The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  I shut down the computer, poured a tall glass of Knob Creek, neat, and went out on the front porch of my new home in Connecticut. The manicured grounds descended to the Boston Post Road. I could take it all the way back to Chadds Ford.

  I set down my empty glass and walked to the wine store, where I flirted with the manager. I bought two bottles—one red, one white, as if I were planning a romantic evening with another person—and gave him my number. I went home and started pouring.

  Chimney swifts made figure eights in the sunset, and I replayed the German Gentleman’s video in my mind. Could the German Gentleman have killed Atlantis, and gotten off on sending me this little piece of film, which felt like a dark movie trailer?

  I knew that I had to stop thinking this way—drug lords, kidnappings, murders—but it was impossible not to. What if it wasn’t Atlantis in the autopsy photographs? Maybe the face had been Photoshopped. Or maybe somebody paid the funeral home director to show some unfortunate girl’s disfigured body to my mother. How hard could it be for a wealthy and mysterious character like the German Gentleman to pay people off?

  I told no one about the German Gentleman. Who would I have told? And what would I have said?

  ·

  My head was throbbing when I came to in bed, naked, with bruises on my knees, hips, and arm. My fingers moved to the back of my head, where a painful, cartoonish bump was growing. I couldn’t remember finding my way here from the porch.

  I decided that, in the German Gentleman’s video, Atlantis was not in pain. She was gleeful, taunting. If she’d been kidnapped, she’d done that to herself. And if she was really hurting, there was nothing I could do about it.

  ·

  The very same day that I’d heard from the German Gentleman, Mom told Aunt Tina that she’d received an envelope with the return address of the US consulate in Tijuana. It contained what appeared to be Atlantis’s police, autopsy, and toxicology reports, written in Spanish. There was no cover letter. At first, Mom refused to share them with the rest of our family; she said she wanted to wait until she could get them translated. I persuaded her to go to Kinko’s, photocopy all the documents, and mail them to me.

  ·

  I checked Atlantis’s account again and found an email from Sugar Mama, whom I’d not yet informed of my sister’s death. It began: “So what is the story doll? Have you skipped town?”

  Sugar Mama said that she was no longer working, that she didn’t have enough cash coming in, and that she and Atlantis were going to have to talk about money at some point.

  I traced their relationship to March, when Sugar Mama had responded to an ad posted by Atlantis:

  I would love to help out a woman who for whatever reason can’t seem to find a girl who sticks in exchange for basic necessities (e.g. FOOD, RENT).

  I can’t believe I’m posting this, but I am desperate and if I was reading this myself in better circumstances I very well might respond, either out of curiosity or altruism.

  ·····WOMEN ONLY·····

  Sugar Mama said it was the word altruism that got her. They met up and hit it off; in their Gchats, both women alluded to oral sex that had sent Sugar Mama into ecstasies. Atlantis sent her an email saying: “Karma works in such strange ways and I can’t wait to see what it holds in store for you because you have literally saved my life :-)”

  Sugar Mama replied: “I do not need good karma—I need a different me in a different world. It is complicated. And please, I am getting plenty out of this already. That is not complicated.”

  Sugar Mama’s long, heartfelt emails to Atlantis unnerved me: they revealed a terrible loneliness and isolation, and a wildly misplaced faith in Atlantis as an intimate partner. I did an internet search and discovered that Sugar Mama had a criminal record in New York City for writing bad checks and had done prison time. After that, she’d relocated to a place outside Dallas, where she’d been arrested for threatening someone with a deadly weapon.

  ·

  I sent a notification of Atlantis’s death to all her email contacts, writing that she died at the end of June and that the account would soon be closed. I heard back from her boss at the California League of Conservation Voters, who said she hoped it was a joke, and who sounded truly upset when I let her know it wasn’t. I also received a condolence note from someone who described herself as “an elderly woman” in Atlantis’s pharmacy program. She wrote: “I just hope she did fulfill her dreams, even if she did not get to work as a pharmacy technician.”

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  I have what I call goth stock imagery. When I’m playing out and forget a lyric, I just throw in something about the night or the darkness or love or breaking hearts, and it works.

  19.

  Meanwhile, Gretchen was still trying to get the rights to Atlantis’s music. Soon after Atlantis disappeared, she initiated contact with my mother and swore her to secrecy about the communication. As I learned later, they began to talk on the phone regularly.

  Gretchen told Mom that she was not just a filmmaker but a forensic psychologist with a law degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. She asked Mom for help in conducting an investigation of her own into Atlantis’s death. Together they would expose the DEA agent and Atlantis’s lawyer as parts of a corrupt legal system designed to make money off drug addicts and their families. Gretchen seemed to have found my mother’s weak spots—anger at the establishment and money wasted on Atlantis—and claimed to have an attorney friend who would file a suit against the Las Colinas Detention Facility for the abuse Atlantis had endured there. Mom agreed to cooperate with her.

  Eventually Mom told my aunt about it. When Tina let that cat out of the bag, I called my mother and asked if she realized that she was communicating with someone who might have destroyed Atlantis’s life. Mom said that Gretchen was simply “being a friend,” and asked me for the password to Atlantis’s Gmail account.

  Remembering that furious last will and testament (“her own mother refused to bail her out of jail”), and those Craigslist ads for sex and drugs, I told Mom that I didn’t think it was healthy for her, or anyone, to read Atlantis’s emails.

  Mom hadn’t used email at home, or even kept a computer in her house, since she’d worked as a systems analyst back in the 1980s, so the person who wanted the Gmail password must have been Gretchen. I could not justify handing it over to one of the people I now held the most responsible—after Atlantis herself—for my sister’s death.

  Mom argued that since she was next of kin, the emails were her property. I said that we had to let it go, that it didn’t matter anymore, and that an investigation headed by Gretchen could lead to nothing good. Why did she trust Gretchen, I asked her, and how did she think Gretchen had gotten her number? Mom said she was listed in the phone book, and that it was clear that Gretchen had loved Atlantis. I suggested that Gretchen only wanted access to Atlantis’s accounts to delete any evidence of her own participation in a crime. If Mom really wanted to clear Atlantis’s name, I said, she could tell Gretchen to save everybody a lot of trouble and turn herself in.

  I believed that my mother was in a manic episode—and had been duped. Later, I wondered if she might have communicated with Gretchen in hopes that Gretchen would slip up and reveal something. But if this was my mother’s agenda, she never told me.

  ·

  I emailed the one person I thought might be able to provide me with a form of consolation: the young woman who’d bought Atlantis’s old Yamaha acoustic-electric. I introduced myself to Guitar Girl, told her about Atlantis’s death, and asked if she might find it in her heart to sell the guitar back to me. Her 721-word response began: “OMG!” Although they had known each other for only a few weeks, Guitar Girl was devastated. Her boyfriend had bought her the guitar for their third anniversary, and when she and Atlantis had met for the handoff, they’d become instant friends. She had been planning to ask Atlantis to play at their wedding.

  Guitar Girl said she understood
Atlantis’s depression, because she, too, had suffered from “endless medical problems since birth.” Atlantis, she said, was the “tightest” person she’d ever met. But she’d become attached to the guitar; she was sorry, but she didn’t feel comfortable selling it. She said that she would name it “Atlantis Black,” and told me to drop her a line if I was ever on the West Coast. We could “kick back, listen to music or watch a movie, talk and drink a few beers. like I used to with Atlantis.”

  ·

  Had they really watched movies together—Atlantis and this young woman who’d bought her guitar? Between the guitar’s sale and Atlantis’s move to the Millionaire from Mexico’s, there was very little time for a budding friendship, and I was with my sister after that. Why had I imagined that Guitar Girl might not cling to “Atlantis Black”—or be “so sad” about its first owner’s death? Or that, when called upon, she’d be humane, have good manners, not write in block text, “The last time we saw each other” followed by “The last time i saw her,” as if there’d been a time when Guitar Girl had seen Atlantis, but Atlantis hadn’t been able to see her? Guitar Girl, like so many of the people Atlantis had associated with in San Diego, somehow seemed strange and scary. I told myself it didn’t matter who any of these people were, and that Gretchen, Guitar Girl, and the sale of “Atlantis Black” were all depressing reminders of what my sister had been “reduced to.” Maybe I was wrong to write to Guitar Girl like that out of the blue, delivering the sad and surprising news about her insta-friend while asking for something.

  ·

  The FedEx box arrived in Westport on a sunny day in August. The deliveryman seemed to look at me with kind, knowing eyes—as if he’d guessed the contents.

  Aunt Tina had packed the ashes in a red plastic purse. In Tijuana, I’d also asked for a lock of hair—and the purse contained some remains of her scalp. It had turned green. I put the ashes in a patch of sunlight on the windowsill, hid the hair in a drawer, and tossed the garish handbag in the kitchen garbage. When I came back to the living room, a solitary wasp was hovering around the ashes.

  On August 13, I received what appeared to be the Tijuana reports in the mail. They arrived in an envelope with Mom’s return address. I’d been expecting them—she’d promised to share them with me at some point. I noticed that the name of my school was misspelled (“Pierpont”), which was easy enough to do, though it would have been an unusual mistake for my mother to make. The thirteen typed, photocopied pages had what looked like official seals and signatures. Mom had written on the pages by hand, adding English translations above some of the Spanish words she either knew or had looked up in a dictionary. She’d underlined people’s names and such details as “room 203.” It was pathetic to imagine her struggling to understand the reports: I knew she’d never pay anyone to do a translation and it had been weeks since she’d received them.

  I put the reports in my suitcase, along with the plastic bag of Atlantis’s ashes, and left the next morning for LaGuardia to fly to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I’d arranged to meet Leah, Atlantis’s former partner. At the airport, a security attendant, with gloved fingers, sifted through the grainy material—all that was left of my sister’s bodily existence on earth—and I was afraid that I’d lose my temper in public, get put in jail myself.

  On the plane, I peeked at the reports, trying not to let my neighbors see what I was reading, but I knew even less Spanish than Mom did. When I got to Albuquerque, I faxed them to Elizabeth and to the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego. If something was wrong with them—if they’d obviously been forged, or if a closer study of them might reveal that the body hadn’t been Atlantis’s, or if there were any signs of foul play—I hoped that someone in a position of authority would do something about it.

  Leah and I drove the winding mountain roads near Albuquerque until we found one whose name—Good Spirits Road—Atlantis would have liked. We played some of her songs to the desert through her old cassette player; I hugged Leah and thanked her for loving Atlantis. We released the contents of the plastic bag, and took pictures of Atlantis’s desert grave to share with her friends. I kept only a few soft tips of her hair, and gave the green bit of scalp to the wind.

  ·

  Back in New York, Tim and I organized a memorial at Stain Bar in Williamsburg. With my sister’s former bandmates around me, I stood at the microphone and read Emily Brontë’s poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” The poem’s final stanza is:

  There is not room for Death

  Nor atom that his might could render void

  Since thou art Being and Breath

  And what thou art may never be destroyed.

  Tim’s band, the Teenage Prayers, played some of Atlantis’s songs. On “More than Opium,” Tim’s melodic voice transformed the lyrics Atlantis had always whispered into the declaration of love it was meant to be.

  And I love you

  more than opium

  And I need you

  to help me break apart

  Tara, our childhood neighbor, tapped me on the shoulder. I hadn’t seen her in a decade. She told me she was studying for a law degree and that Atlantis had inspired her to play guitar; she was now in an all-girl band. Atlantis’s old boss at the New York State Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment came up and hugged me. “I had no idea that she was so troubled,” she said.

  “She kept a lot of darkness to herself,” I said.

  Of course she didn’t.

  ·

  On August 18, the case of The People of the State of California v. Eunice Atlantis Black was continued, because the Johnnie Cochran of San Diego had failed again to provide proof of Atlantis’s death. The bench warrant for her arrest stipulated $100,000 in bail. Later that day, he called Elizabeth and said that the documents I’d faxed were useless to him; he only needed the death certificate.

  ·

  I wrote to Guitar Girl a second time, asking her to reconsider selling me the instrument, and immediately regretted it. Atlantis had anointed me her executor, not her keeper. She’d scattered her own heirlooms. Who was I to decide that something she’d already sold as she neared the end should go to me?

  And I wrote to my friend Ricardo, a poet who was my colleague at the 92Y, and asked if he might be willing to look at the Tijuana reports for me, since he was fluent in Spanish. Though Ricardo had no background in forensics, I believed that if anything seemed amiss in the reports, he’d spot it. But I didn’t think of this as an investigation into Atlantis’s death. I simply wanted to hear what had been documented about my sister’s last night on earth in a gentle, smart, and trustworthy person’s voice. And I knew he’d never judge me—or Atlantis—for whatever disturbing information the reports might reveal.

  Ricardo wrote back: “for you i’d translate the bible entire into esperanto.”

  ·

  Ricardo agreed to meet me after work, by the Alexander Hamilton statue in Central Park; it felt too sad to do this in either of our apartments. I brought a box of Bandit cabernet sauvignon, two plastic cups, a Moleskine notebook, and a pen. I poured little cups of wine and Ricardo read silently for a while, then squeezed my hand and told me, as best he could, what the report said in English.

  “The housekeeper opened the door to room 203,” he said, “and that’s where she found the male sex individual on the floor.”

  I put down my pen. “Wait, Ricky? There was someone else with her, in the room?”

  “Yes. It reads that way. ‘Masculino.’ Male Sex Individual.”

  “Another dead person?”

  “I think so.”

  My family had all thought she’d died alone. At the consulate, when Craig Pike had interpreted the reports for us, he’d said that Atlantis was seen alive after Pascual Perez had left.

  “Ricky, sorry, but can you tell if it was Perez or a different man on the floor?”

  He didn’t know.

  Did most drug dealers—if that’s what Perez was—shoot up with their clients? Had this male sex i
ndividual also died from a heroin overdose (which I believed had been the true cause of Atlantis’s death, despite the mention of a pancreatic hemorrhage), or from something else? Perhaps he was also on the run, whoever he was, and his death was as mysterious as Atlantis’s.

  20.

  Here is a translation I had made of material from the Tijuana reports of my sister’s death. I quote it verbatim:

  the place which we attest to see as a building called Saint Francis Hotel, which in the second floor, within the room number 203, in front of the main door, we attest to see a lifeless body of a female individual, in genupectoral position, with the head oriented to the southwest, wearing a brown shirt with the inscription “Good Karma”, blue jeans, black underwear, gray socks, and the following physical characteristics: wavy brown hair, small forehead, thin eyebrows, green eyes, small mouth, thin lips, white skin, straight nose——- Proceeding with the body exam we noted total absence of conscience, ocular and medullary reflexes, lack of pupil responses to light and opacity, lack of spontaneous breathing with absence of rhythmic body movements, no pulse upon touch, body temperature inferior to the ambient temperature, and rigor mortis. All these signs are indicative of a real and recent death. Upon examination of the body looking for trauma, we noted venipuncture marks on the left antecubital fossa and an incised wound on the phalanx of the middle finger of the right hand. Within the clothing, we found in the right frontal pocket of her jeans, two one dollar bills (US currency). A black nightstand is present to the right side of the main door. On the nightstand are noted three empty plastic bottles with labels reading clonazepam, trazodone and alprazolam. We also noted over the same nightstand, a glass with liquid, likely water, a hypodermic syringe, a piece of aluminum can smoked on the outside, with a substance to be determined on the inside. These objects were picked up by the expert services staff for their corresponding opinions. In the place, we found in front of the body, on the floor, a Nine West black purse, within which there is a multicolor fabric wallet. Within the wallet are a California State driving license number B5839311 under the name EUNICE ATLANTIS BLACK, a credit card number 6018596219606765 under the name E A BLACK, with the inscription OLD NAVY, a bank card number 4326302002217775 under the name E ATLANTIS BLACK, a department store card number 9434030638 under the name EUNICE BLACK with the inscription TARGET, a bank card number 4888930232891397 under the name E atlantis Black, with the inscription Bank of America, two medical services cards with the numbers 5201890027483411 and 5201890101592072 under the name E Atlantis Black, a photograph and several presentation cards. Also within the purse are a passport number 300204943 with the inscription UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, under the name EUNICE ATLANTIS BLACK, also several papers, literature, a pack of cigarettes of the brand Marlboro, black plastic glasses, several US currency coins, two bags, one of black fabric, and the other one of clear plastic within which are make-up and cleaning articles, a syringe, two plastic bottles with pills which will be sent to the expert services laboratory for analysis—