The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  There were other, torn-up bits of paper that turned out to be a Bank of America cash envelope, covered with what appeared to be my sister’s handwriting. I pieced it together.

  The message at the top said: “WELCOME HOME!!” with a smiley face whose eyes were double exclamation points. The note was addressed to no one in particular:

  I know you’re incredibly busy, so read this when you get a chance and then give it back to me so I can destroy it.

  While you were gone, the FBI and DEA kicked in my door like a scene out of COPS and took me away in my pajamas re: a pharmacy sting when I worked back in San Francisco. I was denied counsel, food, water and my anti-seizure meds for 7 days . . . bailed myself out . . .

  Since then, my life has become hell . . . I am now living out of my truck.

  I will not accept their plea bargain for something I did not do. I will see this through till the end—but if things go south I might have 2 leave the country.

  It was possible that she’d written it to someone who didn’t already know the story—though I couldn’t imagine who that might be. Or was the “you” like the phantom lovers in her songs?

  ·

  Elizabeth and I drove our rental car to Atlantis’s sublet. One of her new roommates had washed and folded her clothes and put them in grocery bags. I spotted the DVD of 8 Mile among her books. We collected her things and drove north toward San Marcos. On the way, I called the Millionaire from Mexico, and he cried out when I told him about Atlantis. I asked if Elizabeth and I could pick up her boxes from his garage.

  “What happened?” he said when we got there.

  “She killed herself,” I said. “She didn’t want to deal with the court case.”

  In fact, I had no idea what had happened, but I thought he deserved to feel a little guilty.

  “I don’t understand. I thought she was innocent.”

  “She was—I mean of what they charged her with. The judge and the DA might have been putting pressure on her to name a drug dealer or something. Listen—I really can’t talk to you about this.”

  “I wish I could have let her stay,” he said. “I loved your sister.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “She used you too.”

  ·

  Back in our hotel room, Elizabeth and I sorted through Atlantis’s things. Inside the box I’d brought her from Italy, we found ticket stubs from David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, and Radiohead concerts; a letter from our father, dated soon after Atlantis’s second suicide attempt and addressed to “Nancy/Atlantis/whoever you are”; a few poems I’d written to her; advice from a fortune cookie (“Think of the danger when things are going smoothly”); and a letter dated May 2000 and signed “Missy.” Folded inside the letter was a photograph of a girl with long chestnut hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. She looked about eighteen, and a bit like the Girl Next Door.

  Atlantis had told me about Missy. They’d worked together at Walmart and become friends, and Atlantis pursued her romantically. It sounded as if they’d had a fabulous night together under the stars. Missy’s letter gently let Atlantis know that she couldn’t let it go any further, but that Atlantis was the most amazing woman she’d ever met.

  At the top of one box was a fat folder of documents that had once been sensitive: forms from Las Colinas (these included paper-trail evidence of the grand mal seizure); copies of Atlantis’s APA complaint against First Adult Therapist; a personal history of physical, sexual, and substance abuse which she’d apparently written for the APA. We also found an audiocassette labeled “Atlantis’ Termination” dated 2005, the German Gentleman’s phone number, and the contact information for someone named Mark with a note that read “credit services.”

  And there was a videotape labeled (not in my sister’s handwriting):

  More than Opium—MASTER

  March 15, 2008

  San Diego

  This was the title of Atlantis’s unfinished second album. Inside the sleeve were two sheets of paper, a narrative titled “When Two Muses Collided, or, ‘I have no memory of that whatsoever.’”

  The narrative describes, in the third person, a five-day party involving Atlantis and Gretchen, and sometimes Atlantis’s former San Diego roommate and his girlfriend. It says that Atlantis made Gretchen sleep on the wet side of the bed where someone had spilled beer, and that the roommate’s girlfriend had taken the picture of Atlantis passed out on the floor with a slice of pizza in her hand. It adds: “Where DIDN’T Atlantis pass out?”

  Gretchen, the roommate, the roommate’s girlfriend—perhaps they knew who’d smiled up at the security camera on their way out of the pharmacy, the man rubbing his belly. The narrative brags about Gretchen’s impersonating a doctor to get Vicodin, and other “felonies without incident.”

  But what was I doing there, digging like a rat through my sister’s junk? There’d been a time when Atlantis had taken herself seriously. She and I had both considered it important that she finish her second album, for her mental health and for the music itself. She’d given me copies of the two songs that had been produced, and six demos, some of which I thought were pretty good. Now More than Opium was somehow connected to this story about a stupid drug party with a bunch of assholes.

  With the videotape were stacks of greeting cards—at least thirty—that pictured women artists who’d died. Several of them showed Marilyn Monroe. All were addressed to Atlantis—and she’d kept the envelopes, stamped and postmarked. Many had been sent in care of the Las Colinas Detention Facility, some in care of the Millionaire from Mexico. All were signed, in loopy handwriting, “Love, Gretchen.”

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth said.

  “She wasn’t even in jail for that long,” I said.

  I put the cards and envelopes in the trash. I wanted nothing to do with this Gretchen or her obsession with my sister.

  I put the videotape in my backpack, although I was frightened of what might be on it. It didn’t occur to me to turn the tape over to any of the authorities—the district attorney, my sister’s lawyer. In Atlantis’s last voicemail to me, when she’d insisted that Gretchen didn’t “make the call,” I thought she was asking me not to name Gretchen in the event that anything “happened” to her. It wasn’t as if it could “happen” again.

  Would I call the German Gentleman, or the “credit services” guy? No way. This wasn’t a murder investigation. The authorities had already made that decision. After all, Atlantis had been seen alive after that guy left the hotel. Case closed.

  I didn’t want to watch the tape, but I knew I would.

  18.

  The first weeks back in the east after Atlantis’s death were the loneliest of my life. My sister was gone and my mother had lost her mind. In Greece, without regular internet or phone service, I hadn’t kept in touch with many friends from my old life. And one side effect of having a sister like Atlantis was that I resisted bothering anyone but my therapist with my troubles. I knew how boring it was to listen to an unhappy person.

  I’d loved Greece enough to consider moving back, and if Dan had wanted to pick up our relationship, I might have. But he’d moved home to Toronto, where he planned to live inexpensively and keep painting, and he didn’t check in with me much. When I wrote to him that Atlantis had committed suicide, his condolence note said that he was sorry, that suicide was the worst (he’d lost a friend that way, I remembered), and that I should be sure to ask him if I needed anything. I didn’t ask him to get on a plane. Nor did he offer.

  ·

  I moved to Westport and did what I could to prepare for my new teaching job. Reading—once my passion—now required enormous effort. I felt lucky that I’d be teaching young children in addition to high school students, since my first book with my older group would be one of the saddest ever written: Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Most nights, I stayed in and read magical books I’d never heard of—The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Wizard Children of Finn—and listened to the sounds of the wings of the ladybugs infesting my new
apartment. I liked their company. Sometimes I took walks on the beaches of Long Island Sound. A couple of old friends heard that my sister had died; they visited me in my new home and took me out to dinner and movies. But I found it impossible to explain—or to understand—what had happened to Atlantis. My family called it suicide, but someone might have assisted it. An accidental overdose it was not. My family showed no interest in trying to track down Pascual Perez, Gretchen, or any of the other sketchy people my sister had let into her life near its end. We certainly didn’t discuss the possibility that Atlantis wasn’t dead at all.

  ·

  Yet after we returned to the States, my mother denied that the dead woman she’d identified in Tijuana was her daughter. Did she know something I didn’t? Or was she simply in denial? My aunt overheard her say to someone on the telephone: “Eunice Anne Bonner may be dead. Atlantis Black is a missing person.” What on earth did that mean?

  My aunt attributed it to wishful thinking—or to a psychotic break. I asked her if she was certain that it was Atlantis she’d seen in the morgue. She was, but she admitted that she’d been much more focused on keeping my mother calm than on looking at the body; she also said that the woman’s face had been “half-blackened.” I was horrified by this morbid tidbit—and perplexed. In the autopsy photos I’d looked at, I told her, my sister’s face was pale, not “half-blackened” at all. My aunt attributed the condition of the face to “poor refrigeration facilities” in Tijuana. But I began to wonder if we’d viewed the same body.

  In July, ten days after her visit to the morgue, Mom received the death certificate in the mail, along with the ashes sealed in a plastic bag. Mom said she didn’t want the ashes—my aunt suggested that I might like to have them—and then called the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego and said that she would not give him the Mexican death certificate until he sent her the police and autopsy reports. He said he didn’t have them; but without a death certificate, the case against Atlantis would remain open. When I asked Mom what she hoped to accomplish by withholding information from Atlantis’s lawyer, she said she was “clearing her name.”

  ·

  I watched More than Opium—MASTER, the videotape I’d found among Atlantis’s things in the Millionaire from Mexico’s garage. It was fifty-nine minutes of a documentary interview, which Gretchen had apparently conducted the same week as the pharmacy crime. It was shot practically in the dark, with a shaky handheld camera, and it began with what might or might not have been an editing mistake: a freeze-frame of Atlantis’s face that reminded me of the autopsy photographs.

  Through most of the video, Atlantis smokes and sips beer and seems disassociated. She’s wearing a sweatshirt that says NEW YORK across the front. Their conversation wanders from Atlantis’s music, personal history, and sex life to the ruthlessness of the San Diego police: a cop had given Atlantis a citation for driving with an open container of alcohol, when she claimed she’d only been storing bottles in her truck for recycling. They discussed “Tennessee,” that song they were supposedly writing together, and talked about “two muses colliding.” Atlantis said it would be her last song, that it was “excruciating” to write, and that Gretchen would be the only one who ever heard it.

  ·

  My cousin Elizabeth said she wanted to focus on putting the legal case to rest. Would I mind if she reached out to Atlantis’s lawyer and the DA? I told her to go for it.

  The Johnnie Cochran of San Diego said he still needed Atlantis’s death certificate, as well as her birth certificate and her name-change form. Elizabeth told him that my mother was suffering from a recurrence of her bipolar disorder, that he shouldn’t expect her to send them, and that he should try to deal with the various authorities himself.

  Then she called the San Diego DA. As soon as she gave her name, he knew exactly who she was. Atlantis’s case, he told her, had been very much on his mind. In fact, through his “liaison services,” he already had a copy of the death certificate, as well as the autopsy and police reports. But he wasn’t legally allowed to forward them: it was the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego’s job to get them independently and present them to the court himself in order to close the case. He’d said so to the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego, who had replied, “Well, her sister needs to get them.”

  “Sorry?” I said to Elizabeth. “He said that I need to get those documents?”

  “That’s what the DA said he said.”

  “Why is he bringing me into this?”

  “That’s not all,” she said. “The DA also told me the autopsy report has no name on it, and that the Mexicans didn’t take fingerprints.”

  Again, it seemed possible that my mother and aunt had made a mistake in identifying the body.

  “Maybe the DA could spend some of our tax money tracking down those assholes who actually bought the drugs,” I told Elizabeth. “That motherfucker must have looked at the security photographs. He never should have prosecuted her in the first place.”

  “But he’s seen the autopsy photos and he’s okay with going under the assumption that it is her. And he knows that she was ID’d by you and your mom and Aunt Tina.”

  “Well, I didn’t look at the actual body,” I said. “I only saw the photographs.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I told him that I thought you did see it. Well. I guess that’s not important.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said. “Did you think it was Atlantis in the photographs?”

  “I didn’t see them,” she said.

  “But I sent them to you.”

  “Right, you said you were going to, but I never got them,” she said. “I thought you’d changed your mind. But if that wasn’t her body,” she said, “don’t you think we would have heard from her?”

  I realized that in my panic I must have deleted the photographs without sending them.

  “God,” I said. “You know how much Atlantis would have loved this shit?”

  ·

  At the July hearing, Atlantis failed to appear in court and the judge fulfilled one of her deepest fantasies by declaring her a fugitive.

  ·

  Shortly after this hearing, I got a call from Colleen, Atlantis’s old friend and would-be author of The Book. I didn’t know her well, but I’d been friendly with her in Atlantis’s New York days, and I trusted that she had loved my sister. She had a strange story to tell.

  Gretchen, she said, had called her cell phone, saying that Atlantis had instructed her to do so if anything happened to her, and asking if there were plans for a memorial. Colleen played dumb: she wasn’t sure, she said, but the family might be doing something. How had she known Atlantis? Gretchen said she’d started out as a fan and had become Atlantis’s best friend.

  “But then she said they’d actually only met in person once,” Colleen told me. “In San Diego last March. So I said, ‘Oh, you’re the one Atlantis was protecting. Did you make that call to the pharmacy?’ And she admitted it. She sounds like a cokehead.”

  “Wait. Gretchen admitted this?”

  “Yeah. I wish I’d recorded it. I wonder why Atlantis covered for her sorry ass. She said she understood that your family might not want anything to do with her, but she wanted to get hold of Atlantis’s music—Atlantis had promised her. I just told her I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Colleen,” I said. “Do not give this woman my number.”

  ·

  In late July 2008, I checked Atlantis’s email again and found a message to her from the German Gentleman. Partly because I was curious as to whether he might reach out, I’d never told him about Atlantis’s death, and he didn’t seem to know about it. The email subject was: “Re: Hello, my darling . . .” It was an invitation to a poetry reading he would give in Tijuana.

  Hi Atlantis,

  perhaps you are in Mexico. I hope you can make it!

  Given that her last message to him had been about his getting her a fake passport, this seemed an oddly casual way of getting back in touch. I wrote him from Atlantis’
s account and told him that my sister had passed away a month ago. I signed the email from my mother and me.

  The German Gentleman sent three more messages to Atlantis’s address. The first expressed shock and sadness and attached a long poem that he had written to his mother after she’d died. Another was addressed to Atlantis herself, and he’d pasted in a short poem in a flowery font. Its title was “Lugubrious.” And in yet another, he offered to share video footage he’d taken of Atlantis at his home in San Antonio del Mar in May.

  The German Gentleman lived thirteen miles from the Hotel St. Francis, and it occurred to me that the video might tell me something.

  The clip he sent is just forty-two seconds long. It begins with Atlantis walking toward the camera from a sun-filled kitchen. She’s wearing a black button-down shirt and old jeans. She leans against the doorframe, puts her hands behind her back, crosses her left shin over her right, turns to the camera, and smiles. Above her head are two gold-framed figurative paintings of a female body in ecstasy—the woman could be dancing or dying. Slowly, the camera zooms in on my sister.

  Aviator sunglasses glint in her hair, which is layered and feathering past her shoulders. She wears a silver pendant. Flirtatiously, she says to the camera: “Howdy, cowboy.” She laughs. She seems relaxed. “You ha—oh my gosh, you have the most amazing house. I had so much fun, I had a blast!” More laughter.

  A male voice from behind the camera says: “Thank you, Bonnie!”

  “Thank you, Clyde!” she says, and points both index fingers at the camera. She seems to be having a good time. “Oh man, I seriously may have to, you know, move down here. For good!”

  The voice says: “That sounds great!”

  “And uh,” she says, “you have no idea the pain I’m in right now. But we won’t go into specifics.”

  The voice laughs and says: “Okay, I think—that’s a cut!”

  She lifts her shirt, exposing her hollow belly above the studded belt. The camera tilts down. She lifts the shirt a little higher in a kind of playful striptease.