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.