Jayla Mile. Chapters 18 & 19

18. Angel in Black:

Following Jay’s flight from the prayer gathering, she made daily pilgrimages to the park. Three days in a row she trekked the worn route only to find God in the same way she had that night - in the song of chickadees, in the flight of sparrows. She’d walk on through the city and then back to the house of the old man, for even if her beach pals could entertain her along with their leftover Christmas guests, she was feeling too disillusioned for the wonderment of their Yuletide.

The ailing old landlord on the first floor, desperately fighting off ghosts from a thousand wars, comes screaming in and out of her waking and dreaming states, yelling what sounds like a slew of Slavic invectives, piercing her eardrums and leaving her awake and resigned behind enemy lines. The stench of urine and bootleg liquor rises up from the old man’s lair, his imagined trench. She thinks she hears Sixes and Sevens in his babble and blather; silently she recites Gold’s phone number as a line of defence.

But she will not call him.

Nightly she emerges to the bars, intuitively marching off to the ones where she feels Gold will not appear but praying that he will then leaving before he might. She has sat in the bright and the dim, the loud and the hushed, just waiting for him and hiding from any such encounter. She tries to draw up a cosmic design, a strategy, a philosophy on the back of a coaster, anything to build a shield between herself and Gold, the man whose heart and mind belong to the nonsensical cult of the Holy Order. She constructs a screen of rhetoric, an army of glasses, a cloud of smoke.

19. Luminous Moss Green Christ

“In the beginning,” Jay tells Sam as they sip tea in a cafe, “I just wanted to fathom this ‘knowledge’. I really wanted to know whatever it was he claimed to know. And I wanted to be with him. I went to the Centre because he wanted me to. After the first night I wanted to leave but then I thought if I couldn’t tough it out, he would not be taking me home with him anymore. I needed that home.”

“You should’ve come here,” Samuel says.

“I thought I loved him. Then of course after awhile I couldn’t really think for myself at all.” She tells a tale of Holy Centre brainwashing, of prayer and paranoia, of saintly sinners and fallen angels, of Wonderbread sandwiches and scant sleep.

“And then there were the slippers they gave me to wear. Fluffy pink things that flapped at my heels when I walked, making me feel desperate to be tromping around in my black boots in the brassy bars with Gold. Sitting down to talk to some brainwashed Holy, I’d slip out of the slippers but then, remembering Gold, I’d quickly slide back into their furry pinkness and wait for the coffee and cookies that became the highpoint of my Centre experience.

“My first night there, I lay my head down to rest and floated off into a world of pure crystalline space. There I encountered Christ on a luminous green cross...moss green.”

“Moss cross," she says, as if under a spell. "Jesus Christ on a moss cross."

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