"Per-fek'-shen: 1) the quality or state of being perfect, as a) freedom from fault or defect."
He looked through all the definitions, but none of them mentioned happiness. He was disappointed.
On his way out, the clerk asked Remo: "Find what you wanted?"
"Yeah. Did you know I can be perfect without being happy?"
Before the clerk could answer, Remo was back on the street. He did not feel like going straight back to his hotel room, so he decided to carry his perfection caravan into the Roxbury ghetto of Boston.
The sight of a white man, running down the street after dark, in track shorts, caused much hilarity in Roxbury, but it stopped when nobody could catch him, not even Freddy (Panther) Davis, who last year had set the inner-city record for the fastest 440 ever run in stolen Keds.
The April night was chilling as Remo headed back toward his bright hotel. He looked up toward their room where he imagined Chiun sat at peace and decided he did not want to go up, not yet. So he jogged along Boylston Street until it intersected with Massachusetts Avenue, the sidewalks bathed by the eerie eyes of the passing cars on both the city streets and the Massachusetts Turnpike which passed under that point.
Remo stepped up to the guard rail over the turnpike and stared out at the impassive automobiles of the anything-but-impassive men and women who were born, became neurotic, argued, fought, questioned, reasoned, loved, screwed, killed, sought immortality, then died.
He thought about each one moving toward him and wondering where they were coming from and what they had done. He saw the cars on the other side disappear around a distant bend and wondered where their drivers were going and what they might do.
And then he had it. It was all clear, why he could be unhappy even though perfect.
Suddenly Remo knew where he was going and where all those cars were going.
Remo was going to a hotel.
Everybody else in the world was going home.
And Remo would never go home. Home was a wife, kids. But it would only be a matter of time before a wife would tap him on the back when he wasn't looking and she would wind up with many important internal organs atomized. And kids? By the time his were of school age, they probably would have wiped out half the block, which might be hard to explain to the P.T.A. "You see, friends and neighbors, the children's father is the world's most perfect killing machine and they're just chips off the old block, heh, heh."
But there was no reason he couldn't have a home. A house. A place other than a hotel room. He could do without kids anyway. Bringing them up nowadays was risky, 'cause if they didn't turn out to be junkies, they stood a good chance of turning out to be freakos like that obnoxious Margie from the School of…
"Oh, balls," Remo said aloud.
As he tore off toward his hotel, an old lady clapped her hands over the ears of the twelve-year-old boy walking with her and shouted after him: "What the fuck's wrong with you? Can't you see I got a child with me, for Christ's sake?"
Remo hit the hotel steps three at a time, he took six at a time on the second and third floors and made the last seven flights in seven bounds.
He burst onto his floor, ruining his second door of the day, and jumped to the open entrance to his room.
Chiun sat in the middle of the floor, facing the door, his eyes closed, his mouth creased in a small smile. In the four corners of the room were four girls, their thumbs in their mouths, their rears pointed skyward.
Chiun opened his eyes as Remo entered and looked around.
"Oh, it is the perfect one," Chiun said, and then cackled. "Hen, heh, heh. All hail the perfect one."
"All right, knock it off," Remo said. "What'd you do to them?"
"Nothing but what they asked for," Chiun said. "Barging in here through a door that the perfect one had destroyed, a perfectly good door, and demanding to see wonderful Remo, and all the while, I am sitting here, minding my business, taking a few moments of pleasure from All My Offspring while you are out, gallivanting around… where were you while all this was going on?"
Remo refused to be sidetracked. "What'd you do to them?" he said, but before Chiun could answer, one of the girls moaned.
Remo walked over to the sound. Looking closer, he realized the girl was not only alive, but smiling broadly. So were the other three, including Margie who held a copy of The Powerology Guide to Sexual Fulfillment in her dirty fist.
"Take them out of here," Chiun said. "In a perfect manner, of course. Heh, heh, heh. Just as I always thought. You are perfect for taking out garbage."
Remo, relieved to find that the four bodies weren't just bodies, did not even argue. He reached down to the hulk of Margie and grabbed her under the stomach. She arched slowly, muttered "Fantastic," then wrapped her body around Remo's hand, like a kitten if a kitten could be called sex-crazed. Remo lifted her like the handle of a Samsonite two-suiter and deposited her on her feet outside the suite. She seemed to float down the hall toward the elevator. Remo shot a leering look at Chiun.
"Dirty old man," he said.
"They are reliving their childhoods," Chiun said, "which all happen to be pleasant ones. Wipe that disgusting look off your lecherous muffin face. The Master of Sinanju is above such things."
He turned his back and looked out the window as Remo deposited the other three girls in the hall and pushed them off, like walking dolls sold by sidewalk peddlers, in the direction of the elevators.
When Remo went back in the room, he brought with him the remnants of the door, which he propped in place.
"No one came to fix this door?" he asked.
"They did. But I told them to come back when the Perfect One was here. Heh, heh, heh."
"What did you do to those girls?" Remo asked.
"They interrupted me. I put them to sleep and made them feel good. But what did you do today?"
"I made a decision. I want a house," Remo said.
"Good," said Chiun. "So do I. I will take the one in electrical Washington."
"What?" Remo said.
"It was you who explained it to me. About electricity, the different currents. Electrical Washington."
"Washington, D.C., doesn't have anything to do with electricity," Remo said. "D.C. doesn't stand for direct current."
"You told me it did," Chiun said petulantly.
"Well, it does sometimes. But not this time."
"I am glad you are perfect," Chiun said, "because you will always be able to tell me when it means direct current and when it doesn't. But I still want that big white house there."
"The President lives there," Remo said.
"How long will it take him to move?" Chiun asked.
"He's not moving."
"The President would deny us this?" Chiun asked.
"I deny us this," Remo said.
"I will never forget this, Remo. First you lie to me about electricity and then you will not let me have a house which is little enough to ask, considering all I have done for you," Chiun said.
"Why that house, Chiun?" asked Remo who felt himself sinking into an endless pit of explanation and counter-explanation. "Why is that house so important to you?"
"I don't care about the house," Chiun said. "It is what one can do there. I have seen this maker of automobiles…"
"Ah, geez, Chiun."
"You go back on that explanation, too?"
Remo remained silent.
"I have seen this automobile maker beckon merely and I have seen Barbra Streisand come to this big ugly white house in electrical Washington. This I have seen. And I, I could stand in the glorious palaces of noble Sinanju and beckon until my fingers turn to dust and Barbra Streisand would not come."
"So, we're back to Barbra Streisand."
"Yes," said Chiun.
"Well, let's forget Barbra Streisand and let's forget the White House. I just want a plain house. To live in."