The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  This was the third time I was aware of that Atlantis had tried to kill herself. She was welcome to visit me in Greece, I told her—seeing ancient temples, or just sitting in the strong sunlight, would lift anyone’s depression. She said she didn’t have the money or the energy to travel and told me not to mind if she died. I did mind, I said, and I would never give her permission to hurt herself; if she couldn’t travel to Greece, I’d definitely visit her when I got back. I hoped that meanwhile she’d go to a hospital and get some real help.

  I don’t know exactly how Atlantis first got into prescription painkillers, but certainly various doctors had prescribed her hydrocodone or codeine when she had whiplash or needed dental work. When she couldn’t get it from her doctors regularly, or when she ran out, she went on the internet and ordered it from a pharmacy in the Philippines that would mail it to her. Was that also where she’d gotten the morphine?

  ·

  A week before I left, a former teacher told me a disturbing story about the school where I was scheduled to teach. Years ago, she said, a group of men on the island had gang-raped a local woman, and one of the heads of the school had filmed it. She never saw the film, but her husband had witnessed the crime and told her about it. The rape was never reported to the police, and the fact that her husband had been among those who failed to intervene or report it led to a fight that ultimately ended my teacher’s marriage. I thanked her for telling me and said that I would be vigilant.

  ·

  Paros is thirteen miles long and ten miles wide, a landscape both easy to navigate and easy to lose your way in. Near the coast, I could orient myself by the position of the sun, the bay, the mountain, and the lighthouse. Often, though, I got lost on the winding, unmarked roads in the interior, where stone walls divided the rocky farms. Paros had one small forest left, near the ferry port; most of the pines had been cut down long ago to build boats, but some olive and cypress trees were said to be two thousand years old.

  The white stucco house I lived in was a couple of miles above the town, halfway up a mountain. It had one story, deep-set windows, and an arch-shaped wooden door. My favorite part of the house was the back patio, with reclining chairs, a marble table, gardens, and a view of the Aegean. Stray cats sunned on the stone terrace while I worked. One fat orange tomcat liked to pad over the pages of the science fiction novel I was writing. When he sprawled across my notebook, I knew it was time to put down my pen and scratch his belly.

  I wore my mother’s straw hat and rode a bicycle to the class I taught two days a week. And I found a friend and lover in Dan, a painting teacher from Toronto. We made excursions to the mountain village of Lefkes, to clay beaches, to the fishing village of Aliki. We spent our days writing and painting, hiking and swimming, and our nights in tavernas, eating, drinking, and dancing.

  Atlantis and my mother would have liked that place.

  ·

  Just before Atlantis’s thirty-first birthday (we were both Scorpios, four days apart), Dan and I guided a group of students through Selçuk, Turkey, to the ancient city of Ephesus. Somewhere near the “House of the Virgin Mary”—where the Holy Mother is said to have died—a woman was selling jewelry. Her long, dark hair reminded me of Atlantis’s. I picked up one of the pendants from her table: it was a small, silver sun, with thirteen tiny eyes at the flame tips. The woman said the necklace was extremely powerful and would ward off bad spirits; I told her that my sister in California would love it. The woman said my sister probably needed protection—she could feel something—and what a good sister I was to be thinking of her halfway around the world. She dangled it on a simple black cord, and the sun flashed in all those evil eyes. The necklace cost the equivalent of a hundred dollars—more than I could afford—but I was inexperienced at haggling and the woman knew I wanted it. Also, she frightened me. I paid what she asked and mailed the pendant to San Francisco.

  A week later, I heard from Atlantis:

  THANK YOU SISTER!!!!! It is gorgeous and I adore the “spell quality” to it—it means the world to me.

  ·

  The next time I spoke with Atlantis, she said that she and Leah had agreed to start living separately at the end of the year. She’d have her pharmacy tech degree by then, and she planned to move to San Diego. I advised her to move back to the East Coast, where she actually knew people, but she said that she couldn’t stand another New York winter. I told her that teaching on Paros was sketchy, and Dan wasn’t able to make plans with me. I wanted to come back to the States. Could I help her with the move? No, she said, she needed every inch of space in her truck, but why didn’t I return home and visit Mom, who wanted to see me.

  ·

  One afternoon in December, Atlantis called me in Greece, sounding terrified. “Something bad happened,” she said. “I need you to do something for me. Get a pen.”

  A sting operation had gone down, she said, in the San Francisco hospital where she worked as a pharmacy intern. Two men from the FBI had interviewed her and her colleagues, and she thought one of the men was now stalking her.

  I told her to calm down. Probably someone she worked with had made a mistake, and the authorities were just trying to get to the bottom of it. Had she taken any drugs from the hospital? No, she said, but false arrests were common for people with jobs like hers. Was she still seeing her psychotherapist? No, she couldn’t afford it anymore; she was just visiting a psychiatrist from time to time to get her medications.

  She asked me to come up with a date and place where we could meet in a worst-case scenario. It had to be in a foreign country. Delusional as she might have been, Atlantis’s pain was real, and I knew she wasn’t kidding about going into hiding, even if no one was looking for her. But at least she was talking about living instead of dying. I told her that if anything ever happened that forced either of us to disappear, we could meet in front of the Mona Lisa at high noon on the Fourth of July, any year. Perfect, she said.

  ·

  On my way out of America, at a friend’s suggestion, I’d signed up for Facebook and invited Atlantis to join. The next time I opened Atlantis’s Facebook page, I noticed that she was friends with someone I will refer to as Gretchen. At the time, I wondered who she was—and now that I know more about her, it’s clear to me that I can’t use her real name.

  ·

  Over Christmas, I visited Mom and presented her with an icon from the House of the Virgin Mary in Turkey.

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re so sentimental. No, that’s not the word I want. Betsy, you’re so weird.”

  I said that primitive art was always sentimental and weird, and if she didn’t like it, I would give it to someone who did.

  “It’s funny how different you are from your sister,” she said. “Atlantis is virtually un-insultable. I call her a functioning drug addict and she doesn’t even blink. You’ve always been so sensitive.”

  I told her that Atlantis was barely functioning, and that we didn’t have to have a relationship if she didn’t want one.

  “I’m a blunt person,” she said. “It’s hard to say anything at all to someone so sensitive, sticking out all over the place.”

  Later that evening, Mom slipped a peace offering under my door: a business reply envelope from Wired magazine, on the back of which she’d written: “‘Lost & found’ words for Betsy: imaginative, romantic, wonderful (adj. weird and w.), loving, agapistic, demonstrative.”

  ·

  In January, Atlantis changed her status on Facebook from being in a relationship to being single, and the city where she lived from San Francisco to San Diego. She sent me a few group emails that included Gretchen and someone named Psychobunny as their recipients. I didn’t pay much attention to the emails. One was a photograph of Christina Ricci from the movie Monster, in which she plays a teenage girl who gets picked up by Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer and former prostitute. Atlantis joked that she’d gotten a bad haircut and now looked just like her.

  ·

  Dan called f
rom Toronto—he’d also gone home for the holidays—and asked if we might spend some time together in New York City on his way back to Athens. After seeing him again, I decided to find a way to return to Greece. Neither of us was going back to the school where we’d been teaching, and I had a full semester without plans. I hoped to live somewhere inexpensively and work on my novel. I found an artist residency through the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts and signed up for Greek language classes in Athens. I shared my good news with Atlantis; she wrote back immediately:

  I am SO proud of you, Sister :)

  I really want to write a book too—but I have no idea what it would be about or where to begin. I suppose with a plot outline—but as much as people have urged me to, I could NEVER write an autobiography—perhaps I’ll leave that up to you, E. Bronte :)

  Yes, we Must talk. Call me soon.

  XOXO

  —the Other Bronte

  ·

  While I was in New York, I heard about a job opening at the Pierrepont School, a progressive k–12 private school in Westport, Connecticut. I knew I didn’t want to return to arts administration in the fall. During my semester in Greece, I’d decided that teaching was my vocation. I needed more legitimate teaching experience, ideally in a place where I might lure Dan to join me. I interviewed and was hired. In the fall, I would be teaching English four days a week to students aged seven to seventeen, and an after-school creative writing class. My students would be bright and motivated, and each class would be capped at twelve. I asked if they also needed a painting teacher. It was possible, they said.

  ·

  After the holidays, Mom visited San Diego, where she stayed with an old friend from college. She and Atlantis apparently had a great time together, and Mom made an impulsive decision to resettle there if she could sell her house; she returned to Ephrata and put her house on the market. Atlantis warned her that San Diego was expensive, but she fully supported Mom’s moving there and sent her listings for bungalows and condos.

  ·

  On February 20, I received a copy of an email from Atlantis that was addressed to Kyle, my ex-boyfriend who’d played in her band:

  Hi K—

  I’m making this a mass email so I don’t have to tell the story a thousand times. I got the job but then *didn’t* get the job when they looked back on my blackout dates and saw that I would be unable to work from March 13th-17th (I have a friend coming into town and we’ve been planning on this for MONTHS—she already bought her ticket and has never been to SD and knows no one here and we were planning to go to Mexico together).

  I found it irritating that my sister appeared to have remained so close with my ex. The story didn’t sound like much, and I wasn’t sure why she was telling it to a group. What job was she trying to get? After the FBI sting at the San Francisco hospital, I thought Atlantis was afraid to—or couldn’t—work in pharmacy, and she was looking for any old job to pay the rent. I didn’t know who the mysterious friend was. I wrote back and asked her who, but she didn’t reply.

  ·

  In March, she sent a mass email with the subject “Trailer for the film I’m in,” along with a video link to the trailer of a movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, directed by Pete Shaner. Later that month, I finally got an email from her:

  So right now I have an editing job for University Readers—it’s only PT and my hours suck and the pay sucks even worse—but at least it’s something. That’s why I’ve gotten into modeling and acting. I’m in a Samuel L. Jackson film next month, as well as a Matthew McConaughey and Ashton Kutcher movie. Nothing big—just bit-roles and extra parts. But at least they feed me and give me $150 a pop. I feel sick over the whole thing because I am not, and never wanted to be, an actress. I feel that I’m taking away chances from 19-year-old girls from Nebraska who were molested and saved every dime from their cashier jobs just to get to CA and their dream is to be an actress.

  I didn’t believe all this. When she was in her twenties, people who saw her on the street used to offer her modeling gigs. But movies with Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey? I wondered what she was really doing. Her email continued:

  Gretchen flew in from NYC the other week to film a documentary on me—but after seeing the footage I do not ever want it to be released. She and her editor are determined however—so it’s a battle.

  So that was the mysterious friend. When we talked on the phone and I asked Atlantis who Gretchen was, she acted as if she’d already told me about her. Atlantis said that Gretchen was a fan who’d been especially interested in her experience as a female rocker. They’d been internet friends for about a year. When Gretchen asked if they could meet in person, Atlantis, who answered all of her fan mail, said she was moving from San Francisco to San Diego, and that Gretchen could come and shoot whenever she wanted.

  I wasn’t sure what Atlantis believed about Gretchen. It wasn’t a romance, Atlantis said. She wasn’t physically attracted to Gretchen, and their relationship involved no sex.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  From my first record, the last song, “My Machine,” it’s all about my vibrator. Every girl I’ve been with says, “I want to make you come without that stupid vibrator!” I have never come with another human being. I can only come with my vibrator. I can get people off in my sleep. It’s just sort of a curse I was born with. You know?

  11.

  In April, Atlantis emailed me again. She’d found a great job with the California League of Conservation Voters. And she’d begun writing a short autobiographical piece that recounted her departure from New York City for California after a bad experience with a psychotherapist. She said that the story would be about her “mental breakdown” and “subsequent spiral into drugs and alcohol,” and asked me if I’d read the first couple of pages, since I was “the writer” in the family.

  I was well aware of Atlantis’s hostility to her former psychotherapist—who seemed to have dumped her—but I hadn’t realized that she thought she’d had a “breakdown” as a result of their falling-out. Sure, I said, send the pages.

  Atlantis’s untitled memoir began: “It was a profoundly terrible bliss . . .”

  I wrote back some encouraging words. I advised her to keep going, and not to get too caught up with trying to make her language sound poetic. “In this case,” I wrote, “the facts may be poetry enough.” She thought that was hilarious.

  ATLANTIS’S FACEBOOK UPDATES

  April 17

  Atlantis is mainlining.

  Atlantis is calling poison control because she just realized that what she thought what [sic] China White was actually Anthrax.

  ·

  A Facebook friend messaged her with the subject “as if”: “there is ANY China White on the West coast. Not that I would know anything about that.” She messaged him back: “Oh honey, I run a whole cartel from Barstow to Bejing [sic] . . .”

  She was obviously kidding, pretending to be some big-time drug dealer. Atlantis couldn’t afford the rent for her shared apartment.

  ·

  The next time we spoke on the phone, she told me that she was involved in a class-action lawsuit against a company called Avidhosting.com, which provided website domains. Atlantis had used their service, and her website had frozen without warning or explanation. The suit seemed legitimate: the same thing had happened to hundreds of other Avidhosting patrons, who continued to be charged monthly fees for domains to which they no longer had access. Artists and entrepreneurs lost thousands of dollars. Rumors circulated that the owner had died, and that the new owner was selling Avidhosting members’ domain names to people who appeared to be hackers. Eventually, patrons received a mass email saying they could get their domain names back if they sent fifteen dollars to an address in Texas. Atlantis got in touch with other victims, collected names, and emailed the FBI to report the scam.

  On April 20, Atlantis received an email from someone asking if she was organizing the Avidhosting lawsuit and, if so, whether she ha
d any help. She responded that she was doing it on her own and called herself “the Erin Brockovich of cyberspace.”

  The next morning, a pair of agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency woke her up at the apartment she was subletting in San Diego. (Later, she claimed they’d broken down her door.) The agents questioned her about a Vicodin purchase at a Target pharmacy in San Diego the month before. Atlantis said she believed that someone—she didn’t say who—was using her ID to get prescriptions, and that she’d told both the pharmacist and her doctor about it. She said that she’d had the pharmacist photocopy her driver’s license so that no one else could get her prescriptions.

  I knew better than to believe everything I read in Atlantis’s emails, but these details also appear in the Department of Justice’s investigative report.

  The agent asked Atlantis if she’d given her credit card to anyone. She said no, but then added, “Well, maybe if I’m in the car waiting.” She denied doing anything wrong, and said she’d been prescribed Vicodin after a car accident. She’d been taking it for months, she said, and it made her memory “a little fuzzy.”

  Why had she gone to Target to pick up the prescription after trying to get it at Walgreens? She used both pharmacies, she said, and couldn’t remember which one had called her saying that her prescription was ready. When it wasn’t at Walgreens, she’d assumed it was at Target.

  The agent said that Target didn’t have an automated telephone calling system for controlled substances. Atlantis told him she used to work at Walgreens—which the agents already knew—and that such a system had been in place there. Finally she said, “If you have to arrest me, go ahead.”