What the Floorboards Know About Open Country

We met at a place that used to be a stage depot outside Lordsburg. The building had been converted into something between a general store and a museum — shelves of turquoise jewelry next to a glass case containing a telegraph key that hadn’t sent a message since 1884. The roof was corrugated tin, popping in the heat. Somebody had put up a ceiling fan but it wasn’t connected to anything.

McCarthy was already there when I arrived. He was sitting at a wooden table near the back wall, reading a geological survey map that he’d spread across the surface and weighted at the corners with a coffee mug, a rock, a folded knife, and a copy of what looked like a Spanish-language bible. He didn’t greet me. He looked at the map like it owed him money.

“The Chiricahuas,” he said, tracing a contour line with his thumbnail. “You could lose a regiment in here and not find the bones for fifty years.”

“Is that the landscape you’re thinking about for—”

“I’m not thinking about anything. I’m looking at a map.”

I sat across from him. The chairs were metal folding chairs, the kind churches use, and the seat was hot from the sun coming through the window. Jackson arrived twelve minutes later in a rented sedan that she parked badly, one wheel on the dirt shoulder. She came in wearing a cotton blouse and dark slacks and sunglasses that she pushed up into her hair the moment the door closed behind her, as if removing them any sooner would have been an admission that the outside existed.

“This is a horrible place to meet,” she said, not unkindly. She picked up a ceramic coyote from the gift shelf, turned it over, set it back down facing the wall. “Perfect for what we’re doing.”

McCarthy folded the map. “You’re the one who writes about houses.”

“I write about what houses do to the people who enter them. There’s a distinction.”

“Same thing.”

“It is precisely not the same thing. A house is an argument. It has intentions. The people inside it are — well. They’re evidence.”

McCarthy looked at her for a long time. The fan overhead did nothing. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that I believe.”

I had my notes out — the combination spec, the themes we’d been assigned. A posse pursuing something across a desert that shouldn’t exist. The landscape exhibiting intention. The hunters having been invited. I started to summarize but McCarthy put a hand flat on the table and that was enough to stop me.

“A posse,” he said. “Not a man. A group.”

“That’s the premise.”

“Groups are harder to write. Every man in a group is performing for every other man. You get talk. You get posturing. The thing that happens to a man alone in a landscape is not available to him in company.”

Jackson pulled a chair over and sat with her ankles crossed, her hands in her lap. She had the stillness of someone who had spent a career watching rooms. “I disagree. A group is where the interesting damage happens. A person alone can hallucinate — fine. But a group that collectively refuses to acknowledge what it’s seeing? That’s where the horror lives. In the consensus. In the agreement not to name the thing.”

“That’s conformity,” McCarthy said. “That’s your territory.”

“And the territory is exactly what we’re discussing. Isn’t it.” She wasn’t asking.

There was a pause. Outside, a truck went by on the highway, the sound arriving late and distorted the way sound does in heat. McCarthy watched it pass through the window, then turned back to Jackson with an expression I couldn’t quite read — not hostility, but something adjacent. Professional wariness, maybe. The recognition that someone else in the room knew things about fear that he also knew, but from a different entrance.

“The judge,” he said suddenly. “In Blood Meridian. People ask me about the judge and what he is. What he represents. As if a man seven feet tall and hairless who dances naked and plays fiddle at three in the morning needs to represent something. He is what he is. He’s in the story because the story required him and for no other reason.”

Jackson’s mouth twitched. “The house is the same. People want Hill House to mean something — to be a metaphor for Eleanor’s repressed sexuality, or her grief, or American domesticity. It is a house. It is a wrong house. It was built wrong and it stayed wrong and the wrongness has a will. The moment you make it symbolic you’ve defanged it.”

“So neither of you wants this landscape to be a metaphor,” I said, trying to find where I stood.

“I want it to be a landscape,” McCarthy said.

“I want it to be a landscape that does things a landscape should not do,” Jackson said. “Those are different positions.”

I said something then that I half-regretted immediately, which was that the landscape as malevolent intelligence — Hill House’s architecture as sentient force — might map onto the desert itself as a kind of structure. Not a house but something with the same properties: walls that rearrange, distances that lie, a will that exceeds its contents.

Jackson tilted her head. “You’re closer than you think, but you’re being too metaphorical. Hill House isn’t metaphorical. It’s a house. It has doors and hallways and a nursery. The horror is that these are real, physical things that are also wrong. Your desert needs to be that specific. Not ‘the landscape has intention’ — that’s a thesis statement. What does it do? Does a mesa appear where there wasn’t one? Does the distance between two landmarks change when you’re not looking? You need the equivalent of a door that’s cold on one side.”

McCarthy stood and walked to the window. The light outside was absolute, the kind of white that flattens everything into silhouette.

“The land don’t need to do tricks,” he said. “The land already does what you’re describing. A man walks a bearing in the desert and arrives somewhere he didnt intend. That’s not supernatural. That’s Tuesday. The question is whether you call it something else.”

“So you don’t want anything uncanny in it,” I said.

“I didnt say that. I said the desert is already uncanny. What you and she are proposing is redundant unless you find the right seam. The place where the natural uncanny ends and something else begins. If you cant find that seam then there is no story. Just atmosphere.”

Jackson crossed her arms. “He’s right, unfortunately. The seam is everything. In Hill House the seam is the moment Eleanor stops being able to distinguish her own thoughts from the house’s. Before that moment it’s a haunted house story. After it, it’s something else entirely.”

That word — distinguish — hung in the air. I wrote it down. Because it connected to something I’d been circling: the unreliable narrator. If this story has a narrator who cannot be trusted, and the landscape itself is doing something to perception, then the seam McCarthy was talking about exists inside the telling itself. The reader doesn’t know when the narrator crossed over. The narrator doesn’t know either.

“Who’s telling this story?” Jackson asked, and I realized she’d been waiting to ask it.

“I was thinking first person. Someone in the posse.”

“Which person in the posse.”

“The one who — I don’t know yet. The observant one. The one who notices things.”

McCarthy made a sound that was almost a laugh. “The observant one. Every narrator thinks he’s observant. That’s the first lie a narrator tells. That he saw things clearly.”

“So the narrator believes he’s the rational member of the group,” Jackson said, leaning forward. “The one keeping his head. The recorder. And the reader trusts him because he presents himself as measured, careful, precise.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And he’s wrong.”

“He’s — I don’t want to say wrong, exactly. He’s narrating from a position he thinks is outside the event, but he’s been inside it the entire time. The posse was invited. He was invited first.”

Jackson was quiet for a moment. She turned to McCarthy. “You’ve done this. The kid in Blood Meridian — the reader follows him because he seems to be the human center of an inhuman story. The witness. But by the end you realize the kid was never outside of what he was witnessing. He was inside it the whole time. Complicit. Or consumed. The distinction stops mattering.”

McCarthy didn’t confirm or deny this. He never does, I was learning. He picked up the rock he’d been using as a paperweight and turned it in his hand. It was a chunk of rhyolite, pale pink, the kind of volcanic debris that covers half of southern New Mexico.

“Eleanor narrates her own dissolution,” Jackson said, more to herself than to us. “She tells you she’s fine while the house is eating her. She tells you what she sees and what she sees is wrong and she doesn’t know it’s wrong and you don’t know it’s wrong until you do. That’s the mechanism. Not a twist — a slow revision of trust.”

“That’s what I want,” I said. “Not a gotcha. Not a last-page reveal. I want the narrator to be trustworthy and untrustworthy simultaneously, so that on a second reading every sentence means something different. Not opposite — different. Like the same sentence in two different languages.”

McCarthy looked at me with what might have been respect or might have been the expression he makes before disagreeing. “That’s ambitious. Most writers who attempt that end up cheating. They withhold information. They lie by omission. That’s not unreliable narration. That’s a card trick.”

“So how do you do it honestly?” I asked.

“You let the narrator tell the truth. All of it. And you let the truth be insufficient.”

“There’s a thing that happens,” he said. “With trackers. A good tracker reads sign in the dirt. Heel marks, bent grass, a stone turned dark-side up. He reads these signs because he understands the country. But the country dont care about being understood. It’s not communicating. The tracker imposes a story on scratches in the dust. What if the scratches were put there for him. What if the country does care. What if the reading is the trap.”

I felt something shift. Not agreement — more like three separate ideas converging on the same point from different directions, each of us arriving with different baggage.

Jackson was nodding slowly. “The narrator-tracker reads the signs. Reports them faithfully. And every faithful report is evidence of how deeply he’s been captured. The more precise his observations, the less reliable he becomes. Because precision is what the landscape is feeding him.”

“He’s a good narrator,” I said. “That’s the trick. He’s good at his job. He describes things exactly as they appear.”

“And exactly as they appear is the lie,” McCarthy said.

There was a silence. Jackson stood and walked to the gift shelf, not browsing but thinking — she moved when she thought, I noticed, while McCarthy went still. She picked up a painted tin cross, put it back.

“I want to talk about the other men,” she said. “The posse. Because in Hill House, Eleanor isn’t alone. There’s Theodora. Luke. Dr. Montague. And they each have a different relationship with the house. Some of them are susceptible and some aren’t, and the ones who aren’t susceptible are more frightening because their normalcy makes Eleanor’s disintegration visible.”

“So some members of the posse don’t experience what the narrator experiences,” I said.

“Or they do and they don’t speak about it. Which is worse.”

McCarthy folded his arms. “In my experience the men in a group who dont talk about what they saw are the ones who saw it most clearly. Silence is not absence. It’s a choice. Sometimes the only honest one.”

“But we’re writing a story where silence is also potentially a symptom,” Jackson said. “Where the group’s silence could mean courage or it could mean contamination. And the narrator can’t tell the difference.”

I asked about the ending. I knew I shouldn’t — the template says not to plot — but I couldn’t help it. If the narrator is unreliable in a way that reframes the entire story on a second read, then the ending has to do something structural. Not a twist. Something worse than a twist.

McCarthy waved the question away. “Endings take care of themselves if the middle is honest.”

“That’s not true and you know it,” Jackson said, sharply enough that I looked up from my notes. “You’ve written endings that rewrote everything that came before them. The judge in the jakes. Lester Ballard in the cave. Those endings aren’t afterthoughts. They’re the load-bearing wall.”

“They came from the material.”

“They came from you knowing exactly what you were doing and pretending otherwise. Which is its own form of unreliable narration, Cormac.”

He didn’t respond to that, but he didn’t deny it. He turned the rhyolite over again. The pink surface had a vein of darker mineral running through it, like a flaw in glass.

“The narrator,” he said finally. “Is he alive at the end.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s the wrong question,” Jackson said. “The question is: was he alive at the beginning. Was the person telling us this story ever the person he claimed to be, or was he already the desert’s instrument from the first sentence. Eleanor comes to Hill House thinking she’s an investigator. She was always a guest.”

I wrote that down too. Guest. The word next to distinguish. Two words that might be the whole story, if I could hold them together.

“What does the posse think they’re hunting?” I asked.

McCarthy and Jackson answered at the same time:

“It doesnt matter,” he said.

“It matters enormously,” she said.

They looked at each other. Neither smiled.

“If they’re hunting a man,” McCarthy said, “then they understand what they’re doing. They have a framework. Hunting a man in the desert is work. It has procedures. When the procedures stop working, the fear is specific — this particular man in this particular canyon has done something outside the rules.”

“If they’re hunting something that was never a man,” Jackson said, “then the procedures are a comfort object. They’re performing competence. The tracker reads sign because reading sign is what he does, not because it’s producing useful information. And the moment the gap between performance and reality becomes visible—”

“That’s the horror,” I said.

“That’s the beginning of the horror,” she corrected. “The full horror is when the performance continues after the gap is visible. When the tracker keeps tracking because he cannot stop. When the posse keeps riding because admitting they should turn back would require naming what they’ve seen.”

I thought about that. I thought about the Glanton gang riding deeper into Mexico, atrocity by atrocity, the landscape getting more barren and more hostile, and none of them turning back. I thought about Eleanor driving toward Hill House, narrating her own excitement, and the excitement already being the house’s voice wearing her voice’s clothes.

“There’s something in the invitation,” I said. “The premise says the hunters have been invited. Not lured — invited. What’s the difference?”

“A lure is a deception,” Jackson said. “An invitation is an offer. You can decline an invitation. The horror of an invitation is that accepting it is voluntary. Eleanor chooses to come to Hill House. She receives a letter and she gets in her car and she drives. Nobody forces her. The house doesn’t need to force anyone. That’s the point.”

“The scalp hunters in Blood Meridian werent forced either,” McCarthy said. “They rode out because riding out is what they did. They were constituted for it. The desert didnt invite them. They were already the desert’s creatures before they entered it.”

“That’s a meaningful difference,” Jackson said. “Between a space that selects its victims and a space that produces them. I’d argue for selection. The desert lets most posses pass through. This one it wants.”

“Why.”

“Because the narrator is in it.”

The room got quiet. A fly landed on the geological survey map and walked across a mountain range.

McCarthy stood again. He walked to the door and opened it and the light came in like a wall of chalk. The landscape outside was brown and flat and infinite, the Peloncillo Mountains a blue smear on the horizon. He stood in the doorway with his back to us.

“The thing about the desert,” he said, not turning around. “The thing nobody writes. Is that it’s not empty. People say empty but they mean they cant read it. They cant read it because there’s no grammar they recognize. No syntax. Every man who walks into it brings his own language and the desert lets him speak it and that is the entire trap.”

Jackson, behind me, said nothing for a long time. I heard her chair creak.

“Every house does the same thing,” she said quietly. “Every haunted house in every story. It lets you bring your own language. It lets you believe the cold spot is a draft and the sound is settling wood and the door opened because of a pressure differential. It lets you be reasonable. It’s very patient. It is the most patient thing in the world.”

McCarthy closed the door. The light retreated. He sat back down and looked at the map he’d already folded, as though he could see through the creases to the contour lines beneath.

“So we agree,” he said.

“We don’t agree at all,” Jackson said. “We just happen to be looking at the same thing.”

I started to say something about how the narrator might structure his account — as a report, maybe, or testimony — but McCarthy was already reaching for his knife and the bible, pocketing them, and Jackson was checking her phone, and the conversation had ended not with a conclusion but with a door closing, which felt, given what we’d been discussing, like something I shouldn’t examine too closely.