Blasting Out of My Small Town Apocalypse In a Zero-Gravity Pod

Circular Motion by Alex Foster

It was still early. The northern lights hung like creamed angels, and my sister went out alone to feed the pigs. As the snow crunched beneath her boots, she repeated the Lord’s Prayer to herself, trying to remember what came after deliverance. She was nine and already accustomed to the occasional feeling that her world was spinning out of control.

She found the pigs hiding in the corner of their pen, away from their space heater. They hadn’t touched yesterday’s feed. She didn’t know why. For several minutes, she tried to scrape the old pellets from their trough, but they were frozen solid. In the woodland wind with the stars all falling westward, she grew vaguely afraid.

Something creaked in the dark, and she looked up toward our house. The sound seemed to be coming from underneath the snow. She stepped toward it, the pigs silent at her back, and for a moment, the yard seemed perfectly still.

Then she screamed. Across the yard and into the street, the snow erupted with thousands of rodents. They were like maggots bursting from a carcass, zigzagging and trampling one another. One scrambled up her leg. She kicked it away. They seemed to have no idea where they were. The pigs barked at them, and they dashed for the tree line, following one another blindly. By the time she reached the front door, cold air burning her lungs, no sign of them remained but rough, white scarring in the earth.

---

I wasn’t home to see my sister come in panting, exclaiming how the apocalypse had arrived and it was starting on our lawn. I didn’t witness my parents’ reaction. I can only imagine it. I imagine that had my sister borne testimony to a revelation of doom on any morning other than that one, our father would have encouraged her. “Damn right,” he would have said, barely listening, and then he might have cited the biblical plague of rats at Ekron, consoling her with the admonition that judgment ought only be feared by sinners, socialists, and queers. On any other morning, our mom might have tried to pacify her with promises of red Jell-O or a trip into town to play at the entertainment annex. But my parents’ mood on that particular morning is difficult to guess for the same reason that I am limited to guessing: For on that morning they were preoccupied by the discovery that I, their other child, was gone. In the middle of the night, I had finally run away.

I was twenty and had lived in Keber Creek, Alaska, pop. 900, all my life. My father moved us out there the year I was born, after getting a job in the town’s opencast gold mine. He charged holes for blasting. I remember walking to and from the mine with him as a kid, long walks that he spent excoriating me for not appreciating this opportunity to live out in the boondocks, or as he put it, “amidst Creation.” I remember the mine’s looming concrete walls and how the aspens quaked each time the blasts went off. During my teens, his job was abruptly automated, and the week before my sixteenth birthday he received his pink slip.

He was encouraged to move to an A-O Company town outside Eugene for retraining. I wanted us to go, to leave Alaska. But we stayed. My father was sick of relying on corporate caprices; he appreciated his frontier liberties and said he would find gig work. He never did. Instead, he retreated into bitterness and religion. He had always had a survivalist streak, and this grew inflamed in the want of employment’s civilizing influence. My father was a Mormon who believed even his own Church’s leadership in Salt Lake City was infiltrated by Jews—you can imagine how he felt about, for example, the government. He obsessed over eschatology. For as long as I can remember, he was forecasting society’s spectacular collapse. Violent scripture was his favorite. I feared him. Unlike some other mine workers, he didn’t imbibe, and for that alone I’m inclined to thank his God, but there really wasn’t much difference between an impatience for annihilation expressed by drinking oneself into oblivion and one expressed through his particular brand of piety. While technology-driven unemployment led many men of his generation to pine for the past, he just prayed all the more fervently for a hastening of the End.

I, by that time, did have a job: doing custodial work at our town’s largest church, a crummy little bethel held up by wood glue and blind prayer. Suddenly my family’s primary breadwinner, I drew our livelihood from the building’s lightbulb sockets and clogged drains. Attached to the narthex was a small arcade, Keber Creek’s only recreational facility, stocked with Old Testament–themed video games for the betterment of the youth—Frogger: Red Sea Crossing, Balaam’s Donkey Kong; the machines sat unlit most days, like tree trunks after a forest fire. I spent many afternoons climbing up the narrow wooden ladder to the church’s belfry and there, above the haggard white pines, I would smoke Natural American Spirits and scroll social media on my little 1600p, watching other kids thousands of miles away dance in Eastern ruin bars, kiss astride mopeds, or drink champagne on observation decks above the Champs-Élysées. Sometimes I posted videos of my own. They were nothing better than what any teenager posted in those days (thirty-second clips of me calling Democrats idiots, and later, when I grew uneasy with my father’s politics, deepfake videos of celebrities dancing), but I took to social media with a seriousness certainly enhanced by the fact that the world online seemed to me more important—realer, even—than my backwater hometown.

It was my minor addiction to social media that led me to contact Victor Bickle and earned me the ticket that would end up freeing me from Alaska, not quite for good but for a very long time. Afraid of my overture being lost among ordinary fan messages, I refrained from fawning over Bickle’s videos. In truth, I didn’t really understand a lot of his Scroller content. Bickle, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University in New York, had garnered attention online the year before with a ten-minute video about the structural instability of the Queensboro Bridge—released six months before the bridge’s shocking collapse. In the six months before the accident, his post had garnered fewer than eight hundred views, and then, overnight, eight hundred people were dead, and the video was trending on CNN’s homepage. The earnest forty-year-old professor was suddenly a media go-to. Since then, it was common for his videos to be picked up by mainstream outlets. “Professor Victor Bickle, who predicted the Queensboro Catastrophe, releases his latest warning.” He railed against corrupt regulators, becoming a champion of transparency and of the public’s understanding of the world around them. His videos were technical—too technical for me to follow—but I admired his success. He was handsome, in a lanky, brainiac sort of way. And while I didn’t understand him, I hoped he might understand me, for Victor Bickle, the sudden minor celebrity, had been born and raised in Keber Creek.

I sent him a private message saying that I admired him for getting out of KC and said that I, like him, aspired to make something of myself. I wanted to learn how the world really was. I asked if he might share any advice, or perhaps even take me under his wing, as an aspiring content creator.

When three months passed and Bickle didn’t reply, I feared I’d overstepped in presuming a kinship between us. I read that he’d left Keber Creek on his own at seventeen for university; I, a twenty-year-old church custodian, probably resembled the very thing he’d rejected. In truth, I had spent most of my life in Keber Creek trying to fit in. I’d grown from a church youth so desperate for the counselor’s favor that I volunteered for testimony every month, to a middle schooler who threw rocks through my teacher’s windows in the hopes of winning acceptance from my peers. When the other boys in my school groped Rebekah Hamsley after she blacked out at Winter Dance, I fearfully joined in, but then snitched on them the next day. I followed my classmates in ridiculing Brian K., the “fag,” but apparently that made me no less “faggy” myself. I’d wanted to fit in desperately; I just never figured out how. As a kid I cowered at everyone’s disapproval, which to me were correlates to, if not strange incarnations of, the primary disapproval—my father’s—which I fought and fought through adolescence before finally emerging disaffected only in my late teens. I recognize the sour grapes element to this account—I only resolved to ditch Keber Creek after it repeatedly rejected me. But I had other catalysts too for disillusionment during my teenage years. The world changed. The westward circuit normalized flights between the lower forty-eight and the capitals of Europe and Asia that took barely an hour, making our isolated Alaskan town seem to me increasingly irrelevant. Unemployed, my father hoarded his welfare checks while cursing government largesse (he was the type never to forgive someone for doing him a favor). He turned our moldy prefab house into his pulpit, and as one prophesized apocalypse after another failed to pass, his aggression grew. So did the rift between us. And all the while, the screens around me presented with increasing persistence and allure all the things in the world I was missing.

It seemed obvious to me that our town was already suffering its apocalypse as the mine automated, job after job, and the only thing to do was move on already.

It seemed obvious to me that our town was already suffering its apocalypse as the mine automated, job after job, and the only thing to do was move on already. I thought maybe Victor Bickle, a man of the world and of prestige by way of science, could rescue me. I had no real evidence for this, no history to draw on. Just another kind of faith.

---

When Bickle finally replied, his message was brief.

Dear Tanner, it said. Apologies for the delay. Been a hectic time for me. I would love to meet you and help however I can. You say you want to “get out” of Keber Creek. That’s something I can understand! Would you like to meet me for lunch in New York? How about Ronan’s Grill on 37th at A.H. 973,839? You will love Ronan’s. I’m sure I can refer you to a job in the city if you’re interested. I’ve attached a credit for circuit flights, on me. But if this isn’t of interest, no need to explain. – VB

I turned the message over and over in my mind as I showered that night, using all the hot water. Sitting down at dinner with hair still wet, my heart raced. To meet for lunch tomorrow. So casually proposed, as if New York City were just down the street. I obsessed in particular over the closing line, “no need to explain,” intimidated by its cool indifference. (It didn’t occur to me to interpret it the other way, as a preemptive defense against rejection; I wasn’t yet trained to see in things their opposites.)

But Bickle should have known that even just making use of circuit passes would be impossible for me. The closest pod station, in Fairbanks, was eight hour’s drive on unplowed roads. Our snow machine didn’t have that range. I sat at the table, rolling dirt between my toes. The only option was my father’s pickup truck. I knew he’d never let me take it, but as my mother slid misshapen trout cakes onto our plates, I worked up the nerve to ask.

“What do you need my truck for?” he said. He sat on the couch in the adjoining room, watching news about migrants at the border three thousand miles away.

“To get to work tomorrow morning,” I lied. “The snow machine is empty.”

He told me to go across the street and borrow a shot of propane from the Tumeskys, mix it with corn oil. The dogs wrestled in the hall.

“The engine isn’t working,” I said.

He looked over. “You fucked up the engine? What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, fix it.” He turned up the TV.

Cold seeped into the house through cracks in the carbon fiber siding, and little moths tapped on the windows, fighting to get in front of one another as if each thought its own warning was more important than the rest. Across the table, my mom ate with her fingers.

“Busy day at work?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“Answer your mother,” shouted my dad.

“He did,” said my mom.

“He ought to speak to his family in complete sentences.” He beckoned my younger sister Ashtyn, who brought him another can of nonalcoholic apple beer and collected his empties. My mom drew plasticky trout bones from between her teeth. I had a headache and craved a cigarette. I kept imagining myself walking out the door and never coming back. I glared at my father, at the truck keys carabinered to his belt loop.

“Your brother doesn’t know how the real world works,” he said to Ashtyn.

She looked at me, her overgrown hair the same shade of red as his, and mine. His gaze didn’t leave the TV. I watched him, smarting.

“Hypocrite,” I murmured.

“What did you just say?” demanded my mother.

My father looked over. The TV was blaring about Christian values so loud that there was a chance he hadn’t heard me. I looked at Ashtyn. Her eyes were pleading, wishing to be left out of it.

“Come here,” said my father.

I stayed where I was, frozen between the immaturity of refusing and the emasculation of giving in.

“I said come here.”

I took my last bite but held on to my knife. It was he who finally stood. Hunched, he walked over. He was a man who’d spent adolescence waiting for relief from his family’s bank debts to come in the form of widespread calamity. A man (I now believe) tormented by the mounting possibility that his life might not be a labor of preparation for the world’s climactic end, but rather a labor of endurance through countless small disappointments. He moved very close to me, so close I could smell his Ocean Breeze bodywash, which was the same as my own. Neither of us, father or son, had ever stepped foot in an ocean.

So quietly that not even my mom would hear, he said, “I’ve tried to create a good life for you, boy. It’s up to you whether you deserve it.”

---

That night I tossed and turned. Owls hooted to one another over our property. After three hours, I gave up on sleeping. The clocks flashed A.H. 973,826:02. I crawled out of bed and began packing for New York.

I emptied my “luau pack” of all my father’s survivalist shit no one would ever need (the tent, the unloaded rifle) and stuffed it with clothes, stashing at the bottom all the money I had managed to steal from the church over the years. Three hundred dollars. I looked out the window. A circuit vessel’s blue light streaked across the moon.

“Tanner,” Ashtyn whispered. “Is something wrong?”

“Everything is fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

---

I found my father asleep on the couch, changing colors as pundits disagreed. I stood so close that I believed I could feel the warmth of his body. His breath was strained. I reached down and unhooked the Dodge keys from his hip. He stirred. As I left the room, seeing him for the final time, I heard a woman on TV saying her offer wouldn’t last forever and him mumbling, “Amen.”

---

The drive was quiet. I put on the electronic music I liked but, feeling anxious, soon turned it off. I drove through to morning, along endless chain-link fences, escaping the Arctic Circle to find the sun. Its rise over the highway tundra was freer than anything I’d ever seen. Route 2 bridged the Chatanika, and rush hour traffic began to collect. I’d never been so far from home before. I pressed my phone against the pickup’s windows, taking photos of the big animated billboards. At the end of a mountain tunnel, in low light, Fairbanks appeared. The river was incredibly bright, as if filled with fire, strapped down by bridges, squirming between blue roofs. The city seemed so much hungrier for inhabitants than Keber Creek, so much larger not only in space but in spirit. Yet even as capacious as the city was, I soon hit gridlock. And construction: Even as big as it was, it was being built bigger. Cranes fed on Fairbanks from above. Sawhorses blocked every other road, and men with jackhammers were tearing up the detours. There was no snow. The directions off my phone kept rerouting. My truck seemed to be the only one around that wasn’t driving itself, and nearing the pod station I was taken by lights and arrows, loudspeaker announcements, and the mineral breeze of industry. It took effort to keep my focus on the road in front of me. I parked in the open-air long-term lot and hardly had my duffle out of the truck bed when a passing car honked at me to move. I turned to see the car was empty. It wheeled around into the passenger pickup line as a circuit vessel popped overhead, and I darted across the street toward VISA HELP, DUNKIN’ DONUTS, and PODS—ALL DESTINATIONS.

In the pod station’s domed lobby, a few dozen travelers rested on wooden benches, drinking coffee and staring at their phones. I stood by the door to my platform, anxiously rechecking that I had mapped the right route. There were a dozen circuit vessels crossing over Fairbanks every hour, and you had to be sure to board the pod that would shuttle you up to the vessel you wanted. The pods went up and down, but the vessels never landed—they orbited the Earth, again and again and again. On clear mornings in Keber Creek, I would look up and see their contrails crisscross. Their paths inclined northward or southward to varying degrees, but as a rule, all circuit vessels orbited roughly from east to west. That was the model drawn up by the world’s oldest and largest circuit vessel carrier, the Circumglobal Westward Circuit Group, or CWC, upon whose dreams of commercial empire the westward circuit had first taken its way. It was for CWC flights that Victor Bickle had bought me a day pass, good for arrival and departure at any of CWC’s tens of thousands of pod destinations in fifty-eight countries (even more for US citizens who added special visas to their passports). I knew there were people who viewed circuit travel as a basic necessity (and a single-day pass didn’t cost so much by most peoples’ standards: around fifty New Dollars for regular users and even less for first-time users off-peak), but I couldn’t imagine ever losing the sense of wonder I presently felt at possessing one.

The platform door slid open to another, a revolving door through which several passengers emerged, some popping their ears, some rolling their necks. After the last woman exited, I attempted to enter, swinging my duffle ahead of me. I hit the revolving door like a wall.

The woman who’d just depodded called me honey and said, “You gotta scan your ticket to unlock the turnstile.”

She pressed my phone against a small blue panel, the two screens kissing teeth to teeth.

Once through, I found myself alone in a round cabin about three yards across, encircled by a low bench. It wasn’t heated, and I saw no place for luggage. The only compartment I could find was stocked with barf bags.

“Welcome to CWC,” said a female voice from somewhere above. The wall across from me, which was a screen—all the pod walls were screens—played a promotional montage. It showed people stepping out of pods into various city centers and festivals. I recognized Paris and Hong Kong. A blond kid and his mother were shown exiting a pod in the center of Times Square, and the camera panned up to a bright sky with a circuit vessel approaching—all fuselage, no wings—getting closer and closer until it reached the depth of the screen and burst right out. It was aiming straight for my head. I ducked as the hologram entered the screen behind me with a digital shiver.

Everything was bluer than blue, and the voice said, “Welcome to the world.”

The turnstile locked.

“Excuse me,” I said to no one. “Are there seatbelts or . . .”

As the floor and ceiling began to vibrate, I felt myself growing lighter, rising off the bench. I groped for a handle. Then I noticed my duffle sliding off the bench’s edge. I reached out to it and was knocked forward by an invisible force. I screamed. But my hands didn’t hit the floor. I was weightless. The pod had taken flight.

---

Victor Bickle, Ph.D., was not quite so attractive IRL. Ejected from the protective frame of the screen, his rangy height, at six-foot-one, seemed to put his head at constant risk. He was balding—you never saw that in the videos, how his brown hair folded over in capitulation and frizzed out in alarm around his ears, which were truly humongous, like a child’s drawing of ears, rounding out his physiognomy in the videos, but here, in the physical world, looking bony and appendant. He waved me over to his booth, and I made my way around young finance bros wearing fleece pants with the names of their employers stitched across the seat. Steaks sizzled in the wet New York City air. I was starving.

Ejected from the protective frame of the screen, his rangy height, at six-foot-one, seemed to put his head at constant risk.

My parents had called. I hadn’t answered.

“Tanner,” said Victor Bickle, extending his hand. “You’re late, but that’s okay.”

He wore a mustache, which intimidated me then, though later I wouldn’t be able to help imagining him shaping it alone in his bathroom, and it endeared him to me.

Sitting down, I explained that I’d actually arrived early and had waited at the door to meet him.

“Why would you wait there?” He laughed. “The food is inside the restaurant.” He said I would love the food here at Ronan’s. “I come to Ronan’s whenever I’m stuck in Midtown. Everyone I take loves it here.”

“It seems really lively,” I said.

He replied, “Well. It’s not that lively.”

We ordered lobster.

“So you’re from Keber Creek too, huh?” he said. “My condolences.”

“It’s surreal,” I said, “being here in New York.”

“Yeah. It’s almost half as good as the pictures.”

I laughed. In truth, I had feared New York might offer nothing more than what I’d seen online, but on the contrary, the things I saw astonished me precisely because I recognized them so well. The dripping AC units. The flags at half-mast. The Empire State Building penetrating low clouds. To see New York was to step into my own personal dream, uncannily realized.

Bickle asked where I’d landed.

“Thirty-fourth Street,” I said. “I expected there’d be a station like in Fairbanks, but the pod just fell down onto a platform in the middle of Herald Square. There were like a hundred people waiting around it to board.”

“They’ve got a station in Fairbanks now?” Bickle said.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. You know, since leaving Alaska twenty-odd years ago, I’ve never returned.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Did you leave family behind?”

Bickle looked at me. The air was warm and oily, redolent of seafood and rubber. “I left for college. My dad was a surveyor for the gold mine. I apprenticed there, and the company got me a scholarship.”

“My dad worked at the gold mine too,” I said. I told Bickle that I didn’t know much about engineering but I loved his online videos. “I might have mentioned, I make videos myself. Nothing serious.”

Our lobsters arrived. They were more like crayfish.

Bickle said, “That Queensboro Bridge video changed my life. Now, I can film a five-minute rant and a stadium gets renovated. No one wants to risk a lawsuit for having ignored my warnings. The truth is, it’s funny, but I don’t even need another prediction to come true. If I say an ugly mall is going to collapse, these pathetic little commissioners all scramble to tear it down and rebuild it before we can ever find out if I was right. That’s impact. You know I have two million followers on Scroller now? And I’ve gotten offers. I’m actually considering changing jobs. I’ve been butting heads at Columbia. I’m sick of it. I want to do something real.”

I waited for him to begin eating, while he waited on more butter.

If he noticed me waiting, he chose not to release me. As he spoke, he

kept waving—with both arms—at our server. An elderly man fell down

across the bar, causing a minor stir. When we finally ate, my food had

a chalky bitterness, almost what I imagined poison would taste like,

but Bickle ate the same thing and didn’t mention it.

More than halfway through the meal, he finally stopped talking about himself. “Tell me, Tanner,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

Although in his message he’d already offered to find me a job, I feared that to ask for one outright would seem too forward. Instead I said euphemistically that I’d be grateful for any advice about making a career outside Keber Creek.

“Well, are you willing to run errands?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Shovel shit?”

I told him I was a janitor before.

“Do you have any moral stipulations?”

I thought about it. “Probably,” I said.

“Okay,” said Bickle. “That’s good, I guess.”

He asked how I liked to be managed. Having no experience working under different managers, I wasn’t sure how to answer. I considered saying I liked to be given the opportunity to do work that would make a real impact, since this seemed to be something he valued, but it occurred to me that if he cared about impact, people like him might want to hire others who would do the more thankless grunt work. Ultimately, I just answered, “I don’t mind it,” hoping that was funny.

He smiled. He did seem to like me. He said there were lots of jobs out there.

“This is actually quite an exciting time for me,” he said. “I got contacted the other day by the CWC group.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah, they’re looking for a spokesperson. They want the company to have a familiar face. Someone who people see as being on their side. We’ll see. I think of myself more as an independent voice. It’s important that I retain my independence, right?”

“Totally,” I said, realizing to my disappointment that for the rest of the meal, we would be talking about him again. As he went on about his own options, my gaze wandered. I noticed two homosexuals holding hands. One smiled at me (I thought of the cephalopodic creatures of the gruesome Sodom Striker game in Keber Creek’s church arcade). When I returned my focus to Bickle, he was talking with food in his mouth.

“Circuit travel isn’t the flashiest thing to become the spokesperson for,” he said. “I mean, it’s glorified airplanes. But then, it’s more important than bridges. And any collaboration with a company as big as CWC would really grow my platform. I’m a little concerned about this day contraction stuff that’s come out lately, but, you know, the agencies putting out that research are the same ones who got Queensboro wrong.”

“What’s day contraction?”

“You haven’t heard about day contraction?”

I made some excuse for my education, but he didn’t seem to care. He kept rattling off the pros and cons of his own career opportunities. I grew doubtful that he had any jobs to connect me with at all. Outside, smoke poured up from the sidewalk, ignored by passersby. I wondered what it was. I’d been awake for thirty hours.

“I thought CWC already had a guy in their commercials,” I said. “Captain Sam? ‘Welcome aboard, I’m Captain Sam.’”

“Pederast.”

“Oh.”

“And sure, I’m ready to be making real money,” he said.

For the rest of the meal, he talked about how you can’t live in New York on a professor’s salary, you’d be better off in Keber Creek.

“Anyway, my advice for you,” he said. “Stay out of academia.”

He stood. Following him from the restaurant, I stepped out into the full light of Midtown and within fifteen seconds was almost struck by a scooterist. “Goddamn one-wheels,” said an Indian man with a holographic chess game open on his tablet. “Oughta be illegal.” It was January, and New Yorkers ate on park benches, greedily, like squirrels.

“Well,” said Bickle. “I’ve gotta run. But it was nice meeting you. You seem like a good kid. I’m going to be in touch about jobs. Give me like one week.”

“Thank you so much,” I said, wishing I could believe him.

“Of course,” he said magnanimously. “And hey. What did you think of Ronan’s?”