The Way of the Shark

(A Parable for the Last Breath Society)

A woman tells her son to sit quietly. She tells him that he only has a certain number of breaths and when he has used them all, he will die. The child spends the next few hours, sat, holding his breath for as long as possible. He wants to preserve his life for as many years as he can. He hopes that he might never die. He hopes he might find a way to hold his breath for such a long period of time that the end will never come. The boy goes into training, each day he holds his breath longer. He grows into a young man and still practices his breath holding. He becomes a free diver, swimming under the sea with no oxygen. This helps him to spend extended periods of time without breathing. His life goes on, his only thought is to extend life through holding his breath. He remains silent most of his life. He only speaks when he really needs to. He spends most of his time alone, or standing quietly in the company of others. The man is pretty but never takes a sexual partner. He heard than sex makes breathing heavy, something to avoid at all costs. He listens to music and pities the singers, surely this can’t be good for their health. He is particularly disturbed by songs that use whistling, a terrible waste of breath.

Swimming under the water is his only pleasure. He swims near the sharks, marvelling at their power, speed and beauty. He is particularly fascinated by the white pointer, or great white as they are commonly known. He watches as it moves. The pointer must continually swim forward in order to survive. It can only breathe when water is running through its gills. The man wonders if the sharks too have a certain number of breaths. He wonders if they are conscious that their life depends upon a movement forward.

One day, the man goes out to dive. He climbs off the boat, the water is calm. In the distance, he sees the fin of a shark cutting through the water as if it was a surgeon’s scalpel cutting through a human lung. It moves rapidly towards him, and then vanishes underneath. He knows what this means, as pointers always attack from below. He turns towards the boat, but it was too late. He feels a great force below and the water turned red. He is dragged under the surface. The shark vanishes as quickly as it arrived, they do not like the taste of human flesh, and this was a mistaken attack. The man surfaces, his head above the water. He opens his mouth and for the first time since he was a small child, he screams. The breath forces its way out of his body. It is exhilarating. He screams again, and again, all of his energy went into the scream. He is out of breath but continues to scream in a mixture of agony and pure pleasure. And then he passes out. The blood is running from his leg, and he starts to sink. His mouth wide open in a frozen scream, he continues to sink. The water rushes into his mouth and begins to fill his lungs. He coughs, inhales, exhales, breathes. He is breathing in the water.

In this moment, he realises that his life had been for nothing. All this saving breath, it led, not to immortality but to this moment. This moment of drowning. As he breathed in the water, he felt alive for the first time. He imagines he, too, was a white pointer. He imagines that he needed to move forward in order to breathe in the water. He imagines that the water that was killing him, was actually sustaining him. He imagines that the blood in the water was not his own, but a seal he had bitten. This is perhaps the happiest moment of his life. His body stiffens and his heart stops beating. The water continues to enter his body and he sinks further and further down. The corpse sinks forever, it never reaches the bottom. The salt maintains the flesh for longer. Small parasites feed on the slowly decaying body. The death of one sustains the life of others. The creatures in the deep ocean are able to continue breathing because of this body. The shark that caused this event, continues swimming. It glides effortlessly through the water, always maintaining its forward motion, always pushing the water through its gills, always breathing.

Until the last breath is breathed.