Back to bed

 It was a nearly inconceivable oversight. For years—in fact, for the bulk of Rock's adult life—he had moved immediately from coverage of thoroughbred racing at Oaklawn to the final few weeks of high school basketball in greater Little Rock. Nevertheless, with the races complete, he had forgotten all about basketball through the first week thereafter, and the bigwigs at the paper were angered. Rock awoke at daybreak Monday and knew he had a game to report on that started about an hour later, fifteen minutes away at the new Southwest Little Rock High. At least he knew it for few minutes. After a while, he remembered listening to high school basketball championship games on the radio as he drove home from Oaklawn nearly two months earlier. He still wasn't sure. It had seemed so certain when he got out of bed, but now this just didn't feel right. Wait. No. Basketball was always over long before Oaklawn ended. Rock decided to go back to sleep.

Before daybreak

 He couldn't figure out this very simple procedure. It no longer worked. In fact, everything was completely different. It was hard for him to breathe. Rock couldn't believe the difference. He wondered why his house was such a mess so long before daybreak.

Lockdown

 The press box at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort was on some sort of lockdown. Everyone assumed it was for a new coronavirus outbreak, which was reasonable. The oddity was that provisions were limited to a hefty supply of coffee, soda pop, and tubes of food nearly identical to the stuff Apollo astronauts were fed in the 1960s. It was chalky and nearly flavorless. As dehydrated as he was, Rock found it particularly—even distressingly—difficult to eat.

The short cut

 Rock felt great as he ran the final yards of the Little Rock Marathon's new layout. Just before the finish in a random hallway of a downtown hotel, he had passed a much younger and extremely talented twenty-five-year-old Hasher whose name he could not recall. The only problem was that Rock could see that the timer by his name on a large electronic results board had failed to stop. It was instantly obvious to him that he should have turned right out of the elevator. By going left, directly toward the finish line, he cut several yards off the course. Technically, he had not yet finished, which angered him. "This is great," he said with a nod toward an official seated by the timer. "The guy working the finish line doesn't know how to direct people to the finish line."

The van

 Just as Rock expected, Central Arkansas sports information director Steve East immediately recognized the vehicle, an equipment van Rock won with a bid of less than two-thousand dollars on govdeals.com. East laughed out loud when he saw it. "To tell you the truth, I didn't even know we sold it," he said. "It's been out here around the football field as long as I can remember."

It wouldn't stop

Television commercials that ran all day during coverage of the men's NCAA Basketball Tournament on CBS began to go haywire late in the evening. They gradually began to comment on themselves through a prolonged sequence of criticism and parody. There was some reason in place, one Rock thought involved a warning of worldwide or even universal catastrophe. He had never seen anything like it, and it wouldn't stop. He began to suspect Jim Nantz was drunk and fully responsible for this nearly insane circumstance.

Unimaginable

 A somewhat pretty local runner Rock had known for nearly ten years had been accused by multiple women of rape since1995, and evidence of her guilt seemed overwhelming. It was unimaginable, but there it was, easy to see, graphic and horrible. He spoke of it to his friend Elaine, who wondered how this woman had raped people when she was as young as thirteen years old. Rock understood the question, but he could not clear his mind of the nightmare before them. Neither could Elaine. "How is this possible?" she asked.

His first task

 It had become critical for Rock to get up and begin to prioritize every facet of his life. Moments later, shortly after he refilled his cat Joe's food bowl and as he sat in a maroon recliner with a spiral notebook in hand, Rock knew his first task was to call five horsemen at Oaklawn in Hot Springs. He had known from the night before how meaningful that was, but he was unprepared for the panic involved and how it had begun to seem like a matter upon which his very livelihood depended.

To properly seed

 This would, a short time later, help Rock to know he was awake rather than asleep and dreaming, but for the moment, as he lay in his front bedroom bed, he understood that his two-year-old housecat Joe was central to an effort to properly seed the first round of the four-school NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision playoffs. It was apparently an important issue since one of the four schools had a somewhat mediocre football team. Obviously, the other teams' connections wanted that school as a first-round opponent. Michigan head coach Don Shula, an NFL Hall of Fame inductee Rock admired as a child, was adamant about it and insisted Rock not let Joe out of the house.

A detailed report

 The moment he awoke, Rock was asked to investigate a matter unclear to him from the start. It seemed to have something to do with the Super Bowl and perhaps the availability of his living room-den as an area to view the game. Whatever this was, he suspected a need for a detailed, precise report, so he started to make a list of each item in the front rooms of his house. The living room came first, but approximately five minutes in, Rock began to wonder about this assignment. The most recent Super Bowl was played two weeks earlier. Why would anyone need to know these things now? The first of the items on Rock's list was that he had a television, and he would also never understand why the presence of a television exactly where one had been since mid-October 2002 could possibly have surprised him.

Nothing would change

 Rock knew exactly what happened. He had seen this before. His life had been arranged so that nothing would ever change. For starters, no time would pass. It would remain dawn forever, just as it had been when he awoke in his living room-den, with little more than an idea of daylight east of his house. The television program currently on would remain on forever, which was unfortunate since he had fallen asleep a few minutes after midnight with his TV tuned to a forty-three-year-old rerun of The Love Boat. He wondered if he could find football, baseball, golf, heck whatever, on the set in his back bedroom. It was far too cold to let Joe out, and he couldn't find his bifocals.

Masters Tournament

 Rock's housecat Joe won the Masters Tournament, and Rock was the only reporter there. Shortly after Joe's victory, Rock was besieged by editors from the paper in Little Rock. They demanded a story and wanted it the moment they called. Although Rock was nearly certain he had interviewed Joe moments after the cat's victory was complete, Joe wanted out. Rock couldn't imagine how he had gathered quotes in the first place and knew he could get no more. For Christ's sake, Joe was a fourteen-pound cat. On the other hand, Rock knew he had comments from Joe somewhere and that it was essential he find them.

Gaming

 This gaming business was all new to Rock. He had only recently learned it had risen to the level of an organized sport. His relative ignorance aside, the paper asked if he would report on a gaming tournament in Little Rock. To start, he asked a twenty-six-year-old Little Rock Hasher named Baileigh, the only active gamer he knew, what she knew about the tournament. "The favorite is a former Hasher named Josh," she said. Rock knew Josh well at one time, but he had moved away years earlier.

Improvement

 It had taken Rock well over a year, but he confirmed that he had at last trained his racehorse Joe to stay put until he himself was prepared to get out of bed for the morning. Joe seemed at ease after two firm "nos" from Rock, whereas before, he would have marched right across Rock's head in order to rattle the lampshade and knock things from the nightstand. It was a substantial improvement. The problem was, Rock had a barn full of horses he would also need to train how to behave at or near daybreak. He decided to go ahead and get up.