Once a door starts to open, once breached, it has to keep opening, hands on the back and front of the door, the contact point, so close to touching, but never touching.

Someone has materialized.

Today Rachel, the ghost side, becomes this reality. She is sitting on the couch looking at me with mild surprise, as if I am the one who just materialized. It is never who I expect to find in any given moment, and yet, once here, all other possibilities of this moment, all other permutations, become impossible.  She turns her body away from me, her eyes looking down my face. Has she been here all alone?

Where am I when I’m not here? Isn’t this the mathematical space I belong to, all my neighbors just one step in relation to me? Why do I always come to this living room to find Rachel inside, looking out? Why not on the beach, in the wind, in the forest, on the roof, on the trails winding between houses?

Rachel: The me you find here is incapable and static. You must look elsewhere if you seek me in movement. I am not much more than a puppet here, a doll.

Lisa: I’ve used you as such.

R: I’ve served that role for you.

L: I don’t know that I like having this turned around on me.

R: I can understand that. I didn’t, either.

The fragrance of soup bubbles up from the wood stove and permeates the room.

L: You’ve made soup again.

R: That’s all I do, make soup. I’m the bones that crack open. I’m looking for something in them, hoping to find.

L: I really want to see him.

R: Again, why wait and visit in here?  Why not go out and find him—find my Jasper.

L: Like a Siren?

R: No. Just a regular person.

L: But what kind of person?

R: (smiles)

The door bangs. Footsteps are on the stairs coming up. It’s Jasper. Though I still don’t know if that’s his real name. I don’t know anyone’s name. Everyone who has a name here makes it into a nickname. The real names are too painful to hear.

#

Stop him halfway up the stairs. Bring him out onto the front deck, looking over the bay. Better yet, the boardwalk, the boards the antithesis to solid ground. It’s like I’m trying to be born, to be made alive, in search of the connective tissue back to life. All the moments I notice, and in noticing, don’t fully inhabit.

And what if we were speaking to you? Look out through Jasper’s eyes, feel the way he sits, the long spine. Go outside. I don’t need any more still portraits.

I go down the back stairs, to the truck road, track it down to the flat area alongside dune grass that heads out of town. “Out of town” is a funny phrase here. My boots sink a little and slide. The dried mud is still soft, messy, sticks to me, like a good drenching would cause it to slurp us in to the earth and further, the clay binding to sand, and the salt pulling me to center and holding. Prehistoric animals are still pulled from La Brea tar pits, a pair of gazelles sucked in when they went to take a drink, a saber tooth when it went to prey on the gazelles.

I follow my feet. I have on a light field coat, tan with a brown corduroy collar. The temperature is cooling off. My hands feel a little cold, in the clear air at the beginning of true fall. Or is it the beginning of spring? Fall, I think; I’m still trying to figure this all out. It can’t possibly be spring yet, though technically spring comes first, but not for me, fall always precedes it, no lift till the fall, the beginning of the New Year.

I don’t turn around but I hear someone coming after me, the soft, sucking step in the muddied sand, a faint echo, breath. I slow down. It doesn’t take long for him to catch up to me. This whole moment feels like it’s slowed down and observable through a body. It’s Jasper. I smell him before I see him. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and presses against my back. I feel his head grazing my head, rubbing against it.

Finally I am here. I feel down to my knees, a tingling like Geiger counters, electrical lines buzzing. I rest my chin on Jasper’s hands—they’re wrapped around me—and look out on the horizon which rests above the ocean I can’t quite see from this level but see nonetheless by being here. The seagulls circling, the style of cloud—flat, thin and shapely, raised in ridges like the constant waves beneath them, existence thinned. The lines between things spread out neatly between planes.

I’m warm, a passionate feeling against the cool air, rich and living, in contrast to the still air of the living room, where I can’t find or feel anyone fully alive, including myself. We stand like that for long minutes, my blood filling me up till I’m all the way alive here. I shift my body a few times, and Jasper presses me closer to him. His hands unbutton the bottom of my jacket and reach underneath like I’m a big pocket.

I’m relieved I don’t have to look at him, just feel him against me. The deepest force requires no effort. Rachel called him “my Jasper.”  The other side of will. A wall I could climb over. Finally he turns me around and I see his face for a second, his dirty-blonde hair framed by a half-blue sky, his eyes half-blue, then he covers my mouth in his and I’ve gone into a wet world of mouth and my eyes close because they have to if I want to go in all the way. Which is no longer a choice. I have to. It’s why I’m here. There couldn’t be any other reason.

Why I have lingered inside a house for so long is not at this moment a question.

We kiss for a long, long time. The light is starting to fade and the cooling of the air is apparent again through the warm wall of Jasper’s body coming through the cracks—around my neck and down my shirt. I am so completely his that I start to sink to the ground and the soft mud and he leads me a few paces over to the sand and dune grass and we sink down together off the path and I’m so wired and alive inside that I don’t care how far off the page I have gone.  I don’t care how dark and cold and night it soon will be.

#

Today I can’t get in at all. I can feel it. The island is locked to me. This is not my day to be here, my body learns the schedules too well.

#

Lisa: Calling, calling . . .

Siren: All right, I know, you want me to appear again. You’ve dilly-dallied all week.

L: So what if I have? You don’t always come so readily.

S: So busy reading about evolution you cease to evolve.

L: Not cease. Evolution is irreversible. Learning and growing happens in your sleep…

S: Not my sleep. I don’t sleep.

L: You know, Siren, if you are the Siren, you seem more bitter and contentious every time we meet. Did something happen?

S: The setting is not in a vacuum. Where are they, what’s going on? You were with Jasper.

L: Yes, that’s right, Jasper. The third eye spot. The rabbit hole into all this, if you choose.

S: Alice didn’t choose. She went without thinking. Her body, her little soul chose.

L: Siren, where are we? I feel color swirling around you. You’re something other than words. A manhole cover opened up into a subterranean glow of light, a waterway.

Words falling away, a subterfuge from the subterranean. Poetry is cheap flashes, like a neon sign. A bigger thing awaits than a face or words here. The bitterness on the surface is incidental. Who are you underneath yourself? The leading place, the home center.

Stop asking. No words now, Lisa.

I was the narrator, “L” and “Lisa.” I’ve evolved into someone resembling myself but a reflection. Distorted and…no, not flat-planed. Here I am rounded. I have a soft belly. Our bellies press against each other naturally when we embrace. Simple. I’ve always wanted this feeling of naturalness.

Stop the words. Experience.

I stop talking. I look, then close my eyes. I feel the water lapping me. I am pressed against the belly of the water. This is the place. I think for a second and I am afraid. I’m afraid I am someone else here, too far back. Was Alice able to return from the rabbit hole?

The Siren is here, embodied. I’ve come to her place. Is she only crabby having to come to be in, well, not my world exactly, but any place I call her to? A place between places? I suppose I would be, too.

You can relax. No, Lisa, don’t think of sailors’ deaths, or sirens luring. We’re just in a place. Come with me. She reaches her hand to mine, her voice. The absence of words as the focus. Let the things be. Let the things be things and the people be part of the things.

I lie with the Siren, side by side, our bodies touching comfortably. It is she who keeps me warm. My questioning is still so hard to stop. Jasper, her, my body’s need to press against, like a windowpane. Like wind and pain. She soothes my questions with her hand on my head, smoothing. Her soft lips brushing my forehead. For being touch, seeing the touch, not stuck on the things for once. I’m breathing a pocket of air mixed with water to adjust me, like a fine mist. It calms me. I remember breathing in a cup of my hands under a dock in summertime. I’ve been here before, white veins of sunlight playing over my skin, always in movement through water, but even that fades into feeling, the color seeping into my hands.

What did you mean, taking Jasper?” Rachel calls from above, a distant, foreign sound like a flashlight clanging on a diving tank. But her voice is practically neutral, so little passion without us.

A triad of women. That’s who’s always been. We are all passion together, us sisters.

L: I am part of three sisters.

S: Lisa, stay down here with me.

Her voice, like my thoughts, is distant. Her hand caressing my breastbone, just under my shoulder blades, just above my heart. I am so grateful for that smoothing down of my heart, that rest. I am resting here.

Is this where the child came to?

Her return. Don’t think, Lisa. Use your other senses. Please. Your thoughts are ugly here. Foreign. Words, words. Feel around you.

It’s blue. Everything is blue and thrumming and harmoniously mixed. Are these the colors bats see, sending out echolation, the colors originating in pattern and warp and woof? Sending out and receiving back. Sending and receiving.

It could be…

Time…

Solicitude, the Siren, the other half of me.

Wouldn’t you be angry if your other half took so long to recognize you as you?

I can’t do anything but settle into her. When our softest and warmest parts rise and merge the water makes any of us together whole. The binding element that sweeps through us—sweet sweeping terrifically, enormously spread, fins and tails, legs and bellies. I am mated to the sea, the piece that joins them. La Mar weeping to the poets. El Mar pulsing to the populace. The ligament tissue that rejoins, reprints, comes back to life.

Why did you take them?” asks Rachel, again from afar, but not quite so far this time, a little closer to the surface. I’m drifting up faster than I’m supposed to. I’m passing my own bubbles on the way up. It’s hard to slow down, hard to stay down. A safety stop. I grab hold of a rope of kelp hanging in front of me for a count of three minutes. I’ve just been breathing the water air mixture, not compressed from a tank, but anything can expand in your lungs and I don’t want it to expand too far before I expel it. I don’t want my lungs to burst, my animal self.

Rachel is curious, but only slightly. She has undulated into the shiny seashell on the shelf and is waiting to mold to its shape. The shell is far from the sea but I can take it there. The shell was the place I thought I’d go, but the space inside is filled now, satisfied. Is that what we are all here for, to fill the emptiest spaces? The empty spaces, though, are our salvation. What do we echo? What echoes us?

The Siren rises with me. I am carrying her now. Jasper is on the beach and pulls us the rest of the way onto the shore. The smell of black ink assaults me. We are back in the field of writing, the ink the concealing smell of octopus in flight. Eight arms pulsating, invertebrate. Octopus in its own ink mixed with garlic and olive oil. The sublime, subterranean mixture of self to self, fright to flight, fear to embodiment.

We are all inside the echoes of a seashell, snugly fitting to its curves, a place inhabited. Without the body of the original inhabitant, it would not exist. How many shells we try on, carry with us. Just the curving ones carry the sounds of the ocean. How many places we move unprotected as we transition, soft and vulnerable.

The Siren, the most vulnerable of all of us women, lives outside a shell. We are interior, Rachel and I. Jasper holds the three of us sisters in his embrace, holding the light that curls higher than the fire of questions and half-bald answers that curse this page, this warp and weave. “I love you all,” he says, though he hasn’t ever said those words before. They can’t be uttered without the whole. Why does it take three of us to make a whole?

Because you are exploring women. Men are outside this narrative, the globular force of binding. The semen that merely seeds us, to lay the program of shape and shell against us, a thing to form onto, whose contours to repeat as we crystallize—program and flaw repeating endlessly. A repeat requires more than one, at least three. A shell is a shape, spiraling out from its center where it began. We curl into each other in this shape, his element piercing us together.