The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  Atlantis and I didn’t learn about Rebecca—or about the others in my mother’s family—until a year or so before Atlantis disappeared. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she said to our mother. “All those years I was depressed, I could have felt less alone.”

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  Give me another minute.

  [Atlantis puts her hands in her hair, covers her face.]

  23.

  My mother died of multiple-drug toxicity. The suicide note appeared to have been written in her own hand, though the writing looked unusually large. I immediately thought: My sister killed her. But of course I banished that thought. What had happened to my sister killed her. I told myself the script in her suicide note looked large only in the photocopy that the police had given my aunt. (They kept the original.) And she was probably on drugs when she’d written it.

  Still, I couldn’t forget Nancy’s imitations of my mother’s handwriting: those forged notes excusing her from school.

  ·

  The suicide note was addressed “To the ones I love,” and said: “We are all relieved of a tragic burden.” It contained an apology without specifying for what. Then it addressed me directly and told me please not to worry about her—“I am not worried about you.” I would have “a good life,” the note said, and was “on my way.” It ended with a sentence in the past tense: “If I saw any option at all, I would have taken it.”

  ·

  Of course I imagined that the note was a forgery, a message from Atlantis. It meant that she was still alive, and that I shouldn’t worry about her. The apology was for killing our mother.

  And of course it wasn’t possible. Atlantis was dead, I told myself. Yet I held her entirely responsible.

  ·

  To my knowledge, Mom hadn’t had plans to see anyone that day, but she was wearing makeup when she died. Aunt Tina had invited Mom to join her and Tina’s two stepdaughters for a holiday lunch—a sort of orphans’ Thanksgiving—and Mom had declined. But Tina showed up that morning anyway, along with her stepdaughters. She told them—and, later on, the police—that she’d felt an urgent need to visit her sister for a “mental health check,” and that she was worried because Mom hadn’t picked up the phone.

  ·

  The story I told myself was that Atlantis had committed suicide as a protest against the DEA, and that my mother had followed suit. The story I told only to myself, and kept to myself, was that even if Atlantis hadn’t really died in Tijuana, she couldn’t have managed to live much longer “on the run.” Not with Sugar Mama wanting her money back. Not with people like Gretchen and the German Gentleman involving themselves in her life.

  ·

  A few days after Thanksgiving, Gretchen called my cell phone and left two messages saying that she needed to speak to me urgently. The third time she called, I picked up.

  “I know you probably don’t want to hear from me,” she said, “but I wanted to express my condolences about your mother. I was worried that something had happened, and I was calling and calling her house, until finally a neighbor picked up the phone and told me that she’d passed.”

  Really? It was unlikely that my mother’s nonagenarian neighbor, Lenore, would have been in my mother’s house at all—much less picked up her phone. I assumed instead that Gretchen must somehow have seen the obituary published in the Lancaster Intelligencer. But why would a New Yorker have been reading that paper? Or had Gretchen been Googling my mother’s name? I didn’t want to think about it.

  “Listen: Gretchen? I can’t talk to you. Thanks anyway for the condolences.”

  “I wanted to reach out to you after Atlantis disappeared,” she went on in a flat, steamrolling voice, as if I hadn’t spoken. “She gave me special instructions—but your mother said you didn’t want to hear from me. But I feel your mother’s loss very deeply, and of course you know I still feel Atlantis’s too.”

  “I have a lot to take care of here,” I said. “Please don’t call me again.”

  ·

  When I hung up, I thought about consulting a private investigator; after what had happened to my sister, I didn’t trust the police. But the last thing I wanted was to get a possible psychopath more interested in me, or to make her think I was afraid of her. I couldn’t quite believe that Gretchen had literally killed my sister or my mother, but this wannabe snuff filmmaker, self-declared forensic psychologist, and stalker of my family was obviously a terrible person. I believed that my sister had been used, and my mother harassed, by someone who seemed to have no boundaries at all.

  I thought about changing my number, and even my name. But that would only prove that she had gotten under my skin. The best course of action for my own mental health was to forget Gretchen.

  ·

  I tried my luck once more with Guitar Girl. “Last request with more sad news” was my email subject. I informed her that my mother had died of grief, and that even though I’d never be okay, I still wanted my sister’s guitar to hold in both of their absences. I needed something. It would mean more to me now, I wrote, than it ever had. I told Guitar Girl to name her price.

  I didn’t tell Guitar Girl that my mother had played bluegrass banjo, or that we’d smoked pot together at a Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson concert in Reading and gone to two Patti Smith concerts in Brooklyn.

  Nor did I mention that song called “Tennessee” that Atlantis and Gretchen had written together; or that after finally listening to the unlistenable, and understanding its lyrics (sort of), I believed that Atlantis’s guitar contained some powerful demons that needed exorcising. Guitar Girl had no idea what a favor I was offering her.

  I didn’t hear back from her right away.

  ·

  Over Christmas, I met my aunt to finish cleaning out my mother’s house. Swallowing my dread, I climbed the steep stairs, creaked open the door to the room my mother died in, and found Queen Leah, the tripod kitty, curled up on the bedspread, facing the door, as if she had been expecting me.

  She rubbed her face on my hands, purred, licked me, rolled onto her back, and stretched her phantom limb. It comforted me to know that Queen Leah had been with my mother when she died. I had never wished so hard to understand the language of animals.

  ·

  I went through some boxes of documents and papers that my aunt had found. There were letters that had been typed on a word processor, apparently signed by my mother, and then photocopied. Normally, she used a typewriter since she didn’t have a computer. One, dated August 11, 2008, was addressed to Sr. Hector M. Gonzales Valencia, the director of Funeraria del Carmen, where Atlantis’s body had been taken. At the top, she’d handwritten an explanation:

  (my letter to introduce Gretchen to Hector)

  Dear Hector,

  You may be surprised to hear from me again so soon. The fact is, I need a favor from you, my friend in Mexico.

  Attorneys in New York and California are investigating two San Diego lawyers involved in a prescription-drug fraud case against my daughter, the late Atlantis Black. The investigators are four young women—three in New York City and one in San Diego. (Two are attorneys; one is a law student; one is a film maker who has a degree in Forensic Psychology and a native Spanish speaker for a business partner.)

  After studying the Police and Autopsy Reports regarding my daughter, the investigators have questions that only the Mexican officials can answer.

  The investigators need a bilingual contact person in Tijuana—someone sophisticated enough to deal with the bureaucracy, but low-profile enough not to attract attention (one of your sons, perhaps?)

  The person who would like to call you is the film maker, Gretchen, in New York. Thank you in advance for your kind attention to this delicate matter.

  Sincerely yours,

  Beth Bonner

  What possible business could Gretchen have with my sister’s funeral director? And if her field was forensics—and she had a native Spanish speaker as a “business partner”—might she have had a h
and in my sister’s autopsy and toxicology reports? Could this letter itself have been forged?

  At the bottom of the box, I found a stack of vintage copies of the Ladder, a lesbian magazine, published by the Daughters of Bilitis; and a photocopy of a 106-page novella, Autumn, a coming-out tale Atlantis had written when she was twenty. The title character is beautiful, green-eyed, obsessive, and relentless, fleeing the East Coast and her troubled past. Several other female characters, including an attractive hitchhiker and an old woman who uses a wheelchair in a mental hospital, also have green eyes. The two who don’t are Margarita, a Mexican American teenager whom Autumn meets in a psych ward and has hot sex with under the stars; and Randy, a mechanic with whom Autumn has a one-night stand in a chapter called, strangely enough, “Tennessee.”

  But I’d read Atlantis’s manuscript before, and I remembered it as having had fewer characters and a different ending. It seemed unlikely that Atlantis would have rewritten her novella—if my recollection was accurate—and left a copy in our mother’s house. It seemed like something that Gretchen might have done; she was forever trying to change my sister’s story. It was eerie that my sister’s writing and Gretchen’s handiwork were blending in reality. I no longer knew my sister’s own words. Two muses colliding.

  ·

  A few weeks before her death, Mom had changed her will. She’d kept me as a beneficiary, and in Atlantis’s place, she’d named my aunt Tina. That will was notarized in my aunt’s presence. Then she changed it again, decreasing my aunt’s portion from 50 percent to 25 percent and leaving the other 25 percent to Leah, Atlantis’s former partner. My aunt said that Mom had told her about it, but these changes hadn’t been notarized. It was odd that Mom had written Leah into her will at all; still, it seemed like something Atlantis would have wanted. I called Leah to tell her that my mother had died, and that she’d wanted to leave her a portion of the estate that had originally been for Atlantis. Leah wept when I said that Mom had committed suicide. She graciously declined any of my mother’s money, which ended up going to me.

  I guess *you* inherited the fortune, Sister!!

  I considered taking a leave of absence from my job and traveling. But I wouldn’t have the money for months, and there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go. So, instead, I said yes to as many social invitations as I could and established a strict routine: I worked during the week, took afternoon walks in the park, prepared for classes on weeknights with Queen Leah curled up beside me. She’d purr and lick my hand, as if it were my mother’s hand.

  ·

  I heard back from Guitar Girl:

  she and i didn’t have more than a few months to get to know each other but we became very personal very quick because we understood each other. i was dealing with a lot personally when i met her, she was the exact person i needed to meet and speak to . . .

  Either Guitar Girl had a faulty memory or something was up. She and Atlantis first corresponded after “meeting” on Craigslist on May 26. They certainly hadn’t had “a few months.” I wondered if Guitar Girl might in fact be Gretchen.

  ·

  Nathan and I had been dating for only six weeks when my mother died. We spent nights together listening to music, eating takeout, and making love. One weekend, we took a road trip to Vermont and stayed on a farm. We went out after midnight to smoke a joint, stood in a meadow with horses and dark mountains all around, and I felt safe for the first time in months.

  Guitar Girl finally took pity on me and sold me my sister’s acoustic for the price she’d paid. “Atlantis Black” arrived by UPS on the last day of the year. Guitar Girl had put a sticker on its case, which was falling apart. It said: “Aloha.”

  With “Atlantis Black” in my possession, I invited Nathan over for New Year’s Eve—he played beautifully—and we sang every song we could think of. In the morning, I crept out of bed while he slept, put the instrument back in its case, fastened the snaps, and tucked it in a corner of my living room. A minute later, I got up again and hid it behind a thatch of dresses in my closet.

  ·

  In January 2009, Nathan won silver tickets to Barack Obama’s inauguration. I took the day off from school and joined him in DC. After the ceremony, Nathan and I got drunk on the train to his uncle’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland; that night, by accident, I became pregnant.

  A part of me wanted to have that baby. When the doctor showed us the beating heart on the sonogram, Nathan held my hand, and I cried. We talked about becoming parents together. While she was still in my womb, we named her Virginia, after Nathan’s grandmother. I imagined raising a dream-child and giving her a dream-education at the dream-school where I worked.

  But I wasn’t ready. I prayed that Virginia might be spared whatever bad gene had passed from my mother to my sister, but how could I be sure? Even as I wished for that child, I felt unable to take such a risk. I could not give birth to another Atlantis.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  I got it—my next album will be called Glamor. Spelled the American English way, not the British. Glamor is just a Midwestern girl who wants to get to Hollywood. But she doesn’t make it.

  24.

  In 2010, twenty-three police and public officials in Tijuana were dismissed on charges of corruption, some of them for working with kidnappers and extortionists. Among the dismissed officers was Felipe Ortega Becerra, who’d been in charge of investigating my sister’s death.

  ·

  In 2012, Ernesto Haberli of Avidhosting.com was ordered to pay half a million dollars in restitution for seven counts of mail fraud. The prosecution was a result of an investigation into Avidhosting.com by the United States Postal Inspection Service and the FBI.

  I had suspected that Atlantis’s lawsuit was righteous but quixotic. But had she not been in touch with the FBI just before her own life became too consuming to do free legal work, it’s conceivable that Haberli might have escaped punishment. Haberli had allegedly sold domain names to criminals in cyberspace, and there were plenty of hackers who could have had easy access to information about Atlantis—not only her credit card but her taste for opiates. But this speculation—that Atlantis’s arrest might have had anything to do with her lawsuit against Haberli—was another dead end. By the time of Haberli’s conviction, Atlantis’s domain name had long since expired. It was as if her home page, Atlantisblack.com, had never existed.

  ·

  I didn’t spend a lot of time searching for Atlantis in the “bit roles and extra parts” she claimed to have played in the Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, and Ashton Kutcher movies made in LA in early 2008. But after she’d been gone a few years, I found that abysmal version of As You Like It on Vimeo. The biggest name in it was Victoria Mature. I watched it for ten minutes, and there was Atlantis.

  Atlantis plays “Duke Frederick’s Date.” A silent role, of course. A woman without a name. She wears that heavy eyeliner we’d both used in high school. The bright red lipstick she’d put on for our father’s funeral. She’s in a fancy dress with a halter top. I’d never seen my sister look so feminine. Her breasts appear to have been taped up to create cleavage.

  Duke Frederick and his Date are at a wrestling match. Atlantis feigns interest in the men straddling each other. She’s clearly acting; maybe her character is supposed to be bored. But the director must have noticed that Atlantis was camera-friendly, because she appears again in the next scene. She’s at an event to pay the winner, or someone who’d bet on the fight, and she’s holding an oversized check, like Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune.

  Bad as the film is, I loved seeing her immortalized through a professional’s lens rather than in that mug shot of April 2008, in the German Gentleman’s forty-two-second clip, or in Gretchen’s shaky video. As You Like It had been filmed three months before her disappearance. She looks as if she will always be beautiful, shaking her dark hair, holding up that outlandishly huge check.

  ·

  I brought “Atlantis Black” to a guitar whisperer in
North Adams, Massachusetts, to get it fixed up. He asked if I wanted to keep the “claw marks”—white streaks embedded in the black finish around the sound hole. I said yes. He lowered the action and replaced the plastic nut with bone—of some animal, I guess. I’ve lent “Atlantis Black” to my friends to play, and I’ve tried to learn myself. But it hurts my fingers. Most of the time it rests in a hard black case lined with green velvet.

  Once upon a time, I hoped that Atlantis’s songs might be “discovered”—produced by some genius or covered by a famous singer. After she gave up on her music, their release was hardly a priority for her, or, later, for me. In fact, by going against my sister’s last wishes (“All her horrible demo CDs to be sent to Gretchen”) and keeping those demos in the dark, I prevented it from happening. I doubted that anybody famous would have been interested.

  Before she gave up, Atlantis had wanted to be admired—or at least heard and looked at—and remembered. This book is, in part, my way of doing that for her. Of course it’s not entirely a tribute. There was a rivalry between us, and she caused me a world of pain. I’m the one who survived to tell the story.

  Certainly I felt sadness—and shame—over what became of her; but I’m also proud of what she managed to accomplish.

  Maybe she truly was gifted and undermined herself so badly that the music turned out to be unsalvageable. It’s important to know, because that was her life—until it wasn’t. But I really don’t know. Back when I was a teenager, she convinced me that she was serious, that she was an artist. But when I got to Sarah Lawrence, my film teacher listened to her cover of “Li’l Red Riding Hood” and said, “Why doesn’t she just actually sing? In her real voice? She sounds pretentious.” I was mortified. But while I understood what the teacher meant, I also thought: Don’t you see how amazing it is that she can even do this?