Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

But midway through, we realize that our Czech-made car is pretty low on gas. We decide to stop and go for a little picnic instead. We take a short walk in the lunar park and sit down on a bed of stiff gray moss. Unfortunately there are no trees and no Indian room dividers to shelter a hot game of lovemaking from the small but steady traffic, plus the temperature is more fitting for a game of ice hockey. We settle for a kiss and a sip of Kaldi beer, admiring our small red car parked on the roadside, framed by a deep blue mountain under a lone pink cloud. Above it, the sky is almost white. Some long-beaked bird flies-walks-and-flies around us, at a distance he considers safe (well within gun-reach, though), screaming his lungs out. Apparently we’re in his backyard. The conversation turns a bit serious, as it should, I guess, when most of the fucking has been done.

“So, you think you can live in Iceland?” she asks me.

“Well, I guess I have to.”

Silence, punctuated with bird screams.

“So, that’s the only reason?”

“No. I don’t know.”

She looks at me. Her Gatorade eyes are two blue-green hot springs in the rocky field that surrounds us, just like the ones I saw in the photos of the in-flight magazine on my way up here. She’s still looking at me. Does she really want to waste her life on Toxic waste?

“You want me to?” I finally continue.

“I don’t know. I’m just asking.”

She brings out a cigarette. It falls from her shaky hands. She picks it up and places it between her stern lips. Lights it.

“I mean, I guess I have to. For the time being,” I say.

“For the time being?”

Her words come with a lot of smoke. Actually, the smell is kind of nice, out here in the crisp cold air.

“Yeah, I mean…”

“You like it?”

“Iceland? Yeah, sure. I mean, how can you not like this?” I ask, gesturing at the scenery fit for any lunar love story.

“But you wouldn’t want to live here?”

“You mean, for good?”

She nods. My apartment on Wooster and Spring appears in a flash, my flat screen full of Hajduk games, the barbecue restaurant down the street, and my beautiful black Heckler & Koch that I keep under the loose tile in the corner of my bathroom. I wring my right hand with the left, while murmuring:

“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that.”

She takes to her feet, leaving the half empty beer bottle lying in the moss, and heads for the car.

“Hey!” I say.

I catch her climbing the roadside, with two beers in my hand. The bird takes to his wings and hurries across a small pond on the other side of the road. He seems to have rented the whole fucking area.

“Hey, Gun. What’s the matter?”

Her eyes are wet when she turns around. We’re standing in the roadside, beside the car.

“You haven’t thought about that?” she asks.

“No, I mean, you have to think of my situation. I only take one day at a time.”

“What about MY SITUATION?” she says in a rather harsh way and then takes a quick draw from her half-burned cigarette, with shaking lips.

I have nothing to say. I didn’t know this girl could cry. The bird is back, screaming at us. At me.

“I’m sorry, Gun… Gunnhildur.”

“What do you think this is?”

“You and me? It’s been the hottest summer of my life.”

My shoulders shake from the cold.

“Really?”

“Yes. The best summer I’ve…”

“What’s the matter then? You’re still not sure?”

“I mean, Gun. You’re a nice girl and I’m a…”

“You’re a great guy.”

I am?

“You’re a fucking great guy. And now you’re telling me that…”

She can’t finish. Only her cigarette. That she throws away before walking over to the driver’s side of the car.

“So you want to…?” I try to say.

“YES!” she screams, opens the car, gets inside, and slams the door.

I’m left standing alone between the car and Iceland, holding two half empty beer bottles. She seems to be serious about us.

Am I?

A brand new looking SUV approaches from the east. It slows down as it passes by. I’m faced with a Talian looking couple in their fifties. Some gray haired lovers with a heavy tan, wearing dark blue windbreakers over yellow polo shirts. Dead happy bastards. They’re smiling so hard that you have to suspect that the site of the world’s first outdoor parliament must be hosting an outdoors senior group sex festival this weekend. The woman in the passenger’s seat even has her arm around her partner who, come to think of it, looks a bit like a retired hitman.

We drive back in silence. Even the radio is quiet. I gaze out the window thinking about my two NY bags that now have been circling the baggage carousel in Zagreb for eighty days in a row. The midnight sunset is mostly over, but a few clouds maintain their red glow out on the horizon, hovering like a flock of zeppelins over the glacier that tips the peninsula called Snow Fall’s Ness or something similar to that. Closer, the city of Reykjavik spreads in front of us like a desperate lady begging me to love her. It kind of reminds you of LA at night: flat, vast, and full of lights. The tower of the impossibly named church that stands on the hill in the middle of town is the only thing that rises above the horizon, a dark dildo against the pink sky.

Gun drives into my dead neighborhood of furniture stores and fugee camps and stops the car at an empty traffic circle close to my cell. I tell her I’ll call her. She answers by making her lips disappear inside her mouth. It makes her look a bit like her mother.

It’s about three in the morning when I check into the hotel. The Seven Elevens are fast asleep, as well as their dirty steel-toed shoes at the top of the staircase. From the end of the hallway, I hear the low murmur of TV. Balatov’s out in the kitchen, sitting at the table, wearing only his dingy underpants and still-white undershirt, plus a pair of black socks. He’s as hairy as a gorilla. It’s even hard to see were his socks come to an end and leg hair takes over. He’d need a truckload of “saving cream” for a full body shave. On the screen some stupid actor pretends to be a gunman, holding his weapon like an amateur, looking very much like the pope with a plunger.

“Fuck white night. I want black,” murmurs the voice between the two hairy shoulders.

For the first time since meeting him, I almost don’t dislike him. I grab a beer from the fridge and join him at the kitchen table. I need a friend.

“What about the Icelandic girls? You don’t like them?” I ask him.

“No Iceland girl in Granny Club.”

New friend has limitation.

We watch for a while. It’s one of those “Everybody freeze!” films. I guess every second movie made on this planet has someone like me for a main character, or the main character spends the whole fucking movie going after a guy like me, and always succeeds just before the credits start rising like spirits from the bad guy’s grave. The Mafia hitman is one of the most popular heroes of our time. Then why can’t I live like the actor who plays me, in a Hollywood mansion with a Nobel prize-swimming pool and palm trees all around it? A handful of servants arguing in Spanish out in the kitchen and a bunch of small time celebrities with big time boobs wailing outside my front door, hungry for sex. Fuck it. I should have all that instead of idling up here in the arctic nowhere, a born-again dishwasher with an ugly name and a jumpy girlfriend, sipping on stolen Polish beer and discussing philosophy with the grandson of King Kong.

“What do you think of movies about the Mafia written by some wimps high on soy lattes. Some unshaven campus kids who’ve never even seen a gun in their lives?”