Down a long quiet road for what seems like miles of monster homes. Each has its own architecture, patterned after some other place somewhere else. Half of them look like movie sets, some are Vegas fantasies. There is something in the lighting. They have been lit for effect and nothing more. They could be tourist traps on the highway, closed for the night, billboards for a happy life in a town not far from here.

There is certainly no sign of life. There is no one on the street, there is no movement behind darkened windows, no lights on in the bedrooms of this street.

We pass a huge Spanish stucco imitation lit up garishly with yellow lights so that her shutters look like eyelashes on an aging Spanish whore. A little lipstick around the door and she’d be ready to welcome all visitors to that lonely corner of the city, with a special hello to those boys in the faux castle up the street.

These houses are so new that some of them shine and they are so sterile you could turn the spare bedroom into operating suites and do complicated internal surgery. There are no bricks out of place, no mussed-up lines, no children’s toys on the year or basketball nets over the garage. There are no hockey nets.

Perhaps this is where real estate people live. In spotless showroom houses, wearing pink faux fur slippers they sit at night at the dining room table and write expressive blurbs about other houses in places other than here, for you have to be a real estate agent to live here. This is where dreams are made, not where they come true.

“Spacious two-bedroom flat above store” speaks of the immigrant family, making their way up in the new world. “Ideal starter home” sets the stage for a young couple’s first real home, a place where they can tend the yard and raise their firstborn child, until the next child or prosperity pushes them on to “Clean 3 bedroom + den” in the suburbs.

They write, tragically, of the fixer-upper, the old timer house, that needs some updating. The house that has raised its families and now fallen on hard times. The “where is as is” whose doomed little hut stares out at you from the photos, begging you to read its story through its large dark front window, or to note how the porch once caught the sun before the poplar by the driveway grew all over the yard and blocked out the sun, and whose roots burrowed deep into the septic system.

At night, the real estate agents go to bed and sleep, and while they sleep, their wrinkles are smoothed out, and their skin regains its youth again. Their teeth whiten a little, and their smiles relax into comfortable grins. Outside, the house shines a little brighter, flexes its beams, and settles in for the night.