One Week of Wonder

11. In Your Dreams

(August 27, 2015)

From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Thursday morning, 6:15. Maybe it was just a dream. That makes sense. I'm getting all angsty about going home and being away from Wendy for maybe a few months, maybe most of the year. In a way I hate to leave. The Shack seems almost like home to me now, sometimes more than our house in Piedmont does.

And I've been upset about the business with Mabel, like a throwback to when we were twelve and she messed herself up with Smile Dip . . . and lots of other things. I keep thinking about all the people who died when Brujo was coming after us. For the longest time, I didn't realize that as he came, he was murdering people along the way. Traci among them. I liked Traci a lot. I wish . . . never mind.

But—you know, I still feel guilty. Because Ford and I didn't catch on earlier. Because we didn't stop him before he came so close. What we did worked—but people died because we didn't pick up on the clues.

It's OK to tell yourself, "Well, I didn't know at first what we were up against." But then you think, "I SHOULD have known."

And other stuff. Mabel's so looking forward to getting her driver's license. I'll get mine, too—I'll pass the test, and with what I've learned from Wendy about driving, I won't have any trouble passing the road test, either. I can even parallel park now without breaking a sweat.

Still—Mabel thinks of driving as an adventure, but I think of it as a challenge. A car can kill you if you don't pay attention—or kill someone else, which in a way might be worse. I'll do all I can to drive defensively and so on, but I'm always a little nervous behind the wheel.

Strange that Mabel used to dread growing up, and now she's embracing it. I'm the one who's worried and afraid.

Lots of anxieties. I'm super-stressed but trying to hide it.

Ah, I'm trying to avoid writing about what happened just now.

OK, I had this dream.

I think it was a dream. I may talk to Grunkle Ford about it. He says he's had visions before—not dreams, but warnings, omens, whatever you want to call them. This, I think was a dream.

I think.

But maybe not. Maybe Ford will know.

Anyway, it was very nearly a lucid dream. I wasn't conscious enough to be in control, but everything had the clarity of ordinary life. Sharp, with colors—most of the time I don't seem to dream in color, but this time, I definitely did.

I was standing in this . . . place. It seemed to be made of stone, marble, maybe, blindingly white. Light shone all around. It was a huge building, temple, shrine, cathedral, whatever it was. Or maybe a museum or a center of learning.

But . . . empty. The floor stretched away in all directions, and in the dim blue distance, I could see tiers of arches rising up and up until they got lost in the distance. If there was a ceiling, I couldn't see it—just a brilliant glow. I might have been in a Roman building that was five miles across, and who knows how tall.

Trying to decide where I was, I turned all the way around. I was wearing, well, ordinary clothes. My sneakers, my jeans, a red shirt, and my cargo vest. And my pine-tree trucker's cap. I think I yelled: "Hello? Is anyone here?"

Nobody answered, though, so I started walking. I didn't have any goal—just maybe to cross that immense floor and get to the distant arches. I don't know what I expected to find, or if I expected to find anything. Though my sneakers were rubber-soled, my footfalls echoed: slap, slap, slap. They had the monotony of a clock ticking.

I was in dream-time, maybe. Anyhow, I walked and walked and walked and never got any nearer to the arches. Finally, I stopped and said out loud, "Please, can I speak to you?"

I didn't know who I was talking to.

"Behind you." It was a soft voice, a woman's voice—I think—and I turned around. Somehow while walking away from that wall of the huge room—I had arrived at one of the archways. She wore a hooded robe, midnight-blue. Beyond her the arch opened into space, I suppose. A deep-purple void sprinkled with a few stars and streaked with red and green streamers of incandescent gas.

I just stared. It was a woman—again, I think—tall and slender, with an olive-gray complexion. A kind, smiling mouth. No nose at all. And seven eyes.

"I know you," I said.

"Oh, yes?" She held out an hourglass. "Have some tea."

I looked again. The hourglass was a cup. But hourglass shaped. Tea in the bottom was pouring upwards into the top. "Thank you," I said, accepting it. "I've seen the sketch that Grunkle Ford made of you. You're the Oracle. I don't remember your name."

She smiled. "My name is Jheselbraum the Unswerving, as nearly as your language can contain it. 'The Oracle.' Yes, he called me that. Then you should know I mean you no harm."

"I'm not afraid," I said. That surprised me—because it was the truth. I wasn't the least bit scared. Not normal for me. I sipped the tea. It was better than Mabel Juice.

"You want to ask me something," she said.

"If you know that," I told her, "you know what my question is."

She materialized her own cup of tea, except her tea glowed a fluorescent blue. I'd seen something like it before, in Time Baby's bottle during Globnar. "You're a refreshing young mortal. Sit, be comfortable."

And of course, a sofa had materialized behind me, stacked with soft cushions in yellow and blue. "What's the answer?" I asked.

She raised her cup as though in salute. "The answer is you are here because you need to be here. Things are about to change, Dipper Pines."

I felt a chill run up my spine. The last time I'd heard something like that—Bill Cipher was promising the end of the world.

"Oh, yes, he's here," the Oracle said. "Or at least a projection of him is."

And then Bill himself was seated on a sofa that appeared next to mine. He wore his top hat, his bow tie—the tie still in the colors he'd taken from me—and he also held a cup of tea. And he was my size or larger. "Hiya, Pine Tree," he said in his familiar voice. "I don't always get along with our hostess, but she brews a good cuppa tea." He lifted his hourglass-shaped cup, his stick-finger pinky extended. The liquid in his hourglass-shaped cup was a boiling, steaming red.

"I brought you here," the Oracle said—whether to me or to Bill, I don't know—"to say goodbye."

I felt a little leap of panic. Bill has been part of me for years now—and he'd kept insisting that his presence in my heart, a literal presence, a few Bill-molecules that had saved my life when my heart stopped, had changed me, had made me—well, what I am now. More confident, more willing to take risks. A runner on the track team. A musician. A writer.

Someone who dared to love Wendy Corduroy.

"You're taking him away from me?" I asked.

"She no can do, kid," Bill said. "That little bit of me will be with you to your dying day. However, it's toodle-oo for now. Thanks for the memories. Breaking up is hard to do. You will survive. Just gonna stand and watch me burn? Nothing I can do, it's a total eclipse of your heart. Man, you meat bags love to sing about breaking up."

"Wait, wait," I said. "If part of you is going to stay in my heart—"

"Presence is a given, but communication's the prob," Bill said. "I'm gonna be incommunicado for a while. Years. Maybe weeks, even! You won't hear from me, but I'll be around . . . watching you. Always watching." His one eye rolled toward the Oracle. "Am I telling the truth, Jhes, babe?"

"Don't call me that." The Oracle sipped her tea and to me said, "Bill made a promise to the Axolotl, through me," the Oracle said. "He must fulfill it. Don't think of me the wrong way, Dipper. I am not omniscient. I can see many things in many dimensions. Most things. All dimensions." She blinked all seven of her eyes in sequence and smiled. "Occasionally, however, something can surprise me. When Bill restarted your heart, against all odds—when he did something that he claimed was totally selfish, though I know truly it wasn't—that surprised me. He has made some progress on the path he must take, a few short steps. But now time to fulfill his promise has come around. Bill has some growing up and adjusting to do."

"Yeah, yeah, I've been naughty, I've had my time out, now the test is coming up. Thing is, Pine Tree," Bill said, after having poured about half his boiling-hot cup of tea into his eye, "the fragment of me that's in you isn't big enough to have its own intelligence. It draws on the rest of me, which exists not in reality but in the Mindscape. But that's about to change. I'm going to get my second chance, right, Oracle?"

"Your very last chance," she said with a demure smile. "Courtesy of the Axolotl. No matter how powerful you think you are, you know he can defeat you with almost no effort."

"Yeah, Old Frilly is the big kahuna, blah, blah. Thanks for reminding me," Bill said sourly. "Anyway, part of the deal is I get a new body and a new brain and all that goes with it—physical existence. The downside is, I'm mortal. My understanding and knowledge and everything start from a nearly blank slate. My tabula's rasa. In other words, I got no mental radio equipment to speak to you through the molecules that are still inside you."

"So—this is goodbye forever?"

"Ness notcessarily. When my body's mature enough, then with patience and practice, I can recall my old knowledge and control what I do in the Dreamscape, and then all lines will be open, with operators standing by and bystanders ready to operate. Until then—radio silence, kid."

"I'm not sure I understand," I said.

Bill shrugged. "Let me simple it up for you: I get this one mortal life to prove I can be good, then when the body dies—my essence goes free again, and then if the Oracle and the Axolotl both judge I'm worthy, I'll get to go back, maybe, trillions of years, and have a do-over in my own dimension. My incarnation is gonna be like my final exam for getting a second chance. Maybe this time I can keep myself from slaughtering my own family and wiping out all sentient life in my dimension. That would be a good think, I thing. Anyways, kid, you've been coming to me sometimes with questions or asking for advice. That ain't gonna work for probably a few years. You're on your own, alone again. Naturally."

I felt my heart sinking. "Sometimes I do need help," I muttered.

The Oracle smiled. "And you can always find it. In your Grunkle Ford or your Grunkle Stanley. In your sister Mabel. In your true love, Wendy. Or in any one of all your friends. Most of all, within your own heart and soul, Dipper Pines. Stand up."

I did, and she leaned forward from where she sat and touched my chest. "Bill is mistaken about one thing. I could take this fragment of him from your heart and not harm you."

"Aw, come on! At least leave the kid something to dismember me by!" Bill complained.

The Oracle smiled again. "So shall it be. The little morsel of Bill will remain in you, though I could remove it without harming you physically. I am the only one in the multiverse who could."

"I don't know how I feel about that," I admitted. "Relieved, I guess. I'm sort of used to it."

"Then we will leave the molecules where they are. Though after today you cannot speak to Bill through the molecules, at least for some years to come, the confidence and determination their presence lends you will stay. And one day you will be able to communicate again. Perhaps sooner than you fear. The flow and ebb of human time baffle even me."

"We'll meet again," Bill said, and he started humming.

"Don't remind me of Weirdmageddon," I snapped.

"Sheesh, touchy subject! Well, kiddo, until next time. Say hi to Fordsy for me—tell him I still think he would've made a heck of a henchmaniac! And tell Stanley I don't have any resentment toward him for that punch in the stonework, even if the next time I see him I may try to rip his eyeballs out of his skull, see how he likes it! Ah-ha-ha-ha! Look at your face, Pine Tree! Serially, though, I'm kidding. I mean, sure, I'll miss you, but my aim is getting better! Hey, tell Mabel I'm sorry I never got around to possessing her. She doesn't miss what she's knowing! And give Red my very best, which is about twice as good as your very best, believe me or don't!"

I just stared at him. I never know what to make of Bill. I guess I never will.

His cup vanished, he rose and hovered in the air, and extended his hand. In a quiet, serious tone, he said, "This is goodbye, kid, at least for a while. Before I go, will you shake my hand? Gesture of friendship? Of non-enemyship? No deals, no tricks, no hits, no errors, no one left on base?"

I looked at the Oracle, who returned my gaze without giving any hint.

"OK," I said, holding out my hand. "Good luck, Bill."

And he jerked his thumb back over where his shoulder would have been if he'd had one. "Psych! Ah-ha-ha-ha!"

He vanished before the sound of his laughter faded completely. "He's insane," I told the Oracle.

"I think that greatly depends on one's frame of reference," she said. "Remember, Dipper, Bill will be watching from inside you, even if he can't speak to you. And I'll be watching from all around you. As you said to Bill, Dipper Pines—good luck."

She swept her palm down over my face, I closed my eyes—and instantly opened them in my bedroom.

And it's taken me half an hour to write this out, and I still don't know if it was all a dream or not.

I didn't feel any different. After I woke up, I didn't try to call on Bill—I had no reason to.

But what if in the future I get in trouble—

No. I can't think like that. Not any longer.

I'm going to be sixteen. I can't rely on Bill to give me advice or a nudge or a bit of help from now on, even if part of him lingers inside me.

I guess—though I'm scared—from here on out, I'll have to rely on everything else that's inside me. And on my family and my friends and my goofy sister and the girl I love.

Maybe even my own heart. My own soul.

And maybe that will be enough.