rock the man had identified himself as Miller Barber, a PGA star from the 1960s and '70's who had played at the University of Arkansas.
"He told me everyone should use Titleists and nothing else," John said.
Rock reacted in a manner that reflected complete disinterest in Miller Barber's presence.
"That's bullshit," Rock said. "There are all sorts of different balls for different games. Fuck, you know that, John."

Underway

There was something underway that Rock could not possibly hope to understand. He knew he couldn't find his glasses and that his cat Jo wanted out, but nothing else was clear. It seemed as if an official from Oaklawn Park had tried to tell him something about a race he had overlooked, or something like that.

One other thing he knew was that he was hungry. Was it Saturday morning? It was. He hadn't missed work. There was plenty of time to eat, sleep, and drive to the racetrack. There were shards of a broken lampshade all around the door to his kitchen. Rock knew he could take care of that matter in the daylight.

Sensation

Something Rock had imagined or designed or written had become an internet sensation. He couldn't remember what it was, though he had spent much of the night stewing over it with at least a handful of characters. He also couldn't remember who he sent it to, but whoever it was had apparently forwarded it to people in charge of some sort of commercial enterprise that was now eager to begin an advertising campaign.
Rock climbed out of bed with an intent to clean a bit. He knew people would soon begin to arrive.
He wondered why his phone had not yet rung and suddenly remembered he had calls to make. It was nearly nine a.m., and he needed to call people at Oaklawn Park for a story.
As Rock ate a PayDay bar, he heard a garbage truck approach his house and began to look for his shoes.

In the cards

Rock was pleased to see that Pam had put on some weight. He hadn't seen her for a while, but here she was in the large shed where Rock had stored all sorts of stuff twenty years earlier when he lived with Tall Bob in southern Levy.
Rock's cat Jo was there, too. She and Pam had never much gotten along in the nearly ten years they lived together. Nevertheless, Rock found them playing side-by-side on a pile of baseball cards leftover from his childhood.

A mannequin

She was a boyish short-haired blonde, strong and athletic, a bit overweight, but clearly fit. Her run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers had just ended, and Rock watched as she pulled a life-sized mannequin from the back of her pickup. As she stood it up at the edge of the group, it became obvious to everyone, Rock included, that it was a nearly perfect replica of him.
"Shit, Rock, it's you," someone said.
For a brief moment, he was honored, but then the woman poured a cup of beer over the mannequin's head. She began to curse at it, and she then knocked it to the ground with a fist. The crowd was amused at first, but this had turned weird.

Auto blockers

Theirs was an effort to drive cars over a large, muddy pasture as if it were a football field and the cars offensive linemen. The idea was to keep the cars between imaginary pass rushers and quarterbacks. Rock had heard of it, but this was his first attempt at the game, and he was committed to following the lead of a husky, pleasant looking woman in the other car.
It was difficult in many ways, but foremost among the challenges for Rock was to keep his car in motion and not stuck in the huge, sloppy ruts that grew larger with each round. He was encouraged throughout by the woman. She seemed expert, as though this were nothing new for her.

Rock-and-roll dream

This woman was in the midst of an active rock-and-roll dream, and Rock watched from a balcony seat. She was fully aware that a dream was underway and consequently resisted at first, but later she let it consume her and tried as hard as she could to remain focused on a television program that had thus far served as her guide.
Rock was amazed to see this lovely middle-aged woman convince herself that she could play a guitar solo through the night. He knew she knew that her daughter depended on her success.

Trouble

Someone at a college gymnasium challenged Rock to a game of one-on-one volleyball. Rock accepted and promptly watched as his opponent rocketed a serve past him that he had no chance to return or so much as touch.
Impressed as he was, Rock could tell that the ball didn't look right. He picked it up to see that it was in fact much smaller than a volleyball. It was no larger than an orange, and it was wrapped in an odd canvas-like cover.
"We can't play with this," Rock said. "I'm going to go check out a real volleyball."
His opponent agreed, and they both began to sprint toward the equipment room on the opposite side of the building. En route, Rock made a right turn across a mat for gymnasts and tried to run between two girls dressed in tights. They failed to move, and Rock ran directly between them as they stood shoulder to shoulder. They both spun around from the contact and fell to the mat.
Almost immediately, Rock knew he was in trouble.
"Shit, man, you can't do that," his volleyball opponent said.
"I know," Rock said. "I don't know what I was thinking."