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“Tell me a story,” Combeferre said, as he often did when they dropped together and shared a headspace like this. They could spend hours just clinging to the ground and each other’s words to anchor themselves, and they did this often enough that Jehan knew exactly what Combeferre was asking for.
He held his hands up, straight above his head, fingers splayed. They hadn’t bothered to turn any lights on when the sun dropped below the horizon, hours ago now, and the details of his arms and hands were blurred and shadowed. “What kind of story?” he asked, sorting through a myriad of narratives that his mind threw at him when he groped for a tale to tell.
He shifted his hands minutely, and a screamingly bright pink-orange negative stood in the space his flesh had occupied a moment ago. He smiled, fascinated, and started rippling his fingers. Rainbows chased them. “Can you see the colours?” he asked vaguely.
“No,” Combeferre said softly. He reached up and traced the tip of his right index finger around the line of Greek poetry tattooed around Jehan’s right wrist. “Tell me something Greek.”
Jehan turned his hands until his palms faced down, considering the Greek lettering thoughtfully. “Have I ever told you about Philomela?”
It wasn’t a special occasion, not a particularly notable date, but Jehan had always thought that one should indulge one’s whims to a certain extent when it came to hallucinogens; and LSD in particular was no good unless he was in the mood for it. So it was just an ordinary Wednesday when he’d walked into Combeferre’s room, interrupting what looked like study but upon closer inspection was simply a link-clicking spree on Wikipedia, with three tabs and a hopeful smile.
“I have a lecture at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning,” Combeferre had informed him dubiously.
“Is that a no?” Jehan asked, waving the little plastic bag enticingly and raising his eyebrows.
Combeferre sighed and fought a smile. “No.”
And so it was that by midnight the pair of them were lying in the darkness of Jehan’s room, stretched out on the floor and tracing colourful patterns in the air above their heads while Jehan related the stories and mythologies that played out so vividly in his head.
“Philomela was an Athenian princess,” Jehan began, folding his hands across his stomach. “She had a sister named Procne, and Procne was married to King Tereus of Thrace, who was a son of Ares.”
“I think I’ve heard of Thrace,” Combeferre interjected. He spoke quietly, one arm flung across his eyes.
“It was an area comprised of parts of modern Greece, Turkey, and a large part of Bulgaria.”
“I like how you can remember that even when you’re tripping balls.”
“Thank you,” Jehan said contentedly. He dug his shoulderblades into the carpet just to feel it scrape against his skin; it was almost unpleasant, but he liked using carefully controlled borderline-distressing sensations as a means of staying grounded when he was tripping. “Anyway, King Tereus, of this now geographically obsolete area called Thrace, went to Athens to escort Philomela back to Thrace for a visit. Being the son of a god, and Ares in particular, he had little to no concept of consent or the personhood of women—and as the poets say, he lusted after Philomela on their journey to Thrace.” He broke off suddenly and grinned despite himself. “I love that phrase. I enjoy the frustration implied in it. You just can’t lust after the attainable, can you?”
“It’s objectifying,” Combeferre noted. “Denial of personhood, like you said.”
He tended to speak in short, cryptic sentences when he was tripping. Jehan was used to it; he deciphered his meaning and replied: “Point. In Philomela and Tereus’ case, that line of thought resulted in him forcing her into a cabin in the woods and raping her.”
“Of course it did,” Combeferre muttered. He had voiced his opinions of Greek myths and their extraordinary focus on sexual assault on several other occasions; Jehan interrupted before he could lose the thread of the story.
“Ah, but the great thing about Philomela is that afterwards, when Tereus threatened her and told her to keep quiet about it, she swore she wouldn’t. Ovid has her deliver this wonderfully defiant speech—My self, abandon’d, and devoid of shame, thro’ the wide world your actions will proclaim—she more or less promised to tell anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen.”
“And I suppose he took that well.”
“He cut out her tongue.”
“He was a rather literal sort of person, then,” Combeferre said dryly. “And I just remembered where I’ve heard this story referenced.”
“Is the reference Shakespearean, by any chance?”
“Titus Andronicus, yes.”
Jehan smiled and rolled onto his stomach, propping himself up on his elbows and blinking down at Combeferre in the dim light. “Tereus held Philomela captive and told her sister Procne that she’d died. Philomela wasn’t so easy to silence, though. She wove a tapestry—sometimes it’s a robe—either way, she wove something conveying the things that had happened to her, and sent it to Procne.” He peered closely at Combeferre’s face for a moment, and then blinked. “Sorry, I’m getting distracted. Did you know your eyes look solid black in the dark?”
“My eyes are brown. They tend to absorb light rather than reflect it, and there’s little enough light in here to begin with.”
“Brown,” Jehan scoffed. “Scientific explanation for a phenomenon you lack the vocabulary to describe. Your eyes are anything from copper-coloured to dark russet depending on the light, I’ll have you know. ‘Brown’ is extremely ambiguous.”
“I’m sorry for my poor vocabulary, but I’m tripping so hard I dragged my hand across the carpet just now and for a second I thought I’d ripped the skin clean off my fingers,” Combeferre admitted, and even in the dark Jehan could see his smile.
“And you didn’t panic,” Jehan observed.
“I thought it’d be a great opportunity to give you an anatomy lesson,” Combeferre said vaguely. “What did Procne do?”
“Procne?—Oh. She killed her son—Tereus’ son—and cooked him and served him to his father.”
Combeferre covered his face with both hands to smother slightly hysterical laughter. “You said that so casually.”
“But don’t you think it’s interesting? The echo of Medea, the concept of a mother slaughtering her children as vengeance against the father?” It was one of Jehan’s favourite themes.
“It probably says something about the extent to which women and children were both considered their male family members’ property before all else,” Combeferre conceded. Jehan glanced at him, amused and impressed; it was a much more complex thought than either of them was usually capable of by this point in their trip.
“It was definitely depicted as aberrant behaviour, though,” he said slowly, piecing together his unusually fluid thoughts with an effort. “The average woman wasn’t considered capable of that, any more than they would be today.”
“Ancient Greeks were terrified of women. What about Maenads?”
“Oh, yes,” Jehan sighed rapturously. “Wild women, worshipers of Dionysus the Liberator.”
“Exactly. Liberator. They were so afraid of their women throwing off their chains and becoming strong and destructive and vengeful in their freedom.”
“Yes, but to the extent of murdering their children?”
“Well, look at the rhetoric coming from the far-right today,” Combeferre pointed out. “It’s remarkably similar in some ways. Lesbians are going to steal your teenage daughters and convince them to have abortions—which is equated with child murder so it sounds like something much worse than the legal right to bodily autonomy—and we’re back to freedom, again.” He fell silent for a moment. Then: “So Tereus ate his son?”
“He ate his son,” Jehan agreed. “And the ending is quite surreal—when he found out what had happened, he tried to kill the sisters, but the gods transformed all three of them into birds.”
“Birds,” Combeferre echoed blankly.
“Yeah,” Jehan said apologetically, “sorry, it’s a bit of a weird one.”