The Arrow of Destiny

As soon as Klein joined the man on the stile, both of them began to twist the arrow together. The two men looked as if they were welded to one another in a joint task – without any prior knowledge of one another – with just a blind resolve to move the arrow conspiring to make them stand as one on the stile at this precise moment. The arrow swayed first one way then the next under the intense pressure of the two men’s combined weight. To an onlooker it would have looked very much like the men were working together for a second or two … but not for long. Anyone watching this strange unfolding would have gleaned something else entirely after only a few moments more. In a drastic turnaround of events, it now looked as if the men were involved in a frantic tussle of some kind, one man ostensibly pulling against the other. It was difficult to tell from merely watching the scene unfold which one of the men was actually exerting the most force against the other in this new exchange of bodily movement. What was clear though was that both of them were taking different sides in this act of moving the arrow antagonistically away from the intended direction of the other.