Once again, Danny had no memory of coming up the hill. Only when something different came up did his running come to his conscious attention.
I have been following that ancient inscription because it gave me the idea that helped me overcome the Gate Thief. But the Belmage is definitely not a gatemage, and the inscription sounds as if it’s a battle between two gatemages. That’s what the writer probably thought it was. But Loki-this Loki, the one I know, the one whose gates are inside me-he realized what the Belmage really was.
If the Belmage had been a Gatefather, it would have done no good to take all the gates.
So the inscription accidentally taught me how to fight another gatemage, but it taught me nothing about how to fight a manmage.
And not an ordinary manmage anyway. The Belmage.
Belmage Belmage Belmage, echoed the voices.
Who in the world can teach me about the Belmage? Danny asked.
Nobody in the world today, that’s who, Danny said to himself. For fifteen centuries and more, gatemages and manmages have been killed whenever and wherever they were caught. How can anybody possibly tell me about the Belmage?
Loki, that’s who.
Yes yes.
But he doesn’t tell me anything. If I’m supposed to learn from him, why isn’t he here teaching me?
He won’t he won’t.
Then how can I learn? Who knows?
Silence.
You know, Danny said silently to the voices. You know. Loki won’t tell me, but you know everything he knows and you serve me now, you’re mine now. So instead of obeying him and keeping silent, you’re going to teach me.
Silence.
So teach me.
He was off the bridge so the vibration under his feet stopped. Solid ground felt almost boring after the bridge.
He stopped and waited till traffic cleared so he could make the dangerous crossing of Route 11 to get on McCorkle Drive, which was far safer to run on than 11.
You’re not going to teach me, Danny said to the voices.
Silence.
But you want to teach me.
Silence.
Danny thought about how he couldn’t remember much about the running that had been controlled by his own outself. He realized that the voices had brought that memory to his mind. A memory of what he had failed to remember just a few minutes ago.
But it hadn’t been their memory, it had been his. They didn’t have memories, they could only prompt me to remember what I already knew.
Well, that’s a dead end. I can’t remember what I never learned.
Remember.
How can I remember? I never knew!
Re. Member. We. Re.
It was so vague. No words. He had no words to explain to himself what they were trying to say.
You do remember.
Remember.
But you can’t tell me what you remember.
Almost. Warmer. Warmer.
He thought again about how he had been able to think back and remember the cars that had passed him. Cars that he hadn’t been conscious of when they passed him, and which he had forgotten until he tried to remember them, but then the memory had surfaced. Sort of. Vaguely.
You remember, he said to the voices, but you don’t remember that you remember. Something has to call up the memories. You have to be tricked into remembering. You have to be reminded in order to remember.
The voices flooded him with relief. He was right.
He was also standing on the edge of Highway 60, directly across the road from the combination McDonald’s and Citgo station. How could he possibly already be here? No way had that much time passed.
But it had. He could think back now and remember every curve of McCorkle Drive, every uphill and downhill. He could even remember what thought he had been thinking at each stage along the way. The distance he covered had nothing to do with how much thinking he got done.
And now he remembered that he had been distracted repeatedly by other thoughts. He had thought about Pat and wondered what it would be like to sleep with her. Had thought about Xena and realized how dangerous it was to let himself think about her much more powerful sexuality. Thought about Nicki Lieder and wondered what her game even was and wondered even more how she had figured out that he had done something to heal her.
Yet he also remembered thinking a clear chain of thoughts about the Belmage and Loki’s gates and how they put thoughts in his head and whether they could remember things and …
This was their demo. They were showing me how they held together a clear, continuous chain of reasoning even though I actually got distracted by thoughts of women and also by some of my anger at Coach Lieder-I had been thinking of that when I actually crossed 11, about what an asshole he is, trying to get me to stick it in Ricken’s face. I thought about so many things, I wasn’t concentrating on one thing at all.
But something kept pulling me back, something held on to the thread.
It isn’t just running that the gates, the outself, can take care of for me. It’s also my thinking. They have no language, they can’t tell me any memories, but they can prompt me to think back and recover the memories …
There’s still the problem that I don’t have Loki’s memories so you can’t prompt me to recover them!
Silence.
But you didn’t prompt me to remember anything, Danny said to them as he realized it. I prompted you to remember it and then you fed the memories to me.
That’s what you want to do. You want me to somehow prompt you to tell me what Loki learned.
Yes yes yes.
How?
And then, for a long moment, he became profoundly stupid. Completely lost. He stood there looking blindly at the road, seeing nothing, and thinking absolutely nothing. A complete stupor.
A police car pulled up in front of him. The window came down. Danny walked over to the window, bent down to look inside.
“I couldn’t tell if you were trying to cross the road or what,” said the cop.
Danny realized that the “or what” might have something to do with throwing himself in front of a semi-truck.
“Just deciding whether to go to McDonald’s or just run back home to BV.”
“You’re going to run to BV?”
Danny indicated his clothes. “I was at the track meet at Rockbridge.”
“They have a team bus.”
“Coach Lieder pissed me off,” said Danny.
The cop grinned. “OK, I get that. Just … if you cross the street, be careful. You looked like you were about to cross, but you somehow froze in mid-step. You know? Like a freezeframe in a movie.”
“I had no idea,” said Danny. “Just got caught up in an argument I was having with Bleeder. Inside my head.”
“Well, just remember, nobody ever wins an argument with the coach.” The cop gave him a little wave and drove off, the window rolling up as he went.
Nice guy.
Danny turned to face south on 60. Stay on the left side. Don’t cross the street.
He didn’t run. He jogged. Shambled, really.
What was that about? he asked the voices. What had he been thinking about when he suddenly got so stupid?
He was asking the voices how he could prompt them to tell him about things that only Loki would remember.
And then he realized. They had demonstrated something. That had disconnected him from the moment. Or they had disconnected his own gates, or distracted him-something. They had done something so that his body didn’t just keep on doing what he told it to do, the way Loki’s gates had kept on following his instructions while he lived in a tree, the way Danny’s outself had kept on running his body while he thought about other things.