The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  “What is…What is to see you?” he asks. Must be some local phrase. “What happen to you? You are all in blood.”

  “Hih….”

  Talking hurts like hell. The tiny word burns my throat and cracks my skull. So I let my eyes do the talking. (They must look like two tiny wells in a mud pit.) I’m so fucking happy to see them! I even lose my balance and fall on my knees at their golden threshold. I reach out for his pants, but he moves back a little, his wife standing behind him. My sore, swollen hand touches his sock-covered toes, and I start wailing like a walrus with a broken fang.

  “Goodmooh…” I can’t say more. The pain is too great. I have to put him through to my soul and let it finish for me. Its voice is deep and inaudible, like Barry White speaking under water. I hardly understand it myself, but it sounds something like: “…pleashe helph me.”

  This is getting interesting. My soul is counting on good old Llama Face.

  I’m almost lying on the hallway floor now, spreading my dirty sins on their white tiles. Take a good look at them, dear pastor. Take a good look at the filthy mess. Take it all and burn it in hell, or bring it to the cleaners in your beloved heaven.

  There is some tiptoeing around the matter—I think I hear them whispering above my head—but finally I can sense that Mr. Good reaches out over my head and closes the door. He then helps me to my feet and leads me into the nearby bathroom. I can barely walk.

  Sickreader washes my aching head and swollen face. I try not to look in the mirror, but it whispers to me that I look like the Elephant Man. I can hardly see with my left eye. My nose has doubled its size. Must be broken. As is the tooth next to the front teeth, on my left. Upper lip looks African. Still, most of the bleeding has come from the forehead. There is a cut above my left eye, going all the way up to the hairline. As Sickreader rinses the wound, it shines again. My right arm is deaf from the ache in my shoulder, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some broken ribs if they had an X-ray camera in the house. Every breath brings pain. My right ankle feels twisted, like a semi-wet towel that somebody’s trying to wring with no success.

  “Did you land in an accident?” the preacher asks.

  “Uh-huh.”

  It’s like talking to the dentist with your mouth full of fingers.

  “Where?”

  “Ah cah….” I mumble through broken teeth and swollen lips.

  “In car accident? That is terrible. We have to go to the doctor…to the hospital.”

  “But we have to clean him first and stop the bleeding. We cannot go with him like this in the car,” Sickreader says like a trained nurse, while carefully washing my forehead with a small towel.

  “Noh,” I protest. “No ospitah.”

  “No hospital? Why? It is clean. We have a very good health system. It’s the best in the world. Or, is it maybe against the laws of your church?” Goodmoondoor asks while raising his brows.

  “You know he’s not Father Friendly anymore. This man killed Father Friendly. He’s a MURDERER,” his wife says with the face of Margaret Thatcher and the hands of Florence Nightingale.

  Her less-intelligent husband pauses for a moment.

  “Oh, yes. You are a criminal. We have to take you to the police also,” he then says.

  I turn away from Sickreader and her towel to face the judge of my days.

  “Pleahse. Shave me.”

  He looks at me and then looks at his wife and then at me again. His face is one big indecision. Maybe he really thinks I’m asking for a shave. And I might actually need one. I try helping him out by suddenly leaning my ugly head against his breast (I can hear his pink shirt and blue tie scream out loud as my bloody forehead contacts them), folding my arms around him. He steps back a little, but I won’t let go, pressing my arms even harder around him. The most untoxic thing to do.

  “Pleahse,” I wail into his womb, forgetting my pain for a minute. “They will khill me. Pleahse, I bheg you.”

  I can feel that wife and husband exchange meaningful looks, two soldiers of kindness faced with the defeated evil. For a while they speak in Icelandic. I do the LPP, clinging to the preacher’s body like a newborn monkey to his mother. I watch two tears mixed with blood fall from face to floor. Each one forms a tiny pond on the white tiles, a crystal-clear pond full of blood-red streaks that are constantly moving about in it like some micro-whips.

  Without informing me about any further decisions, they wrap me with bandages, turning me into a mummy, and then take me upstairs to my old bed. Sickreader places a cold cloth on my nose. She tells me to relax, and they then leave the room.

  Mom and Dad.

  I try to get some rest. I try to get my soul some rest. The physical pain is there, but coming from so many sources it has now meddled into one big general pain, a loud buzz in my system, that I can actually ignore from time to time, like the one who’s living next to a construction site finally stops hearing all the drilling.

  I jumped too late. I was too fucking late. I miscalculated the time needed for my big fat body to fall down fifteen feet. I had aimed for a big, white delivery van that was supposed to give me the fatal blow with its solid black bumper. Instead, the van was already half way under the bridge when I finally made contact. I landed on its roof, immediately bouncing off its back into the concrete wall underneath the bridge hitting it with the left half of my face, before falling onto the hard shoulder with my aching one. I lay there KO’d for some minutes, but no one seemed to have noticed me bounce, like a bag of dirty laundry from an unknown army hospital. And nobody seemed to have noticed the dead boar lying in the roadside under the bridge. Still, there was some slowing of cars as a I came to my senses and crawled to my feet. But everybody must have figured out that I was the monster who lives under the bridge.

  I continued my walk. Half-conscious I continued away from the crossing, heading in the same direction as I was going before my unsuccessful date with death. I walked the broad green island of traffic between the double-laned roads. I walked with a twisted ankle and a bloody face. People stared at me from behind their wheels of good fortune but no one stopped. Fucking makeup ladies and plastic surgeons all of them. Then it started raining, and from then on I was invisible to them.

  So I continued walking. Like the wounded polar bear who automatically heads for the North Pole to die, I kept walking the island of traffic. It seemed endless, but I just kept on walking, without having the faintest idea where I was going. The overhead signs told me I was heading for the airport. Keflavik they said, with a picture of a plane seen from above. Of course I could always try to escape this country as Igor and start my third new life as an undertaker in Smolensk, Russia.

  I passed under seven bridges, past a Pizza Hut and some funky spaceship of a mall that I remembered having seen before. The traffic island disappeared and made me take my aching shoulder to the hard one. Then suddenly, to my right, in between some new office buildings, I spotted the big blue cross painted on the big white gable of Torture’s church, the one I had visited with Goodmoondoor the week before. It gave me an idea. It gave me hope. I knew that Silence Grove was not far ahead. I knew that Gun’s parents were my only hope. The good people. And here I am, lying in my good old bed like a lost son.

  Goodmoondoor opens the door. His expression is fatherly and stern. Red face, white hair. He probably owes the facial color to his demon days. He grabs a chair and sits by the bed. His shirt is light blue now. Tie is pink.

  “Look. We have been talking about it…about you. And there is two possibilities. Number one is that we tell the police about you. Number two is that we take care of you. But this is very difficult.”

  He takes a pause, sighs, and strokes his long face with his right hand.

  “It is dangerous for us.”

  “Uh-huh…” I mumble from under the wet cloth.

  “I also called my friend Þórður.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “And he says he can maybe help you also.”

  A beat.
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  “Do you want our help? Do you want us to help you?”

  “Uh-huh,” I nod with pain.

  “But we can only do this if you do one thing.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh?”

  “You have to confess your faith in Jesus Christ and join our church of the living God.”

  Tod nods.

  CHAPTER 20

  TORTURE THERAPY

  05.24.2006 – 05.30.2006

  If sleep is a broadcast from heaven, there is too much static on my radio. I can’t sleep. Too many things in my thawing, aching head. The unsuccessful suicide mourns the death he did not get. I have delivery trucks coming at me by the minute. One moment I’m making love to Munita in the middle of the road, the next her lips are frozen and a bumper hits me in the back of my head. One moment I’m going through hit #23 and the next I’m decorating my funeral home in Smolensk. I better rent a nice street-front space and cover the windows with big letters, American style: “YOUR FAVORITE UNDERTAKER — Death’s Best Friend.” And maybe add some recommendations from satisfied customers. “Excellent coffin and solid manicure. Thanks to Igor, I will rest in peace. —Vladimir Fedorov (1932–2006).”

  I do the mummy, lying on my back, totally still, like Fedorov in his grave. Every small movement brings pain. When Goodmoondoor drops by, I ask him for some aspirin.

  “A spring?”

  “No, aspirin. Medicine. Painkillers.”

  “Oh, I understand. No, I’m sorry. We don’t have it. The Lord is our painkiller.”

  And then once again that stupid smile of his. I’m in Amishland.

  They didn’t dare touch my jeans, so I wear them to bed. My cell phone is still in the right pocket and from time to time I can hear Gun calling. The phone’s vibrations have a strong appeal to its neighbor, at the other side of the pocket wall, but I’m too weak to be able to bring it out and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to answer. I don’t want her to see me now.

  It’s probably afternoon when Torture arrives. He enters the white room like a doctor, with a small briefcase. The combed back hair and the thick Lennon glasses are in place. He looks me straight in the eye and speaks to me in the most commanding voice of God himself.

  “You are the sinner of sinners. You must know that. You have killed the messenger of God’s holy scripture, the holy bringer of the living Word. You have committed the worst of crimes. Are we in agreement on this? Do you admit to your crime and sin?”

  The mummy nods.

  “Could you please put your holy confession on your satanic tongue?”

  “Yes. Yes, I confess. I am sinner,” the Elephant Man weakly issues through his thick rubber lips.

  “And a killer.”

  “Yes. Killer.”

  “You are the true murderer of Father Friendly, our beloved brother and savior of millions, so help me God?”

  “Yes. I killed Father Friendly. It was…not good.”

  “It was NOT GOOD? No, you were not even worthy of being in the same room as he. My dear friends here, Guðmundur and Sigríður, are risking a lot for saving your lost soul. And me as well. We are all taking a great risk. You should know that. They risk their jobs and they risk their reputation, their TV station, their house, their car, their everything.”

  The good couple is standing behind him, with big eyes and proud lips.

  “But saving one soul into the Kingdom of heaven…Saving one soul, even though it’s the most sinful one, as yours truly is…Saving one soul is worth every jeep, every house, every job. Like true believers in the faith of the living God, they do believe in love and forgiveness of the highest kind. Following the good example of Jesus Christ, they’re willing to offer their love and forgiveness, even in the face of their most vicious enemy. So you should know that you owe your life to them for the rest of your days and for the rest of all time. For heaven knows that kindness offered in the face of evil, at the risk of one’s life, is a gift that lasts forever, for all time. A gift that cannot be returned, so help me God. Let us pray.”

  They pray for me and my lost soul. To claim it back I have to lie here for seven days and seven nights, and during this time I must fast. I’m allowed one glass of holy water per day. Only by removing the needs of the body will the soul come forth, Torture assures me as he stitches up the cut on my forehead with a knitting needle and heavy string. It reminds me of when my father stitched my small leg wound in the back of an old school bus our first night of the war. The same silent and forceful concentration on the broad, bearded face. Goodmoondoor helps Sickreader keep the bleeding away from their church-white linen.

  “For he opened up his wounds and let the blood of Christ, his Savior the Lord, flow from the heavens and into his flesh…” Torture murmurs as he ties the knot on my forehead.

  Fasting would be OK if I didn’t smell their cooking downstairs. It’s the story of the perfume and the boner all over again. I take small sips from my glass of water, trying to make it last throughout the day. Torture is a tyrant. There is absolutely nothing left in my stomach except the broken tooth, gnawing away at my guilt.

  Thanks to that, my Torture Therapy is going pretty good. I’ve had time to peek through every hole that I’ve made in people’s lives. In my mind I have followed all my bullets down people’s throats, into people’s heads, and up people’s rectums. And fueled with regret, I’ve played them all in reverse, making them return to source. By making a hundred holes in my head, I’ve made it a showerhead: all my deadly sins come hissing out, mixed with blood and urine, puke and poop.

  The week of cleansing.

  On day seven Gun shows up at her parents’ house. You can’t fail to notice. Some hefty arguing between her and her parents is followed by a sour howling that somehow seems to be a part of a phone call. There must be a crisis in Sibling Town. She would never come here without a reason. Or maybe I’m the reason. After a long mother-daughter conversation downstairs, I hear them come up the stairs.

  Super slowly, Sickreader opens the door to my room and lets the red-eyed beauty inside. Out of habit I suck in my stomach, though there’s not much need to, I guess. It hasn’t been filled for a week now, plus the eiderdown bed sheet is pretty thick. Gunholder snails over to my bed, looking a bit surprised by my mummy disguise. Her face fills my eyes, my dead hungry eyes that haven’t seen anything delicious for a week now. I really want to eat her. Her mom remains by the door with a stern face telling me that she’s not being nice to me: this is no visiting hour. It looks like she’s using me for fixing the broken bond between Gun and her. Letting the girl in on their big secret will possibly help restoring her lost respect for her parents. The fact that you’re secretly nursing a broken-nosed cop-killer wanted in various countries around the world can only make you more exciting. And that’s fine with me. I can be their Savior. Wow. Therapy seems to be working a bit too well.

  The house phone rings downstairs, and Sickreader disappears for a while. We’re left alone. Me and my teary Gun.

  “Hi,” she whispers in a weak voice. It’s the tone that people use when they enter their deserted house after the hurricane.

  “Hi.”

  “I’ve been calling you.”

  “I know.”

  My talking ability has been somewhat restored.

  “How are you?” she asks.

  “Hungry.”

  She smiles.

  “Why did you leave our house? What happened?”

  “I…I got some bad news.”

  “What news?”

  “They killed my girlfriend.”

  “Your girlfriend? Who?”

  “The Mafia. Either us or the Talians.”

  “No, I mean…You have a girlfriend?”

  “Had. They killed her.”

  “OK. Yeah. Good for you.”

  “Good for me?”

  “Yes, that you had a girlfriend. I didn’t know that.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were just, you know�
�dating.”

  “For how long?”

  “A year and a half.”

  “That would qualify as a marriage in this country. For how long can you be ‘dating’ in America?”

  “Forever, I guess, but it does become a bit more serious in the thirty-fifth year, when you get inheritance rights…”

  She laughs a bit.

  “What was her name?”

  “My girlfriend’s? Munita.”

  “Munita? What was she like?”

  “She was…meaty.”

  That’s the tooth in my stomach speaking.

  “Meaty?”

  “Yes. She…she was like a…a main course.”

  The butter-blonde looks at me as if my problems are not only physical. I tell my tooth to shut up.

  “OK,” she says, wetting her sorbet lips with her strawberry tongue.

  “But somebody ate her. They ate her body but left the head in the fridge. For me.”

  A short silence here, and then she asks like a doctor who’s testing the sanity of his patient’s:

  “And you loved her?”

  “No. Not then. But I do now, I guess.”

  Death is a love drug. I didn’t know I loved my father until after he was dead.

  Gun remains silent for a while until she leans over and places her medium rare lips on mine, creating one of the strangest feelings of my life. In record time I need to arrange some round-table negotiations between penis and stomach. The hungry bastards both claim the kiss as theirs. Before the incredible thing is over, I manage to force them to an agreement—standing between them like Bill Clinton out on the sunny White House lawn, presiding over the famous handshake of Rabin and Aarafat. I wonder which one is playing the penis?

  She rearranges the bandage on my nose.

  “My parents have this big plan for you. They’re very excited about it. It’s almost as if you are the challenge of their lives.”