They showed plenty of subterranean detail, under the sidewalks, and under the road itself. In the movies we would have found a storm drain, about as wide as my shoulders, that ran under Joey’s kitchen floor, and I would have climbed down into it two streets away, and inched along, until a sudden thunderstorm threatened to drown me before I got where I was going. It would have been a tense sequence, but in reality there was no storm drain. There was nothing wider than my wrist. Gas line, phone line, electricity supply, water main, and sewer pipe. The house itself was shown as nothing more than the grateful recipient of those public utilities. It was drawn as a large blank rectangle, with no interior detail at all.The leftover architect’s blueprint from the zoning office was better. It was printed small, but Nice stroked her fingertips over the computer screen and made it bigger, and then moved it around, so we could examine each separate area in detail. Or we could pretend it was us moving, not the plan, and take miniature walks through the house, from room to room, and up and down the stairs.
