The Great Disappearance, Part II
The mystery of the world's vanished Jews continues...
Editor’s Note: See Part I of this eight-part satirical series here.
Saturday April 1
That’ll Be the Day
The morning after the Great Disappearance, as it became to be called, Nelson had a dream.
The vision began with his long-dead father, handling a snake in front of the church of his youth in rural West Virginia, while Bob stood off to the side. The snake was no rattler, but a huge python curled around his father’s arms and shoulders. Nelson was trying to figure out why his father was wrestling with a python and not a rattler. The snake started moving up the back of Bob Sr.’s neck.
Bob tried to shout a warning when the snake curled up like a shepherd’s crook and opened its mouth as if to swallow his dad whole from the head down, but he had lost his voice.
The snake had a ravenous look on its almost human face.
Bob Sr. turned and looked his son dead in the eye.
“I need no warning!” he said. “It’s you!” He threw the snake down at his feet where it split into a horde of vipers that sped down the aisle of the congregation to bite at the multitude gathered to witness the devouring.
The vision segued into a view of Rabbi Coen’s kitchen where Nelson had sat and spoke with the rabbi several times during his time in Boston. In the vision, Coen stood before his stove. Another Rabbi appeared in the hallway walked into the kitchen and approached Coen, putting his hand on his shoulder.
“It’s time to go,” the apparition said to Coen. “Gather your people and let’s go.”
Somehow, Nelson was present but unseen as the tableau before him unfolded. The hair on the back of Nelson’s head stood up straight as Coen shook his head in refusal, with an imploring look in his eyes. A time of judgement and trial was coming.
“It’s not fair to abandon these people now,” he said. “Most of them have done nothing wrong.”
“That’s part of the problem,” the apparition said. “Most of them haven’t much of anything. And they’re not being abandoned. Just tested. Refined.”
Coen nodded in acquiescence to the Rabbi’s judgment and walked toward the bedroom hallway to wake his wife and children.
Nelson woke up from his sleep and got up from his bed to find his wife sitting at the kitchen table, looking at him in bemused expectation. It was the first day after the disappearance.
“You’re going to be in huge demand,” Lexi said as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “What are you going to say to the great unwashed?”
“I haven’t a clue,” he said. “Not a clue.”
“You’re mad you didn’t get to go with them, aren’t you?” Lexi said.
“Scared is more like it,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to what happens next. We’re going to have to draw lots to see who replaces them in our imagination.”
Make Ready
Martin Connelly, a London-based conspiracy theorist with a million followers on social media, shouted at his audience from his apartment in London early on Saturday morning. He had fought the impulse to do a livestream as soon as reports of the vanishing started to trickle in so that by the time he logged on the day after it happened, thousands of people were waiting for his response.
“I TOLD YOU!” he said. “I told you these folks were up to no good! They were CHAMELEONS!”
The Jews had to flee en masse when they realized their plans at world domination had come to naught, he said during his daily livestream.
“What did I tell you?” he ranted, leaning back from his webcam. “The Israeli who spoke about aliens making contact? HE WASN’T KIDDING! They were the aliens all along,” he said decisively.
“Get ready!” he said, bring his face right up close to the webcam. “Someday, they’ll return in force, from outer space or erupt from their secret hidey holes they’ve dug deep into the earth where it’s hotter and more conducive to their chameleon metabolism!”
“Make ready for their return!” he said.
The Great Reversal
Renegade Catholic Paul Hanson was equally jubilant during his first public appearance after the Great Disappearance.
“They’re gone!” he said. “Who cares where they went? They’re gone! Who cares how they got there! I want to talk about what it means! This is proof positive of God’s continued presence in history — that God himself is an antisemite! He has finally freed us from the yoke of the Jew and we can now go about the business of restoring the moral order once and for all!”
Hanson was giving an interview to his sidekick Peter Vikander on a local cable access show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hanson had made a living selling massive tomes with lots of footnotes about the malign influence of the Jews on humanity after he had been fired from his first teaching job at a Catholic girl’s college in Minnesota. He had been rebuked so many times by his local bishop that his own priest winced every time he gave him the eucharist.
“This is the great reversal that I’ve been writing about in my books for the past two decades!” he declared.
Hanson was in his early 80s was not just another pretty face. With gray hair and a face shaped like a comma, his eyes moved spastically as he talked. Vikander fed him a question about life after the Great Disappearance.
“Do you think people will have a tough time adapting to the new state of being you’re describing?”
“Are you kidding?” Hansn asked in amazement. “John 14:12 says we will do ‘greater things than these.’ This is the new enlightenment; except this time, we will get it right! God has heard our prayers.”
“I hope you’re right,” Vikander said, his voice betraying a sense of foreboding.
