Robbing the Memory Bank
(June 2015)
3: In the Attic
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Friday, 8:00 PM—"Sure it's gonna be OK with you if I do this?" Wendy asked me.
"Yeah," I told her. "We really need to explain to Pacifica about the Society of the Blind Eye and how they used to take people's memories. I don't think I could do it. You tell her and then we'll let her know that there's a tube with her name on it in the lair. See how she feels. Maybe we could take her there tonight, or tomorrow night, or something, if she wants to go. We could set up the viewer and just step out and let her watch it alone, or if she'd rather, I guess one of us could stay with her."
"I don't know that I want to," Wendy said. "Memories are super private. I mean, you and me don't even share every single memory when we do our telepathy thing."
"I know. But—well, maybe that's a decision only Paz could make. Anyway, talk to her and see how she feels."
"Not my favorite assignment, Dip. But, yeah, somebody's got to do it. I'm gonna be draggin' in the morning, but I guess I'm going to a sleepover."
The others were already in the Shack. Pacifica had shown up right after dinner, and Grenda and Candy had already clomped upstairs and into my room. While Wendy and I had been talking, I could hear giggles and shrieks. "Do me a favor?" I asked. "If Paz doesn't want to go tonight, just stay with them and try to take the volume down a few notches? Mabel's room is right under the attic, and her sleepovers keep me awake."
"I'll try, can't promise anything." Wendy squeezed my hand and left me on the sofa, watching a movie called The Ghost Who Wanted to Dance. It was about a ghost. Who wanted to be a tap-dancer. I mean, some of these movies, the title just says it all.
"Hi, gang," Wendy said, coming into the attic room that Dipper and Mabel had shared during their first summer in Gravity falls. "Whoa!"
She dodged a barrage of Nyarf darts.
"Told ya you'd never hit her!" Mabel crowed. "She's got reflexes like a cat! Like a cat!"
Grenda spun her two Nyarf pistols like an old-movie gunslinger. "Worth a try!"
Candy smiled apologetically. "We experimented to test sharpness of human reaction. You passed."
Pacifica, sitting on the floor with her back against the foot of Dipper's bed, didn't have a Nyarf pistol and hadn't participated. She didn't even look up. She was all in soft pink.
"Pretty PJ's, Paz," Wendy said, dropping her workout bag on the floor beside the door.
Pacifica shrugged.
"She's sad," Mabel confided in a stage whisper.
"Shut up," Pacifica said, but without her trademark sass.
"Everybody gets moody now and again," Wendy said. "I'm gonna change to my PJs." She stripped down to her underwear and then donned fuzzy green pajama bottoms and a pullover light-green top. She had to haul her long red hair out of the neck. "Now I'm comfortable," she said, though she reached inside the shirt to remove her bra. "So, what's up, girls?"
Candy said, "I have a problem to discuss. I have dated a boy for a month now, but it is not working out so good. How do you break up with a boy, Wendy?"
Wendy pulled Dipper's pillow off the bed, tossed it onto the floor, and sat on it next to Pacifica. "Oh, man, there are so many ways! I caught one of my boyfriends just flat lying to me and told him off. Just walked off and left him sitting in his car. There was another guy who didn't want to do anything but dump on me—just wanted a girlfriend to complain to about everything. Just stopped answering the phone when he called, put him on ignore. Why do you want to break up, Candy?"
"He does not kiss me so well and will not learn," Candy said, making a face.
Grenda shoved her friend so hard that Candy fell over on her back. "Oh! Oh! T.M.I.!"
Adjusting her glasses as she sat up again, Candy said, "But you tell us that Marius sticks his tongue to your back molars when he kisses you. Is that not T.M.I. too?
"No! It's J.T.R.I. Just the right I!" Grenda proclaimed. She started to drum on the floor with her fists. "Just right! Just right! Just right!"
"The first time that Teek and I kissed open-mouthed," Mabel confided, "I lost my gum!"
"Wild thing!" Grenda yelled, hurling a cushion at Mabel. It missed, but broke the triangle window and sailed off into the night. An owl fluttered down to the sill of the broken-out window, stared in at them, shook its head, and flew off again.
Through it all, Pacifica just brooded. She didn't get more talkative as the evening went on with gossip, experimentation with make-up, and craziness erupting. Then, close to midnight, the blonde teen went out to the bathroom. Wendy followed her. When she emerged, Wendy said quietly, "Hey, take a minute. Let's sit over here, Paz. Want to talk to you."
They sat on the padded window seat in front of the Bill Cipher window—as Wendy always thought of it, anyway, the window with the big triangle design. "You're really down. What's wrong, girl?" Wendy asked softly.
"Everything."
"Tell me. Maybe I can help."
"You can't."
"Boy trouble?"
Pacifica bit her lip and at first just shook her head, but then it all began to come out: Her fear of changing schools again, her break-up with Adam Beedle, and—reluctantly—the tale of how she had tried an online chat site and had been cut off by a guy after sending him a picture.
"Um—not a sexy picture, was it?" Wendy asked gently.
"I was wearing a sweater. It wasn't, like, a nudie photo or anything," Pacifica said. "But I was trying to look, you know, attractive."
"Forget it," Wendy said. "If the boy didn't respond, it doesn't mean anything. Maybe he thought you were out of his league, you know?"
Pacifica blinked, as if she hadn't thought of that. Grudgingly, she muttered, "He could have said."
"Yeah, guys are the worst sometimes," Wendy agreed. "Hey, it'll work out. Didn't Adam graduate this year?"
"Next year. He's older than I am."
"That's right, he's in my class," Wendy said. She grinned. "Well, after I screwed up and flunked two courses and got behind, he's in my class now. Don't see much of him, though. We don't have any classes together. Want me to talk to him?"
"What would you even say?" Pacifica asked, drawing up her knees and hugging them. "I don't know. It's so confusing right now. Dad wants to put me back in private school. I don't really want to go, but I don't want to stay in Gravity Falls High, either. I've got, like, zero friends."
"That's not true," Wendy said. "Candy and Grenda, for example. And a lot of guys like you, but, you know—"
"Hate my family," Pacifica finished for her.
"I was going to say, they're kind of intimidated by you. You're the most beautiful girl in town, Pacifica. That scares some guys away."
"It's hard to stand up to Dad," Pacifica mumbled, not visibly cheered by Wendy's compliment. "He's trying to be better. He really is. But he's making money again, and he's starting to say we have a position in society, I have to live up to our reputation—as if we had one! Mom will go along with whatever Dad wants. It's just so hard for me, and he doesn't understand."
She fell silent, and Wendy reached out and rubbed her back. "There's one other thing," Wendy told her. "Not sure if you're ready to hear this."
Pacifica looked at her through tears. "It can't get any worse," she said.
Wendy tapped on the door of Mabel's room—where Dipper was spending the night—and he opened it. "Oh," he said. "Hi. Uh—come in."
He sat on the bed. Pacifica sat next to him, and Wendy drew up a chair. "I told her, Dip," Wendy said. "You explain."
"Starting where?"
"The memory gun."
"OK," Dipper said. "Fiddleford invented it thirty-some years ago. It, I don't know, absorbs memories from your brain and stores them in a glass tube. You forget all about the memory, even forget that it was removed. But it's like—this is hard, I don't know the science—it's like there's still a phantom trace of the memory in your mind. If you see what it was, it comes back to you."
"Stan's an example," Wendy added. "He, like, forgot everything! That was how he got rid of Bill Cipher."
"I remember he had amnesia after everything else went back to normal," Pacifia said. "I never knew why."
Dipper nodded. "Yeah, in that case, Mabel got him back by showing him pictures and things. It's funny—he still has blank spots, he says. He remembers everything about being a kid up to when he got kicked out of home."
"Wait, your great-uncle got kicked out?" Pacifica asked.
"At the end of his junior year in high school," Dipper said. "He never graduated. Anyway, we know from things he told us that he spent a lot of time being, I guess, a traveling salesman. He knows that much and can recall bits and pieces now, but he can't remember many details. And then he came to Gravity Falls, and met Grunkle Ford again, and he can remember when Grunkle Ford went away, after that he recalls running the Shack as Mr. Mystery, and he knows the people in town, because once he'd started to recover, just seeing somebody would bring back memories about them." He sighed. "The important thing is, you can recover those memories. Just a little jog will bring them back sometimes."
"OK," Wendy said. "Here's what I didn't tell you. For years and years, there were these dudes who ran what they called the Society of the Blind Eye . . . ."
She described, and Dipper confirmed, the activities of the Society. "The weird thing is," Wendy finished, "those guys thought they were doin' people good. But Doc McGucket agreed that the whole deal was a big mistake. A person's got to come to terms with their memories, not erase them."
Pacifica frowned. "So—these people—stole my memory?"
"One or two of your memories, probably," Dipper said. "We don't know. It would have been something before the summer of 2012, because that's when we broke up the Society."
"Do you have any blank spots?" Wendy asked.
Pacifica said, "I . . . don't know!"
"That's the trouble," Dipper said. "If a memory's taken, you're never even aware of it. Anyway, we can show you what's in the tube. You'll get those memories back. But only if you want to."
"What if it's something I don't like?" Pacifica asked.
Dipper put his hand on her arm. "It's usually not anything real bad. A lot of the time, it's people who accidentally saw the Society members out on the streets at night."
"They kinda stood out," Wendy said. "They wore these bright red hooded robes. They weren't exactly ninjas!"
Dipper flinched at that word, but Pacifica didn't seem to notice. He said, "There's no telling, though. The majority of the memories were of the kind of strange things that only happen in Gravity Falls. Fiddleford once had a run-in with the Gnomes and erased his own memory of them, because little men in red caps were disturbing to think about. Another guy saw some kind of forest giant, like the Ents, and—"
"Like what?" Pacifica asked.
"The Ents. Treebeard?"
She looked at him as if he'd gone crazy.
Dipper said, "You . . . never read Lord of the Rings or saw the movies?"
"I don't like fantasy movies," Pacifica said. "Just romances and musicals."
"The Ents were like, tree dudes," Wendy said. "Giants as big as trees, and they looked like trees, too. The guy Dipper was talking about saw a giant wood-like creature walking around Gravity Falls, and the Society made him forget about it."
"Anyway," Dipper said, "if you really want to see the memory, we can show it—or them, if there's more than one—to you."
"I guess I want to see it," Pacifica said. "But not alone."
"We can watch with you," Wendy said gently. "But remember, Paz, memories are as personal as it gets. If you start to feel embarrassed, we'll shut the machine off."
"Want to go tonight?" Dipper asked.
Pacifica shook her head. "I'm afraid to. Let me get my nerve up."
"The History Museum closes tomorrow at six," Wendy said. "Same as the Shack. I could swing by and pick you up and we could check out the memory then. 'Course, we'll have to sneak in, so we'll wait until dark."
"Are you OK with that?" Dipper asked.
"I—yes, I guess so," Pacifica said. "It can't make me feel any worse than I do right now."
Overhead, a riot of raucous laughter broke out over some remark one of the girls had made. They could hear Grenda's distinctive bellow: "Hey, where's Pacifica and Wendy? They got to get in on this! In on this! In on this!"
"We'd better get back up there," Wendy said.
Pacifica nodded. "Yeah. They've probably decided you and I are off making hot love together."
"Or with Dipper," Wendy said mischievously.
For the first time that evening, Pacifica laughed. "Look at his face! It's glowing!"
And then, to his relief, they left him and went back up to the attic.
Where the noise got twice as loud.