“Jesus,” I said. “Apparently I was living in the middle of The Jerry Springer Show. ‘Teenage Wife-Swappers Speak Out.’” Only a few yards and a few years away, Jamie and Peter and I had been giving each other dead arms and aiming lawn darts at the Carmichaels’ horrible yappy Jack Russell. All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot; of the fox outside my window, calling out to a city that barely overlapped with mine.
