The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  The agents cuffed her, still in her pajamas, confiscated her cell phone, and took her to Las Colinas, a jail in Santee, a suburb of San Diego. Had her identity been stolen or had she given it away and let herself be used? In either case, I thought it was strange that she’d been arrested so soon after reaching out to the FBI about Avidhosting.com. But it might have just been a coincidence; after all, the DEA isn’t the FBI.

  12.

  I was riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, visiting Naxos for the first time, on the day Atlantis was arrested; I was island-hopping during the week she spent in jail. Nobody in my family told me what had happened.

  Atlantis’s San Diego roommate emailed my aunt Tina (our mother’s sister) from Atlantis’s account; he said that Atlantis had been arrested and needed help. When a bail bondsman phoned Mom, she assumed he was a con artist. And when she learned that Atlantis really had been arrested on charges of burglary and prescription drug fraud, and required $1,000 for a $10,000 bond, she told my aunt that she’d decided not to give her any more “handouts.” She told the bondsman’s supervisor, to get it on record, that her daughter was a drug addict and a “flight risk.”

  Mom kept all this a secret from me and forbade my aunt to tell me. But my aunt thought I should know and emailed me about it. Mom was being cheap; but she trusted that the system worked, and that authorities would figure out that Atlantis needed medical attention. By the time I heard what had happened, Atlantis had spent six days in jail. I sent her an email at the detention center the same day she’d finally managed to bail herself out with a credit card.

  ·

  She emailed me a photograph of bruises on her arms and legs, with a message that began:

  I am out.

  Email is not safe.

  Nor are phone calls.

  I am writing our mother out of my life . . .

  Deprived of her medications, including the antiseizure drug she took daily, Atlantis had had a grand mal seizure in the courtroom, delaying her arraignment. She’d also gone on a hunger strike in jail and said that the guards had “pushed her around” when she refused to eat.

  And that is nothing—many girls were whisked off to isolation with broken arms.

  I’ve done a lot of things in my life—but of these charges I am 100% innocent. I am getting a top-notch attorney and am not only pleading not guilty but am counter-suing for false-arrest, abuse and medical neglect while incarcerated.

  All in all, there is no evidence, no proof, nothing. The law firm has a steadfast reputation to protect—therefore they do not take on cases they believe they can’t win—and according to them, mine is a “slam dunk.”

  If she pleaded guilty, Atlantis would get a mandatory eighteen-month sentence, and there was no guarantee that she would be able to serve it in rehab. She decided to fight the charges. She claimed to me that she wasn’t stressed about any of this, and she employed our code word: “I turn my mind to the beautiful artistry of the Mona Lisa.”

  She was referring to our agreement to meet at the Louvre should she ever decide to run away for good. She closed her email saying she’d get a calling card and try me from a pay phone.

  ·

  Atlantis used to say that we both “drew aces in the looks and intelligence departments,” but that somehow I’d been blessed with a disproportionate share of luck. When we were children, Atlantis had protected me from all manner of harm—when she herself wasn’t trying to kill me. But our relationship wasn’t about my paying off some impossible debt. I loved my sister, however troubled and troubling she was.

  ·

  The prescription purchase that got Atlantis arrested took place around the same time Gretchen visited San Diego to shoot video of Atlantis.

  Here’s what I found out: On March 19, someone claiming to be a nurse practitioner had called in a Vicodin prescription under my sister’s name. The pharmacist who’d received the call-in found the order suspicious—it was for a higher dosage than Atlantis had had before and included the instruction to “take as needed.” The pharmacist called the nurse practitioner’s office; they said the prescription was fraudulent and told the pharmacist to obtain a copy of the driver’s license of anyone who tried to pick it up.

  Atlantis visited Walgreens that evening and told the pharmacist who waited on her that she’d received a “weird call” from her doctor’s office about her Vicodin prescription. Atlantis commented that someone was trying to use her identification. The pharmacist said Walgreens needed a copy of her license to maintain on file. The Department of Justice’s report goes on to say that while Atlantis was standing at the pickup counter, someone impersonating the nurse practitioner left a new voicemail amending the fraudulent prescription. Atlantis stood waiting while the pharmacist said that the prescription had to be confirmed. Then she said there was a problem and suggested that Atlantis come back the next day. My sister left empty-handed.

  An hour later, a woman who the DEA report says fit the description of Atlantis—but whom the pharmacist could not positively identify for the DEA agent who’d investigated Atlantis—went to a Target with a male companion and found another Vicodin prescription waiting. She purchased it with Atlantis’s credit card and left the store.

  ·

  Within days of the Vicodin purchase, Atlantis’s two doctors in San Diego both sent letters dismissing her as their patient. But the evidence against her was confusing. She claimed to me that she’d found fourteen errors in the Department of Justice’s report, which also contained two security camera photographs of a woman—clearly not Atlantis—with a white male. Both are standing at the Target counter, and both smile at the camera on their way out, the man rubbing his belly as if to say, “Yummy.” The report claims that these people bought drugs under Atlantis’s name with her credit card. She told me she didn’t know who they were, and followed her denial up with a voicemail:

  I went to my psychiatrist’s to get my antiseizure medication, as well as my antidepressants and my anti-anxiety meds, and apparently the DEA and FBI had already got to my psychiatrist. So she knew the story before I even got a chance to tell her, which kind of freaks me out. And my attorney emailed me a thirty-three-page PDF file of the DEA/FBI report on me, filled with photographs with a female and a male all over the place that’s not me, it’s not even remotely me. They’re even black and white, it doesn’t even look like me, it’s actually insulting because, you know, you would think in the last three weeks I gained like sixty pounds and got a really, really, really bad perm? Um, you know, no—it’s not me. And you can show it to a perfect stranger, and—they even made a remark in their report, that the pharmacist, even, could not identify me with those photographs.

  I’ve seen the photographs, and Atlantis was right. The woman wasn’t her. But did Atlantis know who she was? She told the agents she didn’t.

  The DEA report listed all the antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, and painkillers that Atlantis had purchased over the past nine months: clonazepam (Klonopin), alprazolam (Xanax), zolpidem tartrate (Ambien), and hydrocodone (Vicodin). The agent who arrested her asked one of her doctors if he would have prescribed medication to Atlantis had he known that another doctor was doing the same thing. He said he wouldn’t, and observed that “when a patient begins to obtain pain medication from different doctors it becomes an immediate red flag.”

  Still, there was evidence that Atlantis had been used by at least two people. There was no proof that she had written or called in any of the prescriptions herself, and no evident connection between her and the couple smiling at the security camera.

  I asked her if the DEA might be trying to use her as an informant. Did she know who’d called the pharmacy and impersonated a doctor? That woman Gretchen, who was supposedly making a movie about Atlantis around the time of the Vicodin purchase: Was it possible that she’d had something to do with it? “I don’t snitch on my friends,” she told me.

  It was the first time that Atlantis had flatly refused to tell me somet
hing. Normally, she told me everything—too much. Now she sounded furtive and cagey. But as far as I knew, she was guilty only of drug addiction and bad taste in friends.

  ·

  Atlantis referred to her lawyer as “the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego”—though she was quick to add that he was Jewish and from New York City—and told me that another new friend, “my sugar mama in Oakland,” had already paid his retainer. I pressed her to tell me more about this new friend. Sugar Mama, she said, was a businesswoman in her forties whom she’d met on Craigslist a month or so before her arrest. She had gone with Sugar Mama to parties while Sugar Mama was trying to get over an ex-girlfriend.

  The Craigslist connection and the term “sugar mama” suggested that Atlantis might have prostituted herself to this woman. I hadn’t realized that her life had become so unbearable, and I couldn’t chalk up everything about her disturbing behavior to her having been abused in jail. But there was also something theatrical in this downward spiral. Drugs! Prostitution! “Johnnie Cochran”! It all suggested a celebrity fantasy—Atlantis as the star in her own courtroom drama.

  On April 30, she sent me an email that ended:

  You should know that I always have not only a Plan B, but a Plan C as well.

  Mona Lisa keeps me smiling :)

  Don’t fret, Sister—this is my drama—and I shall prevail.

  ·

  Two days later, Atlantis’s lawyer secured a three-week continuance, and she posted this ad on Craigslist:

  Need a hot, loyal wife? Ocean Beach—31.

  Howdy Cowboy—

  Here’s my deal: I am a lesbian with two degrees (one in GIS and one in Pharmacy) but I am unemployed and in a terrible financial situation at the moment. I do not want to have children, but I would love to have an open marriage—as in you are free to do whatever you like and I would be free to do the same with women. I am extremely loyal, so I would hope that we would ultimately build a bond together :-) I am extremely attractive—5’6”, thin, brunette, hazel eyes, Irish, feminine, etc., etc. and I would say other than loyalty my best quality is my sense of humor. I love vintage/classic films and my reading tastes range from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky—but I am a die-hard Nabokov fan. (Clearly I love Russian authors—LOL.) I’ve thought about this very deeply, and I think I would make an excellent wife to an appropriate gentleman. So if you’re interested in hearing more, send me your pic and I will send you mine in return. Oh, no Republicans—sorry :-)

  She told me about the ad and commented that now she had “all sorts of crazies” writing to her. She said her lawyer had told her that if she married a foreign national, she could leave the country, and the court case, behind her. I advised her to get a new lawyer.

  ·

  The next day, on May 3, Atlantis wrote to me that she’d met a “wonderful British bloke” and they’d fallen “madly in love” overnight, and that he “really wants to be a U.S. citizen. I love how husbands cannot testify against their wives.”

  Atlantis may have gotten this slightly wrong: spousal immunity means spouses cannot be forced to testify against each other, though they can if they want to. In any case, what was I supposed to do with the information she was giving me?

  I had trouble keeping track of all the shady-sounding characters who rushed to aid my sister in her “terrible financial situation.” A middle-aged German living in San Antonio del Mar, a Mexican coastal resort southwest of Tijuana, responded to her ad with pictures of himself and a long letter saying that he enjoyed sailing, tango, horses, jazz, theater, and his motorbike, and believed in “life as an art form.” In response, Atlantis sent pictures of herself in lingerie, and let him know that she was a “Bonnie-and-Clyde type of lesbian,” interested in marrying someone in need of a green card; if they were compatible and he could take care of her, she’d love to give him citizenship. The German Gentleman said he didn’t need a green card, and invited her to his mansion.

  ·

  Atlantis found this Craigslist ad:

  Looking for a wing woman partner in Crime of life. Looking for a sassy girl to be my partner in crime in life.

  She replied:

  LOVE IT!! I’ll be your Bonnie if you’ll be my Clyde ;-P

  The Millionaire from Mexico said he was thirty-eight and had a good job and a house in San Marcos, a San Diego suburb, and a background in “the culinary arts.” He was seeking a wife and house sitter, was HIV positive and extremely wealthy. His wife had died, and he missed holding a woman in his arms. He traveled on business for most of the year and wanted his house to “look occupied.” Atlantis told him she was engaged in a legal battle that would keep her in the San Diego area for the next several months; she told me that he understood the situation (“no sex”) and just wanted someone to eat dinner with and stay over sometimes. After meeting her once, the Millionaire from Mexico said she could move her things into his garage. He was a “total neat freak,” Atlantis said, and “always changing his mind,” but she liked him. She slept in his bed. For the time being, our family could write to her in his care. She gave us his first name, his last initial, and the San Marcos address.

  ·

  While she was making these sketchy connections, I was visiting Crete, where I toured Minoan ruins and the ancient palace of Knossos and hiked the Samariá Gorge. On my way back through Santorini—a putative site of the lost city of Atlantis—I collected stones and shells and ignored tchotchkes bearing my sister’s name.

  ·

  On May 6, Atlantis crossed the border at San Ysidro, and the German Gentleman picked her up at a McDonald’s on the Mexican side. That night, she emailed me from his “gorgeous mansion”:

  Am deep in Mexico with the older German gentleman and his smoking hot 16 y.o. daughter.

  The daughter is fascinated by me.

  Does this mean I’d have to be her *stepmom*??!!

  But the next day, she was back in California. She sent me an email saying that she might have found a way out of the country for good.

  ·

  I emailed Atlantis saying that I was very worried about her, and asked for the German Gentleman’s name and the Millionaire from Mexico’s surname, and for more information about both of them. What might they request of her later on, and why not just stay in Mexico? That was what I wanted her to do. I also asked: What about a trustworthy Canadian? I was still seeing Dan. Did she want me to ask him for help?

  What was I thinking?

  I was terrified of the German Gentleman, who saw life as an art form, and terrified that my sister had emailed me from his mansion. It was like a bad fairy tale. Surely he’d cut her into little bits.

  But even if the German Gentleman was a pussycat, the idea of Atlantis’s taking up with any man I’d never met was unacceptable. She’d disappear in a foreign country with him, and then we could meet only on her own terms, when she sent me little messages or whatever. I would always have to wonder about her.

  I was caught up again in our sisterly psychodrama, playing my good-sister role in which I had all the luck and Atlantis had nothing. I had a trustworthy Canadian; Atlantis had the German Gentleman and the Millionaire. That was just how life went for us; our destinies were already written. It was because she was born first and had been kicked around more than I was by our father. It was because she’d been molested. It was because she was mentally ill.

  My sister was not the worldly woman she thought she was. She was a sad, pitiful creature. If she couldn’t kill herself, she’d find someone to kill her.

  ·

  I’d been reluctant to put my relationship with Dan on the line, or to ask him for too much; but I felt certain that I would lose Atlantis if I didn’t. So I called him and asked if he might be willing to help.

  “I thought you wanted me to marry you,” he said. I had wanted to marry Dan, if he’d ever ask. But Dan told me he had no interest in marrying Atlantis, and though I knew this was a sane decision, I also resented him. No man on earth could liberate me from my primary bond by marryi
ng me. I was married to my sister.

  ·

  Atlantis wrote back that she couldn’t just run away on her own without marrying because “bounty hunters” would come after her:

  Again, I cannot tell you about the gentleman, as email is not safe. But he has no green card and is very progressive (he, himself was detained by the US INS for THREE DAYS with no food or water, essentially in a bus meant for cargo—so he knows what I’ve been through). His daughters—

  Wait—wasn’t there only one daughter before?

  —are lovely and he has lived all over the world and speaks 4 different languages. He hates the US—I wonder why—LOL.

  Nothing would be “requested” of me further on—we each have needs, though I do have a Swiss man and also an American (long story) on the back burner—but I must meet them first.

  She added:

  Canada is too cold, and too obvious.

  What was too obvious was that my sister didn’t want my help.

  ·

  That same night, Atlantis sent a group email to my family with the subject “Mother’s Day,” saying that Mom had “abandoned” her “for the final time.”

  You will not hear from me again.

  —Atlantis (soon to have another legal name who no one will know but Betsy)

  Atlantis wrote to me and other family members that her new name would contain the initials A. B.

  Mom dictated this response, sent through our aunt (since Mom had no email account):

  Dear Lan,

  I will always have faith in you no matter what because I know you will eventually figure out what is right and will do it. And you will do it because you have what it takes; you are a strong and resourceful girl. You have suffered from depression far more than you should have. If you just hold on long enough you will get the treatment and the love that you need. Please don’t think you have to change your name. Know that wherever you are, whatever your name, your mother loves you. Never underestimate my love for you; never overestimate my knowledge of what’s going on with you.