Monkey Games
By Vince Coyner
Chapter 1. Alexander
Alexander Cooke was the youngest of William & Catherine Cooke’s four sons. Catherine was the heiress to New York’s Marks department store fortune. William was once the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. His tenure in London was a rather short one however. Just months after reporting for duty he felt the need to resign for “health reasons.” Coincidentally, this resignation occurred immediately after he was made aware of the existence of photographs capturing his intimate familiarity with the anatomy of two seventeen-year-old English schoolgirls.
Alexander, being the youngest of the litter, always felt like he was living in the shadows of the rest of the family. His oldest brother Jack was always first at everything. First at being born, a scratch golfer, a 3.9 GPA at Exeter and most of all, he was their mother’s favorite. After graduating from Harvard Law, Jack became a Vice President at Marks with his eyes on the CEO’s seat.
Paul, the next in line was the consummate little rich boy. He spent his entire academic career doing not even enough to get by, but never having to pay the piper. His teachers were more than happy to pass him along year after year rather than spend another semester with him disrupting their classes with his chicanery. College was not much different, and he was as surprised as his parents were when he was allowed to actually graduate from NYU with his degree in Philosophy. He never studied much but always seemed to figure out how to avoid outright failure. The choice of philosophy had little to do with his like or dislike of the subject matter, rather he choose it because he knew it was the major that would induce the greatest amount of displeasure in his father. Having never taken a philosophy class in his life, Paul had no idea he would actually love the subject. Although his grades were as bad they were in high school, everyone from his classmates to professors knew it was due to a lack of effort on his part rather than a lack of intellectual capital. Indeed, Paul became the captain of the forensic team in his sophomore year and led his team to the finals in the Nationals three years in a row.
Josh was the closest in age to Alexander, a mere 18 months older. Their closeness could not be exaggerated. While the older boys tolerated Alexander, Josh felt like his protector. From horse riding to baseball to skiing, they were inseparable. Josh was even indirectly responsible for Alexander losing his virginity. Both boys were chasing Victoria, the only sophomore on the Exeter girls varsity squash team. Tiring of the pair’s snickering and stunted approaches, Victoria confronted the brothers. As the boys nervously smiled like two peacocks in a preening competition, she laid down the terms. “I will go out on a date with one of you.” She stopped and looked at them. The two brothers looked at one another and then at her. “But which one?” Josh said, fully expecting Victoria to say his name. “You decide” she said, “and whoever it is, the other one has to go out with my older sister Veronica.” Both brothers having seen but never spoken with Victoria’s bookish and rather frumpy sister Veronica exclaimed almost in unison “What?” Josh followed with “What does that mean?” while Alexander asked “What the hell is that?” Staring at one and then the other, Victoria proceeded explain to the pair that the only way she would go out with one of them was if the other one went out with her older sister, and the four of them went out on a double date. The boys turned to confer with one another. Both assuming they would be the one to win Victoria, they agreed to her terms. Later that afternoon they tried to figure out a mutually acceptable way of deciding who would go out with Victoria. Josh started by saying that since he was older he should go out with her. Alexander countered that no, since Josh was the older of the two, he should go out with Veronica, who was also the oldest. Finally, after finding no mutually acceptable form of competition to decide who would go out with Victoria, the two decided on paper-rock-scissors. Much to Alexander’s dismay, Josh won, paper over rock.
As will occur in life, things do not always turn out as they are expected to. Josh and Victoria had only that one date and it did not go particularly well, due largely to the fact that Josh was sure Victoria was more interested in the waiter than she was in him. After days of analyzing the situation and fact that Victoria had not cared at all who she went out with between he and Alexander, Josh decided that he had been played and that Victoria had simply been using he and his brother to get a date for Veronica.
Alexander and Veronica on the other hand had many more dates. For them the date was a stunning success. Veronica was a diamond in the rough, in more ways than one. Not only was she surprisingly beautiful, but she had a personality that kept Alexander in stitches all night. Alexander could not help but smile at this beautiful kinetic butterfly he had never really seen. Months later to two of them got a laugh out of the fact that Veronica had agreed to go on the date only because Victoria had told her that Josh refused to go out with her unless she found someone to go out with Alexander. Veronica remembered thinking to herself that that was kind of strange because Alexander always seemed so confident and didn’t seem to have much difficulty with girls, but to make her sister happy Veronica agreed. Alexander and Veronica went on to date for a two years and the romance ended only when Veronica’s father was transferred to Los Angeles. She was the one shining light that shone through the darkest moment in his life and Alexander was always glad he lost to Josh that day.
The friendship between Josh and Alexander ended far too early. The two were diving with their older brother Paul off the coast of Truk Island in the South Pacific when Alex was 16. The island is a graveyard of ships and material from WWII and offers one of the most spectacular diving adventures on the planet. Josh, Alexander and Paul were wreck diving on the last day of a week-long summer trip. All were great divers with significant wreck diving experience. Josh was by far the greatest risk taker and decided that he was going to look inside one of the zeros that littered the ocean floor. Unaware of the precarious perch the fuselage had held since it first settled on that coral ledge on the 17th of February in 1944, Josh attempted to lift the canopy. The resulting weight displacement caused the nose of the Mitsubishi to arch upward as its fragile, decades long balancing act was disrupted. As he attempted to swim away from the moving wreckage his mesh bag became caught on the exhaust manifold. Before he could pull out his knife and cut the line to the bag, he was pulled over the edge of the coral head into the crevice below. Alexander was 10 yards away when the plane started to shift. The fifteen seconds it took him to reach his brother seemed like the longest of his life. By the time he arrived, life had abandoned Josh’s body just as surely as the air that billowed from his ripped regulator hose. It would not have mattered if it had taken Alexander only three seconds to get there. It was not the 20-ft drop that killed Josh, but rather, his brother was crushed between the wing of the plane and a head of staghorn coral. Both lungs were punctured instantly from the back. He never had a chance. He was seventeen years old.
Alexander spent most of the next year in an emotional cocoon. Veronica helped, but there was more going on than she could see or Alex would talk about. While he missed his brother and best friend tremendously, it was tangential to the darkness that had overcome him. He would never share with anyone the thoughts that crossed his mind as he swam to the surface with his brother’s body. As life was ripped from his brother’s body, it was not sorrow or anguish that first entered his mind. Instead it was mortality. He was struck by the finality of life. As he hovered in the water staring at his brother’s lifeless body only five feet in front of him, the only thing Alexander could think of was where did his brother’s life go? It was like watching light disappear as the switch is turned off in an empty room. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. Where had it gone? By the time Alexander turned 18, the darkness had lifted, but thoughts about the swiftness of death would never be far from his mind. Like the simple frame of Van Gogh’s Starry Night that goes unnoticed as it outlines the visual cacophony on the canvas, the knowledge of the precariousness with which life rests on its perch would remain a paradigm through which Alexander would see the world for the rest of his.
Alexander went to Princeton after graduation. He and Veronica talked about going to school together but she had decided to attend Stanford and after that they slowly drifted apart. Arriving with no idea what he wanted to learn, was no closer to knowing when he left with an English degree four years later. He knew he had to major in something and since he already spoke what his London-born grandfather called “passable” English, he thought he had a head start. Like his brother Paul, Alex was smart enough to get by without a great deal of effort. Later he would look back fondly at his college career as mostly a blurry parade of women, beer and Shakespeare. At 21 he had no clue what he wanted to do with his life so he decided not to decide. His father wanted him to come to work for the family. He declined the invitation and decided to wander around until he found something that caught his attention. His first adventure took him to Whakapapa, New Zealand’s largest ski area. He spent two seasons as a ski instructor there. During the summer months of December through March he spent much of his time surfing in Crescent Head and Port Macquarie on Australia’s East Coast. At 23 he was still utterly clueless as to what he wanted to do. He next went to what was then West Germany, where he taught English at an International School located just outside of Dusseldorf. At 25, after an off-handed suggestion of a German girlfriend who worked in a bank, Alexander started dabbling in the rather volatile and potentially hazardous (or profitable) world of currency trading. Although he had little real experience with financial instruments, he had a mind like a steel trap when it came to numbers and he was a quick study. Within two years he was well on his on his way to turning the trust left to him by his grandfather into one of the world’s biggest fortunes. Alexander had started on the road to his future. By 32, he had everything a man could ever want, yet he still felt an emptiness he could not with explain. Slowly, as he approached his thirty-third year he began to recognize what was bothering him. It was the darkness he had felt following Josh’s death. They were back. It was not that he was missing his brother any more than he used to, but rather, it was the thoughts that had run through his mind as he floated there staring at his brother’s lifeless body. The idea of inevitable death was once again creeping into his consciousness. The difference was that now he felt like he could do something about it. At thirty-three, with his fortune firmly in hand, he knew he had found his life’s motivation...
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