The Great Disappearance, Part I
A new fiction of the bizarre tale of what began on Friday March, 31...
Editor’s Note: God of the Desert Books very happily welcomes new contributor with his first creative writing submission, a delightfully clever satirical short story which we’ll be serializing over the course of the next eight days. Many thanks to for the referral of such a talented writer.
Friday, March 31
No Answer
Dora Valverde knocked gently on the door of the Berkowitzes’ second-floor unit in an all-Jewish apartment building in Crown Heights. It was 5:30 a.m. on a Friday, the last day of March.
Normally, Mrs. B would answer the door and let Dora in and they would share a cup of tea before waking up the family’s two boys, cooking them breakfast and getting them off to school before spending the next few hours preparing for Shabbos.
Curiously, Mrs. B did not answer so Dora knocked again. Again, no answer. Dora reached into her handbag, found the key to the apartment Mrs. B had given her and let herself in. The electric coil on the stove shined bright red in the dark and the kettle gave off an odor of burnt metal. It had long since whistled itself empty.
Dora turned off the stove.
“Mrs. B?” she called out quietly. The bathroom door was open. Reluctantly, she walked further into the bedroom hallway, not wanting to invade their privacy. The beds in both the parents and children’s rooms were empty.
The housekeeper walked into the hallway and knocked on the door to the neighboring apartment, where the Berensons lived. Like the Berkowitzes, they were early risers. There was no answer, so she rang the doorbell and again, no answer. She checked the doorknob, found it unlocked. She found the same red glow from the stove top and the smelled a similar burnt odor from an overheated tea kettle that had boiled itself dry. As she checked the rest of the unit and discovered it was empty, she heard the building’s fire alarm go off.
Dora stepped out into the hallway expecting to see parents from the other six units on the floor bringing their children out into the hallway and rush down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk to wait for the firetrucks, but no one came out. She pounded on the door of apartments as she ran toward the stairs.
“Fire!” she yelled. “Fire!”
Still, no one came out. She had gotten to the front door of the building when she heard the firetruck sirens. Firefighters rushed past her as she held the door open for them. They went to the laundry room to look at the fire panel to see where the fire was in the 10-story building. A fire lieutenant came in through the door.
“The building’s empty,” she said to him.
“Empty? There’s 84 units in this building.”
“They’re gone,” Dora said. “No one’s here.”
A firefighter came down the stairs.
“Stove fire, sixth floor,” he explained to the lieutenant. “Weird. The apartment was empty. No one home.”
“Start knocking on doors,” the lieutenant said. “Check the rest of the building.”
That’ll Be the Day
Bob Nelson, the pastor of a small Congregational church in Boston, knew something was up when the reporter from the local NPR station said something about a mass disappearance of Jews in New York City sometime during the night.
“When the city woke up this morning, it discovered all the Jews are gone” she said. “Two million of its inhabitants have vanished. The whole community is simply gone,” she said, “and no one has any idea where they went or how they left.”
At first, Nelson wondered if he had missed a day and that he was witnessing an April Fool’s Joke done in very bad taste, but he confirmed the date by looking at his phone. He turned on the television to see a news reporter doing a live shot on the streets of Crown Heights in New York City.
People were milling in the streets behind him, streaming jubilantly in and out of apartment buildings, some with the objects they had taken from newly emptied apartments and vacant synagogues.
“New York City’s Jews have disappeared,” he said. “Not just the orthodox Jews, but every last one of the city’s two million or so Jews. Overnight the city’s population has shrunk by 20 percent.”
“We’re hearing reports that even the Jews who had converted away from the faith have vanished,” he said. “People all over the city had discovered that their neighbors and, in some instances, even their spouses, had vanished during the night.”
“They are gone,” he said.
The reporter interviewed a cleaning lady, a short dark-haired woman from the Dominican Republic who had worked for a family in the apartment building in the live shot. She was nearly hysterical, with one of her sons standing nearby to calm her. The fire department had showed up to put out a stove fire to discover the building’s Jewish inhabitants had vanished.
“The families gone. All of them. Disappeared. The entire building, empty,” she said. “This is not good.”
The son stepped forward and waived off the reporter before he could ask any follow up questions.
“The disappearance comes on the heels of a spike in antisemitic attacks in the city,” the anchor said when the live shot ended.
“Whoa,” Nelson said. He called Chaim Coen, the rabbi who ran a nearby Yeshiva to find out what he thought had happened to the Jews in New York City. There was no answer.
“Chaim, don’t tell me you’ve disappeared too,” Nelson said. “It’s the Evangelicals who are supposed to be raptured, not you guys! Give me a shout.”
As soon as he hung up, he got a call from Father John Sullivan, the local Catholic Priest whom he had shared the dais with at numerous civic events along with Rabbi Chaim and Adeel Masood.
“What’s going on Father Sullivan?” he said.
“I’m calling you to find out,” the priest said, “You’re the expert on these folks.” Father John was referring obliquely to Nelson’s academic career as an expert in Christian-Jewish relations. He had turned his doctoral thesis into a book titled Christianity Without Jew-Hate, a text that graced the bookshelves of numerous seminaries.
His career as an expert on interfaith relations came to a sudden halt with the death of his first son as the result of a drug overdose. For the past five years, Nelson had been working as a pastor at a church in Boston where he discovered he had a gift ministering to drunks and drug addicts.
“I dunno,” Nelson said, “I just put a call into Coen to find out what he thought.”
“He won’t call back,” Father Sullivan said. “Ours are gone too.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I kid you not,” Father Sullivan said. “The police at District 14 had called me asking if I had seen or heard anything from the Yeshiva across the street before the fire trucks came about 4:30 this morning.”
“Fire trucks?”
“Yeah, there was a stove fire that set off the fire alarm,” the priest said. “Coen was apparently cooking eggs before whatever happened... happened. The firemen went into put the fire out and found the apartment was empty.”
Nelson looked at the television. The chyron beneath the newscasters said something about Jews vanishing throughout the world.
“Same thing happened a bunch of places,” Father Sullivan said. “After they got back to the station, they saw the news about New York City. The city sent out police to knock on doors for well-being checks only to find the same thing happened in Boston.”
“What’s going on in Israel?” the pastor asked. “Are they gone too?”
“Apparently so,” Father Sullivan said. “The U.S. has sent paratroopers into guard Israel’s nuclear plants and has said they will drone on sight anyone who even walks near it or any of the country’s military installations.
“Today would be a good day to pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” Nelson said.
Nelson put in a call to Imam Masood.
“How are you holding up?”
“Not too good,” Masood said.
“Why? What’s up?” Nelson asked.
“People are starting to blame us for the disappearance.”
“I get the sense that there’s plenty of blame to go around,” Nelson said.
“That’s the problem,” Masood said. “Lots of blame, not so many targets.”
“Don’t worry,” Nelson said. “We’ll have a public forum. That will fix everything.”
“Of course!” Masood said, laughing.
“In the meantime, I would put a call into the police and ask for a car to be put in front of your mosque.” Nelson said.
“It’s already there,” Masood said.
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