“Just turn around, Soliloquy. Maybe he was robbed and stripped of his clothes. Whatever happened to him, he needs help. He’ll freeze to death out there.”
I’m dubious, but this is Forbes asking. Forbes, who uncannily finds people in need no matter where he is. He was watching the surrounding landscape while my eyes were narrowed to the road in front of me, so I give credence to his sighting.
The fact he is speaking at all is an improvement. The drive from downtown San Diego until now had been repressively silent. He was nursing wounds from a beating recieved in defense of his latest runaway. God, I wish he wasn’t so determined to seek out damaged people and try to help them. His sometimes misguided intentions just get him into trouble. At 6’2” and 220 pounds, he’s a formidable presence, but he’s only 16 years old with the mind of a teenage boy, not an adult.
I find a place to turn off of the road to make a U-turn and then head back. “He’s on our right?”
“No, he’ll be on our left, after this curve, where it opens up to a field...there! See him?”
In the distance, I see what looks like a naked person walking in the snow. The person is too far away to make out whether they are male or female. The figure’s back is to us which makes it even more difficult, but from where I sit, the person definitely appears to have no clothes on.
“Stop the car there,” Forbes commands, pointing to a spot where the shoulder widens. He reaches into the back seat and grabs one of the blankets we keep handy for the kids. Once I’m pulled over and stopped, he opens his car door and a blast of snow-filled freezing air fills the front seat area. Without a word, he launches himself out into the cold, slams the door behind him, trots around the car, and then across the road. He jogs out into the snowy field with his boots sinking up to his shins. I watch him for a few seconds then turn my attention to the person off in the distance. Whoever she or he is, the person is walking in a small circle going nowhere. Hunched over against the cold, the person’s arms are folded across their chest to fend off the freeze. The snow gathered on their head and shoulders is a sign indicating the person has been exposed for some time. Their walking in circles instead of heading towards the road for help is not good. I’m guessing advanced hypothermia and delirium. If the person has frostbite, then toes, or worse, could be lost.
As Forbes, waving and yelling, nears the person, they remain oblivious to him and keep walking in a tight circle. When he finally reaches the person, he follows behind and starts to brush the snow off of their shoulders. He appears to slip and fall to the ground, landing on his butt. There he remains, unmoving, arms and hands splayed out into the snow—long enough for me to become alarmed.
Thinking he might be injured, I start to get out of the car but stop when he slowly pushes up from the ground. Once he stands upright, he brushes the snow off his clothes and then waits for the person to circle back to him. When the person nears him, he throws the blanket over their shoulders from behind. The person stops walking and simply stands still. Forbes rounds the person, adjusting the blanket here and there, getting it in place and then carefully directs the person toward the road, holding onto the blanket where its edges come together. With one hand he leads the person back to the car, like pulling a horse by a rope. Odd action. I wonder why the less than sensitive treatment. As they near, I see by the growth of hair on the person’s face, it is definitely a man. The blanket covers him to his knees. His hair is matted and wet.
When the two of them reach the road’s edge, I get out of the car and go around to the rear door where I open it and spread a second blanket out on the seat in preparation for them. Finished, I look up and see Forbes crossing the road with his bundle of naked man right behind him. I wait patiently by the door, ready to help the poor guy into the car, wondering if he is a homeless man in the later throes of hypothermia where one feels like they are burning up as they near a frozen death. It would explain the nakedness. People in that state strip off their clothes to cool down.
When they are within a few feet of me, Forbes stops. “Don’t touch him, Soliloquy. Too much pain. It threw me off. Took moments to get past it. You drive and I’ll keep him at a distance in the back seat.”
If anyone else had spoken those words, I wouldn’t have understood, but with Forbes it’s different. Over the last few years, he has become an empath with astounding sensitivity. He literally feels your pain when he makes contact with you. I know because I am the same, only more so. If the man’s pain was powerful enough to drive Forbes from his feet, it would be worse for me.
“We need to get him to the Julian Medical Clinic,” I say.
“No. Not him. He’s different. Messenger can doctor him. There’s more to him than you see. He’s here for a reason. Here for us. We need to keep him a secret, at least for now.”
“You felt that out there? What happened? What did you see?”
“I saw...I saw,” he stammers for the correct words. “I saw...the future?”
Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 2
I hear Forbes in the back seat phoning Messenger, explaining our passenger’s predicament, prepping him for our arrival with the mystery man, assuring him that he, Messenger, is the one who needs to care for the man, that we cannot touch him without trauma to us. Looking in the rearview mirror, I snatch glimpses of the man while trying to keep the car in the correct lane. A car flies past us in the other direction, throwing salted snow up onto my windshield, blinding me for a nervous second until the wipers sweep it all away. The sound of the fans blowing heat into the car is comforting in contrast to the eerie silence of the naked man. When I glance in the rearview mirror, I see he is shivering and looking down at the floor. An empty seat separates him from Forbes.
“Messenger says to bring him to the back of the house by the kitchen entry. He’ll be readying the bathtub with room-temperature water.”
It’s fortunate today is Monday, Messenger’s day off from the restaurant. He doesn’t have to leave work to do this since he’s already home with our kids—14-month-old Sonnet and 2-month-old Zed. “I can watch the kids while you and Messenger thaw out our friend,” I tell Forbes. “Make sure Messenger is gentle. You know how he can be sometimes.”
“Got it covered.”
“So...the future?” Now that we’re settled and on our way, I want to know more about what he said earlier.
“I’m not sure.”
When I glance at Forbes in the mirror, he seems to look worried, but his battered face makes him hard to read. His left eye is swollen nearly closed. The left side of his face is puffed out and cut and bruised. The men he scuffled with hit him hard with a two-by-four. Fortunately the ER doc said there was nothing broken, at least not this time. I don’t want to think about what the next time will be like. I sigh in frustration. While I worry about Forbes, he worries about the strange man next to him. Forbes, I lament to myself, always putting others before himself.
“Anything specific?” I ask.
Forbes shakes his head. “It was like a tidal wave slammed into me when I touched his skin. There was so much pain...pain for extended periods of time...awful! Beatings...torture. I’ve never experienced this much volume before. It was overwhelming. Kicked my ass.”
Beatings, rape and other sundry depredations are nothing new to Forbes because of his self-styled quest to seek out damaged people, so when he says it was extreme, I am immediately wary. What kind of environment does a person come from where they end up naked out in the snow and can send Forbes reeling at first touch?
“Do you think he’s a cartel victim?” The Mexican cartels have a history of terrorizing people.
“No. Not of our time. Something we haven’t lived through yet. A war of some kind. I’m not even sure he’s from our continent. Everything felt so different.”
“You don’t think maybe you’re getting mixed signals because of his incoherent state? Or possibly he’s brain damaged?” I can’t accept Forbes’ gut feeling the man is not of our time. Slowing down time relati
ve to some other place is understandable, but the concept of someone being able to go back in time? That’s just sci-fi comic book stuff. The man must be so damaged that his memories are simply scrambled up with delusions that make him impossible to read.
We near the road that will take us to our home in the hills. In the distance I see the snow-covered roofs of our house tucked into the trees. Smoke is drifting up from both of the stone chimneys.
“You think he was captured and systematically tortured?” I conjecture.
“Definitely. The torture was extended for days, weeks, months even. Maybe years. What I felt—I don’t know how someone could survive that. And there is something else about him, something very old, before his time, maybe before our time.”
As the road sounds change and diminish, I hear whispering coming from the naked man. After I adjust the rearview mirror to get a closer look at his face, I see that his lips are moving.
“Forbes, what’s he saying?”
He leans in to the man, bringing his ear to within a foot of him. “Sounds like a foreign language. Some kind of chant. He keeps repeating the same thing over and over.” His repeating something over and over adds credence to my assessment of brain trauma.
I make a left onto the road that takes us to our house. The pavement is slowly filling up with inches of snow which makes me glad our vehicles are 4-wheel drive and equipped with snow tires. Ahead of us, the windows glow warm yellow in our Craftsman two-story home. I turn off the road and ascend the sloped driveway to our garage at the rear of the house. The kitchen entry screen door is ajar. I see footprints in the snow that go from the house to the garage and then back again. This year’s expired Christmas tree is lying on its side off of the driveway and slowly getting blanketed with snow.
“So he’s from our past and from our future, but not of our time,” I say.
“I know what you’re thinking, that he’s giving off nonsense vibes, but I tell you it’s what I feel and I haven’t been wrong yet.”
There is always a first time, I think to myself. The door to the kitchen opens and Messenger is there waiting. I park about ten feet away, turn the engine off, get out and open the back passenger door where our guest is shivering under the blanket. I step back and gesture towards the man. Messenger is walking up to us. He takes one look at the man, shakes his head in sympathy and then stoops down to help him out.
“He’s in bad shape, poor guy. Where did you find him?”
Forbes has exited the car and rounded it to our side. He gives a cursory explanation that emphasizes the need to keep the man our secret for the moment and that he is probably better off under our care than at the clinic. Messenger expresses mild doubt, but goes along with everything, saying he’ll have the guy in better shape in a few hours, if that’s possible.
Neither Forbes nor I give Messenger a hand with the man, beyond opening and closing doors. It’s better not to risk additional contact with him until we speak with him. Getting to know someone first before reading them is a way of bracing against whatever they’ve been through. It lessens the impact of our secondhand experience at the time of physical contact.
After I check on the kids and am satisfied they’ll be fine on their own for a while, I return to watch Messenger slowly easing the man into the bath water, rubbing him to get circulation going again. There are fresh wounds on his body that bleed out into the water, coloring it red, then pink.
“He doesn’t speak to us,” Forbes says. “He just whispers the same thing over and over.”
“He’ll need stitches on some of those cuts,” Messenger observes. “I’m no doctor. I don’t see how we can keep him here. He needs to go to the clinic.”
“We should leave it to him. Maybe he’d rather not be in a police report,” Forbes suggests.
“We won’t know if he doesn’t talk and by the look of him, I’m not sure thawing him out will make a difference. I’m guessing brain injury. Look how vacant his eyes are.” Messenger parts the man’s hair to reveal a bump, bruised and cut, on his head. “If he’s had a concussion, he may need more than we can give him. I don’t think we have a choice.”
Forbes hands Messenger a soapy washcloth to clean the wounds. The whispering man meekly allows Messenger to manipulate him in the tub while he cleans him up.
Forbes looks at me. “What do you think? Being this close to him, do you get any sort of a cursory read?”
“What I get is his odor. Phew. Like horse manure and sweat. Like he’s been rolling around in piles of it. Look, you can even see manure in his hair. What would make someone do that? And look at his skin.” I point to a place where the dirt is washed off. “It looks so pale, almost translucent.”
“Vampire?” Messenger jokes. He lifts the man’s upper lip to reveal the lack of enlarged incisor.
“You’re a funny man,” I reply dryly. “But he’s no albino, or is he?”
“His hair would be white, Soliloquy. It’s just everyday light skin.” He directs the handheld shower head over the man’s freshly lathered hair. As the suds rinse away, the light fair color is clearly visible. “But he has extensive scars. Look at his left arm. It looks like someone took a blowtorch to it sometime in the past.” The man’s skin on that arm is wrinkled, mottled pink, white, red and fair.
“If he stays, Forbes, he sleeps with you out in the guest house where all your other friends usually stay,” I announce.
“Of course. No one gets near the kids. Wouldn’t want to expose them to some whispering lunatic.”
“We need to get him stitched up,” Messenger interjects. “The more I clean him, the more he bleeds.”
Forbes suggests, “What about Cindy at the Julian Animal Hospital? I can get her to come to the house. You know she has a crush on me. She could stitch him up here. No police.” Cindy is a cute 20-year-old veterinarian student interning at the clinic. The first time she met Forbes a year ago when we brought our dog in for shots, she couldn’t keep her eyes off of him.
“You know her well enough to ask her? I was unaware the two of you kept company. You’re a little young for her, don’t you think?” I say.
“Soliloquy, I am ‘a little too young’ for almost all the grown women who throw themselves at me. You know how it is.”
I do. Poor Forbes, looking like a grown man while being just a kid has had its down side.
“If we aren’t taking him to the clinic then it has to be Cindy,” Messenger says. “Call her, right now. We can wrap his wounds, but the sooner we get them sterilized and stitched up, the better. She can probe them and see if they are more serious than we think. If they are, he goes to the clinic, no arguments, okay?”
Forbes nods agreement, takes out his cell and walks out of the bathroom to make the call. The naked man has become silent and doesn’t even grunt as Messenger shoves and twists him to get him cleaned. He stares straight ahead, impassive and pliable.
“Think he’s dangerous?” Messenger asks.
I slowly shake my head. “Can’t tell. Without contact he’s a blank to me.”
Messenger makes a deep sigh. “You know, if he’s as bad off as Forbes says, you’ll have to be the one to explore him. Forbes is too young and inexperienced.”
“I know. I don’t look forward to it,” I tell him.
“Or we could just turn him over to the police and let them sort it out. We don’t have to get involved.”
“I know, but I can’t dismiss Forbes’ impression. We’d get strong resistance from him if we turned this guy away, and you know how he is these days. We’re hanging on by a thread with him. He’s so headstrong.”
“Headstrong is putting it mildly,” Messenger says, “completely out of control, is more accurate.”
This has been an ongoing conversation for us. The rift between Forbes and his parents, Bob and Maggie, grew to such a level that Messenger and I thought maybe it was time to give everyone a breather from each other. Our offer to have him move into the guest house was welcomed by all.
Forbes returns, smiling. “She said she could get away in about ten minutes, said she’ll bring the necessary supplies, said it would be no problem.”
“Anything to be near her precious Forbes,” Messenger teases.
“Don’t,” Forbes says. “And please don’t embarrass me with your dumb jokes when she arrives.”
“Moi?” Messenger feigns injury.
“Yes ‘Moi’, Messenger. I’m serious. Just don’t”
Messenger makes a little laugh then pats Forbes on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll let it go even though you know it goes against my wonderful fun-loving nature. It will be just business, no games.”
Forbes snorts. “Nothing is ever ‘just business’ with you. But I’m asking nicely, let it go. Don’t antagonize the situation...and before you give me another dumb ‘Moi?’ put yourself in my place for once. Think you can do that?”
Before Messenger can respond, I intervene. “Messenger, you’ll have to be the one to hold this guy down when she gets here. Forbes and I can’t help. Think you can manage alone?”
Messenger studies the naked man for a moment. “If he’s as docile as he is now, it should be no problem. Even if he gets anxious when Cindy is working on him, I think I can manage. He doesn’t seem too muscled. In fact, he’s pretty thin and weak, like someone who’s been underfed for a long time. I don’t think he’ll be a problem.”
Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 3
The episode with Cindy went well yesterday. Even with Messenger inviting her to dinner and Forbes shooting him eye daggers in response. Fortunately, Cindy politely turned down the offer, saying she had to get back to work. Before she left, she sedated the man and we tucked him into bed in the guest house for the night with Forbes saying he would watch over him, just to be sure. Messenger and I both concurred with his course of action. So when I checked in on Forbes and the man this morning, I wasn’t surprised to find Forbes asleep under a down blanket in the thickly padded chair next to the man’s bed. Both were getting what was probably much-needed sleep.
Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series Page 12