by Mark Morris
“How big’s four billion?” Michael had later asked his mother.
“A very big number.”
Michael remembered counting – there was nothing else to do but watch the blood bag sending its slow red current to his catheter – to see how long it would take to get to four billion. When he had gotten to a thousand he’d looked at his wristwatch. Fifteen minutes had passed. When you’re ten, you don’t think much about the size of numbers or how many people live on the planet because at ten your world is the entire world. Something small.
“What are you doing?” his mother had asked, hearing him count aloud: one thousand ten, one thousand eleven…
“Counting to four billion.”
“That might take you a while,” she had said.
By the time he’d reached three thousand, he’d gotten bored and tried calculating how long it would take to count to four billion. If each number took a second to say aloud, the answer was about 130 years, and that was if he counted nonstop, 24/7. Four billion was huge!
Now, at eighty, the number haunted him again, albeit for the opposite reason, for sounding so small. He watched the number on the screen drop to four billion, exactly, and in seconds it was in the high threes.
For that moment, Michael Shoe was ten again.
The hourglass of time had flipped, the sand falling like people.
“Hi again, Mr. Shoe,” a woman behind the counter said. “Platelets?”
“Yes. According to my calendar, I’m able.”
“I wish there were more people like you, more people so generous. Can you believe there are less than four billion left?”
“Fewer,” Michael said, correcting her grammar. “And remaining.”
The doomsday clock clicked rapidly in reverse, and he thought once again how long it would take for a person to do the counting instead of a machine, to count backwards from four billion, until there was no one remaining to count… mankind extinct.
Even if a person devoted half their life, twelve hours per day, it would take more than two hundred and sixty years to reach zero, two hundred if they counted quickly. But mankind didn’t have so long if the parabolic pattern of death continued. Nearly four billion people had died in the last twenty years alone.
So Michael Shoe gave.
70
He drank his free glass of orange juice and looked around the room at the others donating that morning, wondering about their blood, wondering about their motives. Were they as dedicated? Had they donated their entire lives? For how many was it their first visit? These questions filled his head. He was seventy, the oldest in the room.
60
“Good to see you again, Mr. Shoe. Blood this time?”
“AB negative,” he said, even though he’d seen her countless times before.
AB negative was the rarest blood type, Michael’s blood having both A and B antigens on red cells, but neither A nor B antibodies in the plasma, which meant his red cells could go to only those with AB blood types, never to those with O, A, or B; although, since his Rh factor was negative, this meant his blood went to Rh negative patients. He shared blood with less than half a percent of the world’s population, which is why he donated plasma as well.
Whatever was happening in the world, or to the world, whether an undiscovered blood disease, something worse than blood cancer, or perhaps caused by some stellar anomaly, blood was the key. Those with O blood types, whether Rh- or Rh+, it didn’t much matter, were dying at a more progressive rate than those with A or B, and those with AB remained relatively stable, this lowest of populations nearly unfazed.
It was good to be AB, if only for survival’s sake; otherwise, donating AB red blood this late in the depopulation game didn’t serve much purpose other than to help those with similar blood types, to keep the last of humankind healthy while the rest of the world and their dying blood types fizzled out like stars at dawn.
On the flipside, having an AB blood type made him a universal plasma donor. He had his parents to thank for that. With his mother A and his father B, he had thus inherited a blood type per the genetic code of possibilities:
“We’re short-staffed today, so the wait’s about twenty minutes,” the woman behind the counter said. She took his paperwork, the same form he’d filled out with the same information, each and every time. After more than forty years of world depopulation and blood donating, there should be an easier procedure, Michael mused. Forty-four years, to be exact. He’d given blood so many times he could do it himself, but that was against regulations. They track births and deaths across the entire world, all of us watching that blasted ever-dwindling number in real-time, yet the process of donating blood’s still so archaic.
The population counter on the screen mounted in the waiting area ticked down steadily: 7,938,110,345. More than ten billion people had died in the last forty-four years. Gone. A few blinks and the 345 at the end fell below 300.
Cremation of bodies had become mandatory, the ground unable to take so much expired life. It was illegal in most countries to bury the dead, and so Michael imagined Cemetery Police all over the world struggling to enforce such crazy laws. Larger cities had erected skyscrapers with floors designed like libraries – some called them Libraries of the Dead – wherein, for a price, a loved one could be entombed within a book-like urn and be placed on ‘bookshelves’. Modernised mausoleums for the deceased. A place called Chapel of the Chimes in California had started the tradition, and now they could be found all over the world.
People still got away with burials, whether illegally sticking to tradition or because of religious belief, yet graveyards, much like the human race, were fading out of existence.
As the counter counted in reverse – the numbers a blur – Michael couldn’t help but wonder how there could be so many funerals, all at once. So many people crying: enough fallen tears to fill reservoirs. Or were funerals, too, illegal? He couldn’t remember, although he’d attended more funerals than he could remember, lost friends and lost relatives so easily forgotten because their deaths had become so regular. How many had he attended these last few years?
What’s the weight of ten billion dead? he wondered. What about the ashes?
Michael had read once that the average cremains of an adult male weighed somewhere around 1.6 pounds, and the average female around 1.4. But what about adolescents, toddlers, infants? Even if you lowballed an estimate of one pound per person, over ten billion pounds of ash had been generated over the last forty years.
Imagine the libraries!
Ten years had passed since he’d visited his father’s book.
50
“Hey, Dad,” he said to the shelf.
His father’s book/urn was brown with gold trim and lettering, and matched his mother’s next to it, which was similar but had a golden rose etched on the spine where a book publisher’s logo would normally go. The Shoes had an entire shelf dedicated to the family name, something his father had wanted in terms of a plot.
The family library, he’d called it. A collection of shoeboxes.
“In case you’re wondering, today’s my birthday. I turned the big five-oh, the same age as grandpa when he died.”
His grandfather, Christopher Gordon Shoe, was one of the last generations to be buried in the ground. His body had been unearthed, eventually, the entire cemetery excavated to make room for a hospital. His ashes resided next to grandma Sharon’s somewhere in Oregon. Perhaps he could get them moved.
“Ten-point-four billion,” he told his father. “That’s about how many people were on this planet when you died, that’s about how many died in the last forty-four years, and that’s about how many are on this planet right now. You were always concerned about world population, and now I’m concerned with world depopulation. How funny is that?”
Michael touched the glass separating him from his parents.
Not so funny, his father would say.
“From the time I was forty until now, the world’s lost over three and a half billion, from whatever’s killing us. The most lost in a single decade since this started back when I was a teen. I remember when the numbers changed direction. We’ve lost as many people in the last ten years as how many had lived on the planet when you were that age. I remember thinking how large four billion sounded. Four billion! Do you remember? Now it doesn’t seem so significant. It seems small. Thirteen billion dead. Imagine the libraries, Dad.”
Someday Michael would have his own book on these shelves.
Will anyone be around to pay me a visit? Will anyone be around to pay any of these books a visit, the mausoleums as empty as the libraries – for real books – of my youth?
He remembered going to the library with his father, back when they still existed, and how empty the building had seemed, how wasted. So many books full of magic and wonder and no one wanting to read them. He’d wanted to take his own children there some day, to encourage them to read, to open their minds as his own father had encouraged.
The first book he’d ever checked out was Stardust by Neil Gaiman. He and his father had read it aloud together, every night before bed.
Michael never had kids, never wanted any. Who could have children in a dying world such as this? he’d always thought.
“We are all made of stardust,” he said to his father, as if reading from its pages.
And we all become ash, in the end, his father would say.
You should find someone, his mother would say.
“So that I don’t die alone?”
Even if he’d managed to hold onto a relationship with a woman having an A, B, or an AB blood type – which would have given future children the greatest chance of survival – the odds of those children dying were far too great. The ratio of having a child with either an A or a B was around 2:3, with 1:3 having a child with AB. And only with a partner having an A, B, or AB blood type. O’s were out entirely, as their children would die as so many O’s had.
Could he have fallen in love with an O? Those with O had unfairly become humanity’s cast-offs, nature’s invalids. This late in the depopulation game, were there any O’s remaining, or had that blood type become extinct, evolutionarily phased out… the world full of A’s and B’s but predominantly AB’s?
He had witnessed far too many child deaths to play the odds of falling in love and having children, which is how he’d lost Amber; she’d wanted kids, to at least try.
All you can do is try, his mother would say.
He touched the glass again, as if she were touching the glass from the opposite side. It was cold, but comforting. Someday he’d be there with them, in his own book, behind the glass, name etched in metallic red, perhaps, like blood.
“I should have tried harder,” Michael told them. “I’ve done everything I can to help those in need, but is it doing any good? The world is dying, and I’m only one man. I’ve given my blood, my platelets. I should have given something more. I should have tried with Amber, should have listened to you, Mom. Shouldn’t have been so selfish. I thought I was being selfless, but I was wrong. And now it’s too late. Now all I can do is continue to give my blood.”
It’s all you can do, son, his father would say.
40
“The world needs more people,” Amber screamed. “More children. How can you not try?”
“We’ve tried,” Michael said, “and we’ve lost two already. How can you even think of losing a third?”
Taylor was stillborn, B negative.
Dylan died from cardiac arrest two weeks after he was born, A positive.
“Odds are in our favour,” she’d pleaded. “The next one will have a chance. The next one will be born with AB and she will have a chance.”
“I can’t go through it again!”
“You’re afraid to go through it again, Michael. Every eight weeks you give blood, and then platelets. The world doesn’t need blood. It needs children!”
She’d slammed the door and walked out. Never saw her again.
The death counter dropped to 13,929, 503, 071.
30
Michael Shoe never thought he’d make it to thirty. Most friends his age had died. He’d donated blood and the ‘clear gravy’ for nearly half his life, but for what purpose? He thought of taking his life, of cutting his wrists and letting his blood kill him the only way it seemingly could, and then he met Amber.
Michael was a regular at BloodSource, but she was something new. After the second time he saw her there, she asked him out over paper cups of orange juice.
She was AB positive. He was AB negative. For some reason this attracted them.
“Is this your first time?” she’d asked.
“I’ve been doing this a while.”
“Yeah? How long.”
“Since I could. I’ve been coming here since I turned sixteen.”
Amber had admired the dedication, the desire to help.
“Down to fifteen-point-eight billion this morning. Can you believe it?”
He could, and by the time the counter hit point-seven, he and Amber had lost their first child together, Taylor. Lost her in the womb. Amber in pain one morning – what she thought were contractions – and their daughter dead shortly thereafter, the ultrasound revealing a pulseless floating baby. And by the time the counter had dropped below fifteen billion, Amber had given birth to Dylan – two months early – and together they’d watched life support keep him alive until it couldn’t.
20
He’d been giving blood for four years, every fifty-six days, and platelets in between – his mother and father still alive, his marriage and children still ten years in the future.
The woman behind the counter was new because the prior one had died. Michael knew this one would die, too, because everyone around him had started dying four years earlier.
It had something to do with the blood.
He knew the exact number, the day this hell began, the same way every boy and girl in the world knew the number: 17,989,101,196… the highest population of people ever recorded.
This had happened four years ago, back in high school.
A website was established, everyone mad with numbers and eager to see world population hit fifteen billion. Cell phone apps were created. You could find the counter just about anywhere, everyone waiting for the big day. How this ticker kept track of all death and life was a mystery to Michael, yet every time the number hit a new billion thereafter, people held parties, monitored the counters in schools, on screens, celebrating the explosion of life, despite the maladies created from overpopulation. Michael was in his history class when it happened, his teacher obsessed with watching the number grow. Mr. Laurensen had the counter displayed on a screen at the back of the room, kids craning their necks every so often to look.
“The monitor’s stuck,” someone had said, maybe Charlie Hanlon, and when his teacher asked what Charlie had said, he said it again. The life counter wasn’t stuck, of course, but had tipped the fragile balance between life and death. For a few moments the 196 at the end stayed 196, long enough for everyone to see… and then it had dropped to 195, and then 194.
Never before had the number decreased.
It had always ticked along, growing, numbers too fast to follow, and then forever more the life clock had suddenly become the death clock.
By the end of class, 1,884 people had died, although Michael knew the number was much larger. People were also born at a surprising rate, so the 1,884 also included new life in the world, which meant the number of dead was either significantly higher, or that women all over the world had stopped birthing children.
The woman behind the counter at BloodSource cleared her throat because he’d zoned, thinking about the past. She’d be dead in a few years, he knew, re
placed by someone else.
Four years seemed such a long time ago…
16
Michael was nervous because he’d never given blood before, or had never had his blood taken, as his mother had said after signing the consent form. It sounded so much worse for blood to be taken than to be given, and so Michael gave.
The number 17,989,101,196 was stuck in his mind.
“Why do you want to give?” his mother asked.
He shrugged and rolled up his sleeve.
“I heard casualties may rise to the millions. Can you imagine?”
10
The last thing Michael remembered was staggering to the front door and ringing the doorbell to his own home, afraid that letting go of his dripping wrist would create a mess if he tried opening the door, and because Mom and Dad would be so mad at what he’d done.
“Michael-oh-my-god!” his mother said, looking from his wrist to the scratch on his forehead to the blood pooling at his feet.
He’d passed out, then, on the porch, and the next thing he remembered was waking in a hospital bed, staring at a blood bag held above him by a skinny metal robot-like arm.
“Where’s Dad?” he said.
“He’s giving blood. You’re AB negative and so is he.”
“Is that Dad’s blood?” he said, meaning the bag.
She smiled.
“No.”
“Then why’s he doing it?”
“There are millions of people in the world who need blood, just like you, and there are only so many people like your father willing to share. Someone gave this blood in case a boy like you might need it someday, and some day someone might need yours.”
“Can I give blood too?”
“When you’re old enough.”
87
