Appetite, Algorithm, and the Porch Light That Never Goes Off

We met in a rented room above a laundromat in Koreatown. Moshfegh had picked the place — she said she liked the vibration of the dryers through the floor, said it was the only honest sound left in Los Angeles. Ogawa had traveled from Ashiya and brought a small paper bag of rice crackers that she set on the table between us without comment. The room smelled like fabric softener and was too warm.

I had notes. I always have notes. I’d printed out the pitch document and underlined things I thought were important — the gig worker, the house, the algorithm — and arranged them in a way I hoped would make me look prepared rather than desperate. Moshfegh glanced at my papers once and said nothing.

“The delivery driver,” Ogawa said. She was looking out the window at a palm tree that had died and been left standing. “She delivers food to a house. The same house, every night.”

“Right,” I said. “And the orders keep getting bigger. And the house keeps changing. And other drivers say the address doesn’t exist.”

Moshfegh leaned back. “So what’s in the house?”

“I don’t think we need to know what’s in the house.”

“Of course you don’t. You want the ambiguity. You want the reader to fill in the blank.” She cracked one of Ogawa’s rice crackers in half. “But the driver would want to know. You can’t write a character who doesn’t want to know what she’s feeding.”

I started to argue, but Ogawa spoke first. “Maybe she doesn’t want to know. Maybe wanting to know is a luxury.”

There was a pause. The dryers hummed beneath us.

“What do you mean by luxury?” Moshfegh asked.

“I mean that curiosity requires a certain — stability. You have to feel that your own existence is secure before you can afford to wonder about someone else’s. This woman, she is not secure. She needs the income from each delivery. The question is not ‘what is in the house’ but ‘can I afford to stop delivering to it.’”

“That’s the economic reading,” Moshfegh said. “Fine. But I’m telling you, if you write a character who never once tries to look through the window, who never once lingers at the door, readers won’t believe her. People are stupid and reckless about their curiosity. Even desperate people. Especially desperate people.”

I wrote that down. Moshfegh noticed.

“Don’t write down what I say. Write down what’s wrong with what I say.”

I put my pen down.

Ogawa took a rice cracker and ate it in small, precise bites. “In my experience,” she said, “the most frightening stories are about people who do not look through the window. The looking — that’s a kind of agency. That’s the character asserting that they have a right to understand their circumstances. But what if the story is about a person who has been so thoroughly processed by a system that the right to understand has been withdrawn? She delivers. She receives a rating. She delivers again. The loop is closed.”

“That’s Memory Police,” Moshfegh said. “You’re describing your own book.”

“Yes,” Ogawa said, without defensiveness. “I’m describing a pattern I return to because I haven’t exhausted it. Things disappear. People adjust. That adjustment is the horror.”

“But in your book, the disappearances are imposed from outside. There’s a regime, there are secret police. Here it’s just an app. Some code. Some venture capital. Nobody’s even trying to be sinister.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

I could feel them circling something. I tried to name it: “So the horror is that there’s no intent. The algorithm isn’t malicious. It’s just an optimization function. And the house — whatever is at the house — is just a customer. A data point. The system connects supply and demand without caring what the demand is for.”

Moshfegh shook her head. “No. That’s too clean. That’s the op-ed version. ‘Algorithms don’t care about us.’ Everyone already knows that. The story has to be dirtier than that.”

“What do you mean, dirtier?”

“I mean the driver has to be complicit. She has to have a moment where she could stop — where stopping is possible, where someone else has even told her to stop — and she doesn’t. Not because the algorithm forces her, but because she chooses the delivery. Because the routine has become her identity. That’s what Ling Ma understood in Severance. Candace keeps going to work not because she has to but because without the office she doesn’t know what she is.”

This landed. I could feel Ogawa considering it.

“There is something true in that,” Ogawa said carefully. “But I would not use the word ‘complicit.’ Complicity implies knowledge. It implies that the person understands they are participating in something wrong and does it anyway. What I find more disturbing is the possibility that the categories themselves — wrong, right, safe, dangerous — have been quietly removed. Like the objects on my island. Not destroyed. Just no longer available.”

“You’re saying she can’t even frame the question.”

“I’m saying the question has been disappeared. Along with the address that doesn’t exist, along with the customer she’s never met, along with the other drivers who have no memory of the route. Each delivery removes one more piece of the framework she would need to recognize what is happening.”

Moshfegh was quiet for a moment. Then: “I like that. But I want the body. I want the physical experience of the delivery. The weight of the bag. The smell of the food. The way the porch light makes the moths do that thing. Your work sometimes floats above the body, Yoko. Like everything is happening in a very clean room.”

“That is a fair criticism.”

“This story needs sweat. It needs the driver’s car to smell like old Thai food and hand sanitizer. It needs her knees to ache from getting in and out of the car twelve times a night. The horror works because it’s embedded in the mundane, right? So the mundane has to be genuinely, greasily mundane.”

I jumped in. “What about the food itself? The orders. The pitch says they escalate — first normal quantities, then for twelve, then twenty, then fifty. What’s being ordered?”

“Nothing unusual,” Ogawa said immediately. “The food should be ordinary. Rice. Soup. Bread. The horror is in the quantity, not the content.”

Moshfegh disagreed. “No, the food should shift too. Start ordinary. Then start repeating — the same order, every night. Then start including things that aren’t food. Or things that are food but not from any restaurant. Things the app shouldn’t be able to source.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Organ meat. Unpasteurized milk. Something that makes the driver think: where is this coming from? And then she looks at the pickup address and it’s a place she’s never heard of, and when she drives there, it’s just a parking lot with a cooler.”

Ogawa set her rice cracker down. “That’s too explicit. You’re building a mystery. Mysteries promise solutions. I want something that promises nothing.”

“Not every shift is a mystery. Sometimes a shift is just a shift. The driver notices the food is different but she doesn’t investigate because investigating isn’t her job. Delivering is her job. She’s been rated on speed, not on asking questions.”

I realized they were both right and both wrong, which is the state I find most useful in these conversations. Moshfegh wanted sensory escalation — each delivery weirder at the physical level, the body registering danger before the mind catches up. Ogawa wanted conceptual erosion — each delivery subtracting one more piece of the driver’s ability to locate herself in a comprehensible world. The story needed both. The food should shift, yes, but the driver’s ability to notice the shift should also erode. By the end, she might be delivering something impossible and not registering it as unusual.

“What about the other drivers?” I asked. “The pitch mentions other drivers who deny the address exists.”

“Cut them,” Moshfegh said. “She should be alone.”

“No,” Ogawa said. “Keep them. But they should not be characterized. They should be usernames in a forum. Text on a screen. She posts asking about the address and no one responds. Or they respond but their responses don’t address her question. As if she has asked a question that cannot be parsed.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Don’t tell me what’s good. Tell me why.”

I tried. “Because it turns the social dimension into another version of the disappearance. The other drivers aren’t lying or conspiring. They literally can’t see what she’s seeing. The address exists for her and only her. Which means either the address is unreal or she is.”

Moshfegh pointed at me. “That. Write toward that. The moment when she realizes the question isn’t ‘what is this house’ but ‘am I the delivery or the driver.’”

Ogawa said, “In the novel I wrote, the narrator’s friend hides in a secret room to avoid disappearing. She makes herself smaller and smaller. I have been thinking about this image for many years. The woman who shrinks to survive. Your driver — she is already small. The gig economy has already made her small. The question is whether there is a size below which a person ceases to be a person. Whether the algorithm has a minimum viable human.”

Moshfegh laughed. It was a dark, short laugh. “Minimum viable human. That’s corporate language for a horror concept.”

“Corporate language is always horror language. You just have to listen to it correctly.”

I wanted to ask about the ending, but I was afraid of the answer. Endings in these conversations always feel premature. Moshfegh’s instinct would be toward a final image — the driver’s body registering something her mind has already surrendered. Ogawa’s would be toward absence — the driver simply not appearing one night, and no one noticing. Both felt too neat.

“The rating,” I said instead. “The five-star rating she gets after every delivery. Who’s giving it?”

“The customer,” Ogawa said.

“But she’s never met the customer. No one answers the door.”

“Yes.”

“So who’s rating her?”

Ogawa looked at me. “Does it matter? The rating appears. The metric is satisfied. The loop continues.”

Moshfegh leaned forward. “I want the rating to start appearing before she completes the delivery. She’s still driving, she’s three blocks away, and the notification comes through. Five stars. ‘Great service.’ And she thinks: they knew I was coming. They’ve always known I was coming. I am the expected thing.”

“That’s the line,” I said. “I am the expected thing.”

“Don’t make it a line. Don’t put it in her mouth. Put it in her gut. She doesn’t articulate it. She just feels the wrongness of being anticipated. The way prey feels when it realizes the stillness around it is not emptiness but attention.”

Ogawa nodded. “And the porch light. It should never go off. Not because someone is maintaining it. Because it was never a light that could be turned off. It is a feature of the house the way a mouth is a feature of a face.”

We sat with that image for a while. The dryers downstairs had stopped. The silence was sudden and noticeable, like something had been removed from the room.

I had one more question. “The title. The pitch calls it ‘the reserve army.’ It’s a Marxist term. The reserve army of labor — workers kept unemployed so that wages stay low. The threat of replacement.”

“I know what it means,” Moshfegh said. “It’s too academic.”

“I agree it’s too academic for a title that appears on the cover. But as a concept running underneath the story — the driver is part of a reserve army. She is replaceable. She knows she is replaceable. And the house knows she is replaceable. Which means the five-star rating isn’t gratitude. It’s inventory management.”

Ogawa said, “In Japanese, the word for this kind of worker is sometimes tsukaima. It means a familiar. A spirit that does errands. The word implies service but also possession. You belong to the one who sends you.”

Moshfegh stood up. She did this sometimes — stood up when she was thinking, as if the thought required more room than sitting allowed. “The driver is a familiar. She belongs to the app. The app sends her to the house. The house receives her. What she carries is irrelevant. She is the delivery.”

I thought about disagreeing. I thought about saying that we needed to preserve the driver’s interiority, her selfhood, that the horror was in the erosion of that selfhood and so we needed to establish it first. But Moshfegh was already putting on her jacket, and Ogawa was carefully folding the paper bag that had held the rice crackers, folding it into a smaller and smaller square, and the conversation had reached one of those natural stopping points that aren’t really stopping points at all but places where the ground drops away and you either jump or you pretend the cliff isn’t there.

I packed up my notes. The underlined words didn’t mean what they’d meant when I arrived. The house had changed since I last looked at it. The porch light was already on.