Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Iterations ❯ Sanctuary ( Chapter 4 )

This is my church.

 

There is never anyone here but me. I stumbled across it a while ago on one of my long aimless flights. I glanced down randomly at the empty dirt road and patches of half-forest below me, and saw the rust and crumbling gray of the roof, feebly entwined with weeds and creeping vines.

 

I flew past it and kept going for five minutes before turning back. There was no real reason, it was just a spur of the moment decision. An abandoned building in the middle of an abandoned part of the country. Why bother?

 

I landed on a relatively weedless patch of ground, the surrounding area completely silent.

 

The building in front of me used to be a warehouse. I had been on enough superfluous managerial trips to various Capsule Corp manufacturing and storage buildings to tell from its appearance, though the inside of it had been gutted long before. The entrance, big enough for trucks to enter, was wide open, the door missing. The walls were lined with empty, crooked wooden shelves, some snapped in several places. The floor was carpeted with dust and garbage, large stains of age plastered across it. Cracked lights that probably didn't meet national standards anymore hung from a high ceiling that slanted slightly upward in the middle.

 

As I ran a hand across the outside wall, a fine layer of dirt accumulating beneath my fingernails, I had the distinct thought that the warehouse looked like a corpse lying on its chest with its mouth wide open. The gaping entrance with its missing door appeared all too human to me. Its decrepit state added to the effect.

 

My mind works in strange ways.

 

I walked inside, intrigued. I stood in the middle of that dead house, my shoes brimmed with dust and whatever else had accumulated in here. I looked up at the ceiling, wondering if the broken glass in the lights would ever fall from its suspended state, as if it could choose to humor me, its only visitor in God knows how long of a time, and shatter on the floor in my presence.

 

We all tend to flatter ourselves in such situations. We are tempted to think things that haven't changed for years, months, weeks, or even hours might suddenly change during that one month, week, hour, or minute that we notice them and are actively watching, searching for that spark of nature-intended coincidence in our surroundings. The gambler who watches a coin flip or a card flip from the dealer's hand, demanding and pleading silently that because he is watching with piercing intent and self-absorbed prayers, the tool of the house will be flattered by his attention and meet his expectations. The student who sits in a room with dozens of others on (insert name of standardized test) day, staring at the innocuous cover of the unopened test booklet the proctor has placed on the desk in front of him; unable to see its contents, he imagines a blank sheaf to be written by his will, let `erudite,' `viscous,' `somnambulate,' be in there somewhere because I chiseled their definitions into my mind; discrete probability problems, don't show, please don't show.

 

I smiled at myself that time. The lights didn't fall the day of my first visit, and not a single piece of broken glass has moved. Nothing has changed except the vines growing along the outside walls.

 

This is my church, my sanctuary. Because it doesn't change for me. Nothing changes, nothing moves. Nothing recognizes me or acknowledges my presence.

 

Most people go to church or some other place of worship to be acknowledged by their God. Of course they say they go to acknowledge and worship God. But of course the real reason is they're selfish and needy. They want to be known, told they're worthy, that their lives aren't just a wasteful speck in the giant black abyss that is the universe. Who could better reassure them of that than the creator of it all?

 

But when I come here, it's yet another reminder than I am just a man. I don't want to be recognized, praised, fawned over, criticized, politically manipulated. I come here for the welcoming silence that only death and indifference bring.

 

I'm standing here now, just standing still. The broken bulbs hanging above me are the stained glass of this church, except they weren't purposely fractionalized. The doorless entrance is the proper entrance to a house of worship; nothing bars the way. I am free to enter and leave as I wish, and I can see the inside just as clearly from the outside as I can from the inside, and vice versa. The dusty shelves lining the walls are empty; there are no texts, just empty spaces telling me to think.

 

When I entered grade school, I started to think about heaven and hell a lot, and which one I would go to. What exactly did one have to do in order to get to heaven? (If it included listening to my mom and obeying school rules, I was already doomed.) What kind of tortures awaited the damned in hell?

 

Then I died and found out what the afterlife is like—when Majin Buu incinerated the Earth, I was one of the many billions that went with it.

 

I guess you could say that my faith, or my ability to believe in any religion, died that day. I was eight years old.

 

Faith isn't faith if you already know what's coming; this is the conclusion I have come to. For me to have faith now would be akin to asserting belief in a mathematical formula or the hardness of the floor beneath my feet. Heaven and hell are there, their existence is fact; I've been to the former, and I was sorely disappointed. I have a feeling that when I die again, I'll end up in the other place.

 

I'll have to make sure that those bureaucratic demons in hell never get a hold of those essays from my history class in junior high. I don't want them getting any ideas.

 

Now here's another thought, laced with my typical arrogance. I think I'd do a good job of redesigning heaven and hell. Maybe I'd even add a third place. Not purgatory, that's been done already. I just want to break that overused dichotomous paradigm. Why are there only two places? Why not more? Are human (and divine) minds so narrow?

 

Or maybe, instead of expanding the otherworldly real estate, so to speak, I'd try building a road. I redesigned the power grid of the capital. Building a road should be a cinch. The fact that it'd have to be vertically oriented might be a challenge. Maybe an elevator then.

 

The sky's growing dark outside and my feet are starting to ache from just standing here, signs that this worship service is over. I leave the warehouse without looking back. I guess you could say I have faith that it'll still be here whenever I decide to return.