Leaving Crosby’s, Manning resumes his trek east along Seventy-Second till he reaches the Dakota on the park. He takes this same route every night. The Dakota was bombed in ’27 during the Migrant Riots, when 1.7 million flooded into the States from Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, made refugees by crop failures, famine, and intertribal genocide. The Americans they displaced still haven’t been resettled and they’re all armed to the teeth. The forecourt of the Dakota remains charred black. The place still hasn’t been reoccupied. The massive wrought-iron gates that were the Dakota’s trademark when John Lennon was assassinated there back in 1980 have been replaced by concrete barriers topped with concertina wire. You can still smell the cordite as you walk past. What this means to Manning I have no idea.

He passes the Dakota and turns south, in other words backtracking, and walks down Central Park West, always on the west side of the avenue, away from the park where the tent cities of the displaced used to be and still sometimes are.

One time, about three months ago, Gleason sent me to fetch Manning when he had bolted from a conference without a word to anybody. I found Manning here, south of the Dakota, on the park side, standing just inside the stone wall that runs along the sidewalk of Central Park West.

A religious revival of some kind was in progress. A speaker, an African-American man, stood on an elevated platform spouting fire and brimstone to a flamboyantly responsive throng of women, middle-aged or older, conservatively dressed, mostly black. The preacher was declaiming about the sins of the race of mankind. The man-made eco-disasters of recent decades were proof that humanity was inherently evil and unworthy of its Creator’s love. The Almighty, the speaker declared, had lost patience with us, as He had before in the time of Noah. Buses, a dozen or more—big interstate motor coaches—were parked at the curb along CPW. I couldn’t help myself. I snapped a few pix with my phone.

FREE WILL BAPTIST CHURCH, Lee, MA

FOURSQUARE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP, Eufala, AL

CHRIST THE REDEEMER CHURCH, Marblehead, MA

NEW HOPE ASSEMBLY, Whitney, DE

I asked a man in the crowd if this kind of rally happened here often. He said gatherings like this had been taking place on this spot for years.

Manning stood at the rear of the crush. He was so engrossed that I held back for long moments, reluctant to break in on his absorption. The women of the congregations were apparently en route to the Holy Land. New York was their staging place. From here the buses would take them to Atlanta, where they would board charter flights crossing first to North Africa and from there to Israel. “Why are they going?” I asked the man who had told me about the gatherings.

“For the end of the world,” he said.