Chapter 11: All Too Easy
(January 1950, August 1946)
The usb produced a shrill whistle, the world faded away, turned dark, and then lightened again. A little. And the air felt still, smelled like alcohol, and was chilly.
After their quick success with the Beatles, the next jaunt, back to Wisconsin on a frigid January day, was to prove similarly easy. In fact, Dipper was starting to believe that Blendin had seriously underperformed in covering his tracks.
In other words, he was being lulled into a sense of security. We all know what that means.
Anyway, of all places, Dipper and Mabel found themselves in a dentist's office on a Sunday—the first of January, as far as they could tell from a desk calendar that had not been changed from the last Saturday of 1949. But it felt like Sunday, and it looked like Sunday, either twilight or early morning, hard to tell with the cloud cover and the whistling wind and the tapping snow.
Mabel found a radio, switched it on, and they heard enough of a broadcast to confirm the date. A news announcer wished everyone a happy 1950 but warned that ice and snow were making travel treacherous, though some thawing might come tomorrow, Monday, in time for the back-to-work traffic. The announcer reminded everyone to "Tune in tonight for the Jack Benny Program," and then segued into a program of classical music, which Mabel switched off. "Might as well explore. We must be here for a reason."
"I feel kind of funny about going through the place like a burglar," Dipper said.
"Not me. I'm a creep!"
Well, two could creep as easily as one, so he joined her. None of the interior doors had been locked, and they roamed through the rooms with the locater silent in Dipper's hand while outside the wind howled and snow pelted the place. While Mabel ransacked cabinets of shiny instruments, Dipper settled in at the receptionist's desk with the appointment book and turned on the green-shaded desk lamp.
And on the page for the next day, Monday, January 2, he read an appointment for Senator Joseph McCarthy: EXTRCTN & BRIDGE.
"I think I've found something," Dipper said. He told Mabel about it.
Mabel had decorated her earlobes with a couple of shiny loose molars she had found in a drawer. "A senator? We landed in politics? Again? Man!" she complained.
"No, remember who Joseph McCarthy was. The 1950s? The communist witch hunts?"
One of the teeth fell off her ear, and she retrieved it from the carpeted floor. "You'd think these would make better earrings. Who cares what politics a witch has? This is a free country!"
So Dipper had to remind her of the bizarre climate of the early 1950s, in which someone merely accused was considered guilty, not innocent, where simply knowing someone casually could be construed as a crime, and where because they couldn't send someone to jail for a non-crime that they hadn't committed to begin with, the powers that be—that were, there was that pesky time-talk again—simply made it impossible for them to work or make a living. "The Red Scare, the people terrified of Russia taking over the world. The blacklist and all. That's the movement McCarthy was sort of a big deal in," Dipper finished.
"Huh. Hey, bring the flashy deal back here into the tooth room. It's huge! I call it Tooth Acres. Get it?"
"Got it," Dipper moaned, closing the book, switching off the lamp, and following her.
The room was big—well, very long, very white, tiled walls and floor, and lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, the drawers bearing labels like Aa-Ad, Af-Am, An-Av, and Av-Ba. Mable opened a drawer at random (Van-Ve). "See? Look at these!"
"These" was a drawer full of teeth molded in what looked like yellowed plaster, each one with a label attached to a red string that wound around it. Not single teeth, mind—whole mouthfuls of them. "Huh," Dipper said. "These are molds of patients' teeth. This one's for Mrs. Lois Vandergrave, see? Top and bottom. Looks like she was a few molars short of a bite."
"Why do that? Why make a model of the bad mouths?" Mabel asked.
Dipper replaced the molds in the drawer. "I guess so the bridges and dentures and things can be made to fit before the patient arrives to buy them and have them, uh, installed."
"Makes sense."
But they really hit pay dirt in the set of cabinets against the opposite wall. Well, not dirt, really, but teeth, but lots of the teeth were gold, so in that way the analogy holds, see, because pay dirt is sand or silt that has flecks of gold—you know what? Never mind. The locater lit up when they pulled one drawer open.
A bridge—two teeth joined by wires, both teeth gold—lay on a cushion of cotton in a box. Beneath the box Dipper found an envelope, which contained a card. In the shape of an equilateral triangle. And it was yellow, with a blue scrawl that Dipper read aloud. "Use this bridge for Senator Joe. You'll thank me later. Uh."
"What's wrong, Brobro?" Mabel asked. "You're all white."
Wordlessly, Dipper passed the note to her. She read the same thing he had just read—but she added the signature: "Bill Cipher!"
"The dentist is following Bill Cipher's orders," Dipper muttered. "No, no, no, this is crazy! But it's possible. I mean, Bill was around in the Mindscape back then, he's trillions of years old—"
"Yeah, he says he is, but you know how he lies," Mabel pointed out. "Might just be billions. Speaking of lying—you know, Dip, these teeth look just like the dentures I tossed into the Bottomless Pit that one time. The ones that got Grunkle Stan in trouble with the law."
"Truth-telling teeth!" Dipper exclaimed, and the locater lit up with a sarcastic flashing red TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH.
"Maybe we should leave them?" Mabel asked. "An honest politician might be a refreshing change."
TAKE THEM, the screen advised. RESULT WILL BE WORSE IF—
The screen ran out of room, blinked off, and then finished—MCCARTHY CANT LIE.
"Huh. Truth works in mysterious ways," Dipper said, gingerly picking up the two gold teeth and dropping them into his pocket.
And that triggered the next jump, to—
New York, New York, toward midday, where Dipper and Mabel found themselves standing on a corner with the world going completely nuts around them. Taxis honked—well, taxis always honk in New York, but these honked like a flock of crazy and infuriated geese who'd just discovered the lead goose had led them out over the Arctic Ocean instead of to Mexico for the winter and who were now seriously pissed off.
People shrieked and laughed and shouted. Some of them blew party noisemakers. Others played ukuleles or trombones. Nobody was producing a recognizable tune.
The air swirled with multicolored snow.
"Confetti!" Mabel pronounced. She tilted her head back, caught some on her tongue, looked thoughtful, chewed, and swallowed. "Yep. Definitely confetti!"
Jostling them on every side bustled thousands of people, men, women, teens, sailors, soldiers, nurses, professional men, cops, cab drivers, sewer workers—the latter were the only ones who had a little elbow room—so many others. "What's going on?" Mabel yelled over the taxis, the kazoos, the whistles, the rattles, and the hoarse cheers.
"No idea!" Dipper bellowed. "In here!"
The alcove in front of a closed bank was, oddly, the quietest place to stand. Mabel was wearing a purple-and-green plaid knee-length skirt, a long, baggy red sweater over a yellow blouse with a butterfly collar, and saggy white bobby sox with black-and-white Oxford shoes. A fussy red bow, not a headband, decorated her hair, which looked as if it had been permed. "Well," Dipper said, "at least you look sort of like your normal self, anyway. The sweater and all."
"Yeah, but it's thin. I like mine bulky and turtle-necked. Look at you!" She reached up and removed his hat—a white baseball cap, but with no pine tree, and quite shapeless, as if the stiffening had long since washed out of it. "Not quite the same. But you don't look bad, sort of attractive in an old-timey way." She clapped the shapeless cap back on his head.
Dipper was in a blue windbreaker, red shirt (Why is it always a red shirt, he wondered), a wide brown belt, jeans faded to a blue-gray and rolled up in three-inch cuffs above the ankles. He, too, wore white socks, but with scuffed brown loafers. He shrugged. "Guess we fit in," he said as a group of chattering high-schoolers went past without giving them a second glance. They all wore rolled-up jeans and bobby sox, too. For a few minutes, Dipper and Mabel stared at the pandemonium flowing past out on the street.
One guy sitting on another guy's shoulders waved a newspaper as they waltzed around through the throng. Dipper made out the big black headline: COMPLETE SURRENDER. Mabel tugged his sleeve. "Hey, wanna see a movie?"
She pointed. Across the street was Lowes Grand, and the marquee said that the picture was A Thousand and One Nights, glorious Technicolor, with Cornell Wilde, Ellen Keyes, and Phil Silvers.
"Don't think so!" Dipper said. "But let's go out and see if we can find out what's happening, and when we are."
They had to hold hands to keep together in the jostling crowd. At one point, a sailor suddenly and without warning swooped in, grabbed Mabel and dipped her, planting a big smacking kiss on her lips, before he whooped and danced off into the crowd. "Not bad," Mabel said, running her tongue over her lips. "But now I think I know what rum tastes like!"
Dipper snagged a windblown newspaper page from the pavement and when they got to a relatively calm corner, he opened it. It was just a couple of pages of want ads, but at the top it had the date: Tuesday, August 14, 1945. The paper was tattered and stained as if it had been on the ground for some hours.
"It's V-J Day!" he shouted into Mabel's ear. He told her the date on the paper.
"What kind of day? Isn't that like tomato juice?"
"Not V-8! V-J! End of World War II! The Japanese agreed to surrender today! Or maybe yesterday! There's a time difference!"
"So, is today Tuesday or Wednesday?"
"I don't know!"
They stopped a slender, giggling woman and asked her, but she only laughed and kissed Dipper. "It's Christmas!" she said before going on.
Dipper wiped his mouth.
"Rum?" Mabel guessed.
"Garlic," he said. "If I'm lucky."
Eventually they realized they were in Times Square, and Dipper found a fresh copy of the New York Times that confirmed they had landed in a celebration taking place on Wednesday, August 15. "The surrender agreement won't be signed until September," Dipper started to explain, "but the fighting's stopped and the war's over—"
"Wish I had my grappling hook!" Mabel said as someone bumped into her with a "Whoops! Sorry, girly!"
A guy with a big blocky camera was snapping away, taking photos of revelers, of servicemen, of ordinary citizens whose expressions ranged from delighted to dazed. "It meant so much to these guys," Dipper murmured.
"Here comes the sailor again!" Mabel warned. "Don't let him grab you!"
As the sailor came grinning up, reaching once more for Mabel, she pointed. "I got mine! There's a lonely nurse, though!"
The sailor tacked and changed course, the photographer snapped the kiss—
And the rest is history, as they say. The man with the camera produced an iconic photo that Mabel caused to happen without meaning to. In years to come it became a symbol of American celebration of a hard fight won at last.
That must have been exactly what they were there for, because in a blink, like magic, Dipper and Mabel were out of there.
And back into the featureless nowhere room outside of time. The walls said in their monotone, "The easy part is over."
"No welcome?" Mabel complained. "We're your guests!"
"Easy? You have got to be kidding me," said Dipper.
The wall remained calm and said in its monotone, "From here on the difficulties begin. You have been awake for twenty hours subjective time. You must now rest for ten hours. You must absorb nourishment. And then you begin again."
"Have we at least done a good job?" Mabel asked.
A long pause, and then the wall grudgingly said, "We judge you adequate. Empty your pockets now, Dipper Pines. When you awaken, you will receive a receptacle that will contain all and make everything portable—"
"Bag of holding," Dipper said.
"—so you may deliver the items if and when you meet Blen—what did you say?"
"Bag of holding. Like in Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons. A plot device. A bag that you can never fill up."
"Hermione's purse," Mabel said helpfully.
"Mabel's normal sweaters," Dipper added. "Hammerspace."
"All right," the wall grumped. "Yes, like that. It was supposed to be a surprise."
Dipper hadn't finished his explanation: "The pocket in this suit is like that."
"But it is limited. This will serve for the rest of the journey."
"OK. Are we going to be sent to the past to sleep or—"
"No. That is merely a stopgap. You require real rest. Your beds."
From the left wall a bunk grew. Dipper remembered Blendin's dismal apartment—one tiny room, one tiny bunk. This bed obviously operated on the same principle. A similar bunk emerged from the wall at the foot of the first bed.
"The first is Mabel's. The second is Dipper's."
"Does it make a difference?" Dipper asked.
"Mabel prefers a temperature of two and a quarter degrees warmer than Dipper."
"OK, I guess. Uh—no pillow or cover?"
"Lie down."
They discovered that once they lay down, the bed poofed up a pillow-like pad beneath their heads, and a blanket, or blanketoid material anyway, crept up from the foot to cover them. Despite looking as if it were made from tile, the bed felt soft and snug. Really it was quite comfortable.
And all at once, Dipper discovered that his eyes felt as if they had been removed, rolled in fine sand, and reinserted. He yawned so wide that his jaws creaked.
"Well—good night, Sis."
"Zzzzz," Mabel replied.
Feeling oddly nostalgic for the summer they had been twelve, Dipper fell asleep to the rough music of his sister's snores.