City of Endless Night

50

Several miles to the north of the Manhattan Detention Center, Marsden Swope stood next to a tarp spread in the center of the Great Lawn. He waited with a thrill of satisfaction mingled with a sense of humility as people began emerging from walkways, stands of trees, and nearby avenues and — slowly, haltingly, as if sensing the gravity of the occasion — walking across the vast lawn to gather silently around him. A few passersby, hurrying to their destinations in the cold January air, slowed to stare at this motley and growing assemblage. But so far they had not attracted the attention of the authorities.

Swope knew his message had reached a varied group, a real cross section of America, but he could not have imagined just how diverse it would be. All ages, races, creeds, and income brackets were now quietly surrounding him in a deepening circle. People wearing business suits, headdresses, tuxedos, saris, baseball uniforms, kaftans, Hawaiian shirts, gang colors — it went on and on and on. This was what he had so fervently hoped, that the one percenters and ninety-nine percenters would unite in their rejection of wealth.

“Thanks be to God,” Swope whispered to himself. “Thanks be to God.”

Now the time had come to start the bonfire. He would do it fast, so that the cops would not have time to stop it or push through the crowd to douse the fire.

He rose to full height, standing in the middle of a circular clearing, already surrounded by pilgrims ten to fifteen deep. With a gesture that was both dramatic and — he hoped — deferential, he threw off his cape to reveal a garment he had woven himself over many painstaking evenings: a hair shirt made of the roughest, coarsest animal hair he’d been able to acquire. Next, he took hold of the tarp and snatched it away, revealing a large white X he had spray-painted on the grass. Beside it were two jerrycans of kerosene.

“People!” he cried out. “Children of the living God! You have gathered here — rich and poor, from all over the country — for a single purpose: to unite in ridding ourselves of the luxuriant and prideful possessions that are so hateful to God, the wealth that Jesus so clearly stated would prevent our entry into heaven. Let us now solemnly swear to divest ourselves of these trappings of greed and purify our hearts. At this place, in this time, let us each make a symbolic offering to the bonfire of the vanities, as our promise to live from this day until the end of our days lives of simplicity!”

Now he backed away from the painted cross, picking up the jerrycans as he did, until he had joined the front line of the circle. Reaching into a pocket of his torn jeans, he plucked out a pen — a gold-filled fountain pen that his father, whom he had not seen or communicated with in a decade, had given him on graduating from the Jesuit seminary. He held the pen up for all to see; its precious metal inlay glinted in the rays of the setting sun. Then he threw it into the open area, where it landed, nib down, in the center of the painted cross.

“Let all who wish to walk in the way of grace,” he intoned, “follow my example!”

There was a brief ripple through the crowd, like a shudder of expectation. This was followed by a moment of stasis. And then incredible showers of items were tossed from the surrounding circle, landing on the grass marked by the cross: designer handbags, clothing, jewelry, watches, car keys, sheaves of bearer bonds, ziplock bags of drugs and packets of marijuana, stacks of hundred-dollar bills, books detailing diet and get-rich-quick schemes, along with some surprising items: a jewel-studded dildo, an electric guitar with a beautifully book-matched top, and a Smith & Wesson handgun. Countless other things that beggared description rained down or were dropped onto the quickly growing pile. The heap of glitter and tinsel and empty luxury mounted up, including a perfectly astonishing number of women’s shoes — stiletto pumps, mostly.

Now a transcendent glow, a sense of divine inevitability, suffused Swope like the caress of an angel. This must be how Savonarola felt, he realized, all those centuries ago in Florence. Taking one of the jerrycans of kerosene, he stepped forward and, unbunging it, poured it in widening circles over the ever-growing litter of vanities. Things thudded around him and fell against his head and shoulders, but he took no notice.

“And now!” he said, throwing aside the empty can and producing a box of wooden safety matches. “Let our new life in purification begin with fire!”

Pulling a match from the box and striking it into life, he threw it onto the pyre — and in the huge, yellow-orange crump of fire and heat that rose, he could see — briefly illuminated as if by daylight — the dark images of thousands of additional pilgrims, coming in from all sides of the Great Lawn, to join in this latter-day bonfire of the vanities, even as luxuries continued to rain down into the conflagration.