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.