Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

A young, redheaded woman, about twenty-three, came to the door in a long skirt, braless under a Bach t-shirt.

  “Hi?” she said, like it was a question, her toes twisting in the carpet as if they were cramped.

  “Are you Marianne?” I didn’t think so—Marianne was older than me, by about two years.

  “No, I’m Molly. I’m busy.”

  I looked closer at the skirt and said, “Handspun? You’re a weaver, John Amber told me.”

  “That one? Mum…m.”

  “John wanted me to give Marianne a message. I was going to leave a note if no one was home.”

  “Don’t ever do that in Berkeley. You’d get us robbed. Where are you from, to do such a thing?”

  “From the country,” I said. “Virginia.”

  She looked at me like what an idiot. A black man, almost asleep, padded downstairs and snuggled up behind her, arms reaching around her waist. He asked, “Who’s this?”

  “Sam, he’s looking for Marianne.” She leaned back against the black guy. The black guy was her lover. I felt weird, then ashamed of my racist streak.

  “We’ll give her your address,” Sam said in most proper and chilly English.

  “Please do,” I said. They stared through me hard enough to have spotted my computerized plastic skull bone. “I wanted to thank her. For helping John Amber.”

  “Yeah, John Amber,” Sam said.

  I didn’t go home then. Virginia or Federal law might be waiting on the comer of Milvia and Cedar to recall me to jail.

  At sunset, on the corner of Shattuck and University, I stuck out my thumb and hitched, to the sunset. Carstairs wasn’t there. After the night came, electric glitter under us, I rode back down with the guys who’d driven me up. They discussed sunsets in Mexico, Japan over Mt. Fuji. I almost told them about the sky around Karst.

  Back at my apartment, the phone rang as I put the key in the round hole. Maybe someone’s watching?

  “Have you seen Alex?” The female Barcon sounded worried.

  “Nope. I went by the Schweigman house.”

  “Wait on that.”

  “I left word. Marianne wasn’t home.”

  “Put her off until we find Alex. “

  I told them, “He’s been hanging out with a Lawrence Lab researcher named Jerry Carstairs. Drinking at an Irish pub. Have you seen Alex’s car anywhere?”

  “Parked at his apartment.”

  “Well, do you want me to check with Carstairs?”

  “Do.” The Barcon hung up. I got out the phone book and looked up the number for Lawrence Laboratory, called and asked, “Do you know when I can reach Jerry Carstairs?”

  “Doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “What about his home number?”

  “Call personnel, ten to four, work hours. Sorry, okay.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t know what to think. Whatever, I’d have to wait until morning. I turned on the radio and tuned in the weird listener-supported station, but that was playing some squealing code.

  I froze in cold sweat, then the announcer broke in, “We’re going to blackbox twenty-four hours a day next month, so subscribe now for a descrambler at present subscription prices.”

  Code but not for me. I collapsed giggling on the ratty couch, part of my brain rather coldly watching.

  Nobody came by or called the next morning, so I began reading The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830, by Donald Keene. The Federation, I thought, was fairer than the Dutch traders at Nagasaki.

  At noon, I heard a knock on my door, light-fist, not like a Barcon’s. Slowly, I got off the bed, marked my place in the book with a grocery slip, then went to the door. “Who is it?” I asked, slipping the chain on. I looked through the open bedroom door and calculated how fast I’d have to run, how long the door would hold up if Feds were behind it. The backyard fence I could get over fine.

  “Marianne. You came by yesterday?”

  “Yeah.” I opened the door as far as the chain allowed. Her hair was long, black, held away from her face by a silk scarf. She turned her head and stared at me through one brown eye, a tongue stuck out between full lips. She licked the chain, nibbled it as though she was mocking my paranoia. She was mocking me. I’d seen women like her buying organic groceries with food stamps in Floyd when I was twelve, sneaking around, watching hippies.

  “You said you know John Amber. Is he okay?” She sounded female over “him.” I unchained the door, wondering about what had gone on before the Gwyngs found me in Virginia.

  “Yeah, he’s okay. He’s back in Asia now.”

  She stared at my mouth as though seeing the surgery that gave me all the Karst phonemes. “He didn’t sound Asian. And where are you from?”

  “I was born in rural Virginia, but I’ve been in Asia a few years.”

  “Speak some.”

  I told her “I’m sorry, but I don’t know much,” in Yangchenla’s Tibetan.

  Her eyes widened. “Holy shit.”

  I opened the door all the way and said “Do you want some lunch?”

  She came in and stared at me, then spoke two sounds, one a dental t, the other alveolar. “Can you tell the difference?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I pronounced them and realized that my alveolar ridge had reshaped from human norm.

  “Yeah?” She sat down. “Okay, I’ll have lunch with you. I’m curious. Am I getting myself in danger?” She grimaced as though that hadn’t come out quite the way she’d wanted it to.

  “Nope,” I said, concentrating on putting phonemes where they belonged in my mouth the old Virginia way.

  “How did you meet John?”

  “Through some friends of his who got stranded in Virginia. How did you meet John?”

  “He and a black girl were living here, and my sister and her husband thought they’d help out another interracial couple. I’m not sure John and Rhoda were lovers, though. Big tension between them, like they were illegal aliens stranded together, used to being in a larger social group.”

  “Yes,” I said. She guessed well, made me quite uneasy.

  “I worked mainly in linguistics, but we got exposed to considerable social anthropology, too, in that.”

  “You teach?”

  “No, I just fool around." She suddenly sounded sad—drop this, I thought.

  “I’m doing some research on Japan now.”

  She went um, a noncommittal um. I put two frozen pies in the microwave. “You don’t eat tempeh, do you?” I had to ask.

  “My parents were nuts about it.”

  “My parents are dead, too.”

  She stared at me, her finger rubbing between her lips, then said, “So we’re both orphans,” with a cryptic smile playing between the words. She sure didn’t remind me of Floyd stock come from Germans.

  “Were your parents Californians?” I asked as I pulled the pies out of the microwave and put one in front of her.

  “They came here from New York in the sixties, following a rimpoche. Burnt radicals.” She opened the pie crust with a fork and looked in dubiously.

  Rimpoche—Yangchenla used the word sarcastically to mean darling, but the other Tibetans used it for priests, precious one. “I just can’t escape Tibetans,” I said.

  “What you spoke? You learned that in Tibet? How did you get in?”

  “Snuck. I don’t believe in passports.”

  “Speak more. “

  “Come on, I’ve told you I was illegally in Tibet.”

  “Um, um, uh. I don’t believe John Amber had traces of Tibetan patterns in his speech. And there’s more to yours.”

  She’ll crawl up your mouth after the strange sounds, Black Amber had told me. I said, “Minor stroke,” wondering if I should trickle out some drool.

  “Not if you can hear the difference between dental and alveolar t’s.”

  “I’d prefer that you not analyze my speech,” I said, arching into high English but slopping into Karst phonemes. She stared at my mouth like a bird dog on point. Oh, shit. I bent over and sho
ok her knee.

  “Tom, tell me if I’m in trouble with my questions?”

  “No.” Her knee was knobby under my hand, the thigh above it muscular. I lifted my hand before my fingers could squeeze harder.

  She tried to spear a chicken nugget out of her pot pie, and half giggled, half choked. “God, we’re nervous people, aren’t we? How long have you been in Berkeley, Tom?”

  “Couple of days. I’m doing research on industrial development in Japan.” I was a bit bewildered by her near giggle.

  “Why?”

  “To help some people get industrially developed without getting swamped by an alien culture.”

  “John Amber’s people?”

  “People in the general area.” Let’s not have her and Carstairs putting their guesses together.

  We finished eating without saying anything more. Then as I crumpled up the pie pans, she said, “Hey, don’t throw those away. Recycle.”

  “What?”

  “Wash all aluminum cans and pie pans, take them down to the recycling center. If you don’t need the money, tell them to donate it to the Job Corps. Sorry to snap. It’s the way my parents brought me up.”

  I swayed slightly on the balls of my feet, pie tins still in my hands, and said, “When in Berkeley, be eco-deco.”

  “You say John is okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the others.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m glad they sent word.” She looked around the apartment, then up at the glitter ceiling. “I could show you where recycling is.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got a freight bike”

  “Is it like a Vector?”

  “Nope. Like an Asian freight bike.”

  I tucked my chin down, wondering if she was trying to trap me into admitting I’d never been in Asia. She took the pie pans out of my hand, washed them, and put them in a paper bag. “So, Tom, you have secrets. Relax, I won’t make any more guesses.”

  “Thanks. Now take me to recycling.”

  “Wait a few days. We’ll have a full load between your house and mine.”

  She left and I felt infinitely more lonely. No Alex, light-years from Granite—and Marianne’d gone, too. The book on Japan lay spine up, pages spread over grease patches on the table. Shit, that Japanese librarian will kill me.

  For the rest of the week, I lived off things that came in aluminum, collecting a huge heap of cans for recycling.

  I also bought lettuce plants. But snails by the hundreds, huge ones, led by a snail big as a softball, I swear it, ate the lettuce down to the ground.

  The female Barcon called to ask if Alex had stopped by, hung up when I said, “No, not yet.”

  I couldn’t do anything except read about Japan or defend my lettuce. I went to the Co-op and asked the garden clerk, “What kills snails?”

  “Corey’s Snail Kill, but…”

  Fuck ecology. It’s Corey’s Snail Kill time.

  I bought my box of Corey’s and was walking back to the apartment with it when Marianne pedaled by on a contraption that looked like a torturer’s bike—little narrow seat, straps, clips, skinny tires, toothy metal gear spinning on the back hub. She wore skintight pants and a jersey zipped down to between her breasts, black plastic straps over her hair.

  Ecological Berkeley women wouldn’t approve of Corey’s. And if Alex was gone, in Federal hands, I ought to be making plans for another life, not be pissing around saving lettuce from monster snails.

  “Hi, Marianne. Is it ecologically unsound to poison snails when they eat my lettuce?”

  “Fatten them on cornmeal and eat them instead. Tell me if I ought to send out more resumes or work on getting my time trial time down to a sub-26.” She sounded tired.

  “What are you talking about? Sub-26? You’re a linguist, right? Get a job in that if you need money. Do your time trial if you don’t.” Time trial on a bike?

  “Sub-26 minutes for a ten-mile bike time trial. The CIA has jobs, but they’d never trust me. I’m a third generation red diaper baby.”

  “Communist?”

  “Weather Underground. Grandparents were stodgy Stalinists, and my parents rebelled. So I had to become a serious scholar except for a bout of Zen mysticism.”

  “What happened?”

  “I converted my parents to Buddhism. Weather Underground had a high burn out rate.”

  “So you pedal around wondering what to do next?”

  “Tom, training for racing doesn’t let you think. She stroked the bike’s lugwork with a hand in a punk glove. I thought punk had died decades ago, then I read that the punks had stolen bikers’ gloves. She saw me looking and pulled the gloves off—half fingers peeled inside out—to show me sunburn spots on her hand. “Matches the mesh.”

  Bike racing—that explained the knobby knee, the firm thigh under my fingers the first day she’d come over. “I’ve got lots of stuff to recycle, Marianne.”

  She pulled her glove back on and said, “Oh. Yes. You can ride a bike, can’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Probably Sam’s will fit you.”

  “I could ride the freight bike.”

  “Nah. You’d…is your male ego fragile?”

  “No, sort of,” I admitted.

  “Well, let the freighter slow me down. I’ll spin a low gear, and we can ride together.”

  I shrugged, male ego plotting to outride her, and walked home to flatten my cans. Ten minutes later she knocked on my door, still in the funny bike clothes, with rocker-bottomed shoes that lifted her toes up off the ground. Behind her I saw the three-wheeled freight bike and the other bike.

  She told me, “I took off the toe straps so you wouldn’t go down if you forgot them.”

  “You ride to the dump in those clothes?”

  “Normally, not. Recycling’s in the flats.”

  As if that explains something. I was about to hop on the bike and ride, but she pulled out a hex key and fiddled with the seat and handlebars. When she’d adjusted it, I lifted the bike. It almost flew through the air, it was so light.

  “I eyeballed it, so now let’s see if you need to fine-tune the fit,” she said, wiping the hex key and putting it up her pants leg. The nylon was tight enough to hold the key in place.

  She beat me—downhill on a fucking freight tricycle. I got off and walked around the recycling yard to cool off while she talked to the halfbreeds that ran the place.

  “Tom,” she called to me.

  “I’m not pissed.”

  “If you’d trained for as long as I’ve trained, I’m sure you could beat me, okay. I feel awful when guys act like I’ve castrated them when I beat them on a bike.”

  “O-kay.”

  “Take it easy. The freight bike falls faster, too, and we were going downhill.”

  “You could have let me beat you,” I said, then wished my tongue had gotten bee-stung before I said that.

  She put her bike-gloved knuckles on her hips, then, said, “Tom!” like I’d exasperated her. Then she pushed her hair back and pulled on the helmet made of fat plastic straps.

  Commie idolatrous bike racer. “Train me. I’ll get a bike.”

  “Do you know how expensive these are?”

  “I’ve got money.” I’d beat her eventually.

  “Okay.”

  On the way back, I noticed the slums we’d raced through the first time.

  “I lift weights,” I told her when I handed her back the bike. “I should have gone faster.”

  “It’s cadence,” she said. “Women generally get better form quicker than guys, even if we aren’t as strong. And we were going downhill. The freight bike falls faster.”

  “So you ride a bike all the time?”

  “Yeah. I…well, since I didn’t have anything better to do, I started when my last grant proposal was turned down.” She took the handlebars of the bike I’d been riding in one hand, grasping them in the center where they joined the bike, and pulled it along beside her as s
he pedaled the freight bike toward her house. "But I’m too old to be a pro, so I’m just wasting my time,” she shouted back.

  When I unlocked my apartment door, I heard the phone ringing. It stopped before I could answer.

  I put out the snail bait that night, fuck Berkeley ecological women. In the morning, the backyard was littered with snail bodies, most curled back into their shells, some dangling out like misshapen penises. I gathered the dead and dying, all slimy, into a paper bag, which I dumped in the dumpster. Marianne, come back and I’ll never poison snails again.

  A dragging ass Lincoln pulled up by the dumpster just as I let the lid bang down—Carstairs driving, with Alex. They’d both grown beards, grubby weirdos in shades. “Alex, you dwarp!” I yelled at him. “People been calling asking if I’d seen you. And Carstairs, you don’t work at the Laboratory anymore.”

  “We were out celebrating that,” Carstairs said, pulling off the shades and putting on his black-rimmed regular glasses.

  Alex fished a pack frame and pack with a sleeping bag strapped to it, out of Carstairs’s trunk. "Just like Kerouac—mountain climbing, Zen shouts. Jerry come in.”

  “Who was this Kerouac?” I asked. Carstairs looked at me and blinked, then shook his head slightly, seemed somewhat nervous. Maybe real nervous and hiding it.

  He said to Alex, “I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Alex looked very alien then, squatting down by his pack. The scars where his crest had been cut off showed as fine raised white tissue running from his hairline over the bald crown of his head. He fingered through one of the outside pockets and got out his keys. Alex, what have you been doing? His beard hadn’t grown in a human pattern, missed his lip as though he’d shaved off a moustache and left the rest stubble.

  “Are you a danger to your friends?” I said to Carstairs. “You drink a lot.”

  “I think not,” he said, rather disdainfully. “Because Alex…” he shut up.

  “Tom, Jerry’s my friend. Really.”

  “We need to talk about this. We all have to talk.”

  “Jesus, Tom,” Alex said. “Let’s get inside.”

  “I’m really Alex’s friend, Tom. Really.”

  “Please, Jerry,” I said, more and more afraid Carstairs would babble about aliens to whiskey-treating bar pals who’d be FBI getting him drunk to find out the truth about his weird companions. Of course, it would sound so crazy that he’d get locked up, not Alex.