Page 37 of Capuleto

The journalist's face was contorted. His dark eyes were reddened, swollen, moist, and filled with the kind of resentment a father feels when he outlives a son in such an unnatural and unfair way.

I swallowed hard because, despite all the situations I had experienced, none resembled this one.

The pain of that man was so palpable it knotted my intestines.

"I'm going to kill you! Bastards!" he bellowed.

"Calm down," I murmured, "please keep that lighter steady," I pleaded with my hands raised. I wanted him to see that I posed no threat to him.

"You killed my son! My son!" he roared.

Dante glanced at me and spoke.

"Hey, journalist, look at me." He watched as Dante pursed his lips. "We didn't kill him. We didn't create that app, we didn't sell him the pills, we didn't force him to buy them, much less to take them. You can't blame us for something we didn't participate in." The mentioned man's eyes filled with anger.

"Don't you dare mention my son! You should wash your mouth before that and not hang around scum like that." He pointed directly at me. "You're just as corrupt as he is, you all are!"

"Dante has nothing to do with this, leave him out, this is between you and me. He just works here, it's not fair to hold him."

"And is it fair that my son jumped off a rooftop?" I shook my head without speaking. "My son had nothing to do with your crap! He was a healthy, happy boy who got dragged in by others, and now... Now he's dead!"

Reasoning with someone deranged by pain was not going to be easy.

"It's not fair," I conceded, "we agree on that, but at least let him go, this is between you and me..."

"What for? So he can call the police? Or your thugs? Do you think I'm stupid? Don't you think I know what you're up to? No, I'm sorry for him, but the only way you're leaving here is in a body bag."

"If you burn us, you'll end up in jail," Dante warned him. Jonás let out a sinister laugh.

"Do you think I care? You've taken the most important thing from me, without my son I have nothing left."

"Of course you do!" I interjected. "You have revenge against the real culprit. I'm not telling you to stand by; I offer to find him and serve him to you on a silver platter. I give you my word that I will do whatever it takes, but you have to let us act. We're with you, not against you. Even if you don’t want to hear what I'm about to say, neither Dante nor I are responsible."

"You're subsidiarily responsible! Even I am. I shouldn't have listened to you or your wife that day. You set a trap and I fell for it, I believed you," he said disgustedly. "What I didn't know was that you were going to screw me over. I was so eager for the truth to come out that I let myself be influenced. And what you were really plotting was to build a wall of parallel lies for me to believe, while behind it you were shamelessly selling your crap to kids who can't discern right from wrong.

"You're fucking cowards. You went after impressionable minds lacking judgment! Young brains thirsty for new experiences, desperate to fit into a society that's increasingly sick and corrupt. They can't see beyond likes, followers, and stupid challenges that make them feel they're not worthless. We're in a culture of not seeing our failures, of glorifying appearances. It doesn't matter if your life is a mess as long as you can snap a picture where it looks awesome. It doesn't matter if you're broken inside, as long as you can post a video where you seem the happiest person in history. It doesn't matter if you don’t have a single friend to support you when you crumble, because you gain millions of followers by throwing yourself into a river of icy waters that could kill you from hypothermia. Is that happiness? That's bullshit!

"We're creating a sick society, one that pretends, lies, and needs to pull from products like Mentium to be able to get out of bed and sustain the fantasy of those showing their teeth on Facebook or Instagram."

I didn't want to interrupt him; he was clearly full of anger and needed to vent. If I could calm him down a bit and make him see reason, it would be much better. His gaze was lost.

"It's no longer valid to be sad, to have a rough patch, or to show your miseries. Unless you want to become an outcast in a society hungry for success, beauty, trips, and happiness. Because if you don’t wear smiles, you lose, because if you don’t do what others do, you're shunned as a pariah. Because if your life isn’t framed in perfect snapshots and videos, you don't deserve the community's approval or admiration."

What he said wasn’t nonsense; in fact, I shared many of his thoughts. Jonás wasn’t stupid; on the contrary, he was just a man who had just lost the engine of his life.

"I understand your anger," I interrupted.

The arm holding the gasoline canister was getting tired, and he lowered it slightly.

"You? You understand nothing. You're worse than all of them combined because you profit from all that frustration generated by the world we're enveloped in. You eat, dress, and fill your coffers thanks to the suffering of others. Tell me, what was Mentium, your wife’s flagship product, born for? Or Felisano, which your pharmaceutical manufactures?" Both products served the same purpose, Jonás knew; they were psychotropics used to improve patients with depressive disorders. Though the medication we distributed didn’t have dire side effects. "You're the same dog with a different collar. You and the Russian," he said disdainfully. "Others' pain is your bread. You profit from a chemical happiness that has nothing to do with real happiness. You disgust me."

He wasn't going to see reason, so I made a slight nod to Dante to intervene before Jonás could set fire to the place. Given his behavior, it was impossible to predict whether he would have the guts to do it or not. I needed to distract him with a speech similar to his own, to focus him on me.

"Then you should kill the entire pharmaceutical industry, eradicate social media, and go back to the origins. Evolution carries its own collateral damage, or do you really think someone would be willing to live like in the Paleolithic era, in caves, hunting, away from any kind of consumerism and the privileges that industrialization gave us?"

I had managed to focus him on my speech. My man had started to move to prevent him from doing something stupid.

"And what are you going to say? Huh? You're fine with the spiral we live in, just look at the car you drive, your house, or the expensive clothes you wear. Our future as a society, or the common good, means shit to you. Nor do you care about the death of my son, nor do I care about yours."

---