The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  I dreaded giving Atlantis’s old true love the news.

  12.) Orianna Riley to have full permission to publish any and all photos she has of Atlantis—even the ones she hated—LOL.

  The photographs my sister hated were the daytime ones in which she looked normal.

  13.) Remy Weber to have full-rights to any documentary he finds suitable, including mortifying out-takes of Fred Soffa’s footage and [Name redacted]’s footage while Atlantis was wasted.

  So she had been wasted with Gretchen. Remy was Orianna’s husband, and a professional documentary filmmaker; Fred had filmed Atlantis at some of her New York concerts.

  14.) Kyle Chrise to have any marijuana paraphernalia in the “map box” that Betsy gave Atlantis as well as her guitar/bass tuner (not that he needs it).

  Kyle Chrise was her bassist in New York, and a total sweetheart.

  15.) Joe Rizzo and Francesca Coppa to be sent Atlantis’ books. They meant the world to her.

  Her New York drummer and his wife, a literature professor.

  16.) Marilyn Baiardi and Danielle Leo will be granted FULL ACCESS to Atlantis’ photos—that’s saying a lot considering how vain she is. I think there’s a pic of Marilyn’s *and* Danielle’s old cars in there.

  Her oldest friends, from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

  17.) Finally, my soeur, my souer [sic], dig through my boxes and take whatever you like. Discard the rest or send to whom you see fit, like Kyle Wills, Terry Adams, Lisa Royer, or [Name redacted]. There are far too many treasures in those boxes to be easily disposed of—and as we know, the boxes are in San Marcos.

  What was Gretchen doing there alongside me, my ex-boyfriend, and Atlantis’s other good friends?

  Tell [Name redacted] to burn the rest.

  She wanted me to be in touch with the Millionaire from Mexico. It was the only way I’d ever get ahold of any of these “treasures.”

  Again, my final Will and Testament.

  Signed,

  E. Atlantis Black

  I guess *you* inherited the fortune, Sister!! You’ll spend it far better than I ever could :-)

  Right. The fortune.

  ·

  I hadn’t realized how deeply Gretchen had wormed her way into my sister’s life. Her name appears in the will three times—more frequently than the names of any of Atlantis’s closest friends. And none of them had ever met Gretchen.

  When I checked her website, I discovered that most of the films she listed remained unmade, but she’d published their plots: all involved suicide, murder, and obsessed female characters. I found one link to an amateur horror documentary, which Gretchen apparently filmed at a Warhol-style party; a synopsis claimed that it was a home video of a murder. The Amateur Horror Documentary follows a woman from the back—she’s wearing a crushed-velvet burgundy dress, and her hair is in a beehive—then cuts to someone opening the door for her at the party. The woman is teetering on platform heels. Her face is pretty, if asymmetrical. From pictures on the website and the internet, I guessed that the woman might be Gretchen herself. She roots through her handbag and takes out a bottle of pills. A tall, elegantly dressed man grabs the woman’s cheeks in one hand—as someone would a dog or a child—and holds her face to pose for a photograph with him. Hipsters in seventies-era clothes stand around the party looking bored and lifeless. The woman heads for the bathroom.

  I clicked the film off.

  ·

  I read all of Atlantis’s emails from March, focusing on the week Gretchen came to San Diego. I found one email with a photograph attached. It had been sent to Atlantis from someone’s phone number; it shows Atlantis, her body contorted as if she’d fallen unconscious, with her legs on a sofa and her face on the floor. There’s a slice of pizza in her hand.

  Someone had seen my sister dead to the world and taken a picture.

  I wanted to kill whoever it was.

  ·

  Just after Gretchen’s visit to San Diego, Atlantis sent an email to her friend Tim Adams saying that if anything ever “happened” to her, her guitar “belonged” to him. Her email to Tim mentioned Gretchen’s supposed documentary, and that Atlantis had “already” come up with an epitaph: “So I suppose it was just one grand party afterall [sic].”

  The epitaph sounded familiar: I searched for it in my Gmail and discovered that Atlantis had included it in her first email to me that mentioned Gretchen by name. “Gretchen flew in from NYC the other week to film a documentary on me . . .” She’d also forwarded that entire email to Kyle, my ex-boyfriend, with a different subject (“letters to theo”). The change of subject implied that the duplicate email was no mistake: Atlantis was sharing her epitaph with loved ones, and Gretchen’s visit had something to do with it. The epitaph she’d sent to Kyle and me had a slight variation from the one she’d sent to Tim. Ours read: “So it was just one grand party afterall.”

  ·

  I don’t know what I’d hoped to find in Atlantis’s emails—proof, maybe, that she was more sinned against than sinning. True, the person who emerged had been mistreated, and was mentally unhinged, but she also seemed dangerous.

  On the day of her release from jail, Atlantis had forwarded the details of her experience there (photographs of bruises and accounts of being deprived of sleep, medications, and digestible food) to that Gmail account called Yoursteamroller. I typed Atlantis’s password into the account and, to my astonishment, it worked. Yoursteamroller had in turn forwarded Atlantis’s messages to First Adult Therapist.

  First Adult Therapist was another figure in Atlantis’s life whose importance took me by surprise, though it shouldn’t have. Beginning in 2004, Atlantis had worked with her for eighteen months. At the therapist’s suggestion, Atlantis agreed to try an experimental treatment, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, to recover from her traumatic childhood memories. EMDR requires a patient to visualize and recall a past trauma while the therapist stimulates nerves in the patient’s eyes by shining light into them or guiding their movement from side to side, inducing a kind of hypnotic state. I looked up EMDR on Wikipedia and learned that the patient is asked to “develop a positive cognition to be associated with the same image that is desired in place of the negative one.” The therapy is supposed to continue “until the client no longer feels as distressed when thinking of the target memory.”

  They worked together until Atlantis’s partner, Leah, got that job offer to do hip-hop programming at MTV in San Francisco. First Adult Therapist thought the move was a great idea, and she set a date for a last session with Atlantis. But the moving day got delayed, and Atlantis asked if the therapist could continue to see her.

  First Adult Therapist said no; she’d already filled her calendar.

  Atlantis filed a lengthy complaint with the American Psychological Association and subsequently received a letter on First Adult Therapist’s letterhead stating that if Atlantis continued to email and call her and her husband, she would report her to the police for criminal harassment. In her complaint to the APA, Atlantis had admitted that during an EMDR session, she’d made a sexual pass at First Adult Therapist, a manifestation of “transference,” which the doctor took personally. The termination of therapy, Atlantis claimed, had exacerbated her long-standing feelings of “rejection” and “abandonment.”

  In May 2006, Atlantis wrote an email to the couples therapist she was seeing with Leah. I have all this correspondence, but I’m legally not allowed to quote it verbatim. It said that Leah couldn’t understand Atlantis’s obsession with First Adult Therapist, and that the obsession was ruining their relationship and Atlantis’s life. To the couples therapist, Atlantis forwarded examples of her own obsessive emails to First Adult Therapist. She closed with a borrowed line of Nabokov’s: “A paradise whose skies were the color of hell-fire, but a paradise still.”

  Atlantis was in desperate need of a new therapist, and she would never stop being obsessed with her previous one. And perhaps she wanted the couples therapist to be awa
re that she could be the next obsessive target if she abandoned her.

  Atlantis continued to harass First Adult Therapist for the rest of her life. Along with the “final Will and Testament,” she sent an email to First Adult Therapist with the subject “Atlantis’ Final Thoughts.” It’s a meditation on suicide—at least that’s how I read it—which speculates about how her loved ones will take the news.

  If First Adult Therapist read these emails from Yoursteamroller (which always included the name “Atlantis Black” as the original sender), then she knew her former client must be in grave danger. I didn’t envy her position. She might have been compiling evidence of Atlantis’s harassment. According to Verizon, Atlantis’s very last phone calls were to First Adult Therapist’s office and home numbers.

  ·

  In Atlantis’s Craigslist correspondence and Facebook posts, I discovered that after she got out of jail and recorded “Tennessee”—that song that she and Gretchen were supposedly writing together—she’d sold her Yamaha acoustic guitar for $150. The young woman who bought it had asked about the instrument’s history, and what kind of band Atlantis was in. Atlantis replied:

  Oh honey, I’m no longer playing out—at least for now—I’m—get this—in the middle of a ***CRIMINAL TRIAL IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF CA***. I’d normally punctuate that with an “LOL” but it’s too real at the moment. Thank god I’m 100% innocent and have an excellent NYC lawyer.

  I could imagine how a simple Craigslist transaction might have gotten personal for Atlantis. But again with the “100% innocent” business, the “excellent lawyer” business. On Facebook, Atlantis had made a big deal about completing her and Gretchen’s song—cue exit music—and having been “reduced” to selling her guitar. I thought that the Yamaha acoustic-electric, its new owner—or even the song itself—might offer some information. But I wasn’t about to listen to any more “excrutiating, painful vocals” to try to find out.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  Everyone is replaceable except, in my mind, the drummer. Because he keeps me in check. I’m the rhythm guitar player. Without him, it just falls apart.

  17.

  At first, Mom said she had “no interest” in identifying the body or in obtaining the police and autopsy reports, so I planned to go to Tijuana with my aunt Tina. I wanted to secure my sister’s ashes, which I hoped to scatter quickly; I was superstitious about her restless ghost.

  I was furious that my mother would take no part in helping clean up my sister’s mess, but at the last minute she changed her mind and said that she would make the trip to Tijuana—“alone.” Was she having another manic episode? No, Mom said, she wasn’t. But she wanted to find her truck—the one Atlantis had been driving for the past eight years. The police hadn’t located it, and it was still registered in Mom’s name.

  I reminded Mom that two people needed to do the identification and insisted on meeting her with my aunt at a Hampton Inn in San Diego. I wrote to my cousin Elizabeth that I feared for Mom’s mental health; Elizabeth said she was willing and able to fly down from San Francisco. Elizabeth was five months pregnant, and she’d need to stay behind in San Diego rather than cross into Mexico, but she would support us in any way she could.

  ·

  Before leaving for Tijuana, I saw my own therapist. “I don’t think Mom can handle it,” I said. “She’s on different meds—I don’t even know what. She’s been acting weirder than ever. I think I should do the identification for her.”

  “You don’t need to go through that again,” he said. He was right. Since seeing my sister’s dead/alive face on my computer screen, I had had nightmares every time I fell asleep. Still, I needed to know that the identification would be done right.

  ·

  Hector Gonzales, the director of Funeraria del Carmen, had offered to pick up my mother, my aunt, and me at the border and to escort us to the Tijuana morgue. I didn’t know if it was the usual protocol for a funeral director to provide his own taxi service, but we accepted his offer. It was hot, and all of the Buick’s windows were open. With my thighs sticking to the back seat, I gazed out the window at the produce and soda stands, the tequila bars, and the shopkeepers standing around in the sun, smoking cigars and staring at the strangers passing through. They knew Hector—some of the men nodded at him—and they probably knew why we were here.

  At the morgue, an attendant escorted us all to a windowless room with potted plants in the corner, then took my mother and aunt into the back. I was worried that my mother might have a breakdown, say the wrong thing or change her mind again, and I’d have to step in. Then I heard a low, human cry. Mom came back into the room bent over at the waist, hanging on to my aunt’s arm. “Bunny, oh my little Bunny.” She was weeping. “Why does she look like that?”

  When we were small children, Mom used to call my sister “Bunny.” I was the “Bug.”

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It’s Nancy,” my aunt said. She put her arms around Mom. “She looks like that because she was sick for a long time. She’s not hurting anymore.”

  ·

  It’s the first snowfall of the season—Nancy is eleven, I am nine—and she chases me through the house, round and round the butcher block, until the game turns and I chase her. She leaps onto the sofa where our mother lies reading Silent Spring. Draped in an afghan, her legs straight out, Mom looks like a mummy from ancient Egypt. “Cool it, girls,” she says. Nancy screams with pleasure and flies down the laundry room stairs and into the garage. She grabs the new blue plastic racing sled and vanishes outside.

  I haul out the old wooden sled with metal runners from where it’s been collecting dust and follow Nancy out of the dark into blinding sunlight, pulling the sled by its frayed rope. Nancy is always first. At the top of the hill, she stands like a matador, lifts the sled, breaks into a gallop, then throws the sled down and her body down on it. She blazes a track to the post-and-rail fence and crashes into a snowbank.

  “That was awesome!” she yells.

  I sit on my sled and try to push off, but I get stuck every few inches.

  “Don’t touch my trail!”

  “Why not?” I call.

  “Because you’ll ruin it, dummy.” She climbs back up the hill. “Here, I’ll push you.” She presses her hands into my back. The metal runners sink deeper. “God, you’re fat.”

  I begin to cry. I’m only fat compared to her, but I’ve split the zipper on the hand-me-down jacket from my cousin Elizabeth.

  “Why are you so mean?”

  “Because you’re so ugly. Here, let me try.” She kneels on the wooden slats; the old sled staggers forward, stops. “This one sucks balls! All right, blubber, you can borrow mine. But don’t touch my trail.”

  I pick up the racing sled, belly flop onto the blue plastic, hurtle down the hill, and destroy her track.

  She’s on me in a lion’s breath, jamming handfuls of snow into my face, punching. I pick up the sled and hit her with it. I’m surprised to see blood springing from her forehead.

  ·

  Still weeping, Mom signed a set of papers identifying the body of her firstborn. I thought she was being theatrical, like those Greek women tearing their hair and rushing at the sea; but all grief seems theatrical to those who witness it.

  ·

  At the US consulate, Craig Pike returned Atlantis’s black fake-leather purse, and my mother handed it to me.

  “You have made my life a living hell,” she said, not to me but to her own hands, clenched in her lap.

  “Her cell phone and iPod aren’t here,” I said. Atlantis had never gone anywhere without headphones. I couldn’t imagine that she would choose to leave this world without music.

  Pike said that my sister’s cell phone and iPod weren’t listed in the reports. Nor had anyone located the truck. Mom, it turned out, had made a thorough accounting of Atlantis’s postmortem expenses: our flights to San Diego, our hotel bills, our meals. If we found the truck, Mom planned to give
it to the funeral home director to offset the cost of cremation.

  On our way back to our rental car, walking over the pedestrian bridge to the United States, she took out her notebook and pencil and turned to me: “Your flight from New York: Was that the cheapest you could find?”

  ·

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, was in San Ysidro conducting her own investigation. I got a call from her: she had located the truck in the last public parking lot before customs. The Tijuana police hadn’t searched on the American side of the border—why would they have? My mother, aunt, and I agreed to meet Elizabeth outside a Jack in the Box—the landmark seemed especially menacing.

  Out of habit, I opened the passenger door, not the driver’s. Atlantis and I had moved from Pennsylvania to New York City in that truck. A sheet of yellow paper lay on the driver’s seat. It appeared to be a journal entry—or maybe song lyrics:

  April

  SD County Jail

  Santee, CA

  I thought all this was done

  Cowgirl, run

  SD sun

  Border run

  Border sun

  I don’t know how I ended up here again

  I just have always had this inherent drive

  to do “bad” things. To cross the tracks

  But now it’s catching up with me

  The stakes are at an all-time high

  To live or to die / to run or to die

  Give me liberty or give me death

  I want to change my life for good

  I no longer want to hurt others or myself

  I no longer want to be so afraid

  of my past that I keep on running

  into deeper and worse situations.

  This is no way to live a life.