Sasha steals a wallet from a woman's open purse in a restaurant restroom while on a first date.

Sasha returns the stolen wallet to the woman and quietly confesses her kleptomania.

Sasha steals a worn note reading 'I BELIEVE IN YOU' from her date Alex's wallet while he bathes.

Bennie skips his son Chris's scheduled therapy appointment and takes him out for coffee instead.

Bennie attempts to confess his attraction to Sasha, and she stops him, saying 'We need each other.'

Lou Kline gives cocaine to teenage girls Rhea and Jocelyn before The Flaming Dildos play at Mabuhay Gardens.

Lou takes a professional interest in teenage Bennie Salazar during The Flaming Dildos' performance at Mabuhay Gardens.

A lion attacks Chronos when he leaps from the safari vehicle to photograph it, and Albert shoots the lion.

Jocelyn tells a dying Lou Kline 'I should kill you... You deserve to die' during a deathbed visit.

Scotty Hausmann arrives at Bennie's record label office carrying a freshly caught river fish and refuses to leave.

Stephanie finds a bobby pin on the bathroom floor and realizes Bennie has been sleeping with Kathy.

Kitty Jackson publicly confronts General B about genocide during a staged meeting, and soldiers drag her away.

Rob follows Drew into the frigid East River, gets caught in a current, and drowns.

Sasha's uncle Ted waits silently outside her Naples door until she invites him inside her squalid room.

Scotty Hausmann performs a landmark outdoor concert at Washington Square that becomes a historic cultural event.

Pool 1 traces the most pivotal moments in A Visit from the Goon Squad, following Sasha and Bennie through their interlocking stories. The events move from Sasha's kleptomania-driven first date with Alex through Bennie's anxious mid-career crisis and the formative teenage years that shaped him. Key turning points include Lou Kline's discovery of Bennie at a punk show, the tragic fallout of Lou's exploitative lifestyle, and the group's final confrontation with Lou on his deathbed. The pool continues through Bennie's marital collapse, Dolly's dangerous overseas PR mission, and the years Sasha spent adrift and alone in Naples. It resolves with Scotty's landmark Washington Square concert, the event that redeems Bennie's career and brings the novel's central themes of time, loss, and renewal to a close.

The headline events of Sasha and Bennie's interwoven lives.

Alex discovers that Sasha keeps a collection of stolen personal objects piled on tables in her apartment.

Bennie, Sasha, and Bennie's son Chris share gold flakes together after hearing Stop/Go perform.

Bennie arranges for his teenage band, The Flaming Dildos, to perform at Mabuhay Gardens.

Lou tells teenage Rhea not to change herself and promises that someone will one day fall in love with her.

Music producer Lou Kline takes his children Rolph and Charlie and his girlfriend Mindy on a Kenya safari.

The narrator reveals that Rolph will grow estranged from his father and commit suicide at age twenty-eight.

Bennie contacts Jocelyn, Rhea, and others from the old group to gather at Lou Kline's bedside after his second stroke.

Scotty Hausmann reads an article about Bennie Salazar in SPIN magazine and decides to send him a note.

As Scotty leaves Bennie's office, Bennie gives him a business card and urges him to share any new music.

Stephanie's brother Jules moves in with Bennie and Stephanie two months after his release from prison.

Lulu calls her mother Dolly 'Mom' for the first time in nearly a year while sharing star fruit at a marketplace.

Dolly releases hidden photographs of General B with Kitty Jackson to the media after returning safely to the US.

Jules Jones takes actress Kitty Jackson into Central Park and attempts to rape her, and she stabs him with a knife.

Drew and his daughter Alison take a long night walk through the desert and discuss how to connect with Lincoln.

Bennie and Alex walk to Sasha's old apartment building and ring her buzzer, but no one answers.

Pool 2 captures the secondary but essential events that give texture to the novel's major storylines. Beginning with Alex's discovery of Sasha's stolen objects collection, it follows the quiet revelations of Bennie's youth, Lou's troubled family life on safari, and the foreshadowed tragedy of Rolph's eventual suicide. The pool traces Scotty and Bennie's tentative reconnection through SPIN magazine and a terse office visit, then moves into Jules's arrival in Bennie and Stephanie's household and the tender moment that briefly repairs Dolly and Lulu's fractured bond. It closes in the novel's near-future timeline, with Drew and Alison's desert walk and Bennie's nostalgic pause outside Sasha's old apartment building, together evoking the bittersweet weight of everything time carries away.

The supporting moments that fill out each character's story.

The scent of bath salts from Sasha's stolen collection triggers a vivid memory of her estranged friend Lizzie.

Sasha finds Bennie's private scrawled notes and reads them as potential band names, giving him unexpected relief.

Rhea witnesses Jocelyn perform a sexual act on Lou Kline during The Flaming Dildos' show at Mabuhay Gardens.

While the group watches lions devour a zebra on safari, Mindy and Albert quietly confess their mutual attraction.

After Rolph reports Mindy's behavior to Lou, Lou dismisses all women with a crude insult and Rolph rejects his words.

Jocelyn and Rhea each take one of Lou's hands and sit flanking his deathbed, gazing together at the pool.

Scotty gives Bennie's business card to a couple in the park he identifies as musicians, certain he can spot talent anywhere.

Bosco tells Stephanie and Jules he wants to stage a grand comeback tour as a public spectacle of his own dying.

Dolly discovers that Kitty Jackson deliberately burned her own arms to appear as a survivor of the party Dolly organized.

Jules Jones is formally indicted for attempted rape, kidnapping, and aggravated assault against Kitty Jackson.

At a Conduits concert, Sasha meets music producer Bennie Salazar for the first time and leaves with him for an after-party.

Rob confesses his erotic feelings for Drew at the East River, then betrays Sasha by revealing her past as a sex worker in Naples.

Ted Hollander stumbles upon his runaway niece Sasha entirely by accident on a Naples sidewalk while exploring the city.

Drew arrives home irritable from work and shouts at Lincoln for playing his compositions made entirely of musical pauses.

Bennie reminds a terrified Scotty of their shared history backstage, and Lulu escorts him out to the Washington Square stage.

Pool 3 focuses on the moments of revelation and internal rupture that quietly redirect the novel's characters. It opens with the private triggers of memory and shame that haunt Sasha and Bennie before moving into the darker truths of Lou Kline's world, including sexual exploitation witnessed by Rhea, Rolph's moral break from his father, and the deathbed reckoning where Jocelyn and Rhea finally reclaim something from their shared past. The pool moves through Bosco's provocative plan to turn his death into spectacle, Kitty's disturbing act of self-harm, and Rob's devastating confession by the East River. It closes in the novel's future timeline, charting a rupture within Sasha's family and the backstage crisis that precedes Scotty's breakthrough, showing how a single moment of truth can permanently alter a life.