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."