Instead of lunch, he'd run in the men's room, stopping to wash or comb his hair every time someone came in. Coffee breaks were used for pushups in the utility room.
Soon his steamy figure became the subject of office chatter and "Merrick" jokes began to circulate.
When an anonymous caller told Merrick's wife one night that there was an office pool betting on whether or not Merrick would die of a coronary before his pungent sweat smell claimed its first victim, she decided to have an intimate discussion with him.
"What the hell are you trying to prove?" she had said. "You're a Sunday athlete. The most running you should do is from the living room to the kitchen."
She liked the way that came out and laughed twice. James Merrick ignored her and kept running.
The Sunday before the race, Merrick had leaned over to his twelve-year-old son in front of the television set and said: "What do you think of your old dad winning the Marathon tomorrow, David?"
"Not now, Pop. Kojak is moving in. Who loves ya, baby?"
Merrick's head snapped up as if slapped to stare at the fat bald man on the Motorola television and he felt the bile rise. Kojak didn't have to run any marathon.
"I'm running twenty-six miles tomorrow, David." Merrick tried to smile but it was wasted on the back of his son's head. "Isn't that pretty good?"
"Yeah, Dad." Merrick felt some relief sweep over him.
"The Six Million Dollar Man did that tonight in an hour," David said.
Merrick saw the tide go out.
"Well, not really an hour, that was what they said it took him, but it was more like five minutes. In slow motion. Wow."
As his son ran around the room in slow motion, Merrick pictured himself on a cold beach and his eyes became as vacant as the horizon.
He'd show them. He'd show them all.
While Merrick had dressed the morning of the race, feeling everything was going to be perfect, Remo had awakened knowing things were perfect and it disgusted him.
It was wrong. It was wrong to sleep perfectly. To get up perfectly. To always be in perfect health. Misery, he decided, was the only thing that made life worth living.
Remo looked into his dark eyes in the bathroom mirror, then let them flick over his tanned face with its high cheekbones. His lean body, even with its extraordinarily thick wrists, gave no hint of the killing machine Remo had become.
Remo had watched himself shave. No wasted motion, easy smooth strokes.
Perfect.
Disgusting.
Why didn't he ever nick himself? Why didn't he get dragon mouth in the morning like everyone else?
Once upon a time he had. He remembered the cold stinging touch of the styptic pencil when he nicked his face shaving. But that had been years before, back in another life, when Remo Williams was just another patrolman in the Newark Police Department.
That was before he had been framed for a murder he didn't commit, and revived after a fake electrocution to work for a secret agency as its enforcer arm-code name Destroyer-in a war against crime.
That had been a long time ago and suddenly he did not want to look anymore at the plastic hotel room he had been staying in for three days. He did not want to speak to Chiun, the aged Korean assassin who was now motionless, asleep on a mat in the middle of the suite's living room floor.
It had been Chiun, the latest Master in centuries of masters from the small Korean village of Sinanju, who had changed Remo.
There had been ten years of prodding and probing, discipline, guidance, and technique and while Remo had long since stopped hating it all, he had never taken the time to determine if it was good.
He had climbed the mountain of his soul but forgotten to check whether he liked the view.
Remo stared at himself in the mirror. If he wanted right now, he could dilate or constrict the pupils of his eyes. He could raise the temperature of any part of his body six degrees. He could slow his heart beat to four a minute or speed it to 108 a minute, all without moving from this spot.
He wasn't even human anymore. He was just perfect.
Remo kicked open the bathroom door and walked quickly to the front door of the suite, past the frail-looking pile on the floor that was Chiun. Remo kicked open the front door too and since it was built to open inwards, most of the wood and plastic flew across the hall. The knob was later discovered by the manager, lodged in the soda machine three doors down.
A high squeaky voice stopped Remo halfway into the hall.
"You are troubled," Chiun said. "What is it?"
"I've just decided. I don't like being perfect."
Chiun laughed. "Perfect? Perfect? You? Heh, heh, heh. Do not waken me for any more jokes."
Remo gave Chiun's back a silent Bronx cheer, then went downstairs, through the red and brown tiled lobby of the hotel into the crisp April Boston morning.
Remo leaned against the outside front door of the hotel and started searching himself.
"Pardon me, sir," said a bellboy.
"Don't bother me," Remo said. "Can't you see I'm perfect?"
"But, sir…"
"One more word and you'll be blowing your nose from the back."
The bellboy left. Remo thought of the first time he had met Chiun. The old Oriental was shuffling toward him in a gymnasium at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the secret headquarters of the secret organization CURE. Chiun had at first looked like a skinny skeleton covered with yellow parchment…
"Pardon me, sir," said the bell captain, who didn't particularly want anyone's pardon. He had been laying his bet on No Preservatives Added in the fifth at Suffolk Downs when the bellboy had made him aware of the man standing outside.
"Pardon me, sir," the bell captain repeated, "but what are you doing?"
"What does it look like I'm doing?" Remo asked.
The bell captain thought carefully. You never knew what might show up when you had a hotel this close to Huntington Avenue, Boston's answer to Dante's Eighth Circle.
"It looks, sir, like you're leaning against a building with just a towel on."
Remo looked down. The bell captain was right.
"So?"said Remo.