The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  Since three people wouldn’t fit in the Alfa, we took Mom’s Honda Accord, which she had special-ordered without AC to save the earth. We headed west on the Dreamway, a nickname for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, America’s first limited-access divided highway.

  Mom and Atlantis both loved to drive, and we all preferred wind and blaring music to conversation. Despite the billboards advertising natural wonders and historical sites, we seldom took an exit. Mom played cassette tapes—Fleetwood Mac, Tracy Chapman, Eurythmics. Atlantis ashed her cigarettes out the window. She told us her own songs were written for the girls who spent their lives trapped in the Middle West behind cash registers. We all got excited whenever we crossed another state line. Every time we stopped for gas, Atlantis headed for the postcard displays. She bought the silliest ones and mailed them to her old friends, and her crushes, back in Pennsylvania. At night, she and Mom shared a bed and stayed up talking as I drifted in and out of sleep. Once, at a Super 8 in New Mexico, I overheard Atlantis asking Mom about her suicide attempt. Had she been pissed when she woke up in the hospital bed?

  “Well, frankly, yes,” Mom said. “But don’t you girls ever try anything like that. You may live to regret it.”

  “Can you please talk about something else?” I said from my side of the room. “Or tell better stories?”

  “You’re lucky not to know what it feels like to want to die,” Atlantis said. “Our stories suck because our lives have sucked.”

  “You are lucky, Betsy,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, I hit the jackpot with you two,” I said.

  “Lucky Betsy,” Atlantis said, coining a new nickname. “Mom! Tell us about the time that lunatic asshole held you at gunpoint and ejaculated all over you.”

  “It was in Seattle in 1973,” Mom began. “I was coming home after a cello concert . . .”

  I’d heard this story before. In fact, I’d written about it in an essay for a high school English class. Mom had been fishing keys from her purse when she was accosted by a middle-aged man saying, “See this gun, baby? Open the fuckin’ door.” She was thirty. The man forced Mom into the basement of a house that she rented alone, yanked up her skirt, came on her, and fled. She filed a police report, but they never found the man. It wasn’t rape, Mom explained, because there had been no penetration. After the assault, she submitted her dissertation, “Communicatory Accuracy in Four Experiments,” got her PhD and a teaching job in Wisconsin. Her first nervous breakdown took place within a year. She recovered on her stepfather’s hundred-plus-acre sheep farm on Gum Tree Road in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Then she went to work at DuPont and met my father, the most reliable man she’d ever known.

  ·

  In 1998, Atlantis transferred her Loyola credits to Penn State, moved into an apartment in State College, and tried to kill herself by taking pills and drinking. Before she passed out, she stumbled around her apartment and knocked over a table. A neighbor heard the noise and called the police. Atlantis was hospitalized, then took the rest of the semester off and moved back home with Mom and Dad again.

  I was in England, on a junior-year-abroad program at Oxford, studying poetry, when I heard about it. On the phone, Atlantis told me she was back on antidepressants, and that Penn State was obsessed with football culture. The few gay people there had to stay in the closet or get raped, she said, and the winter was enough to make you slit your wrists.

  She was still in Chadds Ford two months later, when my father fell down at work and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Doctors said that if he chose chemotherapy, he might have several more years to live—perhaps a decade. When he began treatments, I was still at Oxford, and everyone in my family agreed that I should remain abroad, and that Atlantis and Mom would take care of him.

  ·

  My father had the first real leisure time in his life while he battled his illness. His months were taken up with books my mother gave him. He also read my copy of Animal Liberation, and I was stunned when he sent me a note saying that it had taught him something. He wasn’t going to become a vegetarian, he wrote, but his doctors had taken him off red meat, and he really couldn’t disagree with Singer that it was unnecessary to kill animals.

  When I got back from Oxford, he was in the intensive care wing at a hospital on the main line outside of Philadelphia. Atlantis, meanwhile, had crashed the Alfa and gotten a DUI and was spending two months in rehab at White Deer Run in lieu of a thirty-day jail sentence.

  My father’s cancer treatments hadn’t worked the way the doctors had hoped. During the last three weeks of his life, I spent most of the time just sitting with him as he dozed, high on morphine. I remembered how he’d planted most of the trees in our yard and taught me their names: dogwood, birch, Japanese weeping cherry, burning bush. His devotion to traditional ideas of marriage must have saved our family when Mom was too sick to care for anyone, especially herself. If he hadn’t believed that being a father, husband, and provider were lifelong duties, what might have happened to my mother, sister, and me? As I sat there watching him, I couldn’t forget his bouts of violence, but I knew that I took after him in one essential way. I was committed to loving the people in my family, not because they were easy or even kind, but because they had been given to me.

  Once, he woke up and reached for me. He touched my hair—lightly, lovingly. My father.

  ·

  So that she could go to our father’s funeral, Atlantis was given a reprieve of several hours from her rehab facility. She walked into St. Cornelius Church wearing red lipstick, a short black dress, and stockings, and squeezed into a pew between me and Mom. Had she borrowed this getup from someone at the facility? Neither of us had been back to church since we’d been confirmed Angela (her) and Theresa (me). After Christ Church Cathedral and the Bodleian Library—sights that had become commonplace for me over the last ten months—St. Cornelius felt small and provincial. Atlantis jabbed me, and I followed her eyes to see Mrs. Smith, a severe-looking woman in the front pew.

  Mrs. Smith was the mother of five children, all girls, with their hair pulled into ponytails tight enough to make their eyes slant; she was the strictest of all the parents I knew at our church. Heather, one of the Smith girls, was my best childhood friend. Once, when I was six, I saw Mrs. Smith beating Heather’s bare bottom with a wooden spoon, and when she caught me watching, she ordered me to go away unless I wanted a turn.

  After the ceremony, Mrs. Smith came up to me. “Your father was a good man,” she said.

  In the receiving line, I spotted Father Walker speaking to my mother. I couldn’t believe he was still alive. He’d officiated at my parents’ wedding and baptized both Atlantis and me. My sister and I had spent countless Saturday evenings talking in low voices to this man whose face was a shadow behind a screen; our father had met with him face-to-face. I linked arms with Atlantis and went out to the parking lot without a word to Father Walker.

  An attendant stood waiting by a white van to take Atlantis back to rehab. Our father would be buried in New Jersey, next to his sister, in a plot that his parents had purchased when he was a year old. But his firstborn wasn’t allowed to cross state lines, so I would be the daughter to witness his body being laid to rest.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  In San Francisco, I opened for Johnette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde. It was the biggest performance I’d ever done in my life. And it was the first sober performance I’d ever done in my life. I had a drummer and Andrew, my West Coast guitar player, play with me. Johnette was just doing acoustic, so they didn’t want the whole band there. To put an acoustic guitar in front of you in your lap, it’s one step away from being stripped down naked. She was such a real person. And, uh, I like the fact that she made a comeback. Because that sort of inspires me, being that I’m thirty-one and I’m like, am I too old to be doing this as a woman? I’m like, well hell. If Johnette’s kickin’ it up there, why can’t I?

  9.

  With my father gone, Mom was rich, thanks to his life insu
rance policy, and she wanted to travel with Atlantis and me. She took us on a vacation to Hawaii; I lost track of how many beers Atlantis drank on the plane. She and Mom spent most of their time sunbathing on the hotel balcony while I went hiking in the rain forest. Nights I swam alone in the wonderfully warm water; Atlantis stayed out late at gay bars and Mom lounged in an armchair in the room the three of us shared, reading mystery novels.

  ·

  I was accepted to Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program in poetry at the same time that Atlantis got her bachelor’s degree from Penn State, in geographic information systems. She’d chosen the field of cartography because she loved maps and had heard it paid decently. She got a job as a technician for the New York State Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment in Manhattan and asked me to rent an apartment with her. Since she’d destroyed her credit in Los Angeles, I was hesitant to do it. But she had a salary, and I had student loans. She also had a truck—a Toyota Tacoma that Mom had helped her to buy, after the Alfa wasn’t salvageable—and she offered to help me move. We found another roommate and a rat- and roach-infested sixth-floor walk-up on West 122nd Street. She took the smallest bedroom in order to pay less in rent and kept fiendish track of our expenses. She played open-mic nights at the SideWalk Café on East Sixth Street and Avenue A and invited me to come along, and we began to have some of the same friends. She spent most of her money on rehearsal space for the band she was forming with Ray, a woman in her late thirties who played bass and who became her lover.

  Her shows got louder and more punk. I brought friends along, and she recruited my new boyfriend, Kyle, as her drummer. She would call me onstage, where I shook a tambourine and sang backup as she growled and screamed. Once, when she lost a pick, she played her fingers raw and spattered her guitar with blood.

  ·

  On September 10, 2001, at about 7:00 p.m., I stopped by Atlantis’s office at 250 Broadway; we went out, danced, and got drunk at a Schwervon! show. I didn’t try to conceal my annoyance when she changed plans and decided to go home early to Ray’s place in Brooklyn instead of riding back to Morningside Heights with me. The next morning, I was awakened by a message being left on the answering machine I shared with Atlantis. It was one of her colleagues at the task force.

  “Atlantis, I don’t know what time you’re planning to come in, but if you haven’t left already, please don’t come to work today. Something happened to the World Trade Center. We’re being evacuated . . . there are fireballs . . . I got to go.”

  I tried to call Atlantis’s cell phone. No answer. I managed to reach my mother in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, where she’d moved after my father died. She hadn’t heard from Atlantis either.

  Hours passed before I was able to talk to her. She’d been getting ready to leave for work when the first tower was hit, and she and Ray had been sitting on the roof in the South Slope all day, drinking beer and watching the smoke. When her office reopened, she and her coworkers were required to participate in private therapy sessions with a psychiatrist. The doctor assigned to Atlantis asked if the attacks had traumatized her. She said yes and got him to prescribe Valium.

  ·

  Atlantis built a website in the early 2000s, before most unsigned musicians had one. On it, she described herself as “a depressed girl who can’t sing and doesn’t give a fuck.” She asked a photographer friend named Orianna to do a shoot for her first album, In My Bed, whose songs were about love, depression, and suicide. Orianna took pictures of Atlantis on the roof of our Morningside Heights apartment. While Atlantis was writing material for her second album, More than Opium, she again asked Orianna for help. These songs were about surviving sexual abuse, addiction, and trying to get clean. The concept of the shoot seemed on the nose: a young woman returns to the hometown she had hated as a teenager.

  So Orianna joined Atlantis for an overnight trip to Chadds Ford. Years later, I asked Orianna what that trip was like. She said that Atlantis already seemed to be on drugs in the morning when they met at the car rental place, and she saw her taking more pills on the drive down. Atlantis told her that she felt comfortable taking off her clothes for Orianna to take pictures of her, but that was it—they couldn’t have sex. Had Atlantis forgotten that Orianna was straight and happily married to her high school sweetheart? And did she realize she could make art with someone without that person having other expectations? Orianna let her know she was simply there to do her job.

  The outdoor, daytime photographs made me nostalgic: Atlantis sitting on the trestle in the woods, looking vulnerable and lovable. Then they checked into the Holiday Inn, where Atlantis took off most of her clothes, flipped on the TV, and started drinking.

  “How do you want to look?” Orianna asked.

  Atlantis said: “Make me look desperate.”

  ·

  One Christmas Eve, when we were both in our twenties and visiting Mom in Ephrata, I thought I must have been hallucinating when I saw Atlantis preparing something in the kitchen—my sister found food boring and had never bothered to learn how to cook. Also, there was no stove. When Mom moved into her house and found that the previous owners had taken it with them, she refused to replace it. She told me she had no use for a stove, since she already had a toaster oven, and she’d found a hot plate at Goodwill. She’d rolled a metal cart next to the refrigerator, where the stove had been, and put her toaster oven on it, and the hot plate on top of that.

  Atlantis was standing over the hot plate, stirring a pot of brown liquid. She said it was opium tea, brewed from dried poppies she’d ordered on the internet from Afghanistan. She offered steaming mugs to Mom and me and told us to ignore the foul taste. Mom declined; I accepted. The taste wasn’t that bad. Atlantis got out her guitar and asked me to accompany her on the piano. My spinet hadn’t been tuned in a while, but I’d lost my usual self-consciousness. Mom wandered into the living room and sat down to listen; the next morning, she asked if we planned to record our “miraculous” songs.

  ·

  In 2002, I got my MFA from Columbia and was offered a job as assistant to the director at the 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. The not-for-profit administrative world demanded many overtime hours—a couple of nights a week for readings and events, and some weekends to support the writing program and the literary brunches. The position paid little, but it would connect me to hundreds of writers and people in the publishing industry, give me a library of free books, and enable me to live in New York City without scrounging for adjunct teaching positions or competitive freelance writing gigs. After three years, I was promoted to managing director, and then, the following year, to acting director. A year after that, I was director. This exhilarating, exhausting job became my life. It left me little time to read, do my own writing, or have a serious romantic relationship, but I believed that all that would come later.

  Mom came to New York for events I hosted at the 92Y but was always too shy to speak to the writers she so admired and whose work she’d introduced me to—John Updike, Günter Grass, E. L. Doctorow, A. S. Byatt. Still, I was proud to have been able to bring her to breathe the same air as her literary heroes. Atlantis joined Mom and me for one 92Y reading by Margaret Atwood. My sister had read Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, and a collection called Murder in the Dark.

  In the summer of 2006, seven years after my father died, Mom called out of the blue and said she’d paid off my student loans. She’d written a five-digit check to Sallie Mae.

  ·

  Atlantis spent five years in New York City, playing shows and supporting herself with her government job. After she and Ray broke up, she went on Nerve.com and fell for a woman calling herself luvmedo, who turned out to be Leah, a sweet, beautiful hip-hop DJ who was about Atlantis’s age, and just coming out as a lesbian. They met for drinks, hit it off, and luvmedo accepted that Atlantis didn’t listen to the Beatles. Atlantis moved into Leah’s one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; their domestic bliss was the subject of a photo spre
ad in Metro New York. When Leah got a job offer to do hip-hop programming at MTV in San Francisco, she invited Atlantis to move with her. Atlantis played a farewell show at Arlene’s Grocery and headed west.

  TWO

  10.

  By 2007—the year before Atlantis disappeared—I had lived in New York City for seven years. Then I was offered a job teaching poetry for two semesters on the Greek island of Paros: I would have little cell phone or internet access, and a year to focus on writing. I got a sabbatical from the Y, gave up my apartment, and stored my things.

  I assume that Atlantis was already addicted to painkillers when she enrolled in a program to become a pharmacy technician in San Francisco; she called the band she formed there Drugstore Cowgirl. Though I was skeptical about her career plan, Atlantis said that given her psychopharmacological experience, she already knew everything that she could be tested on. I couldn’t really argue with her: after years of Paxil for depression, Depakote (prescribed in the early 2000s) to prevent seizures, and benzos for panic attacks, Atlantis was an expert.

  ·

  That summer, I got a call from Leah: Atlantis had nearly died after supposedly swallowing a bottle of Xanax over the course of a night. I had a month before my job in Greece began, and flew out to California. I took my sister hiking in Yosemite, and the short, steep walk to the top of Glacier Point was too much for her. One minute she was gazing down at the treetops below; the next, she was seizing, her lips turning blue. A stranger put a leather boot in her mouth before two hikers, who happened to be doctors, intervened.

  That night in our hotel room, Atlantis put down her copy of Anna Karenina and confided to me that her depression had gotten worse since she’d moved west. She wasn’t writing songs, she hadn’t made friends, and she and Leah were in couples therapy. She admitted that what she’d taken wasn’t Xanax but morphine; she’d hoped to die in the comfort of Leah’s arms.