Inside Out

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You might think of Killeville as a town where every building is a Pizza Hut. Street after street of Pizza Huts, each with the same ten toppings and the same mock mansard roof — the same shiny zero repeated over and over like same tiles in a pavement, same pixels in a grid, same blank neurons in an imbecile's brain.

The Killevillers — the men and women on either side of the Pizza Hut counters — see nothing odd about the boredom, the dodecaduplication. They are ugly people, cheap and odd as K-Mart dolls. The Killeville gene pool is a dreg from which all fine vapors evaporate, a dreg so small that some highly recessive genes have found expression. Killeville is like New Zealand with its weirdly unique fauna.

Walking down a Killeville street, you might see the same hideous platypus face three times in ten minutes.

Of course a platypus is beautiful… to another platypus. The sound that drifts out of Killeville's country clubs and cocktail parties is smug and well-pleased. It's a sound like locusts, or like feasting geese. "This is good food," they say, "Have you tried the spinach?" The words don't actually matter; the nasal buzzing honk of the vowels conveys it all: We're the same. We're the same.

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