Susurrus on Mars

by Hal Duncan

This last, aimed loud at the churl, is local idiom—translated: a good guest shifts to their host’s terms, no snits that the family dog isn’t kicked outside... or, in this case, that skimboots aren’t banned on pavements like back home. Puk can savvy the jostle of near sideswipes from speeding brats, to be fair—it took him months to chill the sense of peril when a flock bursts by you in their flight along the esplanade or whatnot—but he sees the principle. Like Renart says, there is no utopia. Erehwyna wouldn’t be Erehwyna without—

  Lookit, says Jaq.

  He follows the point of Jaq’s finger across Market Square. In the road-level plaza lined with awninged undercroft stores, filled on mart days with stalls and booths, buskers and revellers now, he expects some nifty find, sees instead a gathering and parting of crowd at the far corner, Hovendaal and Gunner.

  What—?

  A flare whooshes wavery into the sky, explodes to a blossom of red stars: a firework.

  Out of Hovendaal it comes now, the funeral procession, the quagga-drawn float a small barque of floral wreaths, clear walled furnace atop it, cremation in action, flames fierce around the shrouded form within. Pipes out the top suck smokebelch down into its belly—no chimney, no visible exhaust. And from the base of this, from among the wreaths, fireworks shoot into the night sky, gunshot reports sounding a vermillion peony or scarlet palm, a simple sphere of tailless stars or a thick rising tail of ascent to a burst of comets exploding as fronds. Kamuro and crossette effects are synaesthesia, crimson noise glittering, raucous light crackling.

  They’re all red, says Puk even as his PAN spills elucidation into nous: red as Helladic symbol of: blood; life; passion; rage. Details of cultural roots on Earth go ignored.

  Roman candles mark the pace of the cortège, mourners with crimson satchels and sparklers walking slowstep behind: ffoosh, left; boom, left; ffoosh, left; boom, left. It’s a strange sight as it does its slow circuit of Market Square—the plaza emptying now as locals and savvy visitors make their way to the edges, dints going out public to the unsavvy, here and there some straggler tourist manhandled to custom by a companion. When all’s clear, the float leaves its cortège lining the edges of the square for a slow spiral in toward the centre, where it stops and, as the pyre flames flare and shift in hue to deep rose, limned in blue, the form at the heart of it starts crumbling visibly in the inferno, incinerated before their eyes, fireworks crescendoing in an almighty BOOM, and...

  Then... it’s over. The flames still burn. Remnants of form remain within them. But the barque moves off, and the mourners break, not to follow but to turn to passers-by, drawing flasks out of their satchels, offering drinks.

  Puk watches, unsure of what he’s feeling, as Jaq greets an old woman turned to him at random—right hand to hip, left hand to shoulder, kiss on the left cheek, kiss on the right cheek—and takes the offered drink, asks how she knew the dead.

  A tap on the shoulder—a middle aged man, a mourner.

  Puk steps in to the embrace.

  •

  KYPARISSOS, CYPRESS, CUPRESSUS sempervirens. Son of Telephus, once a lad of Chios, he is a medium-sized evergreen tree growing up to thirty five metres high, often less than a tenth as wide; so: tall and slim as you’d expect of the beloved of Apollo, the eromenos of his erastes, blessed by the god of music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and science who was once however just a litle mouse god on Tenedos. Blessed by his lover with the customary gift was Kyparissos—a deer, only his was tamed.

  A tame stag? says Susurrus.

  A tame stag, says Kyparissos.

  How he loved his pet, his favourite companion, as he loved Apollo and was loved by him, as the two fleshlings walking hand in hand upon the sunlit path, hair tousled by Susurrus, love each other, Puk and Jaq and Jaq and Puk, sard and carnelian, carnelian and sard. The hunting accident, Kyparissos sighs, it broke his heart, the javelin astray, and from his own hands, as his gentle stag lay sleeping in the woods. He’s sensitive, he won’t deny, sways to the slightest breeze, even the lightest touch from spry Susurrus rippling him all up his height—as now, as the swipper godling of the Martian wind tends him a comforting caress, a hand upon a shoulder stroking down to bicep, or the nuzzle of a faithful pet, a dog or deer, who doesn’t savvy your tears but yearns to give you solace. Yes, he’s sensitive. A delicate sort, he won’t grow back his foliage if pruned too harshly, leading Servius to muse if his association with the underworld was down to this.

  What fortitude he lacks though, he makes up for in longevity, with specimens reputed to be over a millennium in age. Why, these here, in the colonnade of slender beauties at the entrance of the Jardins Rochester, for all their limber elegance of stripling pride, have stood for centuries. And he is stripling here, in these; elsewhere, elsewhen, he is immortalised; look to the plein air paintings of van Gogh, who wrote his brother Theo one July, describing his canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid; the former painted with a thick impasto like the Monticellis, and the wheat field in the sun, which represents the extreme heat, very thick too.

  This was the gift of his Apollo: wrought by grief, cradling the dying creature in his arms, he begged the god to let his tears fall for eternity; so Apollo turned him to the cypress, with his scale-like leaves, produced on rounded shoots, from two to five millimetres long, this dark green foliage in dense sprays, branchlets variably loosely hanging, as his tears, from the erect or level branches rising, in slim quivers of his sorrow, tremulous, in his fastigiate crown. It’s strange, he thinks, how Servius could not see in his longevity and frail grace how he simply is memorial; why in Attica, a house in mourning would be garlanded with cypress; why in Rome, statues of Pluto, god of afterlife, of underworld, were decorated with his wreaths; why he was used to fumigate the air during cremations: every cypress is a cenotaph.

  Where do the fleshlings go? he asks Susurrus.

  Ovoid or oblong, the seed cones that Kyparissos grows are green at first, but after pollination, given something between twenty months and twenty-four, they will mature to brown, reaching a length of twenty-five to forty millimetres, each with ten to fourteen scales, the male cones, three to five millimetres long, releasing pollen in late winter.

  The mascherari stall, Susurrus answers.

  At the far end of the avenue, it’s true, erastes and eromenos now browse the renter’s wares: the plain white volto, mannequin blank; the full-face bauta with its snowplow jut of jaw freeing the mouth for hors d’ouvres or aperitifs; the half-face columbina of highwaymen in penny dreadfuls or superhero sidekicks on the silver screens of yesteryear; a black oval moretta with its wide round mirror eyes, all eeriness, inscrutability, strigine and Cycladic; tragedy and comedy, a piange wrung to sorrow’s grimace, and a fawkes mask wrinkle-eyed in sly smirk.

  It would be, in the Libertine Meadows, bad form to wear more than a sunmask, so the fleshlings strip—plimsolls and plimsolls, Puck’s military doublet and Jaq’s sleeveless Geister jerkin, Jaq’s white britches and Puk’s jade and crimson paisley—hand these over to the renter as he raxes them their masks, a columbina each, one sard and one carnelian, each lover in the other’s shade of skin.

  You know, Susurrus says, as Servius tells it, in some versions of the tale, it’s not Apollo you were paired with; it was Zephyros, or Silvanus, spirit of the woods.

  A secret for you, Kyparissos whispers in his rustle, if you promise not to tell your father that I told you...

  Pinky swear, Susurrus says.

  Apollo, Zephyros, Silvanus... I loved them all, they all loved me, and in that aspect they were always, and will always be, one and the same.

  •

  PASSING THE OLD in one another’s arms, birds in the trees, following the tarmac path by the high hedge perimeter, under umbrage of topiary that might have graced Pliny’s terrace adorned with a rendering of diverse animals in boxwood, they come through an arboreal arch into the Libertine Meadow, green swathe rolling down ahoy them flowered
red with poppies and with flesh, kamasutran lotus blossoms of limb-locked lovers here, there, everywhere, a spillage of some erotic cornucopia seeded and sprouting.

  Oh, says Puk. Okay.

  And yet. He had imagined Romanesque decadence, a bacchanal of anonymous cavorts, piles awhoop and wild wantons bucking in ecstasy, but rather than orgiastic rutting, the air is of leisure. Caligula’s wet dreams? Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights? No, under the glorious sun of Erehwynan summer, in all the fuckery here, there’s no transgression to the carnal, no cathartic breach in carnival, no escape; these libertines have long since won the struggle that required defiance of all mores, the stance of combat in their flagrant lusts. Instead, this is Seurat... A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, La Grand Jouissance, La Grand Joie de Vivre.

  So:

  Puk, even after months of barefoot scrambling, trepid on balls of feet over hot tarmac, cervine in his daintying tread out over the twigs and stones among the shin-high grass, Jaq’s seasoned soles allowing steady stride of a hunter, his shaded gaze scanning butterflies and apes, cowgirls and missionaries, crouching tigers and curled angels, they weave a bumblebee’s exploration through constellations of couplings—and grouplings, for that matter—the tummocky slope of Libertine Meadow a grassgreen starfield with poppies for its Milky Way and Aretino’s postures for its zodiac—designedly, a great circle of sixteen twains having spotsynched to cast the pattern of Raimondi’s engravings.

  Jaq stakes a patch, dumping the satchel, crouching down to draw the blanket from it, the slickering lotion. Puk sidles up behind to stand, hands resting on Jaq’s ferntickled shoulders, feeling... that the park is not Jaq’s sward, is not their meadow. But then, maybe they can bring their meadow to the park.

  Yesterday:

  •

  PERFUME AND POISON, worn as a lure to attract mates and as a noxious ward protecting against predators, the sap of Heliotropium europaeum, European Heliotrope or European Turnsole, is a slim scent upon the milkweed butterfly which flutters up from one of Klytie’s sun-gazing flowers to dance around the sky, perhaps a dozen feet away from where, lazed in the sward that rolls down from the treehouse toward undergrowth and river beyond, Jaq and Puk lie side by side, naked, doing whatever it is they’re doing.

  Whatever it is they’re doing, Klytie doesn’t know, doesn’t care; Susurrus is whispering his gossip about it to her even now, but she’s not really listening and has eyes only for the sun she turns her flowers to, for the godly glory that is Helios, who loved her as a nymph until, as gods are wont to do, he left her for another and, as lovers are wont to do, she wasted quite away and was transformed into her current form.

  An annual summer-blooming herb, perhaps because she is so locked in focus on her lost love, blind to what’s around her now, Klytie often springs up as a roadside weed. Here, she has found a spot for herself in a quiet meadow any fleshling sun-worshipper would be blithe to lie in and soak up the solar rays, but Klytie would be as happy, like as not, to sprout on the verge of the dustiest, grit-strewn subrural track of Erehwyna, ignoring skimpod’s buzz or hiking gaggles of tourists atromp with dropped cigar butts and piss-streams into bushes—just as long as they don’t dawdle to gawp gormless and block her sun, as Alexander seeking wisdom of Diogenes. Growing from a taproot to reach maximum heights near forty centimeters, her stem is covered in soft hairs, as too her oval leaves, as too the fuzzy, bristly sepals of her inflorescences, coiled spikes of white flowers, each bloom a mere few millimeters wide.

  A bumpy nutlet, her fruit. A nutty bumplet, her nous, such that it is, as far as Susurrus is concerned. To call it a one track mind might be inaccurate, imply dimensional extension in what’s more a dot, a focus tightened to the keen intensity of her beloved’s rays through a lens in the hand of a firestarting kidster. There’s no getting through to her, really. Still, she is pretty, and Susurrus can’t help but idly flirt with her, as with every flower and blade of grass.

  They’re singing now, he says. Listen, it’s sweet. And it’s about the sun, right up your street.

  That perks her interest a little, and though she keeps her gaze as always locked upon the sun, she lets the sound slip into her nous now. Susurrus isn’t lying either; it is sweet, some modern translation of a hymn as old as civilisation itself, to Aton-Ra, to Helios in a fiercer face. She lets the melody serve as articulation of her own adoration, stancing keen in her sway to Susurrus’s touch, out of time but aptly so, the strain of unsynching spot on for her yen, as if to plead: See? See? They speak for me.

  Fleshlings are good for that, at least, for singing to her beloved for her. Some ring of chanting men on a summer morn, she thinks, singing their boisterous devotion to the sun—as some ancient poet once scribed it, like as he too had a Jardins Rochester orgy in his line of sight, as Klytie has on many an occasion, from another vantage. Yes, let the fleshlings sing, and let their song carry her love to Helios, and let him return it that she may bask.

  The vacuum of space is silent, you know, Susurrus reminds her, no air to carry the sound.

  Oh, but she can imagine the roar of the sun, if one could stand in its corona, photons torrenting into your eyes or petals, into every fibre of you.

  Today:

  •

  PUK ON HIS back, legs astraddle and akimbo as in a mid-air crouch, left hand of Jaq’s on the ball of Puk’s right heel, pushing back, Jaq’s cock to the root, pubic brush pressing in to the valleying curve of buttocks in to splendid socket, tupping that splendid rump from Canova’s Perseus or Corrigan’s porn.

  All rituals duly followed, all gifts given, scenes enacted, the harpagmos is complete, but they remain, and will remain, erastes and eromenos. For all that the cycles of such summer schooling should, in theory, call for a graduated Puk to step on in the togs of older lad and find his own eromenos, for all that this archaic snoot or that might cock to a man being unmanned by piercing fuckery, as passive kinaidos, Alexander and Hephaestion were agelings. So they’ll fuck forever, both have sworn, in Erehwyna that’s as much a country for old men and women, says Renart, as much as anyone.

  They shrugged it off, the Greeks, yesterday’s eromenos become today’s kinaidos. You can lift up a bull, they said, if you carried the calf.

  •

  LANDSCAPE IS LANGUAGE in the Jardins Rochester, formal geometry toppled into a tumble of more dynamic articulation, ordered by grammar as Capability Brown would have it, in his explanation to Hannah More.

  Now there, said Brown, I make a comma, and there where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.

  Tomorrow:

  •

  EARL GREY, SAYS Puk, Maine Coon, waltz, sea salt, pink champagne, apple, reason.

  Espresso, says Jaq, Irish Wolfhound, polka, black pepper, ruby port, cheese, passion, bedsuite.

  Earl Grey, says Puk, Maine Coon, waltz, sea salt, pink champagne, apple, reason, kitchen.

  In the game of Fourier Harmonies, Puk has it easy, cued by Jaq’s extension to find his own in the complement, and Jaq has conceded, in the interests of indolence, that binaries are allowed. So, he lazes with Jaq as pillow, gazes the wee black bumclock crawling along the forefinger held above him, iridescent blue-black little dor beetle like a miniature scarab. He lolls, riposting with reflex flips, enjoying the game more for the fremitus of Jaq’s voice felt ear to chest than for the sport.

  Espresso, says Jaq, Irish Wolfhound, polka, black pepper, ruby port, cheese, passion, bedsuite, sex.

  •

  A BRIGHT RED spring and summer flowering perennial, as Papaver somniferum here, as Papaver rhoeus there, Mêkôn grew naturally amongst the wheat fields of the ancients, long before they thought to plant him, in their crop rotations, to revitalise the soil. Pure and simple in his brilliance of four petals, cleancut as a carved design of quatrefoil symmetry, perfection in a posey, he might seem the apotheosis of his
cultivation, the most manicured artifice of a scarlet blossom, but he has always been and will remain a wildflower at heart.

  When his poppy seeds were not being used in cakes baked for the mysteries of Demeter, as his bold blooms themselves adorned festivities, they were instead, as he recalls with no small joy, being turned to other relishable pursuits, strong opiates extracted from them for the wilder celebrants in those same cults. From the poppy juice dripping from the wand of Hypnos, god of sleep, to the squirt of heroin from a syringe, he has always offered dissolution of raw pain to oceanic pleasure, bliss so far beyond restraint and reason many fleshlings lost themselves within his raptures. He makes no apologies for his addictive charms, his outright seductive snaring of dreamers decadent or desperate, seeking inspiration or escape. He is relief. He is release. And if wars have been fought over his trade, empires established in gunship or garotte, he has been medicine too, he has been mercy.

  A youth beloved of the goddess Demeter, upon his early death in some tragedy long since forgotten in his heady haze, he was transformed by her into a poppy flower, and was so touched by her kind spirit of remembrance that he never once forgot it, never once forgot—though all else slipped from his mind—her generosity of metamorphosis, so that even centuries, millenia on, when she herself was long since gone, untempled and unmysteried, a hollow lesson of Greek lore and Latin echoes to be learned by schoolboys in starched collars, he himself sought to reiterate her mercy for those boys in a foreign land far from the classrooms of their youth.

  He remembers how he swathed himself over the silenced fields, to cloak the gun-churned mire of blood and the buried, first in the pointillism of green grassy shoots dotting sparse the sombre dark brown ground, then in the thickened lightened verdancy as a tipping point was turned so the surface sang in a bright fuzz of Spring; and finally, when the Somme was meadow, he opened his red bloom of sixty thousand remembrances to the sun. Sixty thousand in one day, and more, and he carries all of them in him now, obliviated and preserved.