Some island car silk-screened with an advertisement is parked in every news shot. Some piece of paper trash, a cup or napkin is printed with a corporate name. You can read a billboard. Islanders are wearing their lapel buttons or T-shirts, doing television interviews with the twisted smoking bodies in the background. Now the financial services and cable television networks and drug companies are paying fat kill fees to buy back all their advertising. To erase their names from the island.
Add this money to the insurance, and Waytansea Island is richer than it’s ever been.
Sitting in the Buick, Tabbi looks at her mother. She looks at the urns she holds in the crook of each arm. Her zygomatic major pulls her lips toward each ear. Tabbi’s cheeks swell up to lift her bottom eyelids just a little. With her arms hugging the ashes of Grace and Harrow, she’s her own little Mona Lisa. Smiling and ancient, Tabbi says, “If you tell, then I tell.”
Misty’s artwork. Her child.
Misty says, “What will you tell?”
Still smiling, Tabbi says, “I set fire to their clothes. Granmy and Granby Wilmot taught me how, and I set them on fire.” She says, “They taped my eyes so I wouldn’t see, so I’d get out.”
In the bits of news video that survive, all you can see is the smoke rolling out of the lobby doors. This is moments after the mural was unveiled. The firemen rush in and don’t come out. None of the police or guests come out. Every second of the time stamp on the video, the fire is bigger, the flames whipping orange rags out of the windows. A police officer crawls across the porch to peek in the window. He stoops there, looking inside. Then he stands. The smoke blowing him in the face, the flames blowtorching his clothes and hair, he steps over the windowsill. Not blinking. Not flinching. His face and hands on fire. The police officer smiles at what he sees inside and walks toward it without looking back.
The official story is the dining room fireplace caused it. The hotel’s policy that the fire always had to burn, no matter how warm the weather, that’s how the fire started. People died a step away from open windows. Their dead bodies found an arm’s length away from exit doors. Dead, they were found creeping, crawling, crowding toward the wall in the dining room where the mural burned. Toward the center of the fire. Whatever the policeman saw through the porch window.
No one even tried to escape.
Tabbi says, “When my father asked me to run away with him, I told Granmy.” She says, “I saved us. I saved the future of the whole island.”
Looking out the car window to the ocean, not looking at her mother, Tabbi says, “So if you tell anyone,” she says, “I’ll go to jail.” She says, “I’m very proud of what I did, Mother.” She looks at the ocean, her eyes following the curve of the coastline, back to the village and the black hulk of the ruined hotel. Where people burned alive, transfixed by Stendhal syndrome. By Misty’s mural.
Misty shakes her daughter’s knee and says, “Tabbi, please.”
And without looking up, Tabbi reaches over to open the car door and step out. “It’s Tabitha, Mother,” she says. “From now on, please call me by my given name.”
When you die in a fire, your muscles shorten. Your arms pull in, pulling your hands into fists, your fists pulling up to your chin. Your knees bend. The heat does all that. It’s called the “pugilist position” because you look like a dead boxer.
People killed in a fire, people in a long-term vegetative state, they all end up posed about the same. The same as a baby waiting to be born.
Misty and Tabitha, they walk past the bronze statue of Apollo. Past the meadow. Past the crumbing mausoleum, a moldy bank built into a hillside, its iron gate hanging open. The darkness inside. They walk to the end of the point, and Tabitha—not her daughter, no longer part of Misty, someone Misty doesn’t even know—a stranger, Tabitha pours each urn off a cliff above the water. The long gray cloud of what’s inside, the dust and ash, it fans out on the breeze. It sinks into the ocean.
Just for the record, the Ocean Alliance for Freedom hasn’t issued another word and police have made no arrests.
Dr. Touchet has declared the only public beach on the island closed for health reasons. The ferry has cut service to just twice each week, and only to island residents. Waytansea Island is to all intents and purposes closed to the outsider.
Walking back to the car, they pass the mausoleum.
Tabbi . . . Tabitha stops and says, “Would you like to look inside now?”
The iron gate rusted and hanging open. The darkness inside.
And Misty, she says, “Yes.”
Just for the record, the weather today is calm. Calm and resigned and defeated.
One, two, three steps into the dark, you can see them. Two skeletons. One lying on the floor, curled on its side. The other sits propped against the wall. Mold and moss grown up around their bones. The walls shine with trickles of water. The skeletons, her skeletons, the women Misty’s been.
What Misty’s learned is the pain and panic and horror only lasts a minute or two.
What Misty’s learned is she’s bored to death of dying.
Just for the record, your wife knows you were bluffing when you wrote about putting every toothbrush up your ass. You were just trying to scare people back into reality. You just wanted to wake them up from their own personal coma.
Misty’s not writing this for you, Peter, not anymore.
There’s nowhere on this island she can leave her story where only she’ll find it. The future her in a hundred years. Her own little time capsule. Her own personal time bomb. The village of Waytansea, they’d dig up every square inch of their beautiful island. They’d tear down their hotel, looking for her secret. They have a century to dig and tear and hunt before she comes back. Until they bring her back. And then it will be too late.
We’re betrayed by everything we do. Our art. Our children.
But we were here. We are still here. What poor dull Misty Marie Wilmot has to do is hide her story in plain sight. She’ll hide it everywhere in the world.
What she’s learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We’re all of us immortal. We couldn’t die if we wanted to.
Every day of her life, every minute of her life, if she could just remember that.
Dear Mr. Palahniuk,
