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At a certain point, Dib can’t tell whether he made the whole thing up. The thing with Zim, that is. In the years after he drops out of college, his previous life feels like a dream. Adulthood has a steep learning curve, and it’s all Dib can do to keep from metaphorically flipping over backwards. He doesn’t have time to revisit the past. He’s too busy trying to make rent.
The further he gets from it, the more surreal it seems. Dib believes in lots of things—ghosts, the pseudoscientific method, Murphy’s Law—but it’s too coincidental that his childhood interest in extraterrestrials would be confirmed by the arrival of a real-life space alien bent on world conquest. It’s like the time he accidentally ate some of his old roommate’s edibles, the ultra-janky ones you’d get back before it was legal, and believed for a weekend that he had developed ESP. In both cases, the sole source of evidence was Dib’s perceptions.
He finds some of his old diaries. They support his suspicions. In the hundreds of fanatically detailed pages on Zim’s activities, technology, biology, and speculated future plans, all he sees is a bored, lonely kid with an overactive imagination and a morbid streak.
He brings it up to Gaz the weekend he helps her move out for grad skool, since they started talking again last year. She’s been living at home throughout college to save money. It’s just the two of them alone in the house. Professor Membrane is at a conference on the moon; the robots are all long deactivated, the experiments buried or sent away. Dib hasn’t spent this much time in his childhood home since hi-skool.
It’s surreal to lie awake in the same bed he did as a teenager, to stare at the faded glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling and struggle with familiar restlessness. This house stews with feelings he still can’t deal with. He doesn’t know how Gaz does it, but then he doesn’t know how she does anything.
They’re going through boxes of stuff in the garage, searching for a special crockery set that Gaz swears exists. To compensate for his poor sleep, Dib has drunk too much coffee. A mishap with an ambiguously labeled storage tub—why does their dad keep so many human remains around, anyway?—evokes a repressed memory, and Dib breaks into sharp laughter.
“What?” Gaz has also had too much coffee. She takes hers with tooth-grinding amounts of sugar, so she’s on the verge of crashing hard. Dib makes a mental note to order pizza. Vegetarian pizza.
“Just, those livers. It reminded me of… uh… this time when I convinced myself that this kid in my class was hoarding people’s organs.”
“That sounds like something you would do.”
Dib laughs. “Yeah. You know, I’m not even sure he existed? Zim, I mean. That was the kid.”
Gaz, sifting through a box of arcade prizes, stops short. “What are you talking about, moron? Zim was totally real.”
“Don’t call me a moron,” says Dib on autopilot. “Wait, what?”
“Zim existed. As far as I know, he still does. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve had plenty of delusions over the years, but Zim was real.”
“Don’t screw with me, Gaz. Not about this.”
She rolls her eyes. “Look at your eighth grade yearbook.”
“Do you think I know where that is?”
“It’s on the trophy shelf, dumbass. Right over there.” Gaz gestures at the space Professor Membrane had cleared for their school and extracurricular awards. Most of it is occupied by Gaz’s perfect attendance certificates and esports victories, but there’s some of Dib’s stuff too: a ceramic bowl from his psychiatric outpatient program, a participation award from the fourth grade science fair, and, yes, a slim hardback volume.
“Why did Dad put my eighth grade yearbook on the trophy shelf?”
Gaz shrugs. “It was the first time you got more than three people to sign it. Go ahead and blow your own mind, Zim took up a whole page.”
Dib fetches the yearbook. The theme that year—sponsored by Deelishus Weenie, huh—was “Better Living Through Meat.” He flips through, skimming blurry photographs and stilted copy, recognizing some faces and cringing at the memories that arise. There’s no Zim in the student portrait section. Dib’s own portrait looks impossibly young.
Near the end, he finds it.
Generally speaking, Dib isn’t a crier. He’s not stoic like Gaz, but he doesn’t… Point is, it takes something significant to make him leak from the face. Like an infection, or a drastic recalibration of his worldview. Like the stupid shit Zim wrote and drew in Dib’s yearbook, and oh my god, Zim, how could Dib ever forget him? That fucker.
He traces Zim’s spiky signature with a shaking finger. He feels, improbably, joy.
“Are you crying?” Gaz is horrified.
“He took two pages,” Dib informs her.
“And you’re crying about that.”
“Shut up, Gaz.”
“Did you seriously think you’d made him up?” She’s looking at him too keenly. “You were completely obsessed with him. Every day it was like, ‘Can’t talk, gotta go break into Zim’s house and steal his dirty laundry.’ For seven fucking years. And then there was that thing with the wormhole—”
“That happened?” Dib interrupts.
“Boy, something really did a number on you.” Gaz exhales. “Look, I don’t have time for this Wizard of Oz routine. Whatever you’re arguing with yourself about, it probably happened.”
Dib must still be gaping at her, because she squirms in the way that means she’s really uncomfortable and adds, “He did steal those organs. I remember you whining about your spleen. Can we focus?”
“My spleen?” Dib sputters. Gaz groans and turns aggressively to the stacks of packed boxes.
The next box contains a doll that tries to kill them, so the subject is effectively dropped. Gaz refrains from calling Dib a moron for the next hour, though, and she only makes him pay for half the pizza.
The memories don’t come back to Dib right away. They trickle in slowly, or maybe drip, like an IV. And it’s not that he forgot them, so much as misremembered. Now he’s remembering. Now he’s letting himself remember, instead of trying to cram his thoughts into a narrative to please a doctor or his father or his own occasional desire for peace of mind. The narrative emerges on its own.
A long time ago, Dib thought the only person he could trust was himself. Then his brain got fucked to hell, and he didn’t even have that. He likes to think he’s learned how to grapple with his, uh, issues—to endure, if not to master—but he’s never going to have the same confidence he did. Maybe that confidence was born out of ignorance; maybe it was a symptom of the problem. Does it matter? He is who he is now. He’ll just have to work with that.
He revisits his diaries from a new perspective. They’re easier to read now. He analyzes what data he can glean and makes cautious conjectures regarding the rest. He wouldn’t say that he feels hopeful now, but he certainly feels less hopeless. Just knowing that Zim might be out there somewhere…
Some nights Dib climbs up on the roof of the local 11-Seven and listens for transmissions. He never hears anything, and his efforts typically find him and his equipment lightly crusted with bird shit, but his heart always leaps at that last step to the top. But there’s nothing. Maybe Zim forgot him too.
Then one night he hears something. It’s Tak.
Her ship left years ago, blasted itself out of the Membrane family garage and right through the door. Dib was seventeen and about to be hospitalized; Gaz was at camp or something. He vaguely recalls shaking his fist at the sky. Other concerns had pressed more urgently then.
Tak is shouting over the communicator, upset in a language Dib no longer understands. In a panic, he calls Gaz over. It’s lucky for all three of them that she finishes chewing him out in time to arrive at nearly the exact second that Tak lands.
It’s really lucky that he and Gaz are talking again, because she’s the only person Tak will even look at for months.
So. Yeah. Life goes on, despite the alien exile in their midst. Tak gets menial retail jobs and beats Gaz at PvP. Her deactivated SIR unit remains in her ship, which is chained in the basement of Gaz’s student housing, and she almost murders Dib when he asks about it. (This is, for the record, the last time Tak tries to kill Dib on Earth.) She answers most of his other questions.
It should be enough, to know that he was right. But it isn’t.
Someone’s been stealing packages from Dib’s apartment complex. He mostly gets bills and junk mail nowadays, so he’s not fussed. His neighbors are, though, and the halls soon fill with flyers sporting grainy security camera shots of the “porch pirate.” The shots are usually caught from behind, sometimes showing just the thief’s feet or the back of their head. At least one neighbor uses the crime spree to file a fraudulent insurance claim.
He’s only spoken with his downstairs neighbor, like, once, so it’s a surprise to find her at his door one morning. She’s buzzing with energy, shifting from foot to foot. He hears her talking to herself as he frees the locks on his door.
“Uh, hi?” he says, and she pushes inside, babbling.
“—tacos. Wrappers EVERYWHERE. They said I was crazy, but if you just look at the footage — ”
So that’s how it feels to be on the other side of this. No wonder Gaz gets so annoyed. Dib feels his face redden.
“You see?” his neighbor challenges, shoving a cell phone video under his nose. “I knew it was robots!”
Dib takes the phone. While she continues to rant, he watches the video. Then he watches it again.
Dib spends the next several weeks in a state of escalating anticipation. Now that he knows Zim is nearby, it’s hard to think about anything else. Rekindling his obsession: just like riding a bike. Except now… nah, that analogy’s too complicated. Something about appreciating the scenery.
Despite extensive preparation on Dib’s part, Zim’s actual arrival takes him by surprise. One minute he’s researching just how expired frozen tater tots can get before they go bad; the next he’s staring down at a tired-looking, negligibly taller version of the only reason he survived middle school.
Zim has ears now. Huh.
He’s not sure how he fumbles through the subsequent conversation. His sweaty hands can’t work the door right, and his blood rushes loud in his head. Zim’s plan is ridiculous, of course, predicated on his usual batshit assumptions about human society; Gaz is guaranteed to lose it when Dib tells her about his alias. Dib has no clue where Zim thinks this thing is going. He can’t wait to find out.
He cleans the apartment as best he can, resorts to shoving some things out the window. He can’t seem to stop smiling. In the hallway, he hears Zim’s robot start to sing.
“It’s safe to come in now,” Dib calls, but the only thought in his brain is: Finally, finally, finally. I missed you. I love you. You’re here.