Page 11 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
Jun turned in place, looking up. It was a ruin, but somehow, seeing the sky through the faded painted scenes overhead was beautiful; dark storm clouds rolled about, not quite blotting out the sun, matching the somber effigy of death, decay, and glorious light.
“It’s beautiful.”
Damian nudged a broken piece of masonry away from the center of the nave, his hands in his pockets, and took another look around. “I suppose.”
“You can’t see it?”
“I remember what it was.”
“This…” Jun paused. This place didn’t match the Damian he knew. It was…so much a relic, in a way that Damian was not. Damian was life, bright eyes, a throbbing heartbeat, fast breaths of air, a body humming with life as he ran.
This church was motionless.
Damian shoved his hands in his pockets. “When I was a kid, my sister went on a religious kick. She brought me here. We all went here for a while, actually. My dad was friends with the pastor.”
“Is that how you came to own it?”
“I own it because it went up for auction at a ridiculously low price, due to the safety issues and historical significance. I bought it because the pastor told me I would never amount to anything.”
“But you did.”
“I amounted to enough to buy the place. Now he lives in a run-down house a couple streets away, and every time he walks by here, he has to remember that it’s not his name on the front anymore.” Damian toed more trash off the central walkway. “Wasn’t the most thought-out thing I’ve done, though. Now I own a ruin, and I haven’t done anything with it in two years.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, I let a soup kitchen run out of one of the auxiliary buildings, and I keep that one building in shape so the city can use it as an emergency cold shelter in the winter and cooling center in summer, but that’s only one building. There’s so much more to the property.” Damian waved his hand around. “There’s this space. What you see here, the rooms behind the altar, the Sunday school classrooms, the side balconies above.” He pointed. Jun craned his neck. In the unlit interior, he hadn’t realized there was walking and maybe even sitting space along both exterior walls on either side and above the atrium. “And there’s the bell tower and the second bell tower and the basement below all of this.”
Jun looked down. Basement? This place was huge.
But Damian was still walking and talking. He moved down the nave, pointing toward a side door, away from the street. “Then there’s the parsonage and another residence—I think it used to be a small community for nuns back when there was a Catholic congregation here before it became Methodist or Baptist. It wasn’t either when I attended.”
Damian stopped talking to move stuff out of the way. Jun joined him. Together, they made their way to the side door, not far from the front of the church. Jun couldn’t help but pause, looking up at the tortured figure of the man hanging on the wall above the altar. Bak had made him attend enough church functions before his career really started that he knew the figure was supposed to represent the son of god as he was being tortured to death.
Wood scraped against the floor. Jun flinched and turned. Damian was dragging open a side door. He held it open and motioned Jun through. There was an external green space, which looked like it had once been a garden, with more statuary, raised beds, and half a dozen gnarled trees, their roots beautifully spread out in webs through the grass.
Jun stepped out onto the crumbling walkway. “I love it.”
Damian shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded at the visible buildings. “The old nunnery. The gymnasium. The patronage. And that”—he pulled one hand free to gesture at the eastern building, lower and less ornate looking—“that’s the current soup kitchen and emergency shelter. The only parts that still have power running to them.”
“I could make killer music videos here.”
“That’s a thought.” Damian tilted his head. “Do you want to?”
“Would you let us?”
“Yes.”
Creative excitement tingled town Jun’s arms. He turned back, running into the cathedral and jumping up on the stage, looking down. Lyrics and a beat hummed in the back of his head, the shadowy threads of something pulling together from the ether into a living idea.
“It would be amazing to sing in here.”
“We’d have to clean it up.” Damian waved at the ceiling overhead.
“But that’s part of what makes this place what it is.” Jun paced down the nave, arms spread, twirling as he went, taking the fractured sanctuary in. “It’s the story.”
“Story?” Damian followed Jun. He had eyes more for him than the place. But it didn’t matter. He was listening, and it felt so good to be listened to, like a glow torch inside Jun’s chest.
He waved his arms, taking in the entire space. “Age always has a story. Like when we toured Europe, they’d tell us stories about this place or that place or who else had played the venue before. This feels like that but… rawer. Is that a word? It feels grittier. I almost want to do a concert in a place just like this. Maybe less trash, cleaned up, but still real, still itself. It’s not dead. Whatever was nesting in it might be dead, but…” Jun trailed off. What he wanted to say was too honest, too private. This place needed to be recognized as itself, apart from the people that had inhabited it. It was its own place with its own soul, outlasting and outspeaking the graves of the transitory humans who thought they owned it.
