The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 19} THE AFTERLIFE

I’m almost crawling as I finally reach the fucking house. Yes, it’s their house. I recognize the silver Land Cruiser. That must mean they’re home. I’m the only one who walks in this country. The bleeding seems to have stopped. But the tooth’s still missing. I must look like I’ve been hanging on a cross for a day or two. I’m out of breath when I ring the bell.

When I ring the fucking church bells.

Sickreader comes to the door and immediately slams it back on my broken nose. More church bells. Goodmoondoor’s face shows itself in the vertical window beside the door. The good old llama head with the long front teeth. As someone who has hitchhiked to the core of his own soul, he’s able to cut through the blood, sweat, and tears. He recognizes me and opens the door. We face each other: the toothbrushed and the toothcrushed.

“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.

“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.