The Clout of Gen (2 page)

After four days on the demo money, John felt he had the tools and had learned enough. In his first five days, he’d made $3,200—more than what he could earn in two weeks of working at the paper.
This is amazing! A month or two of this, and I’ll really prove my worth. Maybe then Susan might see that I am taking action. Maybe my whole marriage might be saved and we can at least start to work things out.

With one eye on the political news and another on several companies’ financial reports, John carefully made his choices. His dreams were growing, and he was taking more chances. Ultimately, it proved to be fatal.

Several reports seemed to indicate that Germany was the safest and strongest economy, so John felt his shares placed in German companies had reached their limit, and it was time to fish them out and make it, big time. As it turned out, German shares were not immune to the financial disasters taking shape in Europe. After just one week of big losses, poor John was on the ropes. The world was closing on him. He had withdrawn all of the savings he and Susan had acquired over the years. He had taken a chance and gambled away the family’s money, and he had little to show for it. By noon that day, his account had a mere $2,700 in it. He withdrew it and decided to leave the office early.

He walked for an hour, trying to think of what he should do or say to Susan. He was in real trouble now, and nothing good had come from keeping it quiet. He’d hoped money would fall in his lap from his efforts and all would be good again, but now he realized that kind of thinking was much closer to a dream than a reality.
I’m just…doomed,
he worried.

Finally, he decided to take a cab back home. When he got there, he noticed that one of the lights was on, and he assumed Susan had forgotten to turn it off in the morning. He opened the door and went to the kitchen to grab a beer to help him cope with the dreadful reality of his situation.

He heard some noise upstairs. When he went upstairs to check on it, to his agony, he recognized sounds coming from his wife, growing louder by the second. He opened his bedroom door to the sight of Susan and the perfect Andrew in bed together—in
his
bed.

Andrew immediately grew pale. He covered himself up and ran away, stuttering “Sorry! I’m so…sorry!”.

John didn’t say a word. He simply took out a bag and started stuffing his wife’s things in it. Susan was crying and begging his forgiveness and understanding, but John remained mute. He didn’t utter a word, and honestly he didn’t even hear her; he was caught in a dreadful silence for several moments.

Finally, after he had finished packing up her things, without making eye contact, John said, “You have five minutes to take whatever else you want and leave. Pick up your son from the nursery and never come back here again. And don’t even think about taking the car!”

After fifteen minutes, it was all over. Susan was gone, so John sat down to have a drink. Beer wasn’t going to do the trick, so he took out his scotch whiskey and began drinking it straight from the bottle. All he could think about was how his world had changed over the years. He loved giving to charity. He helped people a lot and was a good husband, but when money started to get tight, everything seemed to collapse around him.

Maybe I am a loser,
he thought.
Maybe Susan is right, and my life is not even worth living.
Seeing his wife in bed with another man was a traumatic event that insisted on playing over and over again in his head. In an instant, he jolted up from his seat and went to look for his gun that he had hidden in an old shoebox in the top drawer. Once he had the weapon in hand, he put three bullets in it. He stumbled to the bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror, and whispered two words: “Bye, Johnny.”

And then, John pulled the trigger…but nothing happened.

The gun was jammed, so he tried to fix it and then pulled the trigger again.

Nothing.

Finally, John threw the useless gun and began to cry, rivers of tears running down his cheeks as if he was just a little lost boy with a broken heart.

After half an hour, he still couldn’t grasp the truth of all that had transpired in his miserable life. The noises of their lovemaking echoed in his ears, and he realized he could stay in the house no longer. He jumped in the car and drove off. He had no idea where he was going, but he knew he was heading toward insanity.

Finally, after driving around to nowhere in a depressed and defeated haze, John saw it: a small parking area near a cliff, with a panoramic view of the sea, about forty-five kilometers north. It was perfect for tourists wanting to take photos, but that was not how John intended to use it. “If a gun can’t do the job, I’ll just throw myself over the edge,” he said aloud.

John parked and got out of the car. He walked slowly to the edge, sweating and shivering. As he neared the edge, he looked below at the big, dark, salty waves crashing against the jagged rocks. Among them, he noticed something that looked like a box of a strange shape and color. His manic state began to calm, and he decided to get a closer look, to see what the thing was. “What’s a dead man got to lose?” he repeated to himself.

There were some steep stairs about twenty yards away that led to the rocks below, likely created and used by locals who wanted to fish when the tide was in their favor. John watched each step carefully, so as not to lose his footing, as he made his way slowly down. He decided it was a good thing he’d taken only a few sips of whiskey; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to make the descent.

At last, he reached the parcel. He picked up the dark green leather octagon-shaped box with maroon stripes. It had two locks, and curiosity filled his mind about what could be hiding behind them. He took the strange case and headed back to the car, so he could go home and have a look at it.

As soon as he walked inside, he noticed the flashing light on the answering machine. He was sure it had to be Susan, trying to weasel her way back into his good graces after her indiscretion. John didn’t care, though, as there was nothing else on his mind other than the strange box and discovering its contents.

He placed the case on the dining room table. He had no clue what it could mean or what it might contain.
Why did I find it now, of all times?
It weighed around twenty pounds and was constructed of high-quality leather. The locks seem to be old, as they were rusted, but they still held securely. John knew he’d never be able to safely open them with the tools he had at home, so he decided he’d have to head to Chinatown for the following day, if the curiosity didn’t kill him overnight.
There isn’t a thing those guys can’t open.

In spite of his worries and curiosities and woes, the hectic day finally took its toll on John, and within seconds, he was fast asleep on the sofa bed with the green box right next to him on the floor.

It was a good thing that all of that mess happened on a Friday, as John couldn’t have imagined going to work the next day; honestly, he could barely imagine living after all he went through that day. At nine thirty a.m., John woke up with many thoughts swarming around in his head, but his real focus was on finding out what the box contained, if anything, or if it was simply a strange washed-up box of no significance. 

A quick ride, and he was off to Chinatown. He passed several small shops and finally came across a locksmith. After twenty minutes of light banging and hammering with his special tools, it was wide open!

Inside the box was another container, a plastic one, something like a box within a box. John thought it was probably meant to prevent any water leakage, though the leather already did a great job of that. It seemed that whoever had put it all together went to great lengths to protect whatever was inside. The interior of the box was the same color as the outside. It was cushioned to protect it from any hits or bumps, and the smaller plastic container was totally sealed and air- and watertight, except for a small circular window that could be opened from a little slip.

John thanked the locksmith, gave him a twenty-dollar bill, and went back to his car.

The inside contents included a plastic-wrapped cassette of some sort and a business card written in something that looked like Asian; the card didn’t seem to contain a name—only an address. There was also a silver ring with an odd symbol on it, as well as some letters engraved on the inside of the band. The writing on the ring also looked to be in Asian.
Interesting, but what does it mean?
John wondered.

The tape looked like one of those old small cassettes he hadn’t seen in a long time. He was glad he hadn’t left Chinatown yet and had decided to check it out right there in the parking area, as the cassette would require a visit to a shop that sold secondhand, outdated electronics. He thought he might take the business card along as well, hoping that the salesman might be able to tell him what it said.

As it turned out, the tape was a small videocassette used in the eighties. The first two shops he went to didn’t have any device that could play it, but John didn’t have to worry, because Chinatown was packed with shops that sold used electronics. After a bit of searching, he found what he was searching for, and for a mere forty bucks, John bought a compatible player. He wasn’t as lucky with the business card, as no one in Chinatown seemed to be able to read it; clearly, it wasn’t written in Chinese, but one of them suggested to him that it did look like Japanese.

Eager to see what was on the tape, John hurriedly headed home. He was starving, so he stopped on the way to pick up a pizza.

Once he was home and settled down with his piping-hot dinner in front of him and the video player properly connected and the tape inserted, his heart began to throb. He couldn’t remember being so anxious to watch anything since the opening of
Terminator 2
back in 1991, when he stood in line for two hours at the cinema. He pressed the play button, and in that moment, from that very instant, John began to see the world in a whole different way.

The tape began with an Asian man introducing himself as Yaturo. He seemed to be in his late forties, and kept talking about his guilty feelings, claiming, “This is the least I can do.”
Great
, John thought.
A suicide tape. Could the timing be any worse? Or more awfully perfect?

Then, the picture went blank for a few moments and then the same guy appeared again, only he looked younger and was standing in a large parking lot, seemingly at a concert, event, or game, though John couldn’t tell for sure. The Asian began to speak: “I am now outside Estadio Azteca in Mexico city. It is June 22, 1986, and Argentina will play England in the quarter-finals.”

John increased the volume of his TV and slid his sofa closer, getting more interesting. As outdated as the game was, he remembered it was quite a match.

Yaturo continued with the stadium in the background, “I want to ask some fans about what they think the results might be.”

Some of the passersby answered, projecting, “England two to nothing,” or, “Argentina, one to zero,” but then Yaturo managed to stop three fans wearing the British flag on their shirts. They looked to be in their twenties.

Yaturo asked, “Can you guys give me your names, where you’re from, and what you think the results will be in today’s match? I am doing a program for a sports channel.”

No one bothered to ask him which channel he was from. The first one answered, “Jim Owen Steadman, Dorking, two-nothing, England,” and started dancing.

The second spectator, a young woman, answered, “Lisa Farry, same, and England, two to one.”

The last guy answered with a smile, “John Humphrey, and I say England will win on penalties.”

Then all three began to chant: “England, England, ENGLAND!”

Before they left, the first guy, Jim Owen Steadman, asked Yaturo “What about you? What do you think?”

Without a moment of hesitation, Yaturo answered, “Two to one, Argentina,” and put one of his hands in a fist shape above his head.

The British fans began chanting again and went on their way. 

John suddenly paused the tape, in total shock. An avid soccer fan himself, as well as a soccer player in both high school and college, John knew that match by heart, especially since it was one of the most talked-about matches in history. In the end, Yaturo was absolutely correct. Argentina won that game two to one, and in the course of that victory, Maradona scored two of the most talked about goals in all of soccer’s history, dribbling half the English team to score one and the other with his fist, just as Yaturo mentioned and gestured before the game began. It was far too exact, too accurate to be mere coincidence. “What in the world is this? Some kind of bloody joke?” John began to shout to his pizza, demanding answers.