CEX SUB CON

Everybody but The Angel has moved out of her house, although it’s no longer a 3-story house but an apartment with a single floor, from the same era as most of the rowhomes/apartments in Charles Village, where you can feel the age in the subtle bulges in the walls and the wainscotting and the designs in tin around the ceiling. I wander through the curling hallway to the rooms I’d never been in before, eventually coming to a fourth bedroom that seems to be much farther from the rest of the bedrooms than it could possibly be. I tell The Angel there’s so many bedrooms, their ought to be four roommates, and if we took this central bedroom we’d have a ton of privacy because the hallway doesn’t go anywhere else and I doubt we could even hear anybody else or vice versa. She seems into the idea. I go to a high school on the west side of Baltimore with the idea of observing some classes. I notice that The Soldier has arrived at the same time, although I stop to find an office to check in with while she goes straight on in. I soon see a long counter in the hallway, with glass across it, like what you might see in an old bank or telegraph office in a movie. I step to the counter and a group of old and wealthy-looking white people arrive behind me. A very tall old woman in a dark pink dress steps around me and straight to the counter to start talking to one of the school staff working behind it, a young man who seems like he could have been a student here quite recently. I give her some guff for cutting in line, she dismissively says she didn’t see me, and I tell her she stepped right around me without even so much as an “excuse me.” The other elderly people, who I assumed to be with her, take my side, although it isn’t much of a drama because neither of us really care. When I get to the young man, I realize I don’t know how strange my desire to just come to this school I have no connection to and sit in on classes might be, and I have trouble finding the right way to word my request, but I say I’d be especially interested in a music class, particularly a music tech class if there is one. He doesn’t seem to think my request is strange at all and prints me out a schedule. He says that period I is about the start, which is strange because it’s not the beginning of the school day– period III is the first class, and I have trouble understanding the strange order of the schedule. He points out a music class about to happen– it’s Marching Band, and under each class there seems to be a small italicized list of subjects that are to be covered. The second item on Marching Band’s list is “Disney Chants,” and I don’t remember the rest but suddenly my plan to observe here seems weird and all my enthusiasm for it vanishes. I go outside to the parking lot where there are a bunch of tall trees– much more Wyman Dell than Westside– and there’s no one out there but The Soldier and her little dog, Sam. I’m surprised to see them. She doesn’t seem particularly moved one way or the other about seeing me, but offers me a ride home in her car. Her car is pretty full of random objects and somehow it’s understand that I will drive. We get in the car, I put the seat way back, and almost immediately a guy comes up to my window. He seems to think I know him, and when I don’t, he says he’s “the guy with the big wallet” and that he was meeting a guy and a younger girl here. I tell him it’s not us. We drive down the road until we hit a bit of traffic, and I see an elderly asian couple pleading with a man who is walking against traffic in the middle of the road, clearly pleading for him to get out of the road. He ignores them and his unhurried but determined pace and the look in his eye make me think he’s “not all there,” the kind of guy who talks to himself loudly outside of the bar. After passing him we very quickly come upon a whole slew of shirtless, shoeless middle-aged men walking in the middle of the road (with traffic, this group, in the same direction we’re traveling) whose pants don’t seem quite shabby enough to make them homeless guys or mental hospital inmates, but whose spacey, fixated demeanor is similar to the first guy. I pull over into what is apparently some kind of pre-season or AAA baseball training place. There’s no stadium, just outdoor diamonds and big chain backstops. A few young uniformed players are coming out of a little one-story brick building with flags bearing the Orioles logo on it. I can’t get the car to come to a complete stop and almost hit another car before throwing on the emergency brake. The Soldier gets out and starts off with Sam. A guy and a younger girl– evidently a father and his teenage daughter– approach me and tell me they are looking for somebody. I ask if it’s “the guy with the big wallet” and they say yes, he’s the one. I tell them I’d just been approached by him back at the school, but they seem to think he won’t be there anymore, so I offer to drive them around in The Soldier’s car to find this guy. We don’t drive for very long before we turn into a large strip-mall and pull up in front of a strange little house next to a muffler place. It’s incongruous in this location. There’s a very shallow glass display window in the front with no display and a fly trapped inside it, buzzing around. I watch it for a moment when an image appears of the head and shoulders of a small, green-skinned fairy, who invites us into the shop. I gather it’s a recording intended to seem like the fly (which is actually a small, green-skinned fairy) has noticed us and is meant to draw us into the house which doesn’t quite seem like a store. But we see upon entering that it is– a very large, Target or Best Buy-esque store with a very large selection of Chinese movies.