The Walls Were Always Eating

The house had been converted into a cafe, which was part of the problem. Some colonial-era building in a neighborhood that couldn’t decide whether it was being renovated or devoured — scaffolding on one side, fresh paint on the other, the roof tiles old enough to crumble if you breathed on them. Moreno-Garcia had chosen it. Poe had arrived first, which surprised me. He was sitting in the courtyard, in the shade of a jacaranda that had pushed its roots through the tile floor, and he was staring at the crack in the foundation with the expression of a man who has found a kindred spirit.

“The tree is winning,” he said when I sat down. He meant against the house. The roots had buckled two tiles and were working on a third, a slow violence you could measure in seasons.

“Every tree in this city is winning,” said Moreno-Garcia, coming through the doorway with two cups of coffee, one of which she handed to me without asking whether I wanted it. She sat down across from Poe and studied him with an expression I couldn’t read — not hostile, exactly, but appraising, the way you’d look at an old map to determine what it got wrong. “The city was built on a lake. The ground has been sinking since the Aztecs drained it. Every building in the centro historico is slowly going down. You can see it in the cathedral — one side is measurably lower than the other. The entire city is a house that’s being swallowed.”

“By what?” I asked.

“By what it was built on top of.”

Poe lifted his coffee, inhaled the steam, set it down without drinking. “This is your subject,” he said to her. “The thing beneath the thing. The buried stratum that refuses to stay buried.”

“It’s not my subject. It’s everyone’s subject who writes about the Americas. You just didn’t see it as your subject because the thing you were burying was personal.”

There was a beat of silence. A pigeon landed on the edge of the fountain in the center of the courtyard — a dry fountain, cracked, growing weeds from its basin. Poe watched it.

“You’re right,” he said, and the admission came with a kind of formality, like a man conceding a point in a debate he’d been having with himself for a century and a half. “My houses contain individual pathology. A man’s guilt. A man’s obsession. The house is the skull and the narrator is trapped inside it with his own heartbeat. I never asked what the house was built on.”

“Because you didn’t have to,” Moreno-Garcia said. “You were the culture that built the house. The walls didn’t trouble you — they were yours. The dread in your stories comes from what’s inside. What happens when the self turns against itself. But the dread in mine comes from the walls themselves, because the walls were built by someone who wanted to keep people like me out, or keep people like me in, and the architecture has not forgotten its purpose even if the current owner has.”

I opened my notebook. I’d been thinking about houses — of course I had, given the combination we were working with. House of Leaves. White is for Witching. Two novels about houses that are more than houses, houses that violate spatial logic, houses that consume. I started to explain my idea: a contemporary house, perhaps in a gentrifying neighborhood, where the interior measurements don’t match the exterior, where rooms appear and disappear—

“Stop,” Poe said. He held up one hand, palm out. “You’re building the funhouse. Everyone builds the funhouse. The hallway that goes on too long, the room that shouldn’t exist. Danielewski did it and did it well, but he did it as a labyrinth of documents — the horror was in the layers of unreliable narration, not in the spatial trick itself. If you just make a house that’s bigger on the inside, you’ve made a special effect.”

“He’s right about that,” Moreno-Garcia said, and Poe looked at her with something approaching pleasure, the way a cat looks when it’s been scratched in precisely the right spot. She continued: “The spatial impossibility only matters if it means something. In Oyeyemi’s novel, the house eats people — but it eats them selectively. It welcomes some. It rejects others. The house has a politics. It’s xenophobic. It consumes what it considers foreign and incorporates what it considers its own. That’s not a haunted house. That’s a nation.”

“A nation,” Poe repeated, tasting the word.

“A nation, a family, an institution — any structure that defines itself by what it excludes. The eating is the point. Not the size of the hallway.”

I put my pen down. They were both ahead of me and I knew it. “So the house shouldn’t be spatially impossible?”

“The house should be spatially hungry,” Moreno-Garcia said. “There’s a difference. An impossible space is a puzzle — you walk through it trying to map it, and the pleasure is intellectual. A hungry space is something else. You walk through it and you feel it taking something from you. A room you can’t leave not because the doors have moved but because the room has made you forget you wanted to leave.”

Poe leaned forward. His eyes had that quality I’d been warned about — a brightness that could tip into fever. “Yes. The confinement I write about — the premature burial, the bricked-up wall, the pit — it is always physical. The body is trapped and the mind knows it. But you’re describing a confinement of desire. The body is free to go, but the want has been eaten. That’s worse. That is — I must say — that is worse.”

“It’s how colonialism works,” Moreno-Garcia said. “You don’t brick people into walls. You make them want to stay in the wall. You feed them just enough of themselves that they forget there’s an outside.”

The pigeon took off from the fountain. I watched it go, a gray blur against the pale sky, and when I looked back at Moreno-Garcia she was pulling apart a piece of pan dulce she’d produced from somewhere, eating the crumbs off her fingers with an absent precision that made me think of ritual.

“I want to ask about pica,” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “From the Oyeyemi.”

“Yes. The eating of non-food. Chalk, dirt, plaster. In White is for Witching it’s a metaphor for imperial consumption — the empire that eats what isn’t meant to be eaten, that consumes land and people and culture as though they were sustenance. But it’s also literal. The character actually eats these things. The body enacts what the history demands.”

“It’s a good image,” Poe said slowly. “The body made into an instrument of its own haunting. I’ve used something similar — the narrator in ‘Berenice’ who extracts the teeth. The compulsion that cannot be explained rationally because it isn’t rational. It’s the body obeying a logic the mind can’t access.”

“But your narrator’s compulsion is his alone,” Moreno-Garcia said. “It’s pathological. Individual. A sickness of the self. The pica in Oyeyemi is inherited. Passed down. The house teaches the body what to eat. The appetite is architectural.”

“Architectural appetite,” I said, and wrote it down, underlining it twice.

“Don’t underline it,” Moreno-Garcia said. “It’s not your thesis. It’s a phrase. If you turn it into a thesis you’ll write an essay, not a story.”

She was right. I crossed out the underline, which made the page worse.

“What I’m circling,” I said, “is a house that assimilates. Not one that simply traps or kills but one that makes you part of itself. The walls get thicker. The rooms get smaller. But the people inside don’t notice because their sense of what’s normal is being rewritten along with the architecture.”

“And who’s inside?” Poe asked.

This was the question I didn’t have an answer to yet. I’d been thinking about the house so hard I’d forgotten to think about the person.

“Someone who came from outside,” Moreno-Garcia said. “It has to be. Someone the house considers foreign. An immigrant, a new wife, a person from the wrong side of whatever line the house has drawn. The house welcomes them and then begins to digest them, and the horror is that the digestion feels like belonging.”

“The digestion feels like belonging,” Poe repeated. He’d said this twice now — echoing her — and each time there was something in his voice that sounded like a man finding the words for something he’d always known but never articulated. “That is the worst thing you’ve said today and I admire it enormously.”

“It’s not admiration I need from you,” Moreno-Garcia said, but not unkindly. “I need you to fight me on something. You’re agreeing too easily.”

Poe straightened. The courtyard was getting warmer as the sun moved above the jacaranda’s shade line. Somewhere inside the cafe, someone was playing music — something I couldn’t identify, a guitar and a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

“Fine,” he said. “Here is where I fight you. You are describing a house that operates through systems. Colonial systems, patriarchal systems, economic systems. The house is a machine. It has a politics, as you said. But a machine is not frightening. A machine is comprehensible. You can take it apart and see the gears. The horror I write is the horror of the incomprehensible — the heart that beats beneath the floor and cannot be explained, cannot be understood, can only be endured until it drives you mad. If you make the house a legible system, you lose the dread.”

“I don’t think so,” Moreno-Garcia said.

“You don’t?”

“The most incomprehensible thing about a system of oppression is that it works. That it sustains itself. That it outlasts the people who built it. That’s not legible — that’s terrifying. You want your irrational heartbeat? Here: a house that punishes a family for something that happened three hundred years ago, and the family has forgotten what it was, and the house hasn’t, and the punishment looks like love. Explain that with gears.”

Poe said nothing for a while. He picked up his coffee, finally, and drank it. It must have been cold by then.

“The nested documents,” I said, because I’d been sitting with this and needed to get it out. “In House of Leaves, the horror is mediated through layers — a film about a house, analyzed by a blind man, footnoted by a young man going mad. The reader never touches the house directly. Every account is filtered, contradicted, annotated. I keep thinking about this in relation to what you’re both saying. If the house rewrites the people inside it, then their accounts of the house are unreliable. Not because they’re lying, but because the house has already edited them.”

Moreno-Garcia set down her pan dulce. “That’s good,” she said, and the directness of it startled me. “The unreliable narrator not as pathology but as symptom. The house has gotten into their language.”

“Into the very grammar of their perception,” Poe said, and now he was fully animated, his hands moving. “This is what I was attempting in ‘Usher’ — the narrator arrives and his language begins to mirror the house. He starts rational and ends rhapsodic. The house infects the telling. But I did it as atmosphere. You’re proposing something more — a house that literally alters what the inhabitants are capable of reporting.”

“Not proposing,” I said. “Worrying about. Because if the narrator can’t be trusted, and the house is the reason they can’t be trusted, how does the reader know anything? In House of Leaves, at least you have multiple layers to triangulate against. If I give you one narrator whose perception has been colonized by the house—”

“Then the reader is inside the house too,” Moreno-Garcia said. “They don’t get to stand outside and diagnose. They’re being digested alongside the narrator. Which is the only honest way to write about these systems. You don’t get to observe colonialism from a safe distance. It shapes the lens you’re using to look at it.”

“But that’s also deeply uncomfortable for a reader,” I said.

“Good,” said both of them, simultaneously, and then looked at each other with an expression that might have been the first moment of genuine accord between them — surprised, slightly annoyed, as if they’d been caught agreeing.

The guitar music from inside had stopped. The courtyard was quiet except for the sound of water — not from the dry fountain, which hadn’t run in years, but from somewhere underground, a pipe or a spring, something beneath the tiles that you could hear if you held still.

“There’s one more thing,” I said. “The house in Oyeyemi — it has preferences. Appetites. Almost a personality. The house in Danielewski is more like a physical law — it simply is what it is, vast and indifferent and measurable only in the failure of measurement. I need to decide which mine is.”

“Both,” Moreno-Garcia said immediately.

Poe shook his head. “You cannot have both. A house with a will and a house without a will are different categories of horror. One is a predator. The other is an abyss.”

“A predator can be an abyss. A system of consumption that has operated for so long that the original will behind it has been forgotten — that’s both. It acts with purpose but no one is steering. The hacienda that still runs on the logic of the encomienda three centuries after the last encomendero died. The house isn’t choosing to consume. It can’t stop consuming. The appetite has become the architecture.”

I was writing fast. Too fast — my handwriting was degenerating into shapes I’d have trouble decoding later. Poe was watching me with what might have been sympathy.

“You’re afraid of this story,” he said.

“A little.”

“Good. That is — in my experience — the only reliable indicator that you’re approaching something worth writing. The stories I could see clearly from the beginning were always my worst. The ones that frightened me, that I wrote in a state of something like controlled illness — those were the ones that lasted.”

“Controlled illness,” Moreno-Garcia said. “That’s a phrase for a very particular kind of writer. Some of us write from anger, not illness. Some of us write because the house is real and we grew up in it and we’re not performing derangement — we’re reporting.”

The silence after that was the longest one yet. Poe folded his hands on the table. He didn’t look offended. He looked like a man reckoning with something.

“I have been dead a long time,” he said quietly. “And the house I wrote about was always my own skull. You are telling me there are houses I never imagined because I was standing inside them and calling them the world.”

Moreno-Garcia picked up the last piece of her pan dulce, looked at it, put it back on the napkin.

“I’m telling you the skull is also a house someone built,” she said. “And you might want to ask who built it and what they were trying to keep inside.”

The water sound beneath the tiles was louder now, or I was more attuned to it. I looked down at the crack where the jacaranda roots had split the floor and thought I could see moisture darkening the exposed earth underneath — the old lakebed, the buried water, the thing the city was built on top of, still rising.

I closed my notebook. We weren’t done, but we’d gotten somewhere that felt like the edge of the story — a house that eats, a narrator being eaten, a reader who can’t be sure they’re not being eaten too. The mechanics of it, the plot, the person — all of that was still to come. But the appetite was there. I could feel it in the crack in the floor, in the space between what Poe feared and what Moreno-Garcia knew, in the question of whether a house that consumes you is worse when it has a will or when it doesn’t.

Moreno-Garcia stood up and brushed crumbs from her jacket. “One more thing,” she said. “Whatever house you build — don’t let the reader escape at the end. No closing the door behind them. No safe distance. The house should follow them home.”

She walked out through the doorway. Poe stayed seated, staring at the crack in the floor, listening to the water underneath.