Being Alien by Rebecca Ore Page A

marriage as I’ve never seen in humans. One real black whispered to his lady, “Must be Africans.”
    Again, I hit the books, saw an old video of an almost kamakazi sales school, read all Harvard Magazine had to say on Japanese, discovered obscure articles about nuclear reactors in Zaire and on the Navajo reservation. All my friends were aliens and on another planet. I didn’t have friends here, human or otherwise, I kept thinking to myself as I booked down with Japanese data.
    Then, three days later, Marianne came by, smelling of warm skin and gardenia perfume, in shorts as if the weather were warm, with a rugged hippie shoulder bag dangling below her elbow. I opened the door and was terrified that she’d burst out laughing again. She said instead, “Roger Strigate wants you to pick up your bike.”
    That was another life, Reeann , but I said, “Okay.”
    “Then we can go riding, out,” she said in a small voice, “away from the city.” She looked at the walls near the door as though searching for bugs.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “I want to know about John Amber” she said. “He was odd.”
    “Odder than you think,” I said as I got my shoes on.
    In the drive, her car, another eco mobile, sat on fat dune tires, su burnt fiberglass and chrome bike racks.
    “I’m sorry I laughed,” she said.
    I didn’t reply then but as we got closer to the bike shop, I said, “I hate having my women arranged for me.”
    She didn’t speak herself until I paid Strigate the rest of the $3000 for the bike, riding clothes, funny shoes with slotted plastic biscuits on the soles. Then she said, “Let’s pretend none of this weird stuff is going on.”
    “Yeah, I’m researching Japan to help an African country develop without getting economically in hock to the West.”
    “An honorable profession,” she said “Better than being an out-of-work linguist who won’t do government work.”
    “What I’m doing is government work.”
    “CIA, USA. My parents’ bad guys.” We loaded my bike on the rooftop bike rack beside hers, then put the other stuff behind the front seat. “The government that put you in jail for drugs."
    “I wish had turned my brother in. No, I don’t… Reann, he was tabbing Quaaludes, making speed, using. But he was crazy, too, and my brother.”
    We drove though modern suburbs planted on western movie set type hills, then out farther. “Tom, you don’t have to be back soon, do you?
    “Hell, they’re, giving me an opportunity to slip back into human culture if I want to hide forever under a phony name.”
    “Do you want to go back?”
    “Shit, yes. I don’t want to get stuck here.”
    “Does Earth seem provincial to you now?”
    “Yes and no.”
    She found a park by water she called a slew, “spelled ‘slough.”
    “Slow,” she said as she began getting the bikes off the rack. “ I thought we’d ride about twenty miles in flat country.”
    “Twenty miles!”
    “Sure, you’re in basically good shape. I’ve seen you running around the campus ParCourse.”
    “You’ve been watching me?”
    “Yes,” she said with a little, very unsouthern hiss. I turned from her as I felt heat rise in my face and reached for my bike. She moved closer to me, hip to hip, and unhooked what I’d just learned to call a quick release, a cam-operated squeeze bolt loosened and tightened with a chrome-plated lever. The front wheels were in the car with more quick releases skewered through their hubs.
    Silently, she showed me how to put the wheel in the front fork and adjust the quick release to clamp the wheel firmly, then she said, “I thought about telling someone there were aliens in Berkeley, but too many people in Berkeley claim to have met aliens already. And I found out lots of fringe academics know Alex, a popular fellow.”
    “He’s manipulative,” I said.
    “No kidding. What about the fake blacks?”
    “They’re hard to get to know”
    We leaned the bikes against the car and pulled on our