Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 14, 2017)
3: Tantalized
Stanford Pines accumulated knowledge the way a pack rat accumulates buttons, beads, coins, shoelaces, and . . . pretty much anything a pack rat can carry. He had never before paid much attention to the legends of the doppelgänger, though, and he found himself exploring the subject, making copious notes, and in fact getting so wrapped up in it that he nearly forgot the immediate goal of resolving the question of what Wendy Corduroy saw.
For instance, Ford discovered that some experts tracked the notion of a twin spirit back to Plato and Platonic Idealism. Had Dipper and Wendy been down in the lab with him, he would have lectured: Plato held that there are two levels of existence, the Ideal realm and the Physical realm. However, the Physical realm is largely an illusion (buy gold!) and exists as an imperfect reflection of the Ideal.
In the Ideal realm, perfect versions of everything and everybody exist without flaws, blemishes, or limitations. Moreover, they are eternal and can be reached only with the mind. Assume, Plato said, that in some Earthly kingdom a king goes nuts and has a grudge against, oh, let's say chairs. The king orders every chair in the kingdom destroyed. He orders every carpenter who ever build a chair to be hanged. He orders every image of a chair, every written mention of a chair, to be expunged from the record. After a long reign, the king dies. His son inherits the, well, not throne, but place-where-the-king stands and continues the ban. This goes on for generations.
OK, so five hundred years later, in the Kingdom of the Standing Up People, some schlub gets tired of standing all the time. Now, nobody remembers what a chair was. They have no concept of chairness. They are a chairless race. But this mook, let's call him Charley, one day gets a few pieces of wood, nails them together, and sits on them. The idea catches on, and soon every house in the kingdom has made or bought a charley for every member of the household. The chair has been re-invented.
Now, says Plato, here's the sixty-four-drachma question: Where did Charley get the idea of a chair?
And answering himself, Plato says that Charley's mind visited the Ideal realm, glimpsed the Ideal of a chair, and imperfectly replicated it in our illusory realm of the senses. And nobody can ever destroy the Ideal of the chair. You can set fire to Charley's invention, and in a few minutes, it won't be a chair any longer. But the Ideal is eternal, and therefore more real than reality, which is transitory, mutable, and subject to frequent commercial interruptions.
Ford would continue to say that were Plato's notion true, then each of us has a double. If that double can somehow temporarily manifest in the Physical realm, there you go. A classic doppelgänger. Not that the information would help Wendy and Dipper, but it was interesting. If you were Stanford Pines.
He roamed through legend, myth, and history, finding references to spooky doubles in Norse mythology—there the word was vardøger, the main distinguishing characteristic being that one of these would go before the human whose semblance it took and would perform the human's everyday tasks for him or her. The Finns had the etiäinen, whose function was to clean up the actions that its human would not be able to do by virtue of being dead soon.
Historically, Catherine the Great once saw herself sitting on her own throne. Elizabeth I saw herself lying dead in her bed and soon afterward died. Abraham Lincoln saw two of himself reflected in the mirror, stopped shaving, and became President. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was riding his horse through a forest and met himself riding the double of his horse going the other way. It shocked him. The horse's reaction wasn't noted.
From there, Ford went on to learn about crisis apparitions—not ghosts, but living persons appearing many, many miles from where their physical bodies were. John Donne's wife Ann, in England, appeared to her husband, in Paris, carrying the corpse of a dead baby. Donne soon learned that at the exact moment he had seen his wife, she had given birth to their tragically stillborn child, hundreds of miles away. And there were many, many other anecdotes of the same kind. The hours just slipped away as Ford buried himself in research.
Meanwhile Wendy had taken matters into her own hands. She and Dipper drove up to her aunt's farm, about twenty miles from the Falls, and sitting at her dining-room table, Wendy had put the question to her: "What does it mean when you see yourself, like a ghost?"
Sallie got the story from her, then asked, "You ever hear of a fetch?"
"Like in a game with a dog?" Wendy asked.
Without smiling, Sallie shook her head. "It's a kind of ghost. Old Irish tales tell about them. A fetch is a spirit, except it looks exactly like a person. And it's sent to Earth when that person's time is up. The fetch escorts it on into the afterlife."
"A psychopomp," Dipper said. "In Greek mythology, Hermes had the job of leading the dead to Hades."
"Like that, I suppose," Sallie said. "I heard stories about them from my great-granny. Didn't put any stock in them, you know. Just bogie-stories or fairy tales. Never heard tell of one in my lifetime. Did you both see this one?"
"I didn't," Dipper said. "But Wendy's sure she saw it."
"I wasn't imagining things," Wendy said. "It was just like me, only—there was something off about it. I can't remember just what. I only saw it for a few seconds before it vanished. And I didn't even see it disappear, just looked away, and when I looked back, it was gone."
"Wasn't your mother, was it?" Sallie asked quietly. "Mandy was the spit and image of you, Wendy. 'Cept in her last year she lost her hair because of her sickness. But you two could be mistaken for twins."
"No," Wendy said. "I would have known my mom. No, this was me, but—I wish I could remember what was off about her. It's driving me crazy! Anyway, it didn't seem to want to fetch me or talk to me or anything. She just looked—sad and kind of scared, I think. Hard to tell."
Dipper added, "Wendy says she looked real, not ghostly. She remembers her boots were wet."
"Boots?" asked Sallie.
"Yeah, like the logger's boots I always used to wear," Wendy said. "You remember."
"Yeah, they were always muddy," Sallie said with a smile. "The ones you wear now look a little different."
"Maybe that was it," Wendy said thoughtfully. She was wearing the—oh, wait! I got it!" She stood up and said, "When I saw her, she was holding out her right hand toward me like this." She stretched out her arm, holding her palm up, as if she were on a ledge and was reaching down to help someone else climb up. "I think she only had four fingers!"
Dipper felt a little cold chill. "So she looked the way you did when we first met," he said. "Before your pinkies came in."
"Yeah, dude," Wendy said. "I—I think I saw myself at fifteen!"
Teek and Mabel, having rushed home from Salem, showed up at about twenty past nine, earlier than they had figured. Ford was still down in the lab; Abuelita had taken the kids off to bed; Soos and Melody were in their bedroom, watching TV. Wendy and Dipper, still puzzling over the peculiar sighting, were on the sofa, with the TV on but the volume muted. An old movie, Planet of the Orangutans (not the 1968 original, but the 2001 remake), was on.
Mabel charged in, Tripper heard her and came charging out, and Mabel scooped up the dog. "Did you think I was never ever coming home? Yes, you can lick my face! Ha-ha! OK, something crucial happened. Dipper, where were you this afternoon between five and five-thirty?
"Um—driving back from Wendy's aunt's farm, I guess," Dipper said.
Mabel turned to Wendy. "Wendy, can you verify what Dipper wait, what? You went there without me? How are Widdles and Waddles and Gompers and my chickens and—stop avoiding the subject!"
"Tell us what it is so we can not avoid it," suggested Dipper. "Why did you even ask that?"
"Teek, the evidence!" Mabel said.
Teek handed over a blue-and-white trucker's cap. "Explain that, if you can! I rest my case!" She flopped down in an armchair, Tripper in her lap.
"It's my cap," Dipper said.
"Ah-ha! And how did that cap get from here to Salem if you didn't physically take it there, Mr. Devious?"
"Hang on," Dipper said. He got up and went upstairs, leaving the pine-tree cap with Wendy. A minute later he came back down. "Here's my cap," he said. "That one's not mine."
"Do you expect me to believe there are two caps in the world that look like that?" demanded Mabel. "What kind of trick are you pulling here, Dipdop?"
"Mabes, he's right," Wendy said. "Look." She put the cap that Mabel had brought in on her head. It sat way high. She doffed that one and reached for the one Dipper had brought down and clapped it on. It was a perfect fit. "Try this one on, Dip," she said, handing him the one Mabel and Teek had brought.
He did. It perched on the top of his head like a yarmulke. "Too small," he said.
"If the hat doesn't fit, you must acquit," Teek said.
Mabel glared at her boyfriend. "That is the dumbest thing I ever heard! But I still love you. So how did this hat wind up in Helen Wheels? Have you been sneaking off to drive her?"
"I have my own car," Dipper said. "Anyway, there are dozens of these hats in the Shack. You know that! This could be anybody's."
Wendy took the interloping hat back and studied it. "This turned up in your car?"
"So did Dipper!" Mabel insisted. "We saw him sitting in the driver's seat, didn't we, Teek?"
"It looked like you," Teek said to Dipper. "The windshield was catching a lot of reflections, though."
"But you made one fatal mistake! You forgot your cap!"
"That was on an episode of Duck-Tective," Dipper said. "It was 'The Copper's Capper Caper.' Season five, episode 13."
"Are you implying that a duck masqueraded as you?" asked Mabel. "This gets murkier with every clue!"
"I wasn't there today," Dipper insisted. "I've never even been to the town."
"Blendin Blandin! This is some time travel deal, isn't it?" asked Mabel. "You went back in time, got yourself from back when your head wasn't so big, went to Salem and got into my car for some reason, but you lost your cap!"
"Pretty sure I'd remember that," Dipper said.
"Well, I'm out of ideas," Mabel said. "Teek, can we cook up something for dinner? I'm starving."
"Dude," Wendy said, "this can't be Dipper's hat. It's all out of shape. And it doesn't fit. Look, the adjustable band in the back is cinched up tight, and there's a little piece of duct tape so it won't pop loose, and you can tell the duct tape's been on, like, forever."
Dipper asked slowly, "Do you think that the me you saw might have been only twelve years old?"
Teek looked a little startled. "Uh—he was sort of short, sitting there behind the wheel."
"I figured you were slumping down 'cause we'd caught you," Mabel said. "But it sure looked like you!"
Dipper took out his phone and called Ford. "Yes, Mason?" his great-uncle said when he answered. "I'm finding some very suggestive hints in the Prospect of the Invysible Worlde, a compendium of paranormal beliefs published in London in 1605—"
"I think we've got another case," Dipper said. "Can you come up?"
"Has Wendy seen another apparition?"
"Mabel did. And it wasn't Wendy," Dipper said. "It was me."
For a moment the phone went quiet. Then, urgently, Ford said, "Don't move. I'm coming right up."
"We weren't planning on moving. Have you had anything to eat?"
"No. I'll be—"
"Ask him if he wants a hamburger," Mabel said.
Dipper relayed the question, and added, "Teek's cooking."
"In that case, yes, definitely. I'll just close out my computer, and I'll be right up."
Dipper broke the connection. They all looked at him. "I think," he said, "Grunkle Ford is scared."