Page 12 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
“This place only had one story for me: Fuck you, Pastor Doyle.”
Jun waited. Damian seemed on the verge of something. His eyes were roving the place again, not just fixed on Jun. “My sister’s story was that she’d find god here and everything would be good, that her dad would ‘get right.’ My dad’s story was that if he came here once a week, then he was good. People here told a lot of stories.” Damian kicked a piece of marble flooring, sending it skidding across the cracked stone floor until it hit the end of a pew. “Stories about me. Stories about young people. Stories about our neighborhood, our city, stories about why things were hard, about why the kids were wrong.”
Jun cleared off one of the cleaner pews and perched on it, knees to his chest, his weight on his heels, as if he were resting during dance practice. Damian paced up and down the nave. He was faraway.
What would it be like to go back to a place you’d been a long time ago, to go back to a ruin?
What if you were the ruin?
Jun hugged himself harder, squeezing his chest closer to his knees. He looked up at the altar space, imagining it cleared off with a live band to one side, him and the rest of 5N standing on the space.
What if they were suspended on a clear glass stage above the ruins of the floor? What if they were on the same level as the stone figure of the god’s son? And the audience with them. Then they could all look down on the ruins and up to the sky, suspended in space between above and below, the way he felt suspended between the past and the present.
What if the past wasn’t forgotten or erased, merely encased and understood, like the open burial pit of some of the museums he’d seen?
Damian came back, arms crossed over his chest. “One of the hardest parts of owning this place is the expectations.”
“Like what?”
“It’s a landmark. As much as I own it,”–Damian meandered over and leaned his hip against the pew across from Jun—“I don’t. It’s…stewardship. What I would do with the place, I don’t think everyone else would want to do with the place.”
“What do you think the people around here want to do with the place?”
“Fix it, turn it back into a functioning church, then let them back in, let them ruin it. Again.”
Damian’s face turned equal parts angry and betrayed.
“This isn’t a happy place for you.”
“Churches aren’t happy for me.”
So many stories were in the narrowing slits of Damian’s eyes. Jun could write an entire album just on this morning.
“If no one else cared, what would you do with the place?”
Damian let out an incredulous laugh. “Me?” He looked around. “There’s the business part of me. I could see housing, an educational center, a clinic. All the things you’re supposed to put into a community to make it better.”
Jun shrugged. He knew nothing about that kind of stuff. What he knew was art, what made people stand up and chant or close their eyes and sway, maybe laugh or cry. “This place was built for sound. There should be sound in it. Maybe you could put classrooms or a clinic in one of the other buildings.”
“I should.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“No.” Damian hunched his shoulders. “This place turned its back on me. I don’t want to keep giving. Without Richard pulling me out, I’d be dead. They told the authorities to throw the book at me and throw away the key.”
“What does that mean?”
“Prosecute to the full extent of the law, as in as many charges as possible with the highest possible punishment, and then leave me there for life. Throw away the key is what they would do in ancient times, lock someone up and throw away the key, meaning the door to let the prisoner out could never be opened.”
Jun shivered. It wasn’t like Korea didn’t have its own stories, and his mother had told him enough of ancient Han dynasties that he knew there had been terrible punishments meted out then, too. But ancient history got talked about as faraway for a reason.
“All because you stood up to your dad?”
“Mostly.” Damian’s accent shifted. “I couldn't keep my face right. I didn’t give respect. Couldn’t see the point. Didn’t take their advice.”
Jun reached out across the debris of the floor between them and took Damian’s hand.
Damian studied their tangled fingers. “I meant it when I said I wanted your mess. I know mess.”
