Being Alien (8 page)

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.

“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 was 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.