Disappearance

by Trevor Zaple

  “No one picked up at 911. Do you understand me? No one was there. No one at all.”

  “I know,”

  “No one, but someone always picks up the Emergency line. That’s what they’re there for! For emergencies!”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to,”

  “Emergencies! This is an emergency! What are we supposed to do if something happens? If anything happens?”

  He stepped back and held her by the shoulders. Her pretty face was contorted by fear and there was panic running loose and rabid around her chestnut eyes. Her lips were trembling, probably unconsciously, and her shoulders were vibrating under his palms in a way that he didn’t care for. He gripped her shoulders tightly until he caught and locked her gaze.

  “Olivia,” he started.

  “Mark, what do we do what do we do what do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said sharply, cutting her off. “I do know that, right now, we have each other. Now,” he stepped back from her, and put one sweating palm to his head, running it back partially through his hair, “I know that we’re over—I’m not going to try to press the issue, because I know your thoughts on it—but I do know that something has happened. I don’t know what—I don’t know if we’ll ever find out, really—but I know that we’re still here. You and I. You know me, and I know you, and hopefully you can still trust me enough to stick around with me as a friend, if nothing else.”

  She looked at him, deeply, as though she were trying to ascertain what lay behind his tired, twitching eyes. She said nothing, and Mark scrambled for how to finish.

  “We need to stick together, right?” he asked. She nodded slowly, but still said nothing. “At least we know each other. And there’s that to think about,” he noted, pointing at her protruding belly. Her hands instinctively went to it, cradling it protectively.

  “Oh god,” she whispered, “what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll figure it out when we get there,” he replied, and then a noise caught his ear from off in the building. It was a noise that he’d heard a thousand times before, but today, in this context, it was explosive. The elevator was rising up through the building. He put out his hand and raised a finger. Olivia caught the hint and then her eyes widened as she heard what he was hearing. They both listened, transfixed, as the elevator lifted and then shuddered to a stop. It was loud enough that Mark knew it had stopped on their floor.

  “Someone’s out there,” Olivia whispered, and Mark wasn’t sure if it was awe or fear that he heard most in her voice.

  “Shh…” he whispered, as quietly as he could manage. He strained his ears to listen and was rewarded with the sound of faint footfalls on carpet. He was reminded of the disappearing footsteps in the street and a storm-surge of panic rushed through him.

  “Stay quiet!” he hissed, and crept over to the apartment door. He pressed his face up to the peephole and stared out. The footsteps got closer, and eventually a figure, blurred and distorted by the funhouse-mirror effect of the peephole, passed into view and stopped in front of the door. Even though he should have known what was coming next, the sharp rap at the door elicited a scream from him. He clamped his hand over his mouth but knew that it was too late to do anything about it now. He looked back and Olivia’s shocked face was wavering, about to break.

  “Hey man, is that you in there?” a warm, gregarious voice asked and Mark’s knees buckled. He put a hand out to steady himself against the door.

  “Yeah, Carlos, it’s me. Hold on.”

  He looked back and Olivia was standing with her arms crossed again, looking singularly unimpressed.

  “You told him where I live?” she asked, anger seeping back into her voice. Mark shrugged, unable to come up with any sort of soothing reply. Instead, he opened the door and stood aside. Carlos was on the other side, looking just as calm and stoned as he had on the street.

  “Hey man,” he said, stepping into the apartment, “do you have anything to eat? I got a hunger like you wouldn’t believe right now”.

  Second Interlude

  While the dazed remnants of the city shook the cobwebs from their heads and pulled together like scared amoebas in a hostile pond, the glittering shops along Queen Street West stayed intact. Their glitzy glass-entombed displays stayed as they were when the people tending them had disappeared, forever selling the latest fashions and electronics to a long-gone audience. The two hundred or so survivors that found themselves alone in the neighborhood were too dazed to think about looting, and managed to come together at the Eatons Centre to huddle together and chatter like angry, panicking birds about the situation they found themselves in. They screamed, and talked excitedly of Revelations, and wept like piteous children, but they didn’t engage in an orgy of larceny. There would be time for that later.

  The continued existence of the downtown core, and the survivor group that gathered in the Eaton Centre that day, was thanks to two men named Moe and Zeeshan. The two of them had found themselves the only two staff members left at the Purple Rhino, an ersatz high-class eatery on the second floor of that giant mall. After the understandable moment of utter shock that occurred immediately after the disappearance, the two of them made a very clever and very timely realization. In a way, their observation of this simple but highly important fact was due to their employment in the kitchen. Had they not been in there during the disappearance, they might not have seen the salmon that the line chef had been searing burst into flames several minutes after he had disappeared. Moe, the salads-and-soups cook, had reacted with unaccustomed swiftness, grabbing the fire extinguisher and unleashing chemical foam all over the stove. Zeeshan, who had been a prep kid chopping onions and cilantro for the day, had run around turning the rest of the equipment off. After catching their breaths (and smoking a joint that Zeeshan had brought to work that day), they had come to the realization that most of the restaurants in the downtown core had been in operation, and that all of them would have active stoves. Within a few hours, the entire core could have been in flames. To their credit, they found the idea of rushing against time to save the downtown from an inferno to be incredibly adventurous and rushed off to do it.

  As they ran through the core, dashing into restaurants and shutting off the flames, they encountered others, wandering in shock or running scared. Some ran away from them, but most stood with them for a few minutes to hear about what they were up to. Within an hour, Zeeshan and Moe had a veritable army of people (thirty or so, anyway) willing to follow them in their mad quest. Between them, they were able to avert a major fire from sweeping the core. Other parts of the city were not so lucky; a pizza shop in far eastern Scarborough went up and took nine blocks with it, burning merrily into the night and driving out the survivors that it didn’t burn alive. Across the bay, some of the machinery in the heavy industry along the Burlington Bay that didn’t grind itself out sparked a massive fire; thick, toxic black smoke spewed into the air and it was only to the grace of a changing wind that the volatile fuel tanks beside the highway didn’t cause a much larger problem.

  Albert Johnson stood at the edge of his tiny side street, which afforded a great view of the lake (and was only a ten-minute walk from Olivia’s apartment, incidentally). He watched the industrial center across the lake burn, watched the billowing clouds of smoke blanket the sky. The sun set, and he watched it go down, the light looking diseased through the choking clouds as it went down over the inferno. As the sun passed the horizon he walked back to the end of the street and let himself into the rooming-house complex where he lived. He sat in his room, put together a perfect rolled, perfectly shaped spliff, and turned his wall-mounted, illustrated Bible to the Book of Revelations. He turned it gently, reverently, to the ninth chapter and read: And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by r
eason of the smoke of the pit. He contemplated this, and nodded, and closed the Book. He held the spliff in his hand, and then left his room. He went back to the spot at the end of the street, and looked back out over the lake. Darkness had covered the land, but the conflagration across the lake still burned as brightly as the sun. He watched it burn silently across the dark, unknowable water, and lit the spliff from a worn plastic lighter that had a permanent home in his battered, dirty jeans. He puffed it hard to get it started, exhaling big clouds of smoke that floated up in front of him, vying against the monolithic exhalation across the distance. He got a bright cherry going on the end, and smoothed out his toking, letting the smoke curl down into him with easy familiarity.

  “Princes shall come out of Egypt,” he said, his thick voice rolling out into the silent, dark night. “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand unto God. Oh thou, God of Ethiopia, thou God of divine majesty, thy spirit come within our hearts to dwell in the path of righteousness. That the hungry be fed, the sick nourished, the aged protected, and the infant cared for. Teach us love and loyalty as it is in Zion. Selah”.

  His prayer finished, he smoked silently, watching the coastline of Burlington burn without ceasing into the darkness of the night.

  In Kensington Market, Jon Trinder and Zachan Cory stood on top of the tallest building in the neighborhood, watching the inferno as a glow in the distance across the darkness. They were, or had been at any rate, students at the university. There had been a benefit party in the building the night before, for the Workers Party of Iran, and the two of them had not only attended it but had crashed in the hallway at three in the morning, gassed on Stella Artois and the bizarre, looping, dragging electronic music that the DJ had spun into the wee hours of the morning. When they had awoken the next morning they had been the only two left; the building was deserted, although littered with the leftovers of the night’s party. Zachan had grown up in a sheltering, protecting home and was under the anxious impression that he had drank himself into brain damage. Jon had corroborated his experience, though, and reported further that he had gone down to street level and only seen four or five people, staring up at the windows of the riot of houses that lined the tiny streets and calling out plaintively. As that disorienting first day wore on, they had encountered a succession of small groups who had all sung the same refrain: we don’t know, we don’t know, someone needs to do something. None of them had offered an idea as to what exactly to do; they just muttered and wailed and spoke gruffly of the need for someone to take the reins and someone to put matters to right.

  They stood atop the roof of the building they’d woken up in, drinking up the beer that the party organizers hadn’t taken away and discussing it.

  “In the end, they’re right, you know,” Jon said sagely. “Someone really does need to step up and start giving orders. If anything’s going to get done”.

  “Yeah, probably,” Zachan agreed, “but who? You? Are you going to go find everyone and say ‘hey guys, do this’?”

  Jon drank his beer (still cold, thank goodness for small miracles) and thought about this. Eventually he nodded his head.

  “Nope,” he said cheerfully, “that does not sound like something I’m going to do, how about you?”

  Zacahn laughed, the sound echoing off into the night.

  “Hell no,” he chortled, “I wouldn’t know the first thing about taking charge”.

  “Well then, there you go. There’s no point in worrying about it until someone else steps up and says go”.

  Zachan chugged the rest of his bottle and threw the empty over the edge. It described a long arc and then plummeted, hitting the pavement below with a satisfying crash. Seconds later a dog began barking wildly and both men jumped.

  “Jesus, was that a dog?” Zachan asked incredulously. “I haven’t seen one since, well, since you know what happened”.

  “I have,” Jon mused, “well, that is I’ve heard some. While we were poking around today, I heard a couple, barking from a long way off, blocks away. That one’s close.”

  “I wonder if it needs a friend?” Zachan asked aloud, ducking into the building’s roof entrance to snag another beer. Jon finished his beer and then tossed his empty to join its companion. It crashed similarly, causing the dog to go off even louder.

  “Fuck him,” Jon called out, stifling a belch. “Get me another one”.

  Zachan returned with two frosty Stellas and handed one to Jon.

  “So, what the fuck do you think happened?” Zachan asked philosophically, twisting the cap off of his beer.

  Jon opened his beer and took a long swallow before replying.

  “I don’t really know, but I have some theories” he said mysteriously. Zachan cracked up.

  “Oh yeah? Lay ‘em on me, oh wise one”.

  Jon paused for a swallow. “Do not mock the wise old sage, my son, for he can still lay out a can of whoop-ass all over your drunk Balkan ass”. He gathered his thoughts, and then spoke. “I think that maybe the planet went through a phase or, a rip I guess, in the space-time fabric, and not everyone survived the trip through it”.

  “That’s pretty meta,” Zachan laughed. “I don’t know, that’s kind of heavy”.

  “Best I’ve been able to come up with, short of it being the Rapture, I guess”.

  Zachan considered this for a moment, drinking his beer. He finally shook his head.

  “I mean, it fits,” he said slowly, “like, it looks like it’s supposed to, I suppose, but…I mean, come on. Really? The Rapture?”

  Jon nodded. “Yeah, no, I know. I get it. I mean, I’m not really a believer, and I think that there’s probably a rational explanation for all of this, but I’ll be fucked if I can think of one.”

  “So it’s the atheist Rapture, then,” Zachan said.

  “What do you mean?” Jon asked.

  “Everyone’s disappeared for no fucking reason at all”.

  Jon considered this for a moment, and then nodded slowly.

  After that first, blessedly calm period passed, the integral avarice in human nature reared its inevitable head. The initial group of two hundred that camped out in the Eatons Centre dispersed slowly into the general population that knocked around the downtown, trying to find more permanent food, shelter, and purpose. There was plenty of alcohol, perfectly accessible both in the wide-open bars on the shelves of the various Beer Store and LCBO locations. The survivors, trying to inject some courage into a suddenly frightening situation, availed themselves of it freely. As they pored through the open buildings in search of alcohol and food, they came across the stores that were less immediately useful. They held the goods that, up until a few days ago, they had worked their fingers to the bone to acquire. Their paycheques, scant as they were, had been held in banks; those banks were now unguarded, and the cash registers in which they had deposited their paycheques slowly were also unguarded. Money was no object or concern, and after a while the idea of grabbing it and taking it off to hoard somewhere “until this blows over” lost its novelty and its appeal.

  As the idea of money lost its power over them, they held it and wondered how they had let funny-colored slips of cotton and polymers exercise such a hold over them. They threw it into the streets laughing; some would watch, bemused and alarmed by such behavior, and then, with a sudden laugh, join in the festivities. They had food and water aplenty, with the restaurants and grocery stores wide open and stuffed with the bountiful riches of the most developed and advanced nation on the planet. Money, that chain of servitude that had bound them to cheerless, thankless labor, had been severed. In the area around Moss Park, a man who had once been counted officially as homeless spent an afternoon gathering up as much paper currency as he could gather together in a backpack. As night fell he brought it back to the park that he had slept so many nights in and counted it, slowly and with great attention to detail. In the end, with the last of the light failing, he finalized the count at $68,345. He took the pile of money, stacked it as neatly as
he could in front of his favorite bench, and lit in on fire. He sat on the bench well into the night, warming his hands over the fire, keeping it stoked with branches and leaves from the fine old trees overhead. He watched as the last of the money burned before finally turning into sleep.

  After that, it was not long before the pristine, opulent showrooms that looked out on Queen Street fell victim to the age-old violence of the rock and the brick. Windows were smashed and locks broken. The loot of the city was dragged out into the street much like the intestines of the victims of a vengeful massacre. The shops were often broken into with more force than necessary, and this is also perhaps understandable. Many of the survivors had harbored greedy dreams about the clothing and gadgets that were locked behind these facades, and now in the end, with the passing of the age, these items were as freely available as the leaves and the grass, and worth equally as much. Many survivors, once they got over the initial moral dilemma of looting, became quite enthusiastic about it. The majority took a laptop of some form, even though the services that they provided had been rendered moot; the internet still functioned, although the forums were severely depleted and told the same stories that were still being uploaded to YouTube and Facebook accounts—that old, familiar refrain of don’t know, won’t someone think of the children? As time wore on, only the survivors that were sysadmins kept the flame alive, tending to their endlessly cycling banks of servers out of a strange sense of purpose.

  Steve St.Omes had held the brick in his hand like a talisman as he pushed his way through the littered debris of crashed cars that clogged the streets around the Bloor and Bathurst intersection. He had walked all the way from Forest Hill, where he’d gone to check on a friend. The friend had been gone, although whether vanished or simply moved on he hadn’t known. After sitting on his friend’s front porch, watching the afternoon breeze rustle through the majestic trees in the neighborhood, he caught a stray thought and decided to follow through on it. He had nothing better to do, after all. So he had walked down from Forest Hill, taking a few hours to do so, stopping only to pick up a broken chunk of cinder block (his ‘brick’) from an empty construction site. As he turned onto Bloor his feet picked up a quickening pace; by the time he approached the Bathurst intersection with the multilevel subway station he was nearly running. The chunk of cinder block weighed a fair amount and after several hours of carrying was straining the muscles in his arms. By this point, however, he was beyond noticing. His plan had taken on a talismanic quality in his mind and most of his surroundings were, in fact, beyond his noticing.