The Archer

It had not stopped raining for even five minutes since Viswanathan had arrived. The air was choked with petrichor. Ceramic plates lay scattered on the green carpet like lotus flowers, collecting drip water from the rafters. Downstairs, the owner clacked on her typewriter in rhythm with the storm, as though it gave her creative strength. It was the third night in a row she had done this.

Viswanathan would have to return to the city tomorrow. His parents and his fianceé, Padma, believed he was at a business conference. His boss thought he was attending a wedding. Everything was fine. He had long ago learned to maintain a careful precision of detail, which he had also convinced himself was better than lying and possibly even better than the truth. His work at the company involved manipulating complex statistical models, assigning probabilistic bounds to error. Precision was everything. Even the errors had to be precise.

He lay on his side on the bed, in a fetal position. His right hand lay beneath his pillow, stinging with pins and needles. His eyes felt shrunken and drained of all their perceptive power, though he did not close them. A hand-crank lamp above the window projected the shadow of the rain onto a table, on which a bow and a quiver lay side by side. The ghosts of the raindrops slid over them and merged with their shadow. Vishwathanan thought of Artemis, the Hunter, who turned her voyeurs and lovers into stags. Below him the typewriter drummed on, punctuated by sharp dings. His eyes would close and a sense of weightlessness overcome him and the rain and the smell would fall away, and then the ding would pierce him between the back of his eyes and he would wake again. He was normally a heavy sleeper.

He rotated the zihgir--the thumb ring used to draw the bow--in his right hand. He wore it all the time now, like a wedding ring. The quiver on the table was full of carbon fiber arrows, almost profane beside the Turkish bow, an authentic 15th century antique. Suddenly, conscious of them, conscious that he was under their dreadful power, conscious of all the noise, he threw back his white covers, stood, and without putting on his sandals, without putting on his shirt, strode to the table and decided instantly that he had to kill the woman downstairs. He had to shoot her. There was no avoiding it.

He’d been coming to this cabin every four months for the last two years. His sick days, holidays, long weekends. Eyes were being raised at the company. They’d started inquiring about his health, how things were at home, how Padma was doing. They could not fire him. It just was too expensive. There was a spreadsheet with his approximate value over time, how much money he'd saved the company, and how much they paid him. It was growing. It was always growing.

He strung the bow, enjoying the strain and the tension of his muscles. That tension seemed to hold him together. It would have to be done, he thought, and not because of the typewriter or the sleep loss, and not because of the rain or the wasted trip, and not because she was an invalid, because she lived like an invalid, all alone, because no one at all would miss her if she was gone. If there was a reason... maybe it was inherent in the instrument itself. And he thought of the stag.

There were stags in these woods. He’d gotten himself a hunting license a year ago and had bought a gun, a rifle, but he could not come up with a good lie for Padma--who hated guns--so he had settled for the next best thing.

At Harvard, he had been the president of the archery club, a member of USA Archery, a two-time winner of the Target Nationals, a member of the U.S.A team at the Archery World Championships where they had finished in 9th place. He had almost competed in the Olympics, passing the qualifying trials, placing into the American team, but at the last minute, unable to compete, he was replaced. He still had his equipment.

On weekends he served as an instructor at a local sports club. An indoor range. Grades K-12, mostly young upper-middle class girls padding their college applications. It was all very casual. Competition was almost discouraged. Vishy didn’t do it for the money, which was laughable compared to his yearly salary, but because he wanted to recapture some elusive first feeling. It was not nostalgia, though there was a sense of pain. It was not longing, though there was the sense of loss. When he was six years old, his grandfather had helped him nock and loose his first arrow and he had felt something incommunicable and vaguely savage which he had been chasing ever since. In the years to follow, he slowly understood the affectation of the bullseye, the point system, the grotesque additions to a fine instrument which had once been used to kill. Even to kill men. Then it all seemed obscene.