Warren Murphy: Timber Line

They were all here, all the faces that had forced themselves into his consciousness by their ubiquitous presence on America's television screens.

There was a fat woman who thought the way to kill cockroaches was to hit them with a broom. There was another one with a flat face like a tanned pancake, who shilled for margarine. There was the Neaty-Bowl man who proved toilet bowls were clean by doing the back stroke in the toilet tank.

There was a British actor who had been out of work for 40 years and had been resuscitated to hawk records.

There was a man who sold stereos at the top of his voice, proving that mental illness was no barrier to finding work.

Remo looked at them all with the shock of recognition. They were all here, the greatest assortment of pests that America had ever had, all collected in one room, acting almost like normal human beings. But tomorrow, Remo knew, they would be back at their evil work. A pleasant thought came to his mind.

And all day long he had been grousing that he never did anything good — really good — for the United States.

He found the light switches in the back of the room, rather than try to figure them out, he pulled them all. The entire hall was plunged into darkness. There were a few screams before the master of ceremonies told everyone to sit calmly, that power would be restored in just a few minutes.

A few minutes was all Remo needed. He wended his way through the tables, seeing clearly in the darkness. Every time he found one of the more odious television pitchmen, he leaned over the person and, using his right thumb and index ringer, broke his or her nose.

It would be a long time before they posed for the cameras again. God Bless America.

Remo left the banquet hall whistling.

Remo closed the door behind him and walked to the window, stepping carefully to avoid the frail, little yellow man in the mauve kimono, who was sitting precisely in the center of the room, where all traffic would have to detour around him.

The room was overheated and stuffy, but because he couldn't count on his body to do anything right today, Remo decided not to adjust his own internal temperature. Instead, he used his index finger to cut a three-inch circular hole in the very center of the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall pane of glass. The wet, cold night air rushed into the room, and Remo gulped it down. Outside, landing and departing jumbo jets from the landing strips a hundred yards ahead seemed to be making kamikaze runs on the hotel room.

"There are two things," Chiun said. The old Oriental's voice was soft and his English precise and unaccented, but to the familiar ear, there was lurking in his speech the scream of the scold.

Remo did not answer.

Chiun sighed. "The Master of Sinanju is again talking to mud, and the mud of course does not acknowledge the Master's existence."

"All right," Remo said, filling his lungs with the cold air from outdoors before turning. "So there's two things."

"Ah, the mud speaks."

"Get off my case, Chiun," said Remo. "I'm not feeling well, and I think I'll skip the lectures and the sermons tonight."

Chiun spoke as if he had not heard Remo. "There are two things. Would you like to know what they are?"

"No. Not tonight. And not tomorrow. Try me next Tuesday. I'm going to sleep."

Remo threw himself down on the sofa and fell asleep within seconds. Within a few more seconds he was awake again. Something had caused him extreme pain in his left small toe. He sat bolt-upright on the couch.

"Did you do that?" he yelled at Chiun.

"And if I did?"

"Then I will have to take drastic steps," Remo said.

Chiun laughed. He was a little man, barely five feet tall, and he had never seen a hundred pounds of body weight. A thin, scraggly beard and tufts of hair around his ears framed his parchment face. He looked every day of his eighty-odd years, and then some. "There are two things," he said.

Remo let out a sulky sigh and lay back down, covered his head with a couch cushion, and pulled his feet out of the reach of the Master of Sinanju. He had not quite fallen asleep when he felt it. It was not quite pain, but it was not exactly pleasure. It was something like a single tickle, doubly infuriating because one knew that it couldn't stop there; more had to come. Remo waited, but nothing more came. He closed his eyes to sleep again, and he felt the single tickle again. He sat up. "All right," he said. "It's obvious I'm not going to get any sleep around here until I play your silly game. What two things?"

But even as he said it, he knew it would not be that easy. He had snubbed Chiun and tried to ignore him. He would pay a price for that before Chiun told him the two things.

"Look at yourself," Chiun said. He shook his head in disgust. "Everything is wrong. You eat wrong, you breathe wrong, you move wrong, you even sleep wrong. You are a disgrace to a semi-human. You smell like burning newspaper."

"Yes, Little Father. Wrong. Disgrace. Whatever you say."

"And to think I once had high hopes for you. You, whom I trained and treated like a son, even though the Emperor Smith cheated me and did not pay me nearly what the job was worth."

"Right," said Remo. "Cheated."

"Someday I expect to find you at one of those houses with the yellow rainbows, stuffing yourself full of those things they sell in the packages made of plastic air. Yes. Beef things. And plastic potato slices. And milk jiggles."

"Right," agreed Remo. "Beef things. Plastic potatoes. Milk jiggles." He paused to consider that then said, "Shakes."

"What?" asked Chiun.

"Shakes. They're milk shakes. You said milk jiggles. They're not milk jiggles; they're milk shakes."

Chiun snorted. "I do not care what they are called. Poison masquerades under many names."

There was a long silence, and finally Remo rose from the couch and went to stand at the window once more. He breathed deeply of the mixture of polluted lake, jet fuel, and municipal mismanagement.

"I'm sorry, Little Father, that I offend you so. It was just a very bad day."

"There are three things," Chiun said.

"You said two," Remo said.

"There are three," Chiun insisted.

"Let's get them over with so I can get some sleep."

"In my land, the young learn by listening to their elders willingly, not by being disrespectful."

"And that is why Korea occupies such a central position in the history of mankind?" Remo asked.

"Indeed."

"Indeed," Remo agreed. "What are your three things?"

"The first is my book," Chiun said.

"What book?"

"My history of Ung poetry. It is a short history, barely adequate to hint at the true beauty of Ung poetry. Only two thousand pages, but it is a start."

"I bet it is," Remo said.

"I have also added two hundred of the very best of my own Ung," Chiun said. "Would you care to hear one?" Before Remo could answer, Chiun took a deep breath and began to recite in Korean in a sing-songy squeak even higher than his usual tone. Remo's sparse Korean was enough to allow him to translate.

A snowflake

A snowflake falls

The cold air embraces it

It falls to the ground

The ground embraces it

A snowflake

The snowflake

Dirt follows

Dirt falls on the snowflake

The snowflake turns gray

Dirty gray

Then black

The snowflake melts

Oh, snowflake!

Oh, dirt!

Remo knew the poem was ended when Chiun stopped speaking. He turned to the old man, who had lowered his gaze to the floor, as if modestly declining the world's waves of adulation.

Remo clapped his hands and cheered, "Bravo. Marvelous. Now what is the second thing?"

"You liked that poem?" Chiun asked

"Great. Fantastic. The second thing?"