by Betsy Bonner
THE BOOK OF
ATLANTIS BLACK
THE SEARCH FOR A SISTER GONE MISSING
A MEMOIR BY
BETSY BONNER
for Queen Leah, dearest of cats (1999-2019)
and for David, with love and gratitude
Let me go, if you want me to let you in!
—EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The sections headed “San Diego, March 2008” were transcribed from a videotaped interview with my sister, Nancy, who had changed her name to Atlantis Black. This interview took place three months before she disappeared.
ONE
SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008
Can we turn the camera off? It’s so cold.
1.
On June 25, 2008, a young woman with my sister’s IDs was found dead on the floor of a hotel room in Tijuana. Her body had needle marks in the left arm, a wound on the right middle finger, and a bruised cranium. She wore blue jeans and a brown T-shirt that read GOOD KARMA. Two syringes were in the room: one on the nightstand, one in her purse. The police report said that the IDs—including an American passport and a California driver’s license issued to “Eunice Atlantis Black”—did not appear to match the body, which was cremated without anyone’s taking fingerprints or checking dental records. The autopsy report said the woman had green eyes and weighed less than one hundred pounds. It estimated her age to be twenty to twenty-five years old. The cause of death was a pancreatic hemorrhage.
My sister had hazel eyes, like my mother’s. She was thirty-one and running from felony charges in a prescription drug case in the state of California when she disappeared.
By the time I heard the news, the only thing that might have shocked me would have been if my sister had found a way to live. Just in case of some miraculous mistake, I called Atlantis’s phone—it seemed to be on—and left a voicemail message. Then I typed an email: “Call me as soon as you can if you receive this. I love you.” I had no expectation of hearing back from her.
2.
In the summer of 2002, Atlantis took the stage, shook back the dark, straight hair that fell to her waist, and lifted the strap of an electric guitar over her shoulder. The instrument settled low on her hips. Strumming some quick minor chords, she tossed her head like a horse assailed by flies. Her silver-sequin tank top screamed Chinatown. A bony knee poked through her jeans as she leaned into the microphone and whispered, “Check.” She made a hand motion as if to say: Come here. “Check,” she said again, louder.
She said something inaudible to the pleasant-faced, leather-clad man climbing the stage, who nodded and took a seat behind the drum kit.
“Let’s have a little more vocals,” she said.
Bar chatter faded as Atlantis’s husky voice filled the room. The cash register opened and shut.
“Check, check, check,” she said. “That sounds great. Hey there, everyone! I’m Atlantis Black. Thank you all for coming out and braving the subways on such a swelteringly hot and humid New York City night. Thank you to the SideWalk Café for welcoming me into your extremely prestigious Antifolk Festival. Honest to God, if I didn’t feel so fucking proud, I’d be a nervous wreck. Thank you to Regina Spektor for that ridiculously fabulous set, and to Lach for believing in me and inviting me here. So tonight I’ve got a few new goth surf rock tunes for you, some from my first album, In My Bed, and a couple of covers. This first one goes out to my little sister, Betsy, who’s here tonight.”
Most people assumed that I was the older sister, though I was two years younger. I was clearly the more serious and responsible one. I went to graduate school for poetry and had never been caught breaking the law; Atlantis used her mug shot from 1996 for an album cover. (She’d taken hallucinogens with a friend in the Mojave Desert. I don’t know what they did to get busted for “public intoxication.”)
The drummer tapped off sticks, and Atlantis built a tower of minor chords. When it threatened to topple into noise, he knocked it down, and Atlantis picked up the shards. Her voice echoed as if from the innermost whorl of a shell:
pour the hot wax on my skin
you always were my sweetest sin
In the middle of a riff, the tank top strap slipped from Atlantis’s shoulder, and her right breast popped out of her shirt like a pale, trembling Chihuahua. Some girls in crew cuts cheered. The Chihuahua twitched its dark nose. I sucked down the rest of my Maker’s and ginger.
“You’re awesome!” yelled a kid with orange hair, raising his thin, muscular arms.
She finished the song, then pulled up her tank top strap as if it were no big deal.
“Wow,” she said. “That was quite . . . cathartic. This next one’s called: ‘Another Fucked-Up Beauty Queen.’”
It was impossible for me to judge Atlantis’s music critically. Her riot grrrl songs were inspired by punk and goth bands that we both liked; she was allergic to pretty radio voices. Her themes were sex, drugs, and a love of pain, death, and transformation. She often sang from the perspective of a spurned lover, with lyrics addressed to an unattainable “you,” and ending on a tragic note. Her songs were easier to listen to when they were more playful and ironic, like “I Can’t Kill Myself Today.” A tribute to her vibrator, “My Machine,” had gotten a mention in Time Out New York.
Before Atlantis performed a song, she practiced it for months. If she played a wrong note, she went back to the place where it still sounded good and tried again. She was the most obsessive artist I’ve ever known.
Atlantis used to say that classical piano relaxed her more than any other music. She didn’t like violins (too screechy), symphonies (too boring and too much), or electronic music (no soul). Yet she never tried to pick up piano herself.
Our mother was a skilled pianist and as a teenager had performed weekly in church. Growing up, I asked Mom to teach me piano on the spinet her mother had taught her on, and I practiced a lot. Sometimes when I got a little loud, or maybe when she grew tired of hearing me, Mom would say, “Light touch.” I thought she laughed to herself after saying it; it was probably something she’d been told when she was learning. Atlantis would never have tolerated musical criticism from Mom.
In my sophomore year of college, I studied piano with Edmund Niemann, who played with Steve Reich’s ensemble and wrote music for Meredith Monk. He taught me to play some classical pieces that became Atlantis’s favorites. Whenever we were both at home, she’d beg me to play Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven, which she said had goth riffs.
After college, when I lived with Atlantis in New York, I bought a keyboard with headphones and recorded songs I made up late at night. I could play only when I was certain that no one but God himself was listening—not the neighbors, not Atlantis.
The first time I saw Atlantis onstage—she was still called Nancy then—she was a high school freshman playing Shakespeare’s Juliet. In the dark auditorium, I watched her die. She was a great actress, especially convincing when it came to representing pain. After that, I became an actress, too, a Miranda marveling at a “brave new world, / That has such people in’t.”
I believed that the demons possessing Atlantis would kill her if she didn’t perform. But I worried that she might actually become famous. I worried for both of us.
3.
Nancy and I grew up in Wyeth country: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The painter Andrew Wyeth’s family lived three miles east across the highway, in the historic district. Where we lived, on Hillendale Road, there were beautiful woods and sweet old stone farmhouses, side by side with kitschy 1950s ranches and 1960s housing developments. Working-class country folks lived next door to wealthy horse people and nouveau riche commuters to Philadelphia; almost everyone was white. Our hous
e was a split-level, painted and maintained by my father. The closest businesses were a mile and a half away: a gas station, a diner called Hank’s Place, and the Wawa food market, where my father took us every Sunday after Mass and permitted Nancy and me one candy bar each. In the summer, before I learned to drive, I walked in the woods, read books, watched TV, and hung out with Nancy and a few friends who lived nearby. Sometimes we went swimming or tubing where the Brandywine River narrowed to a creek. There was a scary rope swing over the black rocks and waterfalls that we loved.
Chadds Ford was named for a businessman, John Chads—the town fathers didn’t pay much attention to spelling—who opened a ferry service across the Brandywine River in the late 1730s. The Leni Lenape had presumably forded that river for thousands of years before he arrived. When I was growing up, a few Native Americans still lived in the area, some of whom sat for Andrew Wyeth, the only artist I was aware of; my parents displayed framed prints of his drawings and paintings around our house. On my way up the stairs to their room—where I sometimes found my mother during the day—I was both mesmerized and spooked by the figure in The Berry Picker: with two brimming baskets and boyish, short hair that frames a face turned away from the viewer, the berry picker appears to be napping in the afternoon. For a long time I thought the figure was a young man until I noticed the small breasts under the loose white shirt.
In October 1945, Wyeth’s father, Newell Convers Wyeth, known for his illustrations of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, died on the railroad tracks where the Octoraro line crossed Ring Road, a few miles from where our house would be built. When I was growing up, the story I heard was that his car stalled on the tracks and was hit by a train. In the 1940s, some trains still carried passengers on the line, but it was most likely a freight that killed N. C. and his four-year-old grandson. A Wilmington, Delaware, newspaper dated October 19, 1945, read: “Troopers Believe Famous Painter Was Blinded by Sun as He Drove Up Incline toward Tracks.” David Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth suggests that the accident might have been a suicide.
Less than a year after what the newspapers called a “double tragedy,” Andrew Wyeth painted Winter 1946, a figure that he described as “almost tumbling down a hill across a strong winter light, with his hand flung wide and a black shadow racing behind him, and bits of snow, and my feeling of being disconnected from everything. It was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping. Over on the other side of that hill was where my father was killed, and I was sick I’d never painted him.” But would he have been any less grief-stricken if he had?
I wonder the same thing about writing this book.
SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008
When I first heard PJ Harvey’s album Rid of Me, I heard what I had never heard in my life. It was a woman screaming, but not in like an L7 way. It was real. And it was produced very finely—I heard a woman rasping. Almost like gasping for air.
The next day I got out and bought every album that was available. I liked the whispering, the groaning, the lo-fi-ness. I was like, You know what, I can do that.
4.
Nancy was my canary, ahead of me in the dark.
Our mother was manic-depressive and suicidal, so Nancy and I were raised mostly by our father. He was a conservative Catholic, and he had rules for us. No frivolous adornments. No best-friend necklaces, because to accept one might hurt another little girl’s feelings. I had to give back at least two broken hearts to confused friends. No ear piercings until the magic age—thirteen. After confirmation, we would be free to wear what we wanted. But if we chose whorish things, God couldn’t save us from falling into hell.
At church and at Catholic school, I loved to think of Jesus in the stations of the cross—how he climbed the hill and fell under his burden; climbed some more and fell again; climbed and fell a third time, turning the other cheek to his torturers. I saw how his performance of suffering, humiliation, and death led him to rise in ecstasy. God’s love meant being above it all. To endure pain would earn me transformation too: in others’ eyes, and in the life to come.
·
When the devil—often in the form of Nancy—tempted me to do something bad and fun, I usually managed to get away with it. In confession, I learned how to lie in an honest voice. Like most Catholic children, if I couldn’t think of anything to tell, I invented wrongdoings that would elicit the penance of a few Hail Marys.
Nancy seldom did what she was told; nor did she attempt to hide her disobedience. Our father tried to beat her into submission with brutal spankings on her bare skin, and threatened her with his belt, though I don’t remember seeing him hit her with it. He wasn’t drunk; he just flew into rages, especially over his firstborn, little Nancy, who looked a bit like his sister—she’d died of breast cancer when we were children—and who definitely looked like our mother. For years, I believed that such abuse was normal—and it was, in the families I knew, most of whom went to the same church we did.
·
Nancy was an ingenious mimic. One evening, when we were both less than ten years old, she wrapped herself in our father’s gray cotton bathrobe and pretended to be Father Walker, our parish priest. She went to the kitchen and opened a bag of Wonder Bread; with her fists, she flattened slices on the counter, unscrewed a two-liter bottle of Coke, and used the cap to make circular impressions in the bread. I helped her pile up the wafers. She snatched a glass and a bottle of grape juice and led me to her bedroom, where she draped a sheet over her desk, told me to kneel on the floor next to it, and, with nail-bitten fingers, fed me the body of Christ. Then our father came in and pushed me out of the room. I heard horrible thudding sounds. Later, Nancy told me that he had her by the hair, and those sounds I heard were of him slamming her head into the wall between our rooms. It wouldn’t shock me if he had damaged my sister’s brain, long before any drugs she was prescribed or used for comfort.
When he went onto the back porch to smoke a cigarette, Nancy crawled out of her room, went to the kitchen phone, and called the police to report child abuse. Mom got up off the couch—she’d been watching TV—and took the phone out of her hand. “Don’t come here,” she said to the person on the other end. “My girls were just playing.” She put the phone in its cradle and told Nancy, “You have to stop setting off your father.”
A police officer came anyway. Officer Peach talked to each of my family members individually and told Nancy and me that we should call again if anything happened.
·
Every autumn, our school closed for the first day of hunting season. From deep in the game preserve across the road, the sound of gunshots echoed off the beautifully maintained colonial farmhouses, and off our 1950s-style ranch. Though our father warned us not to venture too far into the woods alone and without wearing bright colors, I was drawn by the sun-bleached bones—deer, rabbits, and squirrels—that I found there. I considered myself an amateur naturalist. Sometimes I followed Nancy along the ATV trails to a birch-branch fort that other children had built. As we moved through the forest, we pretended we were outlaws, pantomiming a shoot-out. Sometimes I was a doe, and she nailed me.
·
There were signs that Nancy was different from the other children I knew. She ate sparingly, and whenever I drank milk, she insisted that the bluish traces at the bottom of the glass were “cow veins.” I told myself she was crazy, but I also thought she might have psychic powers.
·
I was six and Nancy was eight when I first heard that she had been molested. It was one of the few times she knocked on my bedroom door without opening it. I remember her freckled face covered with tears. She said that our next-door neighbor, a teenage boy, made her give him blow jobs, and put his fingers inside her. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. She wanted him to stop, but was afraid he’d get mad and that no one would believe her anyway, since his dad was buddies with the sheriff. I advised her to tell our babysitter. When she finally did, our babysitter—who went to high school
with him—said: “He dates senior girls.”
But Nancy’s claim was plausible. Since our next-door neighbor boy helped our family take care of the yard, he had easy access to our house, garage, and toolshed. One friend and neighbor, Tara, remembers him and Nancy “hugging” in the backyard while we were all playing hide-and-seek. Tara was a year younger than me and looked up to my sister at least as much as I did. At the time, she told me years later, a romance with an older boy seemed cool, and to see him holding Nancy in secret only made her worship Nancy more. Of course, what Tara saw suggests that they might have had a relationship even more disturbing than a single predatory attack.
·
Once, when Nancy was thirteen, she climbed out of her window in the middle of the night and walked the nine miles to our school, through woods and fields and across Highway 1. My parents assumed that she had spent the night at a girlfriend’s and didn’t seem worried about her absence. The next day, she showed up on time for her environmental science class and took her seat near where a buck’s head poked out of the wall. She told me she couldn’t sleep anyway, and that night-walking was a beautiful and tranquilizing experience that I should try sometime.
Not long afterward, though, Nancy cut her wrists and lay down in her waterbed. I’m not sure who found her bleeding, maybe our father. We went together as a family to see a psychiatrist. Nancy said that nightmares—in which she felt as if she were being choked to death—made it impossible for her to sleep. The psychiatrist prescribed the antidepressant Paxil. After that, when Nancy said she felt sick, she refused to take the school bus in the morning and our parents let her stay home.