Jayla Mile. Chapter 17

17. Holy Disorder:

And so Mile merged with pure impure Gold in the big brass bed night after night. Forsaking Cornerstone and beach pals, she holed up with Gold in his house where they practiced their own divine brand of Original Sin. That is, until the day he dropped her off at the Centre of the Holy Order.

“Through the Order there exists a superior life,” he told her. Since remaining with him seemed to depend on her acceptance of the Order, she consented to spend a few days at the Centre.

And so on a Sunday in December, Jayla Mile and the Holy Order stand in a prayer circle in a downtown park, snow underfoot. Jay, ignoring the desperate murmurs around her, is watching birds that alight on a statue to her left. Dusk descends as she remembers that only a few weeks ago two new and promising propositions came into her life: first, Gold spent the night with her, and second, he asked her if she would like to visit the Centre of the Holy Order. The former he claimed was the end of five years of celibacy and the latter - the Centre of the Holy Order - the reason for that abstinence.

All through the autumn, while she’d longed to feel him beside her in the night, he’d told her that she must transcend such earthly details. And then one cold winter’s eve he’d crawled into her brass bed and they had delighted in the earthiest of details.

She looks up now from the absurd circle of snowbound supplication only to see God, the target of their pleading, where she’d always seen God: in the flight of birds and the silence of trees. Her God calms her for the briefest moment and then she is back to feeling manic from the tips of her lambskin-ensconced toes to the ends of her beret-tucked hairs. But she dare not attempt escape lest lightning strike her dead once she steps outside the circle.

For the past two days she has listened to lectures on the Holy Order’s Doctrine of Divinity, an intricacy of numbers and symbols, some of which Gold had mentioned. Mystical numeric puzzles mapped out on a blackboard at the head of a small collection of chairs in the basement of the Holy headquarters. Here, the Reverend, in his argyle-stocking-feet, had laid out all of God’s sevens and Satan’s sixes to explain all of history and to prophesy the world’s entire future.

Now, shivering beneath the winter sky, Jay looks around at these glazed eyes and iced faces, these furrowed brows and pursed lips. The Reverend chants aloud and beseeches the whole group to look heavenward and pray with all their might until, as he puts it: “We bring God down.”

Mile stands frozen, more from fear than cold wind. Then, as the boy to her right begins speaking in tongues or his native language, she doesn't know which, she slowly turns on the heel of her black boot and makes a beeline for the statue. Only when she is safely hidden behind it does she dare to look back at the circle.

And there they stand trying to bring God down. No one has missed her. And so she runs and runs until she reaches a house in the West End where her touring musician friend occupies a second floor flat. And where a very old landlord with ancient bleary eyes and a mind gone to rot roams the main floor.

The next day she returns to the park in the early morning, having slept little the night before. She is wary that they might have a scout out looking for her. She suspects pigeons and statues. Cautiously, she makes her way to the spot where they’d all stood in the circle of prayer. She looks for evidence of their actually having been there: footprints in the snow, brow prints in the air, but there is nothing. And there is no sign that God had been brought down, none of the Holy Father’s remains, no sacred blood deflowering any perfect virgin snow.

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