I go into one of the stalls and pretend to do what I’m thinking. What the hell can I do now? I can’t possibly go back to my gate. Too risky. The Keatons will be waiting for me there, smiling like silly relatives. But then, what?
The answer comes to me in the shape of a belt, the tip of a belt that introduces itself from below the wall between my stall and the next. I wait for a few moments and pray to God. Finally the owner of the belt finishes and leaves his stall. As I open the cheap door, our eyes meet in the mirror over the row of sinks. God seems to have heard me: just like Igor, Belt Man is shaved to the bone. Two bald and chubby fellow travelers, they look remarkably similar, though Belt Man wears almost invisible glasses and is a bit older than Igor. But he won’t get much older now. Igor puts him out with a near-silent punch in the back of his head, right in the G-spot. His glasses fall into the sink as his head hits the mirror. There is no blood. The fellow is quite heavyset, even more so than me, but still I manage to deliver him into the same stall where he dropped his final shit on this earth, and close the door behind me.
I take his pulse. No heartbeat.
The adrenaline pumping more slowly, I’m rather horrified to realize that #67 is a holy man. He’s wearing a white clerical collar around his neck, plus black shirt, black jacket, black coat. White skin. I search for his ticket, passport, and wallet and pooha! Toxic Igor has a new name: Rev. David Friendly. Born in Vienna, Virginia, on November 8, 1965. I can go for that. I’ve never been an American before. Where is he going? “Reykjavik,” reads the ticket.
Sounds like Europe. With some difficulty I manage to remove the coat and jacket from the holy man’s chubby torso and then start unbuttoning his shirt, sweat pouring off my head again and breathing like a boar. I make a quick break when I hear someone enter the bathroom and try to hide my heavy breathing under the sound of his pee. It’s followed by a quick gush of water and the drying of hands.
As soon as the coast is clear, I emerge from the JFK toilets a born-again Christian, with a halo around my neck and a new mission in life: Gate 2.
CHAPTER 3
ICELANDAIR
It’s fucking amazing. I’m moving across the North Atlantic sky at the speed of sound and yet his soul has caught up with me. I feel restless, buried in some extra-small window seat on a plane full of blonde women and bland men. I don’t know what’s happening, but my legs are absolutely killing me. Mr. Friendly must have connections in heaven; an army of angels is pinching me with their pointy fingernails and strangling my throat with the clerical collar.
Holy men are the worst.
Back during the war I once was ordered to guard a church in a small village near the town of Knin. The Serbs had been using it for storing their bombs, but now we were taking control of the region. On a foggy Sunday morning, the fucking village priest suddenly appeared out of the blue and said he wanted to hold a mass. I said no way, nobody was allowed inside the church. He was an old man with a white beard and white hair around his ears. In a way he looked more like a monk than a priest. And his face was full of this peaceful fatigue. Looking into his eyes was like getting a sneak preview of the afterlife: two silent ponds in the Everwoods. It was as if he was already dead. As if he didn’t care anymore. Without saying a word, he just walked past me, towards the church door. I ran after him and told him again in cut-throat-clear Croatian that nobody was allowed inside the church. I had my orders.
“ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOBODY!” I screamed into his hairy ear.
He just closed his eyes for a slow moment and then made for the door. I tried to push him away with my rifle, but I couldn’t really do it. I just couldn’t get physical with this old man who was like the Spirit of Humanity itself or some high-brewed shit like that. In pure Sunday silence, he brought out his large key and started opening the wooden door. I had already spent four years in the war and had shot more people than were sitting in my family tree, but I was still shaking all over like the badly made cigarettes I would smoke later that day. What the hell was going on? I was being outplayed by an eighty-year-old unarmed priest! How could this be happening? As I watched him disappearing inside the church, I finally freaked out and shot him in the back. He fell on the stony floor, crucifixion-style, like the guy hanging on the opposite wall.
I shut the door and sat down with my back against it. I would have cried if the war hadn’t cast all my tears in stone. So I just sat there, stone faced, cursing the whole thing: my land, his land, our land, and the whole fucking war. I sat there for some twenty cigarettes. My Sunday in hell. I had killed a holy man, and I was deadly surprised by the effect it had on me. I had killed older guys before, even one that could have been a lady, without suffering this type of moral hangover. But somehow this one was three tons more dramatic—probably about the weight of his chapel. I could feel horns breaking through my hairline, and the fast-growing tail between my buttocks made sitting painful.
It was then that I began to lose my mind. A strange feeling started growing in me. I felt like the big bang of my rifle shot was still vibrating inside the small village church, that the horrid sound was slowly filling it up, all the way up to the bell. I even heard the bloody bronze thing resonating with rage, filling my head with the same heavy-metal droning. And before I knew it, I started firing at the fucking church bell like a crazy boy shooting at chickens. It cried out into the fog like a woman in childbirth.
After some fifteen bullets had banged the bell, a different kind of shooting rang out. I threw myself in the wet grass, ducking from a blizzard of bullets blowing straight out of hell. In a split second, all the church windows were shattered to pieces. Moments later, the whole holy thing blew up in a big yellow blast. Rubble punched my back like some iron-fingered masseuse and a cornerstone dented my helmet. I was left semi-conscious.
He who kills a man of the church will be killed by a church.
I’ve never been inside one since. For weeks and months my young sick soul was tortured by the image of an eighty-year-old Jesus facedown on a stony floor. Every night I hammered a big iron-nail into his back and out through his heart, which exploded, painting my entire world red.
They offer Sideways on the plane TV, but also vintage stuff like Seinfeld, some rusty old reruns of weirdo hairdos. Seinfeld was typically American in that show. He was a pretty funny guy, but he had no sense of style. Tacky like a Texan tux. Tasteless dressing and tasteful jokes. That’s Seinfeld for me. I would have preferred it the other way around.
The guy sitting next to me is reading some paperback monster that looks to be one of those Mob thrillers (how many volumes can they write about those Sicilian brats?). Occasionally he murmurs a yes or a no to the older gentleman sitting in the aisle seat who keeps popping some pills. They must be uppers since he can’t seem to allow the poor fellow to read his book without peppering him with questions in a bizarre accent. It turns out the talking guy is Icelandic and the reading guy is a basketball player, born and bred in Boise, Idaho, but now on a transfer to the Schniefel Stickholmers or something like that—a small team in the Icelandic conference.