Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  “Come on in,” Alex said again.

  “I have to think about things,” Carstairs said. “Let’s all go to the pub Wednesday night.” He turned the ignition key, his head cocked to the side as if listening for tuning problems.

  “Wednesday, then,” Alex said. He looked around him and put his keys in his jeans pocket. Carstairs backed out into the street, waved as he pulled away.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked Alex.

  “Parked. Can I come in?”

  “Sure. The black guys have been worried about you?”

  “Hnyeh, I’ll call them, but don’t you tell them you saw me.” I unlocked my door and we went in. Alex pulled what looked like a pen out of his pocket, pulled the pocket clip completely off, and began using the pen-disguised scanner on the walls, behind the sofa, and around the stove.

  When he’d finished, he pulled out the ink barrel and scraped off the micro-electronics with a Swiss Army knife from his pack. As he put the pen back together again, he called on my phone and said, “Gee, guys, don’t be paranoid. I went camping with a friend. I’m not a parolee, for pete’s sake.” He stared at me with suddenly alien eyes when he said that—brown with whites too small, tinged yellow. “Okay, I’m at Tom’s apartment, but I won’t be staying long.”

  I heard one of them grumbling in English about “second-rate academics who…”

  Alex’s fingers strangled the coiled phone wires. “I’m not a second-rate academic.”

  “Why don’t you both discuss it later?” I said.

  “Yeah, Tom worries about me, too,” Alex said to the Barcon on the phone. "I’ll drop by later tonight okay.” He hung up and stood looking at me for a while, then picked up his pack, pulled it on, strapped the waistband tight. “Toni, be cool.”

  “I…forget it.” If I got him really pissed, he could leave me stranded in Berkeley, even call in to the police with an anonymous tip after my fake fingerprints grew out. “I got used to lots of strange companions when I was in Asia.” I was proud of myself. I didn’t put any weird stress on Asia.

  “Well, I need companions,” he said, voice suddenly gentler. But then he said, “Maybe you befriend aliens because you can’t rank among your own?”

  I was bewildered by that. He went all the way out the door, closed it behind him. Marianne! I’d sworn I wouldn’t jump the bones of Black Amber’s designated good female human, but sex with her now would connect me to humankind.

  The phone rang. I answered it. Barcon. “Is Alex still there?”

  “No, he just left,” I said. “I don’t expect to see him before Wednesday.”

  The Baron, the male this time, hung up.

  The next morning I called Marianne and asked her if she’d help me buy a bike like the one I’d ridden the other day. We transferred buses all over Alameda County to end up in a warehouse district knocking on a metal-cased door to a shop with windows painted black and grated over.

  “Yo,” a male voice called.

  “Reeann and a friend,” she called back.

  The steel-sheathed door groaned open—a police lock bar rubbing in a slot behind it—and I saw a thin guy with prematurely grey hair straggling out of the rubber band holding most of it behind his neck.

  “Tom, this is Roger Strigate.”

  “Hi, Roger.”

  “What you need?”

  “Prices. Scare him away."

  “Twelve hundred dollars stock framed, silver brazed. Fifteen to seventeen hundred dollars custom. If you can ride stock, I start at fifty cm.”

  “Try stock,” Marianne said almost flirtatiously.

  The bike dealer said, “You’re a bit big for a bikie, not too long in the leg though for stock. Reeann’s perfect size for a bikie, five feet eight.”

  “Give him the fully fitted price,” Reeann said.

  “Dr. Schweigman, does the man get a club discount?”

  “Can he get mine?”

  “Well, okay, so the whole bike is $2500 with Frageolo-Campangnolo, or $2300 with Toyota, or $2000 with used bits and pieces.”

  Whatever happened to the K-Mart special? I said, “I’ll need those rocker bottom shoes, too, won’t I?”

  “Reeann, has he ridden a real bike before?” The guy picked at a solder burn on the back of his hand between the wrist and the index finger—scuffy-looking hands, muscled for hands the way Reeann’s legs were muscled.

  “He wants it,” she said.

  Roger chuckled. No bike could cost so much. “Are your frames worth it?” I asked.

  The man’s face almost crystallized, muscles rigid. Shadows from the overhead fluorescents made him look gaunt, like a movie priest. He muttered, “There’s a store on Telegraph for people who want toy bikes.”

  “No,” I said. If she wanted to scam me for an ex-lover, maybe she’d feel guilty later. I took out my checkbook and began writing the check. Bike clothes, shoes, the works.

  “Relax, Tom. You said you wanted the best.”

  Hell, it isn’t real money, anyway. And I felt the need to spend some—like wasting money would reduce my tension. Roger put me on a contraption like an exercise bike with plumb bobs. While I pedaled, he shifted the metal angles of the thing, muttering to himself about “mashers” and jotting down figures.

  Finally, he said, “You can take a stock fifty-eight centimeter frame if we’re fitting you for racing. I’ll use a 150 millimeter stem. You’ll take medium shorts. Medium jersey might not fit—you’re long in the torso.”

  “And a helmet and gloves,” Reeann added.

  “He really hasn’t ridden any kind of bike, has he?”

  “Not a ten-speed,” I said.

  “It’s too much bike for you,” Roger said, battered fingernail tacking out the bill on a photoelectric hand calculator.

  “No toe clip overlap?” Reeann asked.

  “Na, just about a thirty-eight inch wheel base. You want to buy extra tires, extra wheels now?”

  “Give him itty-bitty clinchers and gum tubes.”

  Totally adrift in their jargon, I felt my face getting hot before I laughed at myself among such alien humans on my own planet. Skitter, skitter, my pen on paper wrote out a big check without hesitating. We couldn’t take the bike with us. Roger had to put it together from components. I asked, “Marianne, want to come with me and some friends to an Irish pub on Wednesday?”

  “Thistle and Shamrock? They’ve got free hors d’oeuvres Wednesday.”

  “Friend’s taking me—don’t know which bar.”

  “I’ll come by Thistle and Shamrock if I can. If you’re there, you’re there,” she said, maybe making an attempt to evade me.

  On Wednesday, Alex was at the door with his grower/user ID dangling down the front of a gray ribbed sweater, beard grown out even more, with a fake moustache slightly darker than his real face hair. “Ready?” he asked.

  I looked at him carefully, but even though the yellow whites of his eyes showed swollen blood vessels, he seemed sharp, unexpectedly sharp. “Can you drive?” I asked him.

  He shrugged and said, “You can do it. Car’s not too far off norm if you can handle a stick shift. Did you tell our friends where we were going?"

  “The black friends?” He nodded, so I said, “I just said I wouldn’t see you until Wednesday.”

  “Shit,” he said. After I got in the car and checked out the controls, he dropped drops in his eyes which seemed to make the blood vessels swell more—faking stoned, I realized, fascinated.

  “Shit, man, yourself. I did tell Marianne.” I turned the key in the ignition, to the right. No? To the left—the engine sounded like a pillow-smothered motor boat.

  “Don’t want to see them. Chilly black bastards.”

  I wondered what a quarrel between Earth watchers would do for me—alien assholes. “Tell me where to turn.”

  “It’s out Telegraph.”

  “We going to pick up Carstairs?”

  “He’s meeting us there.” Alex rolled another number and smoked it as though it w
as a cigarette.

  I didn’t even ask for a hit. “That doesn’t affect you much?” Did that sound enough like an ordinary question? He rolled his bloodshot eyes at me and laughed, almost an ordinary dope-stoned giggle. I thought, I hate people from the Institute of Analytics and Tactics. A and T, T and A, I hate spies.

  A cop on a blue-cowled motorcycle flashed me over.

  Fuck it, I thought, almost jamming us against the dash as I jerked through a gear change, swerved up against the curb, and braked. I smiled up at my reflection in the cop’s helmet visor. Boy they expect trouble here—not mirror shades, a wraparound helmet with brow to chin visor.

  He held some high-tech kin to a short cattle prod in one hand and said, “Roll it.”

  Alex reached over me and rolled down the window, smiling stupidly at the cop. My hands coiled around the steering wheel, my asshole began to pucker. “Give him your driver’s license,” Alex said. I turned red and pulled it out of my pants pocket, s-l-o-w-l-y.

  The cop pulled my license up to about eye level, sucked up some of the car air with a small vacuum cleaner rig, read a meter on it, and told me, “Any more smoke in the car and I’d bust you for operating while contact high.” He flipped his fingers to the visor joint, then waved us back into traffic.

  I looked over and saw that Alex was sweating. He asked, “What was jail like?”

  “Hideous,” I said, “but you’d be in a different jail. Federal prison, I believe, with tennis courts.”

  Alex looked at his eyes in the rearview mirror. “You think I’m teasing Carstairs. He’s figured out something and he’s teasing me.” He got one of his pens and cradled it in his hands as though it was hot.

  I looked down at it when we stopped at a traffic light, noticed the yellow cap was turning dark. Is he bleeding? Alex dropped the pen out the car window when we got going again and leaned back against the seat. He didn’t say anything about the pen, so I worried as I drove, he directing me. The traffic cop bugged us. The Barcons. The Feds. My parole officer. Shit.

  “If Carstairs is there, the black guys will be too nervous…” He didn’t quite finish the sentence, sucked in his lower lip, and ran his tongue between lower gum and teeth.

  I parked behind the bar. Alex touched my arm just as I was about to get out. We paused there, headlights washing over us as more cars came into the lot, his face half shadows and scars.

  “Go,” he said. Gravel creaked underfoot. I looked back. Alex’s body rolled almost like a Gwyng’s, his legs swinging wide before he planted them. I know my business,” he told me quietly. “You’ll see how well in a moment. The blacks won’t dare mess with me here.” He meant the Barcons.

  The front of the bar was dark glass with spotlit weird harps and tin whistles behind it. As we walked through the swinging doors, I noticed that most of the people were white, divided between college types and older, coarser. Two blacks, no, two Barcons waited for us at the end of the bar, hunched over drinks, with space around them, even though the crowd was hip to ass in the rest of the bar. The Barcons got up and began moving toward us.

  “I won’t pay you for a burn,” Alex said loudly.

  The Barcons stopped. “Nigger dealers,” someone in the bar muttered, face lost in the crowd. I saw the smaller Barcon’s jaw seem to break between the chin and ear, and both their noses pulled in. Why doesn’t someone see?

  “We must talk, outside.” The Barcon male shook his hands as though flipping off sweat.

  “I’m meeting a friend here.”

  A beefy guy stepped through the crowd, pool cue in one hand with a razor scar running across his knuckles.

  “We know Alex,” he said. “Leave him alone.”

  “We have to discuss business with him, a Barcon voice said behind me. A second pair of Barcons stood near the doors. Another white guy in a blue nylon jacket stepped through the crowd, oil on his jacket, hand in his pants pocket—brass knucks, heh, boy, or a gun?

  “Leave us alone,” I said to everyone. The two other Barcons came up behind me. I didn’t want to choose sides.

  Then Carstairs swung the doors back and stopped, arms blocking the entrance. He stared with twisted delight at the whole scene, glasses askew on his nose. He saw me and shoved his glasses back, index finger against the greasy bridge then giggled helplessly as the door on that side flapped against him.

  The Barcons froze, the smallest female at the end of the bar quivering, jaw bones jerking. Is everyone too drunk to see how alien they are?

  I expected the cops any minute—saw the headlines as though they were hanging in neon in the bar smoke ALIEN SPIES CAPTURED IN BAR BRAWL.

  Carstairs got out of the doorway and said, too loudly, “Tom, what is going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No?” He pulled a barstool up and grabbed my hand.

  “If I…” He had a small trocar ready to plunge into me.

  “He’s taking tissue samples,” I said.

  The Barcons behind me grabbed the troccar, broke it against the bar. The crunch sound brought a white boy around to face us. The female Barcon at the end of the bar whimpered.

  Then Marianne came in. “Tom?”

  “Help me get all these people out. Alex needs to talk to the four black guys, but not here.”

  She loosened her shoulders as if cocking them, then did the same for her hips, and said, “Very definitely not here.”

  I couldn’t believe it when she walked up to the guy with the cue stick and took it out of his hands. “Trust me,” she said to him, jutting her hip out against the man’s thigh, “they won’t hurt Alex.”

  The female Barcon began making funny noises, huwh, huwh, deep in her throat. Her mate pushed his knuckles down on her spine.

  “Who are you?" The guy with his hand hidden in his pocket asked Marianne.

  She ignored him. “We ought to try down the street. Better bar for our discussion.”

  “Why?” Alex said.

  She said very loudly, “I met you with John Amber, didn’t I? Was he pimping the black girl or were they lovers?”

  Alex paled along his skull where the bone crest had been. “I’ll come,” Carstairs said, still amused “I like black bars, too.”

  “Holler if you need us,” the man who had the cue stick said. He looked at Reeann as if thinking How did this little bitch get my cue stick away?

  She put it back in his hands and walked toward me, hissed in my ear, “Racists,” her hand on my shoulder.

  “Carstairs wanted to take tissue samples,” I said to Reeann as we walked to the cars, adrenaline still zinging at my fingertips, my gut cramped. “I should have let him.”

  She patted my cheek almost like a cat, violence padded behind the fingertips. Or sex? Then she said, “Was John Amber a DNA recombinant experiment?”

  “Carstairs was a weapons designer. Alex is crazy.” I told the others, “I’ll ride with her.”

  “I took the bus,” she said.

  “In the car with us, then,” the female Barcon who’d been scared in the bar said. “We want to thank you.”

  “I know it’s tough on blacks in parts of Oakland.” The Barcon put her hands on either side of her nose, trying to hide the wiggle, nearly hysterical for a Barcon.

  Reeann looked carefully at them as she got in the car, then looked at me, at Alex getting in his car with the other pair of Barcons, and tucked her chin down, her tongue making little wet sounds inside her mouth as though she wanted to be talking.

  She knows now, just like Carstairs. She almost put her hand on my leg, but the hand rocked in the air.

  “Miss, are you Tom’s friend?” the male Barcon asked almost casually.

  “We just met,” she said, eyes focused on the door handles, then twitching up to the locks.

  “Which bar?” I said.

  “Go back down Telegraph. It’s on the left.”

  “Noisy, but I know why you chose it,” the male said, sounding non-human. Marianne looked away from the locks and door handles
and stared at him, breath hissing in against her teeth as she raised her head.

  “Why did Alex want to avoid you?” she asked.

  “He has problems,” the female said. “And we’re his therapists, right, Tom. He fears something, yet courts the disclosure of what he fears.”

  “Right,” I said, pushing my shoulders back against the seat and arching my spine. The adrenaline had stiffened my muscles, and I wasn’t sure what was coming next.

  “Crazy?” Reeann asked, touching the door lock button.

  “Tempts public ridicule and jail,” the male Barcon said. “Tom, you must tell Alex about jail.”

  Reeann stiffened as though now she disapproved.

  Wounded recombinant experiments okay, jailbirds no. I felt like I was reliving my first day out of prison, and realized what she thought mattered to me. “Marianne, it was over drugs, in Virginia.” I hated my voice when I said that, a draggy whine, con voice deep in hustled cigarettes.

  “Can I…” she began to say, then stopped. “I always wondered where John Amber and Rhoda came from, but I didn’t want to get them in trouble. I have no real loyalty to things as they are.”

  The Barcons shifted in the front seat, looked at each other. “Tom does come from Virginia,” the male said, looking back at us through the rearview mirror, utterly alien, inspecting a potential human breeding pair. He stopped talking when the female touched one of his odd jaw angles with her fingertips.

  “Virginia was wasting him, his talent,” the female said. “He…” she broke off to speak in Barcon to the male.

  Reeann listened hard to them, then pulled away from me, body arched away from me, rigid. “So what happens now?"

  The male wiggled his nose. “Maybe you can become friends with us?”

  “I’m not going to be kidnapped.”

  “No, not kidnapped,” the males said. “We need to talk to Alex, and with you.”

  We parked behind another bar, in Berkeley on Telegraph, not in Oakland. Carstairs, alone in his car, pulled in behind us, got out and watched, his eyes trembling in their sockets as a Barcon got out, then Alex, both huge males, easily 220 pounds and over six and a half feet, then the last Barcon, only slightly smaller, got out and stretched. At first, I thought Alex was in cuffs, but he was just rubbing his wrists, holding them together, Then Alex looked at Carstairs as though he hadn’t meant to involve his human friend in this, whatever this would be.