Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  I wasn’t sure what I’d tell her.

  I was almost to Nebraska, almost two hours from home, when I got to the part in the audiobook where Captain Ahab finally takes his shot at Moby Dick. Naturally, before he throws the harpoon, he goes into a monologue. That’s pretty much how people function in that fucking book—whenever something happens to someone, something in their head goes, “Hey, you’d better make a big speech!”

  If I ever look up the book in print, I’ll bet the speech Ahab makes before he throws his harpoon goes on for a whole damned page. As usual, I couldn’t imagine how Ishmael could have remembered the whole thing, except for the fact that it was a real beast of a speech. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale,” he says. “To the last I grapple with thee, from hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!”

  Damn.

  He was wrong about the unconquering part though, because as soon as he finishes up the monologue, the fucker throws his harpoon, catches himself on the line, and gets yanked out of the boat. If I was picturing it right, he was tied up to the whale and dragged along to his doom. I thought maybe his corpse would be attached to Moby Dick forever, but then I figured that pretty soon his body would rot away enough that even if he was wrapped up really tight, he’d slip out of the ropes and sink down to the bottom of the ocean.

  Or maybe old Moby would notice a body being dragged along and eat it. Maybe trying to get the dead guy on the end of the rope into his mouth would be like playing one of those little games where you try to get a ball on some string into a cup. Ahab couldn’t kill the whale, but maybe he’d at least frustrate him a little.

  But then I played it back and got the impression that he wasn’t tied to the line at the end of the harpoon at all. He just drowned, and Moby Dick probably took no notice of him at all.

  I was crossing the big green bridge over the river that takes you out of Iowa and into Nebraska a few minutes later when the whale sinks the ship and everybody dies except Ishmael.

  And the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

  That’s the last thing Ishmael says before the epilogue.

  I still say he was already long dead by then and spent the whole last half of the book as a ghost. Hell, in the epilogue, he says that the sharks swam by him as though they had padlocks on their mouths until another ship came up to save him. You don’t get that lucky.

  But according to him another ship picked him up, and that was the end.

  I didn’t learn a single damned lesson about myself from the whole thing.

  And Ishmael, in a rare show of keeping his big yap shut, doesn’t explain what anyone should have learned from the whole fucking thing, either.

  I had finished the whole book, and I was broken, beaten, and adrift in unfamiliar territory. Tired, lonely, and just about broke.

  And in Omaha, no less.

  I pulled a map up on my phone and found the nearest Captain Jack’s. After I finished my hush puppies, I called Paige and let her break up with me officially.

  She was right that I wasn’t perfect for her, of course. She wasn’t perfect for me, either.

  But it still sucked.

  I loved Paige. I was pretty sure of that. I was ready to go into real estate for her. I would have let her eat my hush puppies if she wanted them.

  But I hadn’t gotten that dizzy feeling very often, the one I got when Anna and I kissed in the snow, when I was with her. Do you just not get that when you’re an adult? Everyone always says that when you’re a teenager, your highs are higher and your lows are lower. I was still a teenager, but I could see the end in sight. I was only a couple of weeks away from graduating. I’d be twenty in a year and a half.

  I didn’t feel devastated. Mostly just numb.

  As I drove away, my parents tried to call a few times, and I eventually just turned my phone off. There was a good chance Paige would still be texting me a million times, probably trying to explain in minute detail what had gone wrong between us, and I just didn’t need to see it. It was over.

  When I rolled back into Iowa, the sky was dark with midnight blue clouds, and such trees as there were among the cornfields and hog farms were blowing around like they were banging their heads to a Motörhead song. One cloud off in the distance looked like it was forming into a funnel.

  I turned on the radio and found that there were tornado warnings all across western Iowa. This, I thought, was going to be how it ended for me. At the end of Moby-Dick, the whale head-butts the ship, then spins around it and creates a whirlpool that sinks the whole thing. It only made sense that I would die in a sort of whirlpool myself. That a tornado would crush my bones and suck me up into the sky, a broken corpse, then spit my body back out into a cornfield someplace. Or into the parking lot of the Ice Cave, if it was a tornado with a sense of the poetic. You always hear stories about tornadoes blowing pianos a hundred miles and setting them down in perfect condition, almost like they had minds of their own. Maybe a tornado would be my great white whale.

  But, like Ishmael, I survived. Even my car didn’t collapse and die. It stalled out every time I came to a complete stop, but it always came back to life with a roar of messianic glory.

  No tornado ever actually appeared, and no whale ate me.

  In fact, when I got back to the Ice Cave at ten o’clock, I took the antique Willy the Whale ice cream cake out of the freezer and decided that I would eat the whole thing right then and there, just to show the universe that whales don’t eat me, I eat them.

  I didn’t make it past the first bite; it tasted like it hadn’t been safe to eat in a good three or four years, and I spit it out on the floor. If I’d eaten it, I really would have quite likely been killed by a whale.

  But it didn’t kill me.

  Instead, I hauled it outside and tossed it onto the pavement out back to die. To help it along, I poured a couple of buckets of hot water over it and watched it dissolve into a goop at my feet. The water melted the ice cream down to nothing a lot faster than I would have expected; in seconds there was nothing left but sludge rolling down the pavement, with fresh raindrops splattering in the puddles it formed.

  Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale.

  Melt, melt, and let your chocolaty innards roll down the drain between Earthways and the Ice Cave, into the Des Moines River and onwards to the great shroud of the sea.

  31. FLAVORS

  It turned out I wasn’t such an idiot after all; a couple of weeks after Paige and I ended things, during which I mostly just moped around and worked as many hours as I could get, I got my SAT scores back, and I don’t mind saying that I kicked some ass. I could take my pick of junior colleges, community colleges, and trade schools, even with my fair-to-middling GPA.

  Around the same time, Stan announced that he was now part owner of the Ice Cave, a position that didn’t seem like it should give him a much larger income, but somehow did. He bought a nice car, by Ice Cave standards, and started talking about getting his own place and everything. Maybe he’d gotten George to cut him into whatever money he was using the Cave to launder. Maybe he was using his unholy powers to help George pick winning horses down at the track. I never asked.

  I could imagine that one day soon we’d find the entrance to his basement locked, and if we knocked on the front door, some old lady would come to the door and say she’d never heard of anyone named Stan, and she’d been living in the house with her husband, Van, ever since they retired ten years ago. She’d be lonely and bored enough that she’d take us in to see the basement, and it would be full of doilies and crafts and the kind of old-people shit you see taking up space on the tables at crappy garage sales. We’d never see or hear from Stan again.

  And if I went back for another white grape Slushee, there’d be an H&R Block or something where the gas station in Waukee used to be.

  By the end o
f May everything that came before seemed to have happened a million years ago. School was wrapping up and I was getting money from all my parents’ friends and all my relatives in the mail for graduation.

  Prom came and went. I half expected Paige would still want me to take her, but she never asked. I heard she was going with some guy she knew from the Harvester Club or something. I missed her sometimes, but it didn’t feel like a knife in my back to imagine her with someone else. I wished her the best.

  For my part I’d talked to Brianna a bit, and we’d even flirted enough that I thought she’d probably say yes if I asked her to prom, but one fancy ball a year was more than enough for me, and it certainly didn’t seem like her scene, especially for a first date. So I happily volunteered to work the counter on prom night, and spent my evening doing something productive, instead. With no customers to distract me I spent the whole night mixing different ice creams together to invent new flavors. Jake had apparently given up on starting a strip club, and now he was talking about starting up a food truck, so I figured that maybe if I invented some amazing new ice cream, I could get in on it with him. I mixed strawberry with bubble gum, rocky road with peach, and a bunch of other stuff, trying to make an exciting new combination that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

  None of them were all that good, really. But it occurred to me that they were no worse than most food disasters, which made me think that maybe I could suggest that we start up a food truck specializing in those. You never can tell what hipsters will buy. I could imagine them lining up for Turkey Marco Polo. Or bowls of Nards. Hipsters would love to buy bowls of Nards.

  On the night before graduation I was alone in the store again. There was a storm going on outside, a classic midwestern crasher that reminded me of the night when Paige and I first went to the nook. To pass the time I mixed orange sorbet with Superman ice cream in the blender as the satellite radio played a bunch of the same Billy Joel songs that had been playing in Captain Jack’s on Valentine’s Day. Between songs it was quiet enough in the store to hear the walk-in freezer in the back room humming its familiar refrain in harmony with the distant thunder.

  Then, at around nine o’clock, cars began to pull into the parking lot. One by one the car doors opened, and a handful of people ran through the rain.

  It was a few people from the usual crowd. Couples, mostly. Jenny and Jake. Dustin and Catherine. Edie and Jill. They gathered in the parking lot, in the rain, and then came in, led by Stan.

  “Hey, guys,” I said.

  They all crowded towards the counter, and I became aware of the fact that they weren’t there to hang out in the back. They’d come to see me. And they were smiling.

  Stan made his way through to the counter and grinned at me as the lightning crashed in the window behind him. He was wearing a suit. A nice one. It was probably of the “so expensive it must have been woven from hairs from the queen’s butt” variety.

  “Your time has come, minion,” he said. “I’ve come for your soul. Pay up.”

  “You brought all these people with you to ask for my soul?” I asked. “And dressed up?”

  “You don’t go around taking people’s souls in a T-shirt. You want some gravity for a ceremony like this. And some witnesses.”

  “I never said I’d give it to you,” I said. “Unless you’re finally ready to pay, now that you’re apparently so flush with cash.”

  He just kept grinning, and I noticed that Jenny was trying really, really hard not to crack up behind him.

  “I think I’ve earned it,” he said. “Remind us all of how you felt on Valentine’s Day, after you heard that Anna might be moving back.”

  I didn’t answer, so he answered for me. “You felt like a loser. You didn’t want her to see you like that.”

  I wiped down the counter again and avoided everyone’s gaze. It’s embarrassing to have people call you a loser to your face.

  “Am I right?” Stan asked.

  “Something like that, I guess,” I said. “Seems like a million years ago now. I don’t remember.”

  Stan turned back to the crowd. “He was freaked out. His car was a mess, he hadn’t eaten a vegetable in ages, he probably only bathed once a week, he wasn’t sure he was graduating, and hadn’t stirred up any shit at school in years. Mrs. Smollet thought he had matured.”

  People laughed and said “Ooooh” and “For shame” in funny accents.

  Then he turned back to face me, spinning on his heel like he was Michael Jackson or something, and laughing like Vincent Price.

  “What the fuck is this?” I asked. “Can’t I just mail in a form about ownership of my soul if I want to turn it over?”

  He ignored me and kept up his monologue.

  “You’re graduating tomorrow,” he said. “Your car barely smells, you’ve killed the SAT, you’re probably going to college, and you led a band of Satanists on a campaign to promote their first amendment rights. You probably got over some performance anxiety issues in bed, too, if I’m not mistaken. And it’s all because I made you listen to Moby-Dick.”

  Jenny started to giggle uncontrollably, and I hoped she wasn’t giggling about the performance anxiety stuff.

  But as the thunder crashed and the rain poured ever harder against the glass windows at the front of the store, it occurred to me that he was right. In addition to all the stuff he pointed out, I’d freaked the hell out of Mrs. Smollet more than once, not to mention a couple of other teachers. I’d become a legend among the staff at a fancy restaurant, and any number of other things. I may not have accomplished too much, but I wasn’t just sitting on my ass anymore. I wasn’t quite as disgusting a human being as I’d been a few months before.

  Now that I thought about it, I didn’t even feel that old, gnawing, hungry feeling of dread in my gut anymore. I hadn’t since the day I drove to Omaha and back.

  I felt like myself again. The version of myself that I liked.

  I was saved.

  And it really was all because I’d listened to Moby-Dick, if you looked at it from a certain angle.

  The son of a bitch really had done it.

  Stan jumped up onto the counter and faced the crowd.

  “There came a great plague, and the hallway flowed with the blood of the unbeliever,” he said. “And I believe in the resurrection of Leon.”

  People cheered and laughed and shouted, “Hail Satan,” and Stan turned back to me, looking down from above with a shit-eating grin. I almost expected his eyes to start glowing red. My face already was.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You guys want any ice cream, or what?”

  “No,” said Stan. “I told you. The soul. I earned it.”

  With everyone staring, I couldn’t argue much. He was right. He’d earned my soul.

  One of them, anyway.

  I stepped over to the cash register, printed up a blank receipt, and wrote LEON’S OLD SOUL FROM HIGH SCHOOL on it with the pen that sat beside the credit card reader.

  I made a point of putting “old soul.”

  Anyone who thinks you only get one soul has never known what it feels like to be fourteen years old and kiss Anna Brandenburg in a snowstorm beneath the streetlight outside of Sip coffee. That’s not just acupressure. It’s the feeling of getting a new soul.

  I’d let that soul, the one I got in that snowstorm, go to waste after Anna moved. It was a beautiful thing once, but now it was just a heavy burden that I’d been lugging around for too long. Being with Paige had helped me get enough of the rust off that I could pry it loose, and now Stan was welcome to whatever was left of it. I was glad to be rid of it, and I was sure he could find something creative to do with it. Even if he wasn’t the actual devil, he had to at least be some sort of trickster spirit.

  “Good-bye, high school version of my soul,” I said as I handed the receipt over. “From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee.”

  Stan folded it up and put it in the pocket on the inside of his suit with all due pomp.

 
“You know what would have happened if Anna had come back, and I hadn’t resurrected your ass?” he asked. “You would have fucked it up. Big-time.”

  “Probably.”

  “You didn’t know shit about women or relationships or anything,” he said. “You do now.”

  I nodded. “I’ve learned a bit about how you have to play things backwards to get the hidden messages.”

  His grin got wider and wider as he kept talking.

  “Of course, if she did come back you’d probably find out she wasn’t really all that great, and it was all in your head. Or that she grew up and wasn’t as cool as she used to be. Or that she was just faking it and had you fooled the whole time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe you’d realize that all of her talk about being artsy and worldly was about as genuine as me telling that girl about carbonated milk.”

  “I guess. And her name’s Brianna.”

  I tried to keep wiping the counter down, but I felt like everyone was just staring at me. They were. I noticed that, when he was grinning a particularly wide grin, Stan appeared to have more teeth than most people. That had to be an optical illusion.

  “But, then again,” he went on, “you might also end up moving to England to raise a bunch of babies with her. A bunch of little British twits named after jazz greats who spell color with a U and get free glasses from the National Health Service. Shit.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “You’re not a freshman anymore. Moving to England isn’t completely out of the question.”

  I finally put down the rag I was using on the counter and just looked up.

  “So, what do you think, in your infernal wisdom?” I asked. “If she came back, what would happen?”

  “Sorry, asshole. You only get so many prophecies per soul. You’re on your own now.”

  “Quit dragging it out, Stan, you fucker!” said Jenny. “Leon, just look in the parking lot.”