Yeah, right. Dasheway clearly recalled the reaction when they screened the Slick Willy pilot to a focus group. There were no laughs, not even cheap ones.
“Who cares about this guy anymore?” commented one white female in the seventeen-to-thirty age bracket. “He’s more last week than Ozzy Osbourne.”
“You could have at least let me audition for The Ladies’ Man,” Dasheway’s caller bemoaned. “Wait! How about another Ladies’ Man—The Ladies’ Men. We’ll alternate episodes.”
Dasheway hung up. This guy, he simply could not deal with right now.
They woke together at 3:00 a.m. Remo rolled their mats around two down parkas purchased in the gift shop and cleaned of their feather filling. Exerting proper compression on the parkas flattened them into packages no thicker than a cheap paperback. That was all the preparation they needed. They went out via the patio doors, stepping off the balcony and landing lightly on the snowy earth three stories beneath. The mechanical trolls were cold and silent. The mountains were peaceful. It seemed criminal to allow the natural beauty of this place to be subverted by these noisy contraptions.
“Give me a sec.” Remo found a service door under a flap in the troll’s breeches and in he went.
Chiun patiently stood on the crust of snow, hands in his robe sleeves. Remo emerged from the nether regions of the troll, only to repeat the behavior with the second one.
“Was it enjoyable?” Chiun asked as they walked on.
“Very,” Remo answered. “Would you like to know what I was doing in there, exactly?”
“Please do not tell me.”
The ice wall was a breathtaking field of white ice, sculpted painstakingly by nature from the mountain’s earth-warmed water flow. It was named the Wall of Resolution by the earliest white settlers in the region. The Maoris had a name for it, too, and they were always going on about restoring this name to the thing, but nobody could pronounce it. Well, the Maoris could pronounce it, but nobody else could pronounce it. The Maoris were always strutting around making demands as if they owned the place.
So far the name Wall of Resolution had stuck, and the Kiwi government had been trying for years to market the wall as one of the wonders of the natural world. It truly was wonderful, but there was a problem.
“It goes away,” complained the New Zealand minister of tourism to the New Zealand minister of national parks. The minister of tourism was a frumpy, just-so woman who did not walk around in a skimpy bathing suit, thank you very much, unlike some ministers of tourism who received so much undeserved attention. “You want to make it a real tourist attraction, you figure out how to keep it from melting for three months out of the year. Nobody’s going to take a holiday to see a medium-sized waterfall.” The minister of national parks proposed a bold plan to market extended holiday packages for stays that spanned the annual build-up of the ice.
“You think people are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars to sit there and watch the water freeze for ninety-eight days?” the minister of tourism demanded.
“I suppose you have a better idea?” the minister of national parks demanded.
“I most certainly do.”
“Oh, God, not those idiot movies again”.
“Those idiot movies, as you call them, have made billions of dollars. Billions. And those movies were filmed right here on the South Island. Where is our slice of that pie?”
“What do you want me to do, Minister? Put the hotel staff in elf costumes?”
“For starters. I’ve also been in contact with the Extreme Sports Network.”
“Oh, God!”
“You see the difference in our thinking, Minister? You would have us invite a bevy of sedate senior citizens to look at the mountain for a few weeks. I, on the other hand, have plans to create a publicity powerhouse. I will leverage our recognition and our ice wall into something exciting and dynamic!”
“You ruin it.”
“On the contrary.”
“They ruined it. They took a nice ice wall, out here minding its own business, and turned it into just another obstacle of Nature for man to conquer.”
‘You are disdaining the industry of televised spectacle?” Chiun asked. “You premiere this Friday. Across the country and even in Europe and Australia. Probably the Chinese will show it. The Brazilians will consider it a grand farce. But the Japanese—now, they will truly appreciate your television show, Remo. They adore true-to-life farces. You will be a hero to the Japanese.”
They began to scale the wall. Their fingers probed the uneven surface and found purchase among the ripples, the cracks and even in the varying densities of the ice. Where there was no firm grip to be found, they simply exerted pressure on the ice and moved the wall down.
“You don’t sound all that ticked off anymore,” Remo noted.
“About what would I be ticked?”
‘You know. The Ladies’ Man. You aren’t on my case about it like you were before. Don’t you care?”
“The show no longer is a concern to me. Your bluff has been seen as transparent.”
“What bluff?”
“You never intended for the show to proceed,” Chiun said simply. He pulled himself off the wall onto a ledge that was chopped in the ice. Remote-controlled cameras were bolted into the ice at the rear of the landing, and checkered flags were stationed to frame the image of the climbers in the shot as they made the summit. The race was still hours away and the equipment was in standby mode.
“Look,” Chiun said, “you can still be on television if you desire.”
“Wait just a second. What makes you think I was bluffing about the show?”
“Your behavior tells me it is a sham.”
“What behavior?”
“Idiosyncrasies in your speech patterns.”
“I don’t have idiosyncrasies,” Remo insisted.
“Unusual variations in your body language.”
“I don’t have body language!”
“You are bluffing.”
“I am not bluffing! The show will go on.”
“If it does, I will be proved wrong,” Chiun said.
‘You are so annoying when you get all agreeable.” Remo unfurled the mats side-by-side and put himself down hard. He glared menacingly at the empty blackness that awaited anyone foolish enough to step off the ledge.
“Fine. You win. It was a bluff.”
“Truly?”
“Ah!” Remo waved his hand at the air—a gesture of dismissal that was perfectly Chiun. They sat in silence. The cold wasn’t intense enough to require the use of the un-down jackets.
“Did you remember your vision, yet, Little Father?”
“I never forgot it. Did you not listen to my description of the dream?”
“Yeah, sure. But you said in the dream you saw something and you recognized it, and then it was gone. Then you were somewhere else and you recognized something, and then it was gone. What I’m asking is, did you remember the two things that you saw in the vision?”
“There was nothing for me to remember.”
“Oh,” Remo said. A minute later, he added, “What?”
“I was meditating. Maybe I dreamed, and if so then what I saw was symbolic. The recognizing and forgetting—this happened two times in rapid succession. This would tell me that the act of recognizing and then forgetting is the message itself—never mind what I saw and then at once forgot.”
“Oh,” Remo said. “So what does the message mean?”
“I do not know.”
Remo wondered if the old goat was fibbing. Chiun lied expertly.
“If what I saw was a vision, then I must take it as a directive. Perhaps I am being instructed to seek something I have yet to recognize.”