by Betsy Bonner
The Tijuana consulate has no record that this was ever done.
—a black metallic keychain (not plastic) with three metal rings and four keys. The identifications found within the purse have photos whose physical traits are not consistent with the decedent, given the physical state of the decedent.
That last sentence had caught the attention of the San Diego district attorney.
Also found in her body are silver earrings and a necklace which were removed from the body and placed in her purse. The administrator of Saint Francis Hotel, Matilde Dueñas Curiel, manifested that on June 24th, 2008, at approximately 14:00 hrs arrived to the hotel reception two individuals, a female and a male. They rented the room number 203, they went up and after a little while, the male individual (waiter-like) came back to the reception. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants with the following physical characteristics: white skin, long face, thin, with large teeth. He told the administrator that he stayed outside the room and that he knocked the door to his companion female individual but she wouldn’t open the door. He asked the administrator if she could open the door and she said no, for this reason he opted to leave the hotel. Approximately half an hour later, the female individual came down to the reception, said some words in english to the administrator and leave the hotel. One hour later, the female individual came back to the hotel reception, said some words in english to the administrator and went up to the room number 203. For this reason she was not bothered until today June 25th, 2008, at approximately 12 hrs, when a phone call was made to notify her it was time for check out but she did not pick up the phone. For this reason the administrator decided to open the door of room 203 and here is when she found the male sex individual on the floor.
The reporter might have meant to write femenina, not masculino—an odd error to make. But Atlantis would have enjoyed being mistaken for a male in a police report.
There are more details about the man who’d been with her:
The informant Matilde Dueñas Curiel of 66 years of age, said that yesterday at 14:00 hrs, E. Atlantis Black of 25 years of age, checked in to Saint Francis Hotel. She was accompanied by a 38 year old man of name Pascual Perez, living in Buenos Aires Sur neighborhood, who was wearing black pants and a waiter-like white shirt.
The Tijuana police hadn’t noticed the weirdnesses and discrepancies. Atlantis was thirty-one, not twenty-five, and her eyes were hazel, not green. And had Curiel, who’d found the body, really been on duty for twenty-two hours?
If the report was to be trusted, the last words that Atlantis had spoken to anyone in person—“some words in english”—had not been understood.
21.
That August, I bought a dark gold used Toyota Camry and named it Champagna after a line in one of Atlantis’s emails: “I miss you like a champagne disaster.” I drove it to Ephrata for my mother’s belated birthday lunch with my aunt. We hadn’t seen each other since San Diego.
I found Mom in her backyard. She was picking up tiny sticks in her stone circle—a previous owner’s garden border. Under her wide-brimmed straw hat, her face was set with the concentration of a physicist working out formulas for the Large Hadron Collider. Mom seldom uprooted weeds; she groomed the earth as she might pet one of her many cats, combing out stray hairs with her fingers. When I was a child, she spent whole summers collecting branches and debris from our lawn, which was almost an acre. She piled it in the game preserve across the road until one day a sign appeared: No Dumping. She wouldn’t put anything she found outside, in nature, into plastic trash bags, and she hated people who burned garbage or used leaf blowers. She refused to waste fossil fuels with a power mower and ignored both her neighbors’ complaints and a city ordinance that her lawn be kept neat. The children of those conservatives, she said, would thank her in years to come.
Two cats were stalking each other in the tall grass. Mom had named one Joel after her youngest brother, who’d leaped from an outbuilding at his stepfather’s farm and broken his neck after receiving what had appeared to be good news: an athletic scholarship to college. He’d left a note saying he was afraid of disappointing the family. Joel the cat got low to the ground, ears back, waving his tail, then pounced at Queen Leah, a three-legged tortoiseshell—my favorite—who hopped away like a giant bunny, clearly enjoying the attention. Mom looked up when she noticed me standing in front of her, pushed her glasses higher on her nose, and stood to give me an awkward hug.
“Let’s see this Champagna,” she said, grinning her John Updike grin.
I saw that she’d done an incomplete job of dyeing her hair, which fell past her waist. It was pink in some places, with traces of green and orange at the brittle tips.
She loved the car—great deal! amazing color!—but we took her red Honda Accord to Isaac’s, a local diner chain. She pushed an old Bob Dylan cassette into the deck and blasted “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.”
Even if Mom had eaten properly, she would still have been skeletal—she had a thyroid problem, and food simply passed through her—while the few sunflower seeds that my aunt Tina scattered over her Amish salad greens would go straight to her round hips. I had always had more in common with Tina than with the other women in my family. She, too, had been the younger, more stable sister, and she’d looked after Mom for most of her life. She was now a retired welfare caseworker; for thirty years, she’d helped poor people find jobs and collect checks when work was scarce in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Toward the end of our lunch, Mom glanced at my virtually untouched plate and said: “Isaac’s isn’t good enough for this one.”
She spoke as if there were still two of us: my sister alive, our finicky food habits up for comparison. On our way home, we gave each other the silent treatment. I’d long been used to her mood swings. Gently, I told her that I needed to leave, and got in my car. As I put Champagna in reverse, she came to the driver’s side window and again demanded Atlantis’s password.
“I told you, I don’t remember what we changed it to. Ask Elizabeth.”
She grabbed my arm through the window. “Give it to me, you shit.”
To placate her, I told her the password to the old accounts—though not the new password to Atlantis’s Gmail. “Velvet13,” I said. “Please be careful.”
·
The very next day, Atlantis’s Myspace name mysteriously changed to Just Jane. The profile picture was still her mug shot. But the update I’d written—that she’d committed suicide in Tijuana on June 24—had been erased. A new update said she’d “disappeared” in Tijuana, on June 23.
I opened Atlantis’s Gmail account. Gretchen had been trying to hack it for days: she’d sent emails to Atlantis’s Yahoo! and Gmail addresses saying she wanted to see if the accounts were still open, and I found a confirmation email from Facebook saying that Gretchen had recently entered new contact information on Atlantis Black’s page.
Why had Gretchen changed the story of Atlantis’s death? A tiny, wishful part of me fell into the rabbit hole: I didn’t really believe that Atlantis had merely “disappeared,” yet I couldn’t quite accept that she was dead.
I called my mother and told her that Gretchen was altering Atlantis’s story online. Mom admitted that she’d given Gretchen the password Velvet13 in hopes that Gretchen could gather information and promised that she would ask Gretchen to return the Myspace account to my control. To my surprise, Gretchen complied.
What kind of game was she playing?
Then I opened the Yahoo! account and saw that every message in it had been deleted.
·
I watched More than Opium—MASTER for the second time. By the end of it, Gretchen talks over Atlantis and complains about her failed career as a stand-up comic.
·
On August 23, Gretchen posted on Atlantis’s Facebook wall:
I don’t know why I am writing, I suppose
morbid curiosity if you were still the living dead.
If I’d still had the autopsy photo
graphs, I could have posted them in response. More than anger, I felt shame—that my sister had let such a person into her life.
But I was morbidly curious too. That night I forced myself to watch the rest of the Amateur Horror Documentary on Gretchen’s website.
The woman in the crushed-velvet dress. The tall man pinching her cheeks. The people standing around taking pills, drinking. Then the woman going into the bathroom, where I’d left off.
The woman’s beehive turns out to be a hairpiece. She removes it and sits on the edge of the tub, half filled with water, in which a long-haired girl has apparently passed out in her clothes. The woman pulls up a velvet sleeve and slaps her own arm. Another partygoer—a man—shoots her up, and she leans against his chest, blinking, like a stunned calf. The man is chewing gum.
Then an androgynous figure in checkered pants steps into the frame and slides a needle into the already unconscious bather’s arm.
A close-up of the bather. She looks dead. Was this really a snuff film, or an imitation of one?
The film ends with a cover version of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Li’l Red Riding Hood.” I’d used Atlantis’s cover of the song in a short film that I’d made at Sarah Lawrence in 2000. My film was screened nowhere but the college auditorium, but Atlantis had had a copy of it. This version isn’t Atlantis’s cover, but the singer sounds as if she’s imitating her, singing off-key and pretentiously badly.
Gretchen’s website claimed the Amateur Horror Documentary had been screened at independent film festivals in Philadelphia and Chicago in 2005—years before she’d met Atlantis—so it may have been a bizarre coincidence that both her film and mine used the same song. Then again, Gretchen might have made up those festival screenings. Or redone the soundtrack. Whatever the truth was, it messed with my head. It felt like Atlantis was trying to communicate with me through Gretchen; it also felt like Gretchen was making fun of Atlantis and taunting me.
I got up, drew water for a bath, then let it grow cold and drained the tub without sitting in it.
·
Nights were the worst. In my dreams, I’m with Atlantis in her truck, headbanging, shaking our long hair. She turns down the music and looks me in the eye. Then I know she’s dead. She’s sorry, she says, but she had to pretend to be alive so I wouldn’t be frightened by what she’s about to tell me. It’s very important, okay? I wake up unable to recall the important thing she said.
I told myself, and everyone else, that she’d committed suicide. I just wanted to put the madness behind me and nurture relationships with people who cared about me. To help with the dreams, a psychiatrist prescribed Ambien. But I had become a different person from the hopeful young woman who’d signed a contract at the Pierrepont School six months before; I’d wanted to be an English teacher, but now I feared that I was no longer mentally equipped for it.
I had been working at my new job for only a couple of weeks when my brakes failed on the steep hill of the school parking lot. The brake pedal went all the way to the floor with the resistance of a piano damper. I hit the wall of the school—my workplace and home—and the car was totaled. If the brakes had failed on a highway, I could have killed someone, or myself. I was twenty-nine years old and had owned my first car for just twenty-nine days.
And when I crashed, I was wearing Atlantis’s sweatshirt with NEW YORK across the front—the one she’d worn when Gretchen interviewed her. I really believed that Atlantis’s unlucky spirit and my own were battling for custody of my body. Like Atlantis, I was broke, tired, and depressed—but I had zero interest in killing myself. The brakes had failed, not me.
The one good thing about that accident was that it prompted me to pick up the phone and call Mom the next morning to tell her about it. I didn’t have money to buy a new car, but I told her that the school’s theater teacher was selling a beautiful Volvo S40. I asked her for a loan. Mom sent me the full ten grand that the teacher was asking and said it was a gift.
·
On September 26, the DEA prepared an additional report for Atlantis’s file. It began: “Possible death of Atlantis Black.”
On July 08, 2008 DEA S/A [(b)(7)(C),(b)(7)(F)] (TJRO) informed S/A [(b)(7)(C),(b)(7)(F)] that the American Services Section of the U.S. Consulate, Tijuana, BCN, Mexico informed him that the [sic] BLACK was found in a hotel room dead in Tijuana and the cause of death was listed [as] Pancreatic Hemorrhaging, however there was a container near the bed that was believed to have a substance that was heroin, and that BLACK may have died from a heroin overdose.
Those elaborate codes stood for agents’ names. Two weeks later, the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego finally produced the Mexican death certificate in court, and the case against Atlantis was dismissed. When I called Mom to tell her, her lethargic response made it clear that her latest manic episode had run its course. She said she’d asked Gretchen to stop calling her.
·
That autumn I met Nathan, a composer who worked as a production manager at the 92Y. As the child of an alcoholic, he understood my sorrow better than most men I knew. I hadn’t made love with anyone, or even felt like it, since Atlantis had disappeared, and Nathan brought me back to life. But while I wanted to let him protect me, I was frightened of becoming dependent, of getting lost in him.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, my mother left me a voicemail saying that she’d applied for admission to a mental hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, but the earliest possible opening wasn’t until February.
“I mean, I can’t believe that,” she said. “It seems so critical to me, and to them, it seems, ‘Well, let’s see how many people we have ahead of her’ or something. Anyway, I’m going to keep trying.”
I called her back and invited her to Westport for the holiday. She said she would drive up the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Then she apologized for not “being there” when I was a child.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I know I wasn’t a good mother.”
“Look: Dad and Atlantis were no picnic either. I always tell people that you taught me about words and music. I wouldn’t be here teaching if it weren’t for you.”
“There’s a term for what I have,” she said. “My new therapist calls it ‘dysthymia.’ I don’t know how to experience happiness or pleasure.”
“I’ve never heard of that word,” I said. “Anyway, I love you. See you Saturday.”
·
On Thanksgiving morning, my aunt called. She’d found Mom’s body, at home, in the twin bed that my sister used to sleep in, and a suicide note on the nightstand.
SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008
Hang on. Give me a minute.
22.
Once, when I was in college, visiting home, I asked my mother about the time she’d tried to kill herself when she was thirty-eight and I was two.
She seemed grateful that I’d asked. She’d had postpartum depression, she said. She’d imagined her body floating down the Brandywine, felt a rare sense of tranquility, then swallowed a bottle of downers.
Do I actually have a memory of that episode, pulling at her satin nightgown, trying to wake her? I don’t think so, though in later years my sister and I would often do that to rouse her from a nap. My father came home from work and found her; then he put all of us in the car and drove to the hospital.
·
In the early 1980s, my grandmother inherited the farm on Gum Tree Road after her second husband, Mom’s stepfather, died of heart failure. She sold it immediately, without asking any of her children if they might like to buy it from her. Mom had long dreamed of living close to the earth, and she always resented not having been given a chance to hold on to the farm. Sometimes, when Nancy and I were children, Mom would drive us by the place and tell us that it could have been ours. I knew Mom had recovered from her first nervous breakdown on that farm, when she was in her twenties, and that it was where her brother Joel had jumped off the roof and broken his neck.
I’d found it strange that my
mother wanted to live among such memories. Now I believe that it must have been one of the only tranquil places she’d ever known.
·
Stories about suicide in my mother’s family go back at least one generation before her and Joel. My great-aunt Rebecca, an unmarried schoolteacher who lived with her mother and her two brothers, was said to have jumped off a bridge in Philadelphia in the 1940s. She may have been mourning her brother John, who’d supposedly shot himself to death a few years before. Perhaps because the family didn’t want the shame of yet another suicide, nobody claimed Rebecca’s body.