Winter Pyre: Travels by Foot and Your Devious Death
Back to it. Remember, this song has been playing for the past 15 minutes.
The ride from here into the hills is long and there’s traffic. This gives you plenty of time to sit and think about your sins, but those won’t matter soon; you rest your eyes.
When the coach pulls up on the side of the road, your watch reads 4:43 PM (an hour fast). Up here the foliage isn’t so robust; winter has arrived, which sets the stage a little better for what’s about to happen. We’re looking down the aisle toward the back of the bus, but not far from where you are as you step out from your seat and your gamer friend wishes you safe travels and Happy Cranberries, to which you respond you too. Now we’re facing you at the doorway as you step down from the last stair. You pause for a moment and take account of your late-afternoon solitude before heading to your right (our left) to claim your suitcase, which the Operator of the Coach is slagging out of the cargo hold. Sure you can handle this? It’s heavy. No choice; it’ll come into play in a few moments. Call you soon, sweetie. You take care, now, and have a blessed holiday.
If the script had you traveling further, you’d have ditched here anyway, a blessed holiday indeed. We watch from a nearby hill as the coach pulls away and though your luggage implores you to stay you press forward eagerly and step down off the asphalt—in low-angle close-up, now—onto a dead, grassy downslope slicked with wet and rotting leaves. Your descent is a choreography of quick steps and short slips that place you alongside a creek that you follow for several minutes save for one break.
And here you are again, standing, assessing your solitude. And the suitcase in your hand… You take it and you empty its contents into a pit that you’ve just dug. And you’re dirty but no matter; you’ve just dug this fire pit and you unload into it everything in your suitcase—clothing and notebooks and pens and pencils and art supplies, the contents of your “sin drawer” and products of the Dead Sea and a pastel drawing of a couple of koi that someone at the mall made for you—and you set them on fire, along with your mobile phone. You’ve been well aware of the time it could take for everything to become one crisp and congealed mass, but after a few minutes the smoke gets a little heavy so you prematurely stifle the flame with soil and bury the entire mess.
Now, your burden lighter and the job half-done, we follow you as you jump from stone to stone like a deer to cross the creek and traverse the rolling hills, quick now the cuts as you hurry deeper and deeper into the forest until you arrive at a certain tree—at the base of it is a door—and enter.
The interior of this tree can’t be any more than sixteen inches in diameter, but the wallpaper is detailed with such tiny depictions of fruit that it feels much larger. The whole construction really challenges your previous notion of what constitutes a tree house, and it’s a difficult confrontation between you and it, which we can see in the back-and-forth shots of your face and shots from your point-of-view. But you find this all the more inviting, even despite the fact that the vertical passage ascending the inside of the trunk is even narrower than the foyer. Eleven inches, let’s say, where they meet, and outfitted with a crank-operated elevator that, worse yet, shares the shaft with its counterweight. You’re sweating now, by the way, and dirty (but still looking fantastic in your final moments) and the glisten seems to lubricate your squeeze into the narrow elevator carriage. You pull a chain that rings a tinkler and wait, but not long at all. A cockroach or speedy beetle must be charged with turning the crank because the footsteps you hear far above you click lightly and are very, very quick. The carriage rises, its speed varying wildly, and with it you grow smaller and smaller until, when you arrive on the upper level, you are about four and a half inches tall. (We know that. You don’t.)
The music stops. In the middle of the floor sits a grand piano, as you expected and as if someone has been expecting you. And as you hoped nobody’s around. Along the curved wall is a rolltop desk, on top of which there is a globe, and there’s a bar stocked with wine. A generous bookshelf and an armoir and a well-outfitted bed complete the room, and here you are with nothing with which to fill the armoir because you’ve just burnt everything you own. But on closer inspection we realize that it’s there as a showpiece of craftsmanship that must have been created using old-fashioned hand tools; there is no modern electrified tool or instrument of mass-production capable of such detail, and we’re sure now, from the look on your face, that you’ll be far happier in death than you ever were in life. You turn to your piano.
You’ve pulled out the bench, now, and are sitting in a silence free from the imposition of clocks and refrigerators. We’re behind you at waist level as your arms rise to the keys and begin to play a song. At first we don’t recognize it, but it’s “Long Distance Runaround” by Yes—listen to it for a moment so you get a sense of what you’re in for—and we can see real emotion in the subtle movements of your back and the swashing of your hair as you pedal and pound and just as you get into the meat of it (Long distance… runaround), we hear a shrill ring and you stop, pulling your hands down to your thighs and snapping your head over your left shoulder at the source of the sound with desperate curiosity. After the second ring, you swing your whole body around on the bench toward us to match your face and you leave frame left.
We cut to a medium of you, shoulders-up, and as you come into focus you lift the earpiece of an old-fashioned telephone on the wall and place it against your ear with your fingertips, the heel of your hand under your cheekbone. You deliver your greeting to the mouthpiece and we can hear the person on the end of the line speak tenderly: How’s it goin’, girl? My route just ended and I couldn’t wait to call you.
by Rt. Hon. Yr. Fancy, gentleman and your Special Friday Treat
