Wicker

Extract from Wicker by Kevin Guilfoile

This wasn't grief Davis felt, staring at her so-still feet pointing at impossible angles to the tight, synthetic weave of charcoal carpet. Grief is born. Grief matures. Grief passes. Despair, on the other hand, which arrives in an instant, ferments into depression. And although depression was months away, at least, already he felt himself not caring. About his life, his wife, his practice, his patients. His new home near the golf course and his second home by the lake. He imagined everything—people, property, possessions—in flames, while he stood before it all impassive, not caring.

The fluorescent lights exposed the room from the ceiling straight down, a glow so bright and perpendicular that Davis couldn't find a shadow in the entire place. From inside, the broad windows to the street looked covered in black paint, and from the outside, beyond the police cars and oily snow drifts and yellow tape, the store was as white and naked as a night-time portrait of a home by Mies.

There were cops on the sales floor and they were talking, but Davis's mind registered only the broken echoes of their whispers: ‘What's he doing here . . . he'll tramp all over the crime scene for Chrissakes. . .’ The cop standing next to Davis was named Ortega and had been his patient once. Tonight, Ortega had let him in the back door of The Gap—led him through the stock room and out onto the floor and inside the rectangular checkout island where he now stood—and Ortega was getting his ass reamed by a detective for it. Anna Kat's feet went in and out of focus, but Davis's eyes never left them. From the ankles down they looked like tan plastic, rigid enough to have been severed from one of the mannequin torsos dressed in ribbed sweaters against the wall, and he began thinking about Ortega's lifeless semen and the day he, Dr. Davis Moore, had delivered the bad news to the cop and his pretty wife. Catholics he remembered, they decided against in vitro. They clucked their tongues at the anonymous DNA and all those extra embryos, the routine run off of his work. He wondered if they ever adopted, if the cop, now a parent, might understand that the sorrow Davis felt now was incurable.

Back the way he came, jacketless in the dark and snow. A different cop would drive him home to the big Prairie-style house on Stone Avenue, where Anna Kat's mother, Jackie, would be sobbing into the consoling collars of their neighbors. He would prescribe something for her and pour The Macallan all around and hope they could manage a numbing, dreamless sleep. The first morning after would be the worst of all, when he would wake having forgotten and then, in the daylight, remember, that his only child was dead.

Author and creator of Wicker, Kevin Guilfoile discovers how he came to sympathise with main character, Dr Davis Moore during the writing process and how humour plays a great part in writing of all kinds.

In America, you're known for your humour writing for online publications such as McSweeney's. Was the idea for Wicker always germinating at the back of your mind? And were people surprised that you chose to write a dark, chilling thriller rather than a light-hearted humorous novel?
Well, even though most of what I had published before this was humor, I had always written in different styles and genres. I had written a terrible novel in the late 90s - a horrible, caper story set on the Chicago music scene heavily influenced by Elmore Leonard. Not that Elmore Leonard is a bad thing - I'm a big fan - but my execution was just unreadable. Only one person has ever read it and I'm trying very hard to make that fellow forget it.

The idea for Wicker came when I was watching the news one night in 2001 and an attorney named Christopher Darden appeared on CNN. Darden became famous in the US as one of the prosecutors in the OJ Simpson murder trial. I think I turned to my wife, Mo, and said, "Wouldn't it be darkly funny if Christopher Darden had been able to clone Nicole Simpson's killer and at some point he could hold a press conference with this teenage boy at his side, who may or may not look an awful lot like OJ Simpson? When I wrote it down in the little notebook I carry with me, I probably thought it could be part of a humor piece (although perhaps one of questionable taste). In the following weeks and months, however, it evolved into Wicker.

It's interesting: In the last year I've thought a lot about the relationship between humor and thriller writing. They seem to be galaxies from one another, but when you deconstruct the craft, they really aren't all that different. In both instances you are trying to elicit an involuntary response from the reader - laughter or chills - and while you might use different words, the architecture of humor writing and thriller writing is very similar. The structure of a joke (set up and punchline) is not so different from the structure of a horror scene (suspense and reveal).

Also, I think humor is terrific training no matter what kind of writing you want to do. Humor is all about rhythm and timing, which is the foundation of all good writing, I think. When you read, say, Twain and Waugh the truth of that really hits home.

Wicker is a wonderfully imaginative thriller and, of course, its near-future setting allows you to explore the potential outcomes of our current dabbling with human cloning. Do you have a particularly scientific background? And do you believe that by writing on the subject you might issue a warning of the consequences of cloning - both in terms of science being used for illegal means and in terms of the dangerous religious backlash.
The subjects I am drawn to write about tend to be things in which I have an interest but no particular expertise. Things that I have a lot of curiosity and ambivalence about. Medicine and cloning are certainly examples. I studied journalism at the University of Notre Dame and probably had enough credits for a minor in philosophy. After graduation, my resume includes two years in sports publicity (I briefly followed in the footsteps of my father, who was a professional baseball executive) and eleven years as a creative director at an advertising agency.

I didn't write Wicker as a warning necessarily. I certainly didn't write it to preach to anyone. The issues addressed in the book are ones I've thought about and in many cases ones that I am conflicted about. I suppose I look at it not so much as a work of persuasion as much as a work of provocation. If reading Wicker causes people to think about these issues of technology and identity and the human individual, that would make me happy, even if they came to conclusions that might be different from mine. On most of the political issues, I tried to make the book agnostic about most of the choices made by characters in the book so the reader is free to form his or her own conclusions about whether they were right or wrong. Many readers have told me that the fact that the story demands some emotional and intellectual participation, especially at the end, is the reason they have a hard time getting it out of their heads.

The other futuristic aspect of your novel involves a virtual reality online game. Have you always been interested in the reaches of online technology? Apparently you were an early pioneer of blogging...
Ha! I never really thought of myself as a blogging "pioneer." I suppose it's true that Coudal Partners, the advertising and design firm where I worked, was a very early proponent of using blogs to promote your business. Five or six years ago, Jim Coudal built our company website (coudal.com) around a popular blog called "Fresh Signals" and I was very involved in the execution of that strategy. The vision, however, was all Jim's.

I'm not a gamer either. I initially conceived of the game, called Shadow World in the book, as a way to mark time. The book takes place over twenty years and if you assume the beginning of the book is the near future (or perhaps some alternate present) then the end of the book is at least two decades on. But I didn't want the story to get bogged down by futuristic elements. I didn't want to try predicting the future and talking about cultural shifts and so forth. I think sometimes that can be alienating to the reader, who starts to wonder what s/he has in common with these people from the future. I wanted the characters to feel like they could be you and me, and I wanted the world at the end of the book to feel very much like the world at the beginning. But I also needed to acknowledge the passing of time. So I introduced Shadow World about a third of the way into the story and as the years pass, the game gets more sophisticated and becomes more of a phenomenon while the real world stays relatively static.

Shadow World is a virtual replica of the real world down to every brick and streetlight and alley. Players begin the game as themselves - working the same job and living in the same apartment as they do in real life - but can then choose to take risks they might not in reality. They can try to be an actress or a concert pianist or date a supermodel or whatever. Except some people decide to live their lives in the game exactly as they live them in real life. They drive the same car and coach the same youth football team and so forth. I originally thought of it as a very sophisticated version of The Sims but I saw its potential as a metaphor right away, as characters made virtual clones of themselves.

If advances in fertility were to mirror your imagination, would you ever want to be cloned?
Gosh no. What if your clone grew up to be more successful than you? That would be just awful to watch, wouldn't it?

And finally, if you were in the situation of Dr Davis Moore, would you make the same fateful decision?
I'd like to think not, of course. One of the pleasures of writing fiction is to make up these characters - who become quite real to you - and then put them in terrible situations and see how they react. It's an interesting question, however. My wife became pregnant with our first child when I was writing the book, and Max was born about two months after I finished it. So during the editing process I had a very different perception of Davis Moore. I was able to relate to him as a father in a way that I couldn't when I was writing the initial drafts. I can't remember if I might have changed the text in subtle ways as a result, but I certainly became more sympathetic toward him. I no longer have to imagine what that incredible feeling you have toward your child is like - the knowledge that you would do anything at all to protect and defend him - and so I empathize with Davis much more now than I did when I was inventing him.