Week 3 Storytelling: Insatiable Greed

The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, pushed along by the cool breeze ruffling the tree tops. The sun's rays reached out and lit the whole forest as if it were a neon green welcome sign. What a beautiful day to destroy a forest. Erys Goldmire stepped out of his shiny black car, dirt crunching under his expensive, black leather shoes, and surveyed the scene before him. A tiny shack of a house sat off to the right, and behind it, a sea of bright green trees just waiting to be felled. In front of the ramshackle building stood a frail and ancient woman, a local who had tried to prevent Erys from obtaining the land. If she had agreed to sell it when he had offered, she could have received a much bigger payment than what the government had given her as compensation for taking her land under eminent domain (and Erys wouldn't have had to spend the 1.5 million to pay off that government official). She was looking his way, eyes squinting not in defense from the sun but in hatred of the man before her.

"I prayed that you would never come back," the old woman said, eying the large construction machinery parked all over her yard which had left scars of their tracks behind them. Her brown, wrinkled face scowled angrily up at the man who had stopped at nothing to rob her of her childhood home.

"I hoped you would be dead before long," Erys flung back at her. He had tried to be charming to win her over at first. Once he realized he wasn't going to get anywhere, he had dropped the act and let his contempt for the old hag spill out from him.

It was at that moment that he spotted the tree--the old woman's favorite tree. She had dressed it in ribbons and set up an altar in front of it, an altar she used to pray to the pagan patron goddess of the forest. Needing to drive home his triumph over her, Erys grabbed a chainsaw from a near by equipment rack and headed right for the tree. Not bothering to clear away the altar or ribbons, he yanked the chainsaw to life and sneered at the old woman before proceeding.

"Where's your great protector of the trees? Is she not going to stop me?" The woman stared passively at the crazed man, no sign of outrage or frustration on her face. This only fueled his madness more. He plunged the rotating sharp teeth into the trunk of the ancient tree, a loud whine like a scream emanating from the point of contact. As the blade sank deeper and deeper, sap began to pour out of the open wound and bled all over the altar. Finally, with a loud crack, the trunk snapped in two and the massive tree plummeted to the earth, crushing the altar underneath it. Erys looked to the old woman for any sign of emotion.

"You will pay," she said hollowly. Without a word more or a glance back, the woman silently left the scene.

"Get to work!" Erys bellowed. "I want to be able to see the horizon by tomorrow morning." A strange uneasiness settled over the cruel businessman. He was anxious to have the forest cleared and construction started, but it was more than that. He wanted more. More land, more buildings, more money, more business. He wanted a foothold in every country, an enterprise in every state. He hungered more than he ever had before, and he needed these things now. Though he had intended to oversee all aspects of the project, Erys climbed back into his luxury car and ordered the driver to take him to the airport immediately. He had work to do.

...................

Six months later, the man was a wreck. He spent days at the office at a time, haggling deals for land, approving designs for new buildings, monitoring the success of each enterprise. With each new parcel bought, each new building erected, and each new profit report received, his hunger only grew even more. No number of acres or building square footage or amount of money could fill the ever-growing hole inside of him. The feeling of need gnawed at him day and night; even in his sleep he could not find peace.

Soon Erys was up to his ears in dept. He was buying for his newest ventures before the old ones could make any money. He made bad deals for poor quality land, spent millions constructing lavish hotels, and tens of millions on bribes that would help push approvals through faster. He even pawned off his daughter to the son of another wealthy businessman as part of a deal for his worthless swamp land in Louisiana.

It was not long at all before Erys was on the fast path to self-destruction. He drank alcohol as if it were water and did drugs to keep him awake throughout the night so that he could work as long as possible. Work was his food source, and his body began to waste away because of it. One night, he found himself on the roof in a drunken stupor. He staggered around on uneasy legs, taking in the scene of his surrounding empire on the very edge of the roof. A strong sense of vertigo engulfed him and his body, ravaged by hunger and toxic chemicals, could hardly hold him upright. Now a cool, strong breeze was stroking his face, just like the one he had felt that day on the outskirts of the beautiful forest, long since gone. His vision blurred as the speed increased. It could have been his imagination or a drunken hallucination but he could have sworn he heard the wind whisper in his ear, "I told you that you would pay," right before his body hit the concrete sidewalk thirty stories below the top of his skyscraper office.

Scene from the movie Greed (1924) Erich von Stroheim

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Author's Note: My story is based on the Greek myths about Ceres and Erysichthon, from Ovid's Metamorphoses (translated by Tony Kline, 2000). In the original myths, Erysichthon cuts down Ceres' favorite tree with his own hands after his men refused to do so themselves. The tree was actually a nymph and when he swung into the trunk, blood poured forth from the wound. Enraged, Ceres sends a messenger to ask her antipode, Famine, to inflict her torturous power upon Erysichthon. He becomes unable to be satisfied no matter how much he eats, sells his daughter multiple times in order to get money for food (she keeps running away from the buyers but is taken back by her father), and eventually cannibalizes himself in the end. When I read this story I thought about this as a metaphor for man's destruction of nature and insatiable greed. In my version, I give Erys(ichthon) a motivation for cutting down the tree whereas in the original myth you don't really know why he was set on destroying Ceres' favorite tree (at least in the stand-alone story that I read for this class). It was easy to retell the story using this kind of metaphor, but I did end up eliminating the role of his daughter, Mestra, because she didn't work into the plot of my story very well. It was tricky to figure out how Erys would "eat" himself but I decided that it would make sense for him to destroy his body with drugs, alcohol, and ultimately suicide.