The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

fifteen degrees Celsius (happens three times a year), all the shops and banks close two minutes later, so the employees can go outside and enjoy the heat wave. It’s called “sun-break,” Gun explains. You have to feel for these people. Those six weeks wouldn’t qualify as summer anywhere else. “The Land of the Ten Degrees” is no joke; the average temperature in July is exactly that. Icelandic summer is like a fridge that you leave open for six weeks. The light is on and all ice thaws away, but it can never get really warm. After all, it’s only a fridge.
    But one Saturday night in early August, all the beds vanish from the store. Gun calls her friend. They’re getting ready for autumn, she explains. The Sweet Karma line, from the elementary factory in Bombay, is bound to arrive any day now. We break the rules of Torture, and she takes me for a ride outside the city.
    It’s a beautiful night, with fancy clouds out west participating in the golden sunset across the bay, and all the winds have gone abroad for the weekend. We drive east and I get that fresh-out-of-prison feeling. Finally I get to see something other than Balatov and bus line 24, Olie’s mole, and Indian furniture. The road takes us past the former home of a famous dead writer. Apparently this is the only house in Iceland that comes with a swimming pool. It was part of his Nobel Prize, Gun explains, though he had to provide the water himself. It’s a museum now. You can see the water he swam in, hoping to eye his strokes of genius, I guess. She’s taking me to the most famous place in the land, Thing Valley, the site of the world’s first outdoor parliament. Actually, I don’t think there have been any others.
    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