Last chance

At least a twinge of sentimentality had apparently run through several of Joe T. Robinson High School's football coaches. Their team had played in a new stadium for several years, and the old field, located on a ridge above the school, had eroded away to no more than a thirty-yard stretch of dirt.
As Rock watched a few of Robinson's assistant coaches play a pickup game on the old site, another coach told him plans were underway to remove it. The coach said his friends were afraid this might be their last chance to play on the field they had used when they played for the school.

No clear stakes

This was as bizarre as any of the critical, early-morning games Rock had either participated in or witnessed. In this one, Rock watched as two versions of a cat named Joe argued over which had been more precise in their measurements of molecules intertwined in a bundle of wires under Rock's back-bedroom bed.
Atypical of these contests, there were no clear stakes beyond bragging rights. No valuable things—including lives—were at stake, at least as far as Rock could tell.

Progressive worry

An earthquake was scheduled to strike the western edge of Los Angeles at an unspecified time later in the day. Rock woke up that morning confident he was safe in the enormous house he had slept in at least fifteen miles from the coastline, but as the day passed by, a progressive worry began to creep through him.
He wondered if he would feel safer outside and wished he had a city map.

A pleasant simplification

The recently established age of information technology had turned obsolete overnight. All inaccessible things on earth were now meaningless to anyone other than those who possessed them. Passwords were irrelevant, which had become obvious to Rock as he walked across and around actual and metaphorical borders with ease.
There was one at the end of an old pillow on Rock's front bedroom bed, inches from his face, but he was confident he could ignore it. His house seemed filled with gatekeepers, each baffled by a cat named Joe's and his indifference to them and everything else.
At first, this change struck Rock as a pleasant simplification, but he didn't know what he had done the night before. His watch told him it was early Saturday morning, and he wondered if he had agreed to cover a game for the paper that afternoon or evening. He wasn't sure what he was to do this day or where to go to find out.

Green Acres

Young and energetic, enthusiastic high school football coaching staffs bent toward masculine virility were common to Rock's experience. They had changed little in his life among them, long before he had begun to record their efforts for papers and such, from when he was among their subjects, but this group at Joe T. Robinson High School took the cake.
Rock drove through a quarter-mile of woods to a clubhouse they had built behind the school. It included a large kitchen, with grills with and smokers spread about and an enormous cooler filled with ice and cans of cheap beer. There was a long communal table loaded with enormous platters of sandwiches and charred meat. The mandatory television—tuned to MeTV—was mounted to a wall, close to several coaches lounged in lawn chairs next to a large box filled with dozens of guns.
Rock was handed a tiny semiautomatic pistol, small enough to fit in a front pocket of his baggy short pants. "You might need this," the coach who had drawn the gun from the box said.
Before Rock asked why a pistol could become necessary, he heard the opening-credit soundtrack to the 1960s sitcom Green Acres. Ava Gabor had just sung, "I get allergic smelling hay,..." and Rock spontaneously reminisced.
"As a second-grader, when this show first came out, that lyric confused me," he said. "To me, it sounded like she was complaining that someone had given her some allergic-smelling hay. You know, as if she were around a bunch of hay that reeked of allergens."
The subsequent raucous laughter from these men surprised Rock.

A maze

There were patterns on the rugs in Rock's back bedroom and hallway that indicated where water could be found. They apparently were there to help the handful of people who had come to attempt to solve a puzzle or follow a maze of some sort.
Rock did his best to assist them, but he wasn't sure what he could do for these people or exactly why they were in his house.

The Dirt Mile

Rock was surprised to hear that streaming coverage of the Breeders' Cup World Championships was scheduled to begin in a few minutes. It wasn't quite 5 a.m., and as he debated whether or not to get up to watch the Dirt Mile, his cat Joe aggressively licked the back of his head.
The sound of heavy rainfall rung against his roof and metal awnings. Combined with Joe's behavior, it served to help Rock realize there was no way a horse race in southern California would start at three in the morning local time.

Football fatigue

It wasn't exactly unimaginable, but the design of the Super Bowl and its television coverage baffled Rock. The best he could understand, it had been put into place so the University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban could watch the game while college football was underway and without a requirement that he leave Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Someone had designed the television frequency in such a way that it was carried across the country on the equivalent of the electronically-generated yellow stripe that television had employed for the previous thirty years as the yard line teams needed to reach for a first down. As far as Rock could tell, it made the Super Bowl omnipresent within the broad confines of a football season. He tried to watch it in the middle of a game between Kansas State and Oklahoma, but he was far too sleepy to concentrate on both a mid-season college game and the Super Bowl at the same time.

Impossibilities

Entry into whatever was at the end of Rock's long, arduous pursuit required he do something he suspected and indeed determined was impossible. Though he was alone, it was almost as if there was a gatekeeper in place to give Rock the rules.
Rock clearly understood that to enter he would have to press the palm of his right hand flat on his right shoulder blade. His attempt was, of course, futile, and it was hard for him to fathom why anyone or anything would have established a mandate that was nothing less than an anatomical impossibility.
Within seconds, he wondered if this was set up to eliminate the need for any sort of heaven. In fact, Rock knew a conversation was already underway among theological scholars. He could literally hear it coming from the hallway outside of his front bedroom.

The cutest thing

Rock's kitten Joe weighed about a half a pound and had climbed into a baseball cap with a baby rabbit and a puppy, both of which were no heavier than two or three ounces. As Joe slept, the bunny and tiny dog nestled together in the fluff of his midsection.
"You need to take picture of that," Rock's friend Tim Cooper said.
"No kidding," Rock said. "That's gotta be the cutest thing anyone's ever seen."

Nonsensical choices

Something was wrong with the remote. No matter how many times Rock tried to switch from one streaming channel to another, all he could find were nonsensical choices, including one that offered him certain suffocation in either his den or kitchen or the empty and dark chill of his front yard. There was an incessant alarm blaring somewhere in his house that did little more than accentuate the unlimited, meaningless storage sites for unreachable streaming television shows.
Rock had seen things like this before, but he could not remember anything so bereft of hope. There was nothing to breathe, even outside, where earlier he felt the energetic, pastel-colored, good-willed life of a mid-October afternoon.
Maybe something to eat would help, Rock thought, though he was doubtful of a solution so simple.

Containment

The CBS network's weekday morning show hired a lesbian as one of its anchors, and several network affiliates across the south replaced the national show with local programming, including KTHV in Little Rock.
Rock was among many who seemed stunned by the reaction of these southern television stations. "I thought all those morning shows had at least one gay person on them," he said in a conversation with a longtime friend.
Protests of the station's homophobic choice spread over the Little Rock metro throughout the day. Rock joined it at a bus stop on McCain Boulevard in front of a North Little Rock Barnes & Noble bookstore. When he stepped out of an approximately twenty-square-foot area marked to contain the dissidents, several city police officers drew and pointed pistols, rifles, and one AK-47 directly at him.
The cops' response seemed perfectly appropriate, Rock thought. He was nevertheless somewhat panicked that he might soon die.

The descent

The police officer in the passenger seat seemed completely indifferent to Rock's Crown Vic rolling backward down Kavanaugh Boulevard from the Heights neighborhood in Little Rock. Rock was panicked, but he somehow managed to direct the mammoth car around Mount Saint Mary High School onto Van Buren Street toward War Memorial Park.
To begin, Rock had been parked on Kavanaugh in the Height's business district. He had just tossed an empty beer can onto the backseat floorboard when he heard the cop tap a knuckle on the passenger-side window. Very shortly thereafter, the officer was seated beside Rock, studying data of some sort on a smartphone when the Crown Vic's brakes failed.
As a result, Rock's car rolled backward, across Cantrell Boulevard and down and through an old, tree-ladened, fashionably quaint neighborhood of middle-class homes built by babyboomers seventy years earlier. The cop's inattention to this descent toward War Memorial Stadium and probable disaster baffled Rock, who had begun to wonder whether this was nothing but a dream.
Somehow, Rock managed to steer his car, still rolling in reverse, across Markham Street and around a sharp right turn between the stadium and the park's defunct golf course. Now on level ground, the car quickly decelerated and Rock was able to stop it against a chainlink fence stretched across the street.
The cop was gone. Indeed, Rock realized he had just awakened from a nightmare in which he was on the cusp of incarceration for driving while intoxicated. He knew it might take a while before he could drive his car again, so he pulled his golf clubs from the trunk and rolled them onto the closed golf course, where he began to look for the stretches of mowed grass scattered about.

Good friends

It had been at least ten years since Rock had seen his college buddy and TV news director Randy Dixon, but here he was seated next to him on a passenger train headed toward Camp Clearfork. There were lots of Hash House Harriers on board, too.
Rock tried to introduce Randy to Zach, the Little Rock Hasher in charge of the camp, but it soon became obvious that neither were interested in meeting characters from Rock's life about which they were completely uninformed.

Rock's embarrassment

Everyone on the tee box could see that Rock's drive stopped just short of a white flag in the fairway, approximately 150 yards from the center of the green. Rock knew this was an impossible result. He had not hit a drive beyond 240 yards in years, and this one went nearly 400.
Rock was paired with PGA Tour player Paul Casey, who acted as impressed as everyone else by the long, straight drive. That and everything else about this circumstance added to Rock's embarrassment when he shanked his five-iron approach.

The final hole

Rock couldn't miss. Every single putt he attempted had rolled in throughout his round. He was on the final hole, and his approach shot stopped on the fringe, ten feet from the pin.
This would be Rock's first chip shot of the day. Chips had become a strength of his game, but he bladed this one, and it motored toward the hole, seemingly destined to roll all the way across the green and into his own backyard.
But he couldn't miss. Rock's shot slammed into the pin and dropped to the bottom of the cup, just as he should have expected on a day like this.

The flood

Rain had fallen all night the night before, but there was more involved in this late afternoon flood in Levy. Water, thick with what looked like sludgy, black oil, was already at least two feet deep on Orange Street. It flowed north to south and ran through yards and up the exterior walls of all of the houses, including Rock's. It had reached his front porch and was getting deeper. It made no sense to him. He couldn't imagine the source of this water, but Rock feared he might drown.

A perfect place

Rock knew he was in a nearly perfect place. Everything about his life was set by circumstances he had put into place years earlier when he was capable of such arrangements. There was still enough mystery to maintain his interest, but he was confident all would turn well as long as he lived.
It was cool in his house. Hogan's Heroes was on TV. Rock was hungry and a bit lonely, but his cat Joe was nearby, and he couldn't think of anything he wanted.

Silliness

A test had been arranged by someone to see how Rock and his cat Joe would react to separate 6 a.m. wake-up times, the first of which was work-related and the other established for no obvious reason on a typical Sunday morning free of obligation.
Both were up at 6 a.m. sharp for the former. For the latter, Rock climbed out of bed with Joe at 6:02. He let the cat out through the back door, ate a bowl of Bran Buds and a handful of walnuts, and wondered what this silliness was all about.

In deep

No one had ever seen so much rain at a 100-mile trail race. Runners had been on the course for most of a day, and it fell throughout.
Rock was with Bob Marston near the finish line on a paved county road. It was late at night and dark in this secluded section of a national forest. Water flowed across the road and was avoidable only through careful navigation that Bob seemed incapable of. Rock laughed to see him up to his waist in water in the front yard of a country house near a crowd of volunteers gathered at the finish.

Dangerous places

This recurring dream had become so complex that Rock could walk from his bed, wide awake from everything except the dream-like grip of hypoglycemia, convinced that his house was the epicenter of earth's dwindling energy resources and the corresponding spill-over filth of carbon-based fuel consumption. He knew he could never leave. There were too many people outside, and his reputation throughout not only his immediate neighborhood but across much of the world had dropped into dangerous places.
As always before, Rock thought his sole hope was to clean and straighten his living-room den, the only room most of his visitors ever entered. A lack of balance worked against him, but he wasn't sure anything mattered anymore.

The ambulance

Apparently one of Rock's neighbors in Levy called an ambulance for him. He surmised this for the benefit of his doctor, who was as confused as Rock when he was delivered an hour before sunrise to the doctor's office in southwest Little Rock.
"You are a little hypoglycemic, but this seems well within your tolerance level," the doctor said. "This doesn't make any fucking sense."
"I told the guys in the ambulance that I was fine, but they insisted on bringing me all the way over here," Rock said. "I don't understand it either."

Chicken rows

Rock and several of his neighbors had long debated the significance of chicken in the American diet, and Rock weighed heavily in chicken's favor. His cat Joe took a contrarian stance, but Rock thought he had all the evidence he needed when he awoke to find yellow styrofoam packages of four chicken thighs each stretched in a row from his back bedroom to the kitchen.
Joe seemed convinced, but he was also anxious to go outside. As Rock walked toward the front door, he wondered where all the chicken had gone.

Racecats

Several racehorses the size, shape, and color of Rock's cat Joe were in Rock's back bedroom at daybreak. Rock interviewed their jockeys one by one and heard the same from each, bearing in mind as always that optimism from horserace participants skews their comments to an extent that renders them virtually meaningless.
"We feel good about our chances," they said; the only variable was how their rides responded to whatever medications they were prescribed.
It gradually dawned on Rock that these animals weren't horses at all. They were, in fact, housecats, which raised an infinite set of questions. At first, Rock wondered how racing had conned the public for so long and what sort of visual tomfoolery was required to make ten-pound cats appear as one-thousand-pound horses. How did they carry their jockeys? Why were they not visually dwarfed by the enormity of one-mile racetracks? It seemed as if they would do nothing more than sink into the sand and silt.
After a while, Rock saw other horses around the track, regular thoroughbreds familiar to nearly everyone. He guessed the cats were used for cheaper races, but this was all very confusing. He wanted to call his horse-training friend Lynn Chleborad. She usually had the dirt on everything, but he wasn't sure how to begin this potential story of a lifetime, this incredible, perhaps world-changing story about cats. Rock was indeed frightened by it.

Fantasy football

A running back for Rock's fantasy football team scored a touchdown even though a lineman for the running back's team had illegally blocked an opposing player. Had a penalty been called, the touchdown would not have counted and Rock's team would not have received six points.
Rock knew he was responsible for the missed call. Apparently, the owner of the fantasy team Rock's team was playing also knew this. That must've been why Rock's flip phone kept ringing on his nightstand long before daybreak.

Balloons

Two hot-air balloons were attached to the hull of a caravel-type ship, typical of those used by seafaring explorers of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and Rock and dozens of others boarded the craft in a vast city park late in the evening of some sort of summertime celebration.

All went well as they skimmed past trees on the edge of the park, no more than ten to fifteen feet above the crowd and carnival grounds, but Rock gradually began to feel something go amiss. The ship at first brushed the trees and then began to drift randomly across the park, an apparent loss of control adequate to somewhat panic him. 

A Skillet

There was a Beat the Streak option called a Skillet. This was a way out for internet players who had not selected anyone in the mlb.com fantasy game the night before and had subsequently failed to fall asleep.
"I think they named it that because it sounds like the name of that guy from Chicago who faked a hate crime against himself," Rock explained to no one in particular.
Rock tried to pick someone, but nothing seemed to work with his computer. As he tried to figure out the malfunction, he could hear an alarm go off in his back bedroom. Apparently, he had nodded off in his living room recliner.

The concession stand

After climbing down from the press box on a maze of unsecured aluminum ladders, Rock approached a concession stand a hundred or more feet below the stadium's upper reaches. It was unlike any he had theretofore seen, with only two items listed on a chalkboard menu.
This concession stand served steaks and frog legs and nothing else. From Rock's perspective, the steaks looked perfect. They were each huge three-inch thick Porterhouses. There were a dozen or more of them spread on platters behind the clerk who approached Rock. Each of the slabs were textbook medium rare, and Rock figured they weighed at least three pounds each.
The steaks looked wonderful, but Rock wasn't particularly hungry, and he couldn't imagine how much a three-pound steak would cost at typical concession-stand rates, so he went with the frog legs. They were indeed cheap, but whereas the steaks were perfect, the frog legs had the bland, tasteless appearance of processed fried food. Rock wished he had dug deep.

Impossible old house

Years had passed since Rock was last in this enormous old house, but as before, he had moved in at the invitation of extended family members. He was given the familiar back portion, which alone was twice the size of his former house in Levy. Rock remembered living in this very section several times over the last thirty years.
On his first day there, one of his many Hispanic first cousins—an overweight but pretty thirty-year-old woman—approached him in his kitchen with a photo album. His cousin and Rock overlooked a vast, dark-paneled den filled with at least a dozen other relatives. She tucked her left arm under Rock's right, leaned into him, and held the album so they could both see it. "Take a lot at these hot chicks, Rock," she said. "You need to meet them. They're really hot, and I promise, they would all love you."
He knew this was too good. It was impossible.

Nothing made sense

Rock watched live video of an enormous tornado as it raced by Mount Pinnacle on the westernmost edge of Little Rock. He was in the radio station newsroom he had worked in nearly forty years earlier but was the only of his newspaper coworkers to have seen it. The tornado looked to Rock as if it were traveling east at close to fifty miles an hour, meaning it would reach downtown in less than ten minutes.
Rock tried to warn others in the sports department, but no one seemed interested. Nothing made sense to him except to walk down to the station's basement.

Roommates

There were too many people here. Rock was enrolled for classes at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and he had been eager to find an inexpensive place to live before a man who ran a print shop near the campus invited him to move into his apartment.

Rock was aware the man had other roommates, but he didn't know how many until he awoke on a couch in the den, early his first morning there to see a crowd of overweight, college-aged women pass by him between their bedrooms and the apartment's only bathroom.

"Good morning, everyone," he said.

Several of the women smiled and returned Rock's well wishes. Others passed by without pause. Neither response surprised him, but he knew there were too many people in this apartment. He would have to find someplace else to stay.

English words

Things were underway in Rock's house that foretold for him a future in which English words would no longer mean what they had from the previous days of his life. He wasn't sure how to react. All he knew was that he needed something to eat and that his cat Joe seemed confused.
Rock was hopeful, but this wasn't a good circumstance.

Rock's pro shop

A handful of old golf historians worked for years to turn Rock's house into a golf museum, a structure that would celebrate the early days of the game in the United States. They tried to make it look like a nineteenth-century clubhouse but had apparently fallen short with the pro shop. All of the clubs in it were relatively modern. Only one—a putter—dated back more than fifteen years.
Rock gradually began to understand that his job had been to acquire the clubs. Obviously, he had made no effort in that regard. He realized he was in big trouble and that the men would arrive soon. All he knew to do was to let his restless, nearly panicked cat Joe go outside.

Anxious for his demise

It wasn't until he reached the door that Rock realized he had two tins of Altoids mints in his hand. He saw a woman at the register staring at him, and he became immediately self-conscious of his apparent attempt at theft. He responded by returning the containers to a candy counter that he thought seemed out of place at a night club such as this one.
Rock was in Nashville, Arkansas, at the club on Sunset Boulevard, three blocks away from his maternal grandmother's house. After he put the candy back, he saw that the woman continued to glare in his direction. He was worried and hoped he could walk to his car and drive away without incident, but when he reached his ten-year-old Chevrolet Impala, it was turned upside down in the parking lot. The trunk had popped open and the doors were buckled out.
It took him a moment to realize there was no way he could drive to his grandmother's house and that the car was a loss, but he knew her house was a short walk away. He walked down Sunset, but his relief was short-lived. People, perhaps creatures, were all around him, anxious for his demise.

Deliberate obfuscation

Rock hadn't seen this sort of crowd at Oaklawn Park since the late 1980s, and thirty or more reporters were there for the Arkansas Derby, packed into a new, ultra-modern press box. The weather was horrid. Rain fell in torrents and cut through fog so thick it was difficult to distinguish one horse from another in the post parade.

Once the race was underway, Rock and everyone else in the press box had trouble seeing through row after row of computer monitors. Midway through the race, no one had yet determined the order of the field. It seemed as if this obfuscation was deliberate.

No warning

No one had seen anything about this in the forecast. Rock was at his friend Walt Webber's house, and they each looked south across Russellville and much of the Arkansas River Valley from Webber's property on Crowe Mountain. There had been no warning either was aware of, but there was an unimaginable tornado headed their way. It was miles wide and stretched into the valley below from purple and orange clouds. As they watched, they could see it had spawned a dozen or more smaller funnel clouds, each rushing about like infant raptors from the Jurassic Park franchise.
Next Rock knew, he and Walt were in the house. He watched Walt run into a bedroom, where he gathered a set of golf irons and clinched them to his chest as he lay in the midday darkness beside his and his wife's kingsize bed.
"Don't you think it would be safer here in the hallway?" Rock said.

The singer

A neighbor of Rock's, a musician of some sort, told Rock of a somewhat crazed man who recently sung for him. Rock heard the story and then watched a corresponding video of the man begging the neighbor to come outside and hear him sing.
In it, Rock saw the man standing beside a telephone pole and singing acapella, and he sounded as if he had never sung before. The man's voice was terrible.

Into the future

This wasn't the first time Rock had been presented with an opportunity to advance time by a total of four hundred and ninety-five years, but until now he had never accepted it. What was odd was that the future version of his house no longer allowed him to watch the Cincinnati Reds on his television.
Rock surfed through the channels and settled on a show from the 1950s. George Lindsey, the man who played Goober on The Andy Griffith Show, was among its stars.

This can't last

Another day was done, and as Rock watched hundreds of his employees walk from his vast, dimly-lighted office complex, he still had no idea what anyone there did. He sat at his desk, with his cat Joe nearby, and wondered if he would ever figure it out.

It couldn't last. Rock knew that much. He stood to leave and told the men and women around him to wrap things up.

"It's time to go," he said. "We've done all we can do."

Missing cats

The research project had been underway for years. It involved Rock's cats and the food he agreed to feed them, but he had forgotten about it long ago. All he remembered was that he was supposed to compile data important to someone. The thing was, Rock didn't know where most of his cats were. It seemed as if he hadn't seen Pam or Samantha for years. He knew this would be hard to explain.

The church

Rock was never able to explain to anyone why he walked into the church in the first place. The fact was he didn't know himself, but for whatever reason, he could not resist.
It was midafternoon and Rock drove north on U.S. 71 toward Fayetteville, Arkansas. As he drove through one of the many small towns along the way, his attention was drawn to an old, enormous church. It reminded him of the European cathedrals he toured as a child.
Rock's next memory was of a walk through a wide hallway in the church. He reached its end and turned left into another to see a pileup of crushed cars, pickups, and SUVs. Several were burning. It was clear the wreck had occurred within the last minute. Rock could see airbags deployed and bodies crushed inside each of the half-dozen vehicles. He called 911.
"I don't know what town I'm in, but it's about twenty miles south of Fayetteville," Rock said. "There are a lot of dead people here."
The Democrat-Gazette sports department was in what Rock assumed was once a classroom in the church. He joked about the tragedy he had just witnessed, but no one laughed. It was easy to see that his former boss Jeff Krupshaw disapproved.

Rock's cousin

Rock's cousin Jill called just after daybreak. He answered in his front bedroom bed and could immediately tell she was at an Aikman family gathering. Jill put her brothers Bill and Crutch and her daughter Rebecca on the phone.

"Jill, are you in Longview or Beaumont?" Rock said.

"No, dummy. I'm right here."

She sat on a corner edge of Rock's bed, the one by the window that overlooks the front porch.

"Did you climb in through one of the windows?"

"No. I just unlocked your front door."

Rock remembered Jill's skill as a locksmith.

"I thought you were somewhere in Texas," he said.

"Rock, you didn't know? I'm the mayor of San Diego. Everyone's out there. You should come join us."

French fries

A cute, short-haired, twenty-five-year-old brunette woman sat at a desk connected across from Rock's at the paper. As she ate her lunch, Rock was struck by the appearance of a bag of French fries before her. Each fry had a light sheen of grease and was pitted by tiny indentations that bespoke of its crispiness. Rock could not resist.
"I hate to have to ask, but I have no choice," he said. "Could I try one of those French fries?"
The woman paused for a second, but then said, "Sure. Have one."
Rock did, and he found the fry among the best things he had ever tasted.

Rock's stuff

Jen Reynolds checked her carry-on luggage before she flew out of the airport in downtown Little Rock and found several things that belonged to Rock, including at least half a dozen pairs of boxer shorts.
"Rock, find something to put these in," Jen said. "I'm not taking this stuff with me."
Rock had no idea how his things had made it into Jen's bags, but he could see they had. He walked to a nearby gift shop and asked for a plastic bag to carry his underpants out of the airport.

Trips to Nashville

Someone—he couldn't figure who—had begun to keep track of the number of trips Rock made to Nashville, Arkansas, to visit his maternal grandmother. He didn't know why, but it seemed in some way connected or correlated to the presence of his new cat Joe.
Rock found a chart on the website Facebook that showed he had gone much more frequently before he adopted Joe. The best he could tell, this was worrisome data to somebody out there, but Rock didn't understand any of it.

A horsemen's tournament

Several young horse trainers—men in their twenties from Oaklawn Park—set up a golf tournament in Hot Springs. Among them was Ronnie Jones, who asked Rock to caddy for him, a request Rock readily accepted.
Late in the very light-hearted round, Ronnie led by a stroke, but couldn't find his approach shot into the eighteenth green. A player Rock had never known, a tall, lean bearded youngster, was whooping it up. "Ah, you're fucking toast, Ronnie," he said. "I don't know why you even bothered playing."
Rock finally found Ronnie's ball under a standard metal shopping cart just off the front of the giant almost orange green, which was composed of the same rubberish material used for artificial running tracks. Ronnie had wandered to the back of it, at least two hundred yards away. Even shouting, Rock couldn't get his attention.

Skepticism

Jo ran around the north corner of the big, wild hedge that helped obscure the back of Rock's shack-like, one-room house from the rest of the neighborhood, and Rock was stunned.
The thing is, Jo was dead. Rock had buried her nearly two months earlier. When he last saw her, she was frail and withered from malnourishment and now was in his backyard as muscular and energetic as ever.
Rock was overjoyed. He was also embarrassed. Several Little Rock Hashers who said kind words to him as he grieved Jo's death were at this house. Each, of course, seemed skeptical.
"What's this?" one said. "I thought you said Jo died."
"I can't explain it," Rock said. "She died in my den. I buried her in the back yard, but when I walked out my backdoor this morning, there she was."
He understood how unbelievable this was, but his pleasure overwhelmed everything.

Countdown to insanity

Someone had established at least a pose as a god in Rock's den, and there was a countdown underway to put this man in place as a permanent diety. It seemed an absolutely unacceptable result of the chaos in the room, a circumstance rendered even more insane by Cindy Crawford's unending televised support for a new hair care product.

No way out

Two women at Nashville (Arkansas) High School put into place a system for the school's athletic program that would send Rock the same sort of live and archival data he had theretofore found reserved for college teams. Unfortunately, his internet connection had failed.
The women were at Rock's new house to help, but Nashville's boys had a basketball game scheduled to start in just a few minutes. Rock had to cover it. He, indeed, absolutely had to. It was by far the most important assignment of his life.
"Are you sure you've ever had access to the internet?" one of the women said. "I didn't think you could get it out here."
Of course, he couldn't. He knew that now.
The house stood in the heart of a grove of old oaks and pecan trees near a sprawling apartment complex two miles out of town on Old Centerpoint Highway. It was no more than a hundred yards off the best road for running Rock had ever found in Nashville, and it was built on a post and pier foundation twenty feet above the ground, with clear views of the pastures and cattle and woodlands all around. From the start, Rock loved everything about his house.
None of that mattered now. He had to have access to the game. The women assured him he couldn't have it and never would, not in this house. The internet would never reach it. Rock knew he was ruined with no way out.

The bad sport

Rock wanted no part of it. Someone had arranged a table full of female Hashers in a downtown restaurant and wanted to Rock to play the part of a servant for their every wish. Another man, John Cawn, would serve as the head waiter. Rock's job, best he could figure, would include such silliness as placing warm, damp towels on the women's necks.
"You never go along with anything," Lacey said.
"I just came here to eat supper, Ms. Poo," Rock said. "Why can't you figure out that I don't want to roleplay as a boy from a restaurant in fucking Hong Kong?"

Uninhabitable

Reruns of the television show Chicago P.D. and each of its commercials and public service ads had so completely consumed Rock that he was consigned to their grip. At first, he accepted it as a permanent condition, but it had devoured the entirety of his house, and though he could not imagine a route to escape this pulsating envelope of music and sound effects and the infinite rotation of voices and bright colors, he knew a search had to begin before this circumstance digested him.

To start, Rock accepted there was no way to turn off the TV. His refrigerator was empty of anything that might help, and there was nowhere else for him to look. Rock wondered if he could resign to this force, perhaps embrace it. He considered options, including an attempt to sleep, but his bedrooms were uninhabitable. They had become no more than extensions of the stage sets blared from his television, the ones he had seen in his living room from the start.

It occurred to Rock to look outside. He walked onto his front porch, where he saw reminders of nighttime reality all around, something he remembered from a place in this past.

With adequate balance intact, Rock walked to his kitchen. He reached into a box of shredded wheat and placed a handful of the cereal into a small, white styrofoam bowl. He poured in milk, but the added weight caused it to tip over. Cereal and milk splashed on the kitchen tile, but Rock adjusted and put the countertop to work.

A large rug

Someone had died years earlier while running a road race in Little Rock, but his or her body had never been found, and Rock and nearly everyone else had speculated about this mystery since the day it formed.
Rock woke up early one day to learn the body had been discovered rolled up in a large rug and deposited in a ditch near Rebsamen Golf Course. He was there for the paper when authorities and several older runners he had known for thirty or more years began to unroll the rug, which wasn't anything Rock wanted to see.

Little Rock to Mars

As a matter of course, Rock traveled overnight from Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock to Mars and back. He had made this trip several times, but for inexplicable reasons, neither he nor anyone else had ever timed any of his trips.
Several minutes after he awoke in his flight's landing spot, his back-bedroom bed, he sat in the recliner in his den and noticed he had once again failed to stop his stopwatch. It had run a bit past nine hours, and the fact of this timing oversight left him frustrated as he flipped through his TV to Channel 11.1 for the morning news.

Everything to lose

It was the kind of warning that would make it hard to sleep. Rock had paid for a bottle of Miller Lite at a bar in Hot Springs with a credit card he had never before used. When the bartender returned it, she told him he might want to call the 800 number on the back.
"I can't tell for sure, but it looks like someone or something is trying to drain all the cash from this card," she said.
"Do what?" Rock said.
She tried to explain what she saw when she ran it through the cash register, but none of what she said made sense to Rock.
"I'm not sure, but I've seen something like this before, and that guy lost everything," she said.

Coed soccer

From the start, Rock was unclear how he had become a member of this coed soccer team, but here he was, right in the middle of a game that made no sense to him. He couldn't begin to understand why the team they were playing had just begun to celebrate. Last he knew, the ball was at their end of the field, but Rock saw their goalie and several of their players jumping up and down.
Rock didn't know what to do. Nevertheless, his team's coach kept putting him in.
"Heck, Rock, we don't have anyone else," the coach said. "You're the only one here who isn't exhausted."

Rock's stage set

There was an advertisement on television for imaginary communities in which everyday Americans could live the lifestyles of actors, dancers, and musicians, complete with intricate, ornate, and professionally lighted stage sets. A young actor on the commercial sang that there was nothing like it in real life.
In Rock's mind, he lived in such a world. His den and kitchen were specifically designed as if for a middle-aged bachelor. It was a confusing circumstance, and he was relieved when he walked onto his front lawn in the darkness to see his neighborhood remained as he remembered it.

Smartphones

There was a media room set up in the clubhouse, but Rock couldn't find a wireless connection for his laptop. Under ordinary circumstances, it wouldn't have mattered. He was only a fifteen-minute drive from home, and the tournament would end hours before the paper's deadline. The difference was that Rock was in the final round of a sports-trivia contest significant enough that it was all anyone around him talked about, including the golfers.
Rock needed to answer one more question, and time was running out. Panic had begun to set in. Middle-aged golfers, several of whom Rock had known since they were high-school stars, tried to help. A few handed him their smartphones, which did nothing for him. The room was packed with media and golfers and the newsroom clutter of equipment and reams of scattered press releases and  Rock was suddenly aware that not only was a fortune on the line but perhaps survival itself.

Alone

Rock and his father Richard were in motorized wheelchairs headed south on University Avenue in Little Rock toward the southern edge of town and I-30 en route to San Diego on California Highway 1. They reached the expressway where they were directed by highway department signs to a tunnel beneath it.
The tunnel was large enough for considerable foot traffic but was lighted by no more than a bit of spill light from narrow vents ten feet above its walkways. It had a dank, subterranean smell of abandonment that made Rock feel as if he and his father were the first to have used it in decades. With that in mind, he was stunned to see an old African American man pushing a mop and bucket toward him shortly after Richard turned his chair into a large, dark bathroom. There were cobwebs all around him and cracks everywhere, and it seemed incredible to Rock that anyone on any sort of public payroll would be in this nearly nightmarish, dark, and dilapidated place for the sake of sanitation. He felt haunted by the idea of this man alone in such emptiness.

Two feet of water

Rock bladed his chip shot. He watched the ball dart across the green and over the far side. It was his first time on the course so he had no idea where the shot had settled, but his mother let him know.
"Ouch," she said, putter in hand, as she stood twenty feet from the pin. "You went into a ditch."
It was worse than he imagined. His ball was in a creek bed approximately six-feet deep and under at least two feet of water. Furthermore, it was tucked in a rocky groove that appeared to present an unplayable lie. Rock considered a climb down the bank, but the water looked cold, and he would be in it nearly to his knees. He decided to leave the ball in place.
"I'll just take a drop," he said. "I'll wait 'til I can use John's ball-retriever to get that one."

More to come

Thousands of runners had passed by Rock's house on Camp Robinson Road, and there were plenty more to come. They stretched back south as far as he could see toward the interstate highway and Little Rock.

Under ordinary circumstances, Rock would have looked at this experience as an entertaining spectacle, but on this day it was closer to a disaster. He had agreed to cover the race for the paper. His car was blocked in the driveway. There was no way for him to get to the finish line. He couldn't understand how the race route had been changed so drastically without his knowing.

Too much stuff

A fire truck went rushing by, and Rock saw therein an opportunity to get out of downtown in a hurry. He had a supply of hardware and such in a grocery cart and pushed it as quickly as possible in the truck's wake. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't keep up. Besides, the truck turned onto an alley behind a hotel along the river, and there was far too much stuff and people in the way for him to follow.

An intricate display

As far as Rock could tell, someone had arranged this historical reenactment of the day Sylvan Hills High School had opened for classes and placed it in and around his house in Levy, approximately five miles south of the school.
The whole matter was baffling and worrisome, since national and perhaps worldwide security issues hinged on the accuracy of this intricate display.

Doomed either way

Options for Rock's journey to the moon were virtually infinite. He knew he had to make a choice, which had apparently been mandated by some omnipotent deity, but as far as he could figure, none were even remotely safe.
Best Rock understood, the vehicle he chose would not be able to decelerate, so he had to balance the speed of the trip against the safety of landing at that speed. After no more than a few seconds of consideration, he knew he was in all likelihood doomed either way. It seemed he was asked to choose between death from the force of impact and years of exposure to the harshness of outer space.

Indifference

The one-hundred and fifty-yard par-three green was composed of a mesh of quilts, and Rock and his friends Chris and Erin each hit it in regulation.
Rock hit the final of their tee shots, and his ball landed and stopped no more than two feet from the pin. "If I can hit enough shots like that, one of them will eventually go in," Rock said.
They walked along the cart path toward the green. Rock was the first to reach it, and as he stepped toward his ball, he saw that the hole was a cocktail glass and that there was a ball in it that stood out as Erin's. He recognized its quarter-size red smudge, as if she had haphazardly marked it with a Sharpie.
"Erin, your ball's in," Rock said.
Erin walked across the quilts with a look of indifference.
"Cool," she said.
Rock was surprised and unreasonably disappointed by her reaction.

Old money

While turning through one of his high school yearbooks, Rock found a fifty-dollar bill and then later a five-dollar bill. Both were from the 1970s, and they were much larger than contemporary bills. Rock showed them to several Little Rock Hash House Harriers who had come by his house.

"I wonder if I could spend these," Rock said.

One of the Hashers said he didn't think so.

"I don't know if anyone would think these were real," he said. "They look counterfeit."

Through the wire

An overweight young woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, had been transported into Rock's back bedroom through the wire that connected to an electric blanket on the room's small bed. This made no sense to Rock, but apparently whatever the woman did had drawn worldwide attention. No one had ever seen anything like it.

Literary scholars

A collection of older Little Rock Hash House Harriers, led by Reverend Bob and a handful of stereotypical literary scholars—overweight, balding, gray-haired men with beards—were at Rock's door in Levy to tell him they had examined his writings and said it was clear his work was superior to all of the others they found in his house.
At first, Rock was pleased. There were greats works of contemporary literature in each of his bookcases, several hundred at least, and he thought they were included in the count.
Rock later learned from Bob his work had only been compared to those of his cat Jo's.
"You're telling me these experts have concluded that I can outwrite my housecat," Rock said. "That's great to know, Bob. Thanks."

The past

It was believable because it was true: Rock had traveled approximately thirteen billion, eight-hundred million years into the past, to the instant of the Big Bang, to learn the universe had been created without the constituents of hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon. It was clear to him that nothing recognizable had or would ever exist.

His house and all within it looked the same, including Jo the cat, but Rock knew none of what appeared before him could possibly be there.

Weight loss

They had been together for much of a large outdoor social gathering before Rock noticed that Walt had lost hundreds of pounds. He was truly lean.
"Goddamn, Walt, what do you weigh?" Rock said.
"I'm at about a hundred seventy."
"You're kidding. Jimminy Cricket, man. Hell, I outweigh you by twenty pounds. How did you finally do this?"
"What do you mean? I just watched what I ate."
Walt had been among Rock's close friends for a little over twenty-eight years, and during each of those years, he had routinely gone on and on about his need to lose weight, and now, out of the blue, relatively overnight, he had lost at least three hundred pounds, perhaps more. Rock was confused and couldn't seem to get an answer from Walt.

Totino's frozen pizzas

There was virtually no difference between the winning entrant in the pizza cookoff held in Rock's house and the masterpieces Rock had long created on the foundation of Totino's frozen pizzas. Even the winner, a bearded young man of middle-eastern decent from New York City, acknowledged the validity of this culinary oddity.

Both Rock and the winner thought the strangest thing was how much Jo the cat liked pizza. She had apparently walked into the front yard at daybreak with a short stack of contest entries.

Backyard disaster

There were at least half a dozen tiny sprinkler heads from which water gushed and pooled in Rock's backyard. The pools had begun to overflow into his neighbor Merle's backyard. It was clear to Rock that a disaster loomed.
Staten, a photographer from the paper, and Pulaski Academy head football coach Jon Kelley coincidentally stopped by moments after Rock discovered the flood.
"I don't know what's going on," Rock said. "I didn't even know this yard had a sprinkler system."

Otherworldliness

This room, these rooms, rung of otherworldliness, though in many ways the place had begun to remind Rock of his house in Levy. A frightened and curious, gray and white cat looked at him from the rim of a bathtub. She looked familiar, but he was too lost in a maze of words from the dim light of a back bedroom to consider her.

Hall of Fame

Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs second-year quarterback, had been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and Hall officials decided they wanted to try something different. They came up with a plan involving Rock's house that seemed clever on the surface, but after careful examination from Rock's perspective, it seemed so farfetched that he decided not to participate.
The officials told Rock they wanted to transport his house, with Mahomes inside, directly to the Hall of Fame building in Indianapolis. In order to do this, they told Rock he would need to empty his house of everything and clean it so that it looked as it did the day he moved in.

Saddle-cloth numbers

The new betting system for racing at Oaklawn Park confused Rock to the point he questioned its viability. Obviously, he thought, it had been designed for no other reason than to allow it to merge aesthetically with the color and flash of Oaklawn's casino. For instance, betters would select the horse they wanted to bet by pressing large, translucent plastic buttons that flashed the colors of saddle-cloth numbers designated to identify the post position of horses entered in a particular race, e.g., betters should know to press the red button to select the No. 1 horse, white to select the No. 2, blue the No. 3, yellow the No. 4, and so forth through the lime green No. 12.
For one thing, the system would require gamblers to memorize each of the twelve colors of the corresponding saddle-cloth numbers. Rock figured no more than one in a hundred racing fans had ever done that. In fact, few of his fellow turf writers had, either.

Jo's tags

Hours before kickoff, Rock decided to take a nap near one of the teams' benches. A few players stretched nearby as Rock lie down in the stadium's pregame dim. It was nearly silent inside, so Rock heard the bell on Jo's tags ring before she walked lightly across his legs to curl up next to his knees.

Hardy Jo

Rain fell in figurative buckets. It was cold out. One of the cats—Jo, the younger of the two—ran directly in from the porch when Rock opened the front door. He wondered if Pam was inside, perhaps hidden under one of the beds. She was older and much frailer than hardy Jo. Rock wasn't sure when he had last seen her, and he was worried beyond reason.

Exhibition baseball

Not long after Tommy Lasorda made Rock hand over a six-pack of Miller High Life bottles, because, as the Hall of Fame Dodgers manager said, "You can't bring that shit in here if it ain't Budweiser," Rock was at a UALR exhibition baseball game just off Dickson Street in Fayetteville, close to the University of Arkansas campus.
Rock walked from the game through an old, dimly-lited dank tunnel with a young brunette to the red brick of the city's downtown square as he spoke on his cell phone with UALR athletic director Rick Mello. He reflected on a huge haystack-like pile of bleached cornmeal someone had dumped just off the field. A student manager told Rock it was used to mark home plate and the baselines, but Rock and everyone else recognized it as nothing more than a mess. It had been far too close to first base, and several players ran into it, which caused a white cloud of the meal to spread across players and nearby spectators. Almost everyone there was at least a bit stained by the powdery white dust.
"That's a legitimate criticism," Mello said. "We're going to have to do something about that."