SATOSHI NAKAMOTO: THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD

SATOSHI NAKAMOTO: THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD

Helpless. Hopeless. Two feelings more familiar to Satoshi than his own reflection. It wasn’t even worth recalling all the times in his life when he felt these sensations. He supposed most people felt this way, at least the 99 percent of people who couldn’t afford to control their destinies. Yet, this time was different. So far, Satoshi had been lucky enough to get by in life without relatively few losses. Of course, over the years, he lost friends. In fact, he lost so many friends, he couldn’t even remember half their faces anymore. Each death followed by a week of mourning and then everything returned to normal. No one could waste more than a few days thinking about the dead, not when death was after them too. But this time was not like those times.

Up down…up down… up down… Satoshi watched the man lying on the bed, his chest rising and falling softly. For hours, Satoshi watched the man on the bed sweat, cough, and breathe slowly. Now, it was only a matter of time before the chest would cease to rise and fall. Soon, the only sound in the room would be Satoshi’s own breathing. Death, Satoshi thought to himself. He never really contemplated it before now, just embraced it as a reality. Everyone dies, and if they’re lucky, they died before they had to live, live and suffer. Satoshi had seen countless people suffer and die. Sometimes one without the other and sometimes both. After his parents died, the landlord who owned their small one bedroom apartment kicked him out onto the streets. Without remorse, the old lady who owned the building told him,

“You can’t live here if you got no money to pay me with. This ain’t no charity. You want me to end up dead like your folks? I got my own mouth to feed.” The old lady didn’t even let him take any of his belongings. Nothing to survive with, and nothing to remember his parents. Satoshi knew it was coming. When his mother came home from work the week before, her face was pale and sticky with cold sweat. She coughed heavily, like there was something lodged in her chest that couldn’t get out. The first twenty-four hours, his mother pretended like it was fatigue. He knew better. His father knew better. However, now that she already exposed them to her sickness, there was no point in leaving or trying to send his mother away. He and his father would almost certainly get the sickness too and die by the end of the week. Likely, that was the first time Satoshi felt helpless. Unlike, the wealthy who became sick and simply ordered a personal physician who could cure them within a day, Satoshi’s family was just like the other 99 percent. His family was broke. Satoshi never had medicine before. In fact, he wouldn’t even know where to get medicine. There probably wasn’t a pharmacy within miles. Why would there be? No one in his neighborhood or the next one could afford medicine.

Satoshi’s father became sick just hours after his mother returned. Strangely, Satoshi never fell ill, but over the following week, Satoshi watched as his parents’ conditions grew worse. Before both of them fell unconscious with sickness, the inevitable sign that their time was approaching, his father told him to pack whatever food he could carry into a bag.

“Satoshi,” his father breathed from the pile of blankets on the floor. Beds were just one of the many luxuries his family couldn’t afford. “You will only have a few days before the landlady notices,” his father heaved. His father was talking about after he and his mother died. Satoshi would have two days, maybe three days at best before the landlady noticed no one entering and leaving the apartment. The old lady had been around too long not to know what that meant. It meant someone died, and she had to get whatever occupants were still remaining out so she could move someone new in. Hours later, his parents stopped opening their eyes, stopped moving, and the only thing left was the rise and fall of their chests as they waited for death to claim them.

The landlady walked into the apartment two and a half days later. She walked in with a shotgun loaded, waiting for the remaining occupant to resist. She found Satoshi sitting on the floor next to his parents deceased bodies. The landlady had seen this often enough. Children living inside the small apartments with their parents dead on the floor, trying to hold onto shelter for a few more days before they were kicked-out onto the streets. The old lady felt no sympathy. The times were hard and if she let every orphaned child live for free in her building, she might as well join their parents then and there. Satoshi wasn’t mad at the old woman. How could he be? That’s just how things were.

Satoshi wandered the streets for days, living off the few morsels of food he grabbed from the apartment. He hid during the day from other orphans trying to steal his food and clothes. At night, he walked around near the buildings, trying to find anything someone might have been unfortunate enough to drop. After a week, he could feel death creeping up on him too. His lips turned white from dehydration, his hair began falling out, and every step took more effort than the one before. But he didn’t die. The old man lying on the bed before him found him curled up on the side of a building. The old man took him home to another small apartment a few blocks from his parents. Slowly, the old man nursed him back to health. The old man didn’t have much food or water to spare, so the healing process took weeks, but eventually Satoshi recovered.
However, unlike him, the old man was past healing. The sickness would take him too, just as it took Satoshi’s parents and millions of other lives each year. No one ever came to help. No one ever offered their condolences. Here, everyone lived and died alone. As it had always been.

The rise and fall of the old man’s chest stopped now. Dead, Satoshi thought for a third time. The old man was finally dead. For days of heaving, coughing, and sweating, the old man was finally dead. There was nothing for Satoshi now. Everyone who had ever cared for him was dead. This wasn’t like when his parents died and he immediately thought of survival. He actually felt pain. For the first time, he felt the cold, aching, unbearable feeling of sorrow. He lived with the old man for longer than he had with his parents. There was no one closer to him, and now he was gone. It made him angry. Unlike when the old lady kicked him out on the street, he felt anger. How could the wealthy tycoons sit on their ass while people around them died? This went farther back than just the death of his grandfather. For decades, the wealthy sat in their tall buildings looking out onto the decrepit city, watching it waste away, waiting until they were the only ones left.

According to the old man, things had not always been this way. The old man rambled about a time when people, just like him, went to stores and bought carts of food.
“Back in 2010, when I was just ten years old, my father took me to northern Michigan. Hunters from all over the state came to hunt deer. If someone in our party got one, we skinned it and ate it. We even had leftovers to put in the freezer.” The old man told him once. At the time, it seemed preposterous. Satoshi didn’t think he had ever even seen an animal before. Those died with the sickness too.

In 2030, the banks collapsed. The old man said this happened before, long ago, before even he was born. He said that the two were alike. Back when there was public school, he saw pictures of people standing at the window of skyscrapers getting ready to jump to their death. Just like then, when the banks collapsed this time, people fell from the sky. The old man supposed it was because countries could no longer afford to bail the banks out anymore. After the war in 2001, the banks caught the sickness, much like the one that spread thirty years later. By 2008, the banks were all but dead, and the people soon followed. All except the 1 percent. The 1 percent seemed invincible. The old man said things had always been that way, but until 2008, everyone just accepted it.

After that, the old man would tell him, no one could afford to live anymore. Power began shutting off across the world. Famine struck and claimed millions of lives. Then the sickness came in 2030, and everything had been this way since then.

“If only…” the old man would murmur in the darkness. Satoshi and the old man laid on the floor as soon as it got dark. There was no point to keep moving around, no one had electricity for miles. No running water. There was nothing to do once the dark took over but lay on the floor and listen to each other. “If only… we had seen it sooner. If only, there would have been a way out...none of this would have happened. Can you imagine? Back in the day, you would have gone to school, played with friends, and come home to your parents who would sit down at a table and eat dinner with you. Food by the platefuls.” An old man and his dying dreams, Satoshi would think. “If only there was a way to go back,” those were damn near the last words the old man ever spoke to Satoshi before he died. While time-travel was possible for some, it certainly wasn’t for them. Well, at least, not at that time.

To be continued…