Remo The Adventure Begins (6 page)

“History,” said McCleary, “is made up of lots of todays that just aren’t here anymore.”

“Go back to your beer,” said Smith. “We’re committed, but not happily.”

“But then again, you’re never happy,” said McCleary.

But Smith was not listening to him. Something very strange was happening in an especially sensitive part of America’s defenses. The organization’s computers were sounding an alarm. They were having difficulty accessing areas they were normally supposed to monitor. It was as though entire crucial areas of America’s defense system were off limits to American scrutiny. At first, Smith thought this had to be some form of computer error.

“First, show me how you do that thing with the bullets. You know, the dodging,” said Remo.

He sat on a bare wood floor in a well-lit room stripped of anything but bamboo mats spread along the two farthest walls. Those were for sleeping, Remo was told. Next door was another room, with fourteen steamer trunks that seemed to have enough colored kimonos to furnish a decade of oriental fashion shows. Chiun seemed to have one appropriate for each moment of the day and for each purpose of each moment.

“That is not first,” said Chiun.

“Was it hypnotism?” said Remo.

“Are you going to learn or are you going to talk?”

“The best way to learn is to ask questions,” said Remo.

The room was cold. But Chiun did not seem to mind cold. Nor did he react to the heat when the big iron radiators steamed up.

“And how do you know the best way to learn?”

“Well, we were taught that.”

“Which is why you know nothing. The best way to learn is to listen to him who knows. I know. You do not know. Listen.”

“What if I don’t understand something?”

“Of course you don’t understand, that is why you are learning. You will learn better if I talk and you do not, because I know and you do not know.”

Remo shrugged. His legs hurt, being tucked under one another as he sat in what Chiun had called the sitting-alert position, best for learning.

“The first thing you must realize is that a gun is not the best weapon.”

“Right. Your hands,” said Remo.

“Your hands are not your greatest weapon, nor are your legs, or even, as you will learn, your breathing. The greatest weapon on this earth is your mind. The cheetah is faster. The gorilla stronger. And of course a bird can fly. But man rules because he has his mind.”

Chiun paused. “Of the ten places of the mind, man uses less than one. This was discovered by the Great Master Go, the Elder, in your year of 1200
B.C.
, dating from the emergence of your God.”

“I’m not religious,” said Remo. “But you know I once read that modern scientists have discovered that we use only eight percent of our minds. Did you know that?”

Chiun folded his gray morning kimono around his long fingers and sat down in the learning position. He was quiet.

“I just wanted you to know that,” said Remo after a while. “I thought you might find it interesting.”

After another while when Chiun did not speak, Remo said:

“Okay. I am sorry. I will listen.”

Chiun rose. He raised a finger.

“First, you must realize you made a horrible mistake, one that I can only forgive once.”

Remo felt his legs begin to hurt, tucked under him in a lotus position. He moved around. He was quiet.

“You called me a Japanse. I am not Japanese. There is a story about peoples. Whites have light skin to make up for the cold climates in which they live. That is one aberration. Blacks have dark skin to make up for the heat in which they grew. That is the second aberration. But yellow men have the color that is perfect and normal. They are no aberration.

“Yet, among yellow men, the Japanese are perfidious. The Chinese lazy. The Thai slow. The Cambodian demented, the Burmese peculiar in the extreme, and not just a little bit gluttonous.

“Only the Korean can claim diligence, courage, intelligence, beauty and perfection. But I am sorry to say, not all Koreans have these virtues. The southerners are too emotional, and north we find decadence in Pyongyang. Only in the blessed village of Sinanju do we find people worthy of being what mankind should be. Except of course the fishermen who have become lazy because of the generosity of the House of Sinanju and the baker who cheats on weights, and at times the women can be hard.”

“You’re Korean, aren’t you?” said Remo.

Chiun smiled. “See. You listen and you learn.”

“And you’re from Sinanju,” said Remo.

“You are learning.”

The second, and next most important, lesson was breathing. Remo thought it was idiotic.

“I’ve always breathed,” said Remo. “Everybody who is alive breathes. They do it from birth and stop at death.”

“And they do it wrong. Like you. Like the way you happened to start at birth, never bothering to give it another thought, unless you have a problem with it. Willy-nilly. Breath. When you are exhausted you breathe hard. When you are frightened you hold your breath. But you never let it give you the power of your most important fuel. Air. You will start now to breathe correctly.”

Remo felt Chiun’s fingernails straighten his spine and press his diaphragm and then release. He felt the air go deeper into his lungs. He felt a calmness come over him. Suddenly his mouth was filled with the odor of rancid fat.

“Where’d that come from?” asked Remo. “Who has left meat to rot?”

“You have, in your last meal. The meat is rotting in your stomach. You eat dead meat.”

“That reminds me. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since last night,” said Remo.

“So you ate,” said Chiun. “And besides you are too fat. You move like a pregnant yak. Live off your stored fat for a while.”

“I’m hungry,” said Remo. “And I am not going to sit around here breathing and starving to death waiting for you to show me how to break some board with my bare hands. I’ve done your breathing; now let’s get on with the training.”

Remo saw the finger. He saw the long nail of Chiun go forward. He saw it touch his bicep. And then he felt as though someone had dropped a safe on that bicep. His arm was broken. He was sure his arm was broken. He rolled on the floor and groaned in pain.

So close to the floor he could see the grain in the wood, he nursed his injured arm with the other, and heard Chiun speak.

“You did not ask to be here, I gather. No more than you asked to be white, or arrogant, or insolent. It is not your fault. So let us make this agreement. I will train. You will learn. And then I will leave.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But how am I going to learn with a broken arm?”

Remo felt the fingernail touch the bicep again and then there was no pain. He moved the arm. He stretched it. He turned it. He felt it with the other hand. Miraculously the bone had been restored.

“How did you fix the break?”

“If you will listen,” said Chiun, “you will understand that bones and muscle do not make strength. Nerves make strength. Knowledge makes strength. The mind you do not use can make strength. The arm was never broken. It only had to feel like it was broken for you to listen to me. He who talks cannot listen.”

“Do you always talk like a Chinese fortune cookie?” asked Remo.

He saw the fingernail again, but this time he was ready to dodge it. Strangely it seemed almost attached to him, one with him, until the pain came to his solar plexus. Then after sufficient groveling on the floor that pain was released.

“Okay,” gasped Remo. “Korean cookie.”

Chiun nodded.

“You bastard,” said Remo.

“That is swear word, a curse of sorts. Swearing is a helplessness. You are not here to learn to be helpless.”

Learning to breathe was harder than Remo thought. Chiun kept blaming it on Remo’s immoral life.

“You grunt. You groan because of the poisons you have brought into your system,” said Chiun.

“It would help if you stopped standing on my stomach,” said Remo.

Every breath had to raise Chiun. The slippers were firm in his abdomen.

“Let the muscles go. You are holding me with your muscles.”

“Otherwise you’ll sink.”

“Raise me with the breathing. Feel the floor you are on. Sense the floor. Sense the air. Sense yourself. Be yourself. Breathe.”

Remo let the stomach muscles go, and at first tensed to keep Chiun’s weight from collapsing his stomach. But as soon as he thought of his breathing, sensed the air, even the dust in it, and the light in it, he felt he could breathe with lightness, as though the man standing on him was part of him, and breathing was right and steady. He did not feel the weight of Chiun on him or off him. His body understood. His breathing knew. He tasted light and darkness with his breathing.

One did not need eyes to see, or hands to feel, or even skin to sense the cold and the warm. The breathing made him one with all of it, in space and on the wood floor of this bare room two stories high, with the skylight and the vastness above it. Remo opened his eyes.

It was dark. He looked at Chiun.

“How long was I breathing like that?”

“As long as you needed,” said Chiun.

“Eight hours? It felt like a minute.”

“Time is something that takes place in the mind of the universe,” said Chiun.

“May I ask what you mean by that?”

“No,” said Chiun.

“When am I going to learn to dodge bullets and things?”

“You will learn everything you can, and no more than you can,” said Chiun. “Now go to sleep.”

“I’m hungry,” said Remo.

“Use your fat,” said Chiun.

“That’s not exactly a meal,” said Remo.

“I will tell you when you are ready for a meal.”

“I’m ready. I’m ready.”

“You ate Tuesday. Now quiet,” said Chiun.

It became clear in the days that followed that what Remo was learning was not hand fighting as he knew it. Chiun showed him a fingerboard Remo had seen karate students use. Actually, Remo had never seen them use it. Patrolman Sam Makin had seen them use it. The name was bothering him now. He had taken “Remo” assuming he would use it for a day or two, and then be free of everything. Now he dreamed in Sam Makin, and he thought in Remo. Sometimes he thought in Patrolman Sam Makin, and dreamed in Remo. Sometimes he didn’t know one from the other. But he always called himself Remo.

He had been in training three weeks, mostly breathing and starving, when Chiun showed him the fingerboard.

Remo tapped the soft pads of his fingers against the wooden board to toughen them. When he was done, Chiun told him to hang it on the wall. Remo asked how. Chiun showed him the proper way to train fingers on a board. Then, with two taps of his index finger, he put a hole in it.

“You build calluses on your fingers but build strength in your mind. You must believe; that is where your strength is. Man is the only animal that does not believe in his own powers.”

“I believe. I believe I am hungry. I believe I am Patrolman Sam Makin. I believe I am Remo Williams. I believe. I believe.”

“That is not belief, that is anger.”

“You should be happy with anger. You’re a killer.”

Chiun clutched a delicate hand to his bosom.

“This is the second thing you must learn, almost as important as knowing the difference between Koreans and lesser peoples of the naturally colored race.

“I do not train you to kill. A truck kills. Meat of cows kills. A professional assassin promotes harmony and brings about a more peaceful humor to the entire community.”

“You make it sound like a public service.”

“A professional assassin is the highest public servant,” said Chiun, who went on to tell him about the horrors of the last half-century, when governments spurned assassins for amateurs of their own kind.

“Yes, it is true,” said Chiun. “Every government seems to have these crude imitations in great number, and what is the result? Mass murder. Killing. They are the killers. When the world returns to the proper assassins you will see grace and harmony.”

“I’d like to see breakfast,” said Remo. Patrolman Sam Makin used to love breakfast. Sam Makin used to fry brown sausage, and cut onions and butter into steaming rich potatoes. Sam Makin used to spread sweet red jams on crisp rolls.

Even the nuns at the orphanage had allowed Sam Makin to have as many rolls and as much jam as he liked, as well as a hot cereal during the winter that Sam Makin used to call warm cement.

Remo Williams would have given cartilage for that cereal now.

Chiun said Remo did not understand starvation. Starvation was when the body did not get what it needed. Remo did not need food. He needed to memorize the names of the first hundred Masters of Sinanju. He needed to learn how Sinanju came about, how selfless the Masters were. How the world was.

“What do I care how castles are fortified?” asked Remo. “I am never going to crawl into a king’s bedroom.”

“You think everything you see is new just because you see it for the first time. But everything has been here before. It has just had different names. And they too, in times so far ago no word remains today, thought they were new. But even then, they were not new.”

Finally, after weeks and weeks of breathing and moving, and learning about more dead Koreans than Remo thought ever existed, Chiun said Remo was ready to go outside. But he had better leave Sam Makin in the past or he might not survive the day.

Before dawn, Chiun had Remo walk outside with him. Now Chiun wore the dark kimono, which he explained was copied by the Ninja assassins of Japan.

“A nation notorious for cheap imitations,” said Chiun. They walked several blocks with Chiun peering into the night sky, looking for something above them. They entered a building with an elevator. Chiun pointed to the elevator doors.

“I like these. I rode in one yesterday,” said Chiun. “They’re called elevators.”

“I know,” said Remo. “I was raised in this country.”

“Shut your eyes,” said Chiun.

Remo did so. They entered the elevator, and Remo called off the floors with his eyes shut, right up to forty, where the elevator stopped. Still with his eyes shut he followed Chiun up a flight of stairs.

“You are now going to learn that one does not jump with his eyes,” said Chiun. “You are going to jump from one place to another with your eyes shut. You will sense me, sense where I land and then you will land there.”