Sweet Dreams td-25 Read online

  Grassione laughed and clapped his hands together.

  The picture suddenly changed. It was a romantic, dimly lit apartment. The dark-haired young man was sitting at a small round table, raising a glass of wine to a dark-haired beauty across from him. She was small and delicate, with Oriental eyes. The door of the room burst open and Grassione appeared with a submachine gun and opened fire.

  Grassione watched and sat smugly in his chair aboard Il Avvocato, smiling his pleasure with himself.

  The picture began to jump again. But instead of a new shot, the colorful landscape returned. Grassione frowned. The giant foot was still there, but it was slowly rising.

  Grassione sat up and looked closer as the foot rose.

  The shadow under the foot receded until the dark-haired man, now looking gentler than Grassione had pictured him, had lifted the foot an arm's length above him.

  Grassione thought about the foot pressing down, crashing down on this peacefully smiling man with the thick wrists. Except the foot didn't. It began to crack.

  The harder Grassione thought, the more cracks appeared and the wider they grew. Suddenly, the foot, as if made of plaster, crumbled around the young man's hands.

  Grassione cursed and thought about himself machine-gunning this man, and the picture shifted back to the dimly lit apartment. Grassione was still firing the machine gun but the bullets were hitting nothing. They crashed into the table and the walls. The girl wasn't even there.

  Grassione saw a blue shadow alongside his image on the television screen, and then his own machine gun was in his mouth and the bullets were smashing off the back of his skull, blood, brain, and bone flying off to color the walls.

  Grassione shouted in spite of himself, twisting in the leather chair. The picture lost the vertical, then the horizontal. Grassione tried to rise but could not.

  A new scene came on the television. It was a devastated town street. A gray, dusty moonscape lined with craters and bullet holes. Sifting through the wreckage were dozens of Grassiones, all dressed in Nazi uniforms and carrying automatic rifles.

  They would poke around a bit, then one would fire at a small animal, a rat, a shadow. They all seemed frightened.

  The real Grassione sat sweating in his chair, riveted, wanting to rise but feeling unable to.

  A wall fell down on the television screen atop several Grassiones. A human whirlwind hit the desolated town. The Nazi Grassiones started firing wildly. They succeeded in chipping wood and concrete as well as killing two more Grassiones, and then the blurry human form moved among the others, and where he moved, they died. Seemingly without touching them, he sent Grassiones flying all around him. His limbs were dark blurs and his head bobbed like a baloon in a cross current. He would seem trapped in the sights of a rifle, then the gun would be gone and his hand or foot would fill the television screen, then there would only be red.

  Finally there was only one frightened Grassione left on the screen. He backed off slowly now from what finally had come into focus as a dark-haired young man with thick wrists. The television Grassione tried to run.

  But the dark-haired man was on him, Grassione's head between his hand. With what looked like simple pressure, Grassione's head split open like a walnut shell.

  Arthur Grassione screamed in his seat.

  The picture wavered, then disappeared in a maze of vertical lines and a wash of red, then went black.

  Grassione tried to get up. He tried to pull the electrodes off. But his hands couldn't reach his face. His head wouldn't move. He felt locked in the big soft leather chair.

  Then a picture began to take shape before him. The dark television screen seemed to become a mirror. Grassione saw himself sitting in his chair with only one electrode on his temple and one on his neck. There were still four black wires coming from the Dreamocizer box on the back of the television set, but two of the wires were leading above him, over his chair.

  Grassione concentrated on the screen. He bent a little so he could see better.

  Standing behind the chair, arms crossed atop the back, was the thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists.

  Grassione stared in wonder as the man reflected on the television set reached down to him.

  He felt something on his chest.

  He felt the pain.

  He felt the air go out of him and his ribs crack and his heart pushed up against his spine. His blood vessels burst like popping corn, and his brain clouded, and he felt no more and saw and heard and did no more.

  Remo let the two electrodes in his hand drop to Grassione's lap.

  He sensed someone at the door and turned to see Chiun enter.

  "There is no one else on this boat," Chiun said. "I found the girl. What he did to her was not nice."

  "What I did to him wasn't much better, Little Father," said Remo.

  He smiled at Chiun, then waved to the television set.

  "Want to try it, Chiun?"

  "A man should not come too close to his dreams," Chiun said.

  "Oh, hogwash," Remo said. For the first time in days, he felt good. "Can't you just see it? Little hazel-eyed yellow men lusting after shining, black-haired almond-eyed beauties?"

  "No," said Chiun.

  "Of course you can. Tales of Sinanju starring Lad Lex. When we last left our story, Ming Hong Toy, playful research scientist and part-time song stylist, was about to marry Clark Wang Yu, gardener and part-time Godzilla impersonator, when her drunken father, Hing Wong, interrupted her joy with the news that her half-brother, Hong Kong, had been hit by a laundry truck while he was on a mercy mission, trying to smuggle soap back to the women of North Korea…"

  "You are not funny," Chiun said. "You mock an old man's simple joys and you, yourself, go through life diminishing your skills by worrying about such things as home and duty and patriotism and country."

  Remo recognized the hurt in Chiun's voice and said, "I'm sorry, Little Father."

  "But who is the fool? Is it me with my moments of pleasure, my fantasies which I do not try to live? Or is it you, trying always to catch dreams you do not understand, and always failing?"

  "Chiun, I'm sorry," Remo repeated, but Chiun had turned and left the cabin and all Remo's happiness of a few moments before had vanished in the wake of the hurt he knew he had caused the old man.

  Later Remo went up on the deck and found Chiun leaning over the rail, staring across the wide Mississippi to the twinkling of lights from the other side of the river.

  "Thinking of home, Little Father?"

  "Yes," Chiun said. "It is like this on some nights. There are cool breezes and the water moves gently and as a boy I would stand on the shores and watch boats sail by and I would wonder where they were going and dreamed someday to go too."

  "Now you've been to most places," Remo said.

  "Yes. And none of them live up to the dreams I had in childhood. Dreams are like that."

  Remo watched the lights of a passing boat twink on and off in signal to another boat.

  "I'm going to call Smitty later tonight," Remo said. "I'm going to tell him to forget that house."

  Chiun nodded. "That is wise, my son. You already have a home. I gave it to you as my ancestors gave it to me. Sinanju is your home."

  Remo nodded.

  "Not the village," Chiun said. "The village is just a dot on the map. But Sinanju itself. The art, the history, the science of all I have taught you, that is your home. Because that is what you are, and every man must live inside himself. That is every man's home."

  Remo was silent.

  Later, as he and Chiun started to leave the boat, Remo paused and went back aboard. Down in the lounge, he looked at the bodies of Grassione and Massello, men who had tried to live their dreams but had found that in death all men were the same, no matter-what their dreams.

  He walked toward the Dreamocizer thinking of all the people who had died in two days because one man had tried to harness dreams. He thought about Chiun. He thought about the house he would always
want, but never again ask for, because men were kept alive by unfulfilled dreams. Dreams were to dream, not to realize.

  Remo brought his arm up over the plastic box of the Dreamocizer.

  "That's show biz, sweetheart," he said aloud.

  He brought his arm down.

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