God-Shaped Hole

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  I charged around the corner, grabbed Chip by the arm, and dragged him out the door. I took him to where I wouldn’t make a scene. He looked like he had a hard-boiled egg stuck in his throat. Cole and Elise followed quickly behind me. Kat and Gopal were standing on the steps and they walked over to see the commotion.

  “You are such a fucking asshole!” I said to Chip, poking his bloated chest with my finger.

  “Beatrice, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know exactly what you meant, you fat fuck, but you don’t know shit. You with your servants, your summer blockbusters, your surgically attached cell phone, and your two-bit hookers, you don’t know shit.”

  “Word,” Kat said.

  Cole covered his mouth and tried not to laugh.

  Elise scampered up next to me, “Honey, please. He didn’t mean what he said. He just likes to hear himself talk, you know that.” I ignored her.

  “Let me tell you something,” I said. I looked Chip straight in the eyes until his face got pasty. “I want to tell you a story.” I took a quick breath. “Last spring, Jacob and I went to Catalina for the day. We hiked about three miles up a trail, to a bluff overlooking the whole island. We snuck off the path and made our way into this tiny meadow that was covered with wild flowers. Jacob spotted two butterflies there, right at the edge of the field. They were just hanging out, fluttering from one flower to another, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. I mean he was mesmerized by the damn things.” I paused to regain some composure—remembering a day like that had the power to thoroughly wreck me. “We followed those two stupid insects around for over an hour, and do you want to know why?” I wiped my nose with the sleeve of my fifteen-hundred dollar suit. “Because Jacob was curious about what butterflies did, that’s why. So don’t tell me Jacob was reckless. Jacob was not reckless. Jacob just wanted to feel things. He wanted to live, something you wouldn’t know the first thing about.”

  I stormed back inside. Kat followed. Cole brought me a Styrofoam cup filled with black coffee. The smell of it reminded me of Jacob’s breath and I couldn’t drink it. I tried to give the cup back to Cole in a hurry but it slipped out of my hand and crashed to the floor. Seeing the splash on the linoleum broke something in me. It was my life spilt, the dark liquid of my sorrow being released. I completely lost it.

  “It’s okay,” Cole said. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Are you all right?” Kat said. I noticed Kat wasn’t wearing any lipstick. She looked weird without her lipstick.

  “Am I all right?” I cried hysterically. “What kind of a question is that? Of course I’m not all right. And can I tell you why? Because Chip is probably going to live to be a hundred years old. A hundred fucking years old. But Jacob will never get to see the sun rise again. He’ll never see his book in print. He’ll never push two raven-haired daughters on a swing. He’ll never paint his little Victorian house and he’ll never pull into Memphis and see the goddamn signs for Graceland!”

  A moment later Kat whispered, “Graceland,” as if the connection had just dawned on her.

  “Jacob wasn’t stupid,” I said to whoever was listening.

  “We know that,” Cole said.

  “He didn’t go into that water to test fate. He didn’t go in thinking there was a chance he might die. He went in because it reminded him of the beauty of being alive. Does anybody understand that?”

  “Grace land,” Kat said again.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  “My heavens, Beatrice, where are all your things?”

  I left the brunch in a bit of a state, and my mother stopped over that night to check on me. By the time she arrived the apartment was empty, save for my backpack and a box of Jacob’s notebooks—I wanted those with me at all times—they echoed with the sound of his voice.

  “The movers took everything,” I said.

  “Movers? What are you talking about? Surely you’re not still moving?”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.” Before my mother had a chance to squawk, I cut her off. “Don’t try to change my mind, or tell me it’s dangerous, or that I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I need time to think it over. I’ve made up my mind and I’m leaving as planned. End of discussion.”

  And I had thought it over. I’d spent hours thinking it over. I came to the conclusion that if I stayed in Los Angeles, I would be relegating myself to the equivalent of life in prison without the possibility of parole. If I didn’t leave then, I knew I never would.

  You can’t wait forever for something, and then say it’s too late when the time finally comes, even if every shred of incentive inside you has been lost.

  Jacob would have been disappointed in me if I’d stayed.

  “Well…” my mother said. “May I ask one question?”

  “What?”

  “Where are you going?”

  I knew I wasn’t going to Memphis. There was no way I could go anywhere near the state of Tennessee without Jacob.

  I took my mother’s hand and walked her to the door. “I don’t know where I’m going. I really don’t,” I said. “But I promise I’ll call you when I get there.”

  That afternoon, when I bid farewell to my friends, it was with the understanding that I wouldn’t be seeing them for a long time. Kat was in her own category—she wasn’t part of the Jacob contingent and I knew she wouldn’t let me slip away. The others were different. I told Pete and Sara I’d keep in touch, but I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t—that I couldn’t. They were going to have a new baby soon, their lives would be refilled with life. Hell, I thought they might even do something enormously touching and name the kid after Jacob. They would never forget him, but they would get over him. They had to. And I’d become nothing more than an afterthought. I’d be that girl their dead friend used to date. They probably wouldn’t even remember my name in five years.

  As for Joanna, I planned on calling her regularly, to see how she was holding up, and to keep some sort of blood-connection with Jacob going. I needed that. But Joanna wouldn’t understand the incredulity of my grief. The unfairness of it all. Joanna had God to help her make sense of things, so she was better off than I was right from the start. And she would have the strength to remember all the good times. She would thank her lord that she’d been blessed with her precious son, even if it had only been for a short while.

  Meanwhile, I’m left with nothing. Sure, I had Jacob’s clothes, his books. I could even push Play on a machine and watch him sing and joke and play a guitar. I should have been grateful for that. I hated it. I hated that I had to go on without him. I hated the future I saw before me. The thousands of showers, the meals, the mindless conversations, the sleepless nights, the complaining about traffic; the hours spent making beautiful, unimportant rings and necklaces; and in the meantime, Jacob Grace is history. He no longer is, he just was.

  I don’t even know what that means, let alone how I’m supposed to endure it for the rest of my life.

  “At least you have the memories, right?”

  That’s what some dickhead from the Weekly staff said to me after the memorial service. Memories, my ass. In Hallelujah, Jacob wrote that memories are the patches that make up the quilt of our emotions. A beautiful way to put it, but wrong. If that were true, then memories would blanket us, they would keep us warm. My memories were chilling me to the bone.

  I took a long walk that night, my intended destination being Venice Beach. I was going to find the spot where Jacob disappeared. I’m not sure what I planned on doing once I got there, but my legs refused to take me in the right direction. I ended up in a dark, empty church instead. The air smelled like frankincense, and the only illumination in the place was at a little alter in the back, just to the left of the pews. I knelt down there, in front of a black iron tray that held dozens of burning candles. I dropped nineteen dollars and sixty-six cents—all the money I had in my pocket—into the offering slot. I
lit a candle and decided to give God one more chance. I asked him to do me a really big favor—to let me forfeit the next thirty or forty years of my life. I was willing to skip right to old age if I could see Jacob one more time, even if it was only for a minute. I promised God I’d never doubt him again if he’d honor my one request.

  When I didn’t hear back from God, I wheeled-and-dealed with the smaller people: Mary, Jesus, Joseph, Saint Anthony, Saint Frances, Saint Joan, Saint Michael, Saint Christopher, Adam, Eve, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I even tried Moses and Noah. I cried out to every stupid holy person I’d ever heard of. And I don’t know, maybe I half-expected one of them to show up and bargain with me a little, but, as usual, I didn’t get shit.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I ran into Greg the next morning. I’d just shut the door of my apartment for the final time, and I could taste my heart in my throat as I walked down the hall with my backpack.

  “Hey, Bea. You guys are leaving today, huh?”

  He said you guys. He didn’t know. I wanted to live in Greg’s world, the one where Jacob Grace was still a person.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re leaving right now. Ja—I mean Henry—he’s waiting for me in the car. I have to go.”

  Greg misinterpreted my melancholia. He thought I was going to miss his sorry ass. He hugged me good-bye.

  “Have a nice life,” he said.

  Going through the California desert in a car was like being inside a kiln. But the desert was no different to me than Los Angeles. It was forsaken land. Scorched, unconquerable, and crawling with phantoms who perished trying to quench their thirst for gold.

  For the first hundred miles or so, all I could think about was how shitty life was. And how sometimes you stumble upon things—good things—that give everything meaning, and when you do, you should get to keep them. They shouldn’t be taken away. They shouldn’t be swallowed alive and then spewed back out, limp and lifeless. Not the good things.

  Maybe I was just stupid.

  I wondered about the omens, the warning signs.

  I like to say I don’t believe in mystics. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in destiny or kismet. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything.

  But I believe in the possibility of everything.

  The whirlpool dream—I’d interpreted that all wrong. The whirlpool was a fucking metaphor. The water will show no mercy, that’s what it was trying to say. If I believed that crap.

  It was a coincidence, that’s all. A random chance, an accident, a fluke.

  And then there was Margaret. She said no wandering. But she was a walking sham. Nobody sells the truth for fifteen bucks.

  The one that irked me the most was Madra—that damn fortune-teller who cursed me when I was a kid. She couldn’t have made it any clearer for me if she tried. For Christ’s sake, Warren Beatty had four kids. His wife practically popped one out on national television during the Academy Awards—the same month Jacob and I met. We’d watched that show together, it was right after he moved in, and we laughed about how bad it would suck to have a seventy-five-year-old father when you were in high school.

  “Then again,” Jacob said, “beggars can’t be choosers. In the father department, I’d have taken whatever I could get.”

  I looked out across the wasteland and my soul ached.

  I knew whatever I could get would never be enough for me now.

  I didn’t make it out of California that first night. I stopped in Needles to see if I could find traces of Jacob there. I checked into the infamous Sage and Cedar Motel—a horizontal, one-story building made of aluminum siding, with a hunter-green roof, fake wood paneling for walls, and spider webs in the corners of the ceiling. A dump, just like Jacob said.

  The man behind the desk was a tawny old totem pole who greeted me like he wasn’t sure I was really there. I told him I knew someone who’d stayed at the motel. I gave him the exact date Jacob would have arrived.

  “I’d like the same room you gave him,” I said.

  The man put on a thick pair of bifocals and scanned the registry. After a minute, he said, “Sorry lady, we had no Grace here.”

  I knew I had the right place.

  “Try Chinaski,” I said. I spelled it for him. He spun the book around and pointed his bony finger at Jacob’s scraggly signature.

  “Chinaski stayed in room seventeen,” he said.

  “Is it available?”

  He handed me the key and I thanked him like crazy. I could tell he thought I was a little off my rocker.

  Room seventeen had tacky, prehistoric carpet on the floor, a decrepit floral bedspread, and it reeked like bug spray. In his journal, Jacob had described the room as stinking like shoe polish, but my sense of smell was more acute than Jacob’s. I knew Raid when I detected it in the air.

  After I got cleaned up, I called all my family members, the ones I was still speaking to, and asked them if they remembered Madra.

  “Beatrice, I was nine in 1984,” Cole said.

  “I know, but think. Please. It’s important.”

  After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry. I really am. The only thing I remember about that party is sitting next to Fernando Valenzuela.”

  My mother told me I’d imagined Madra.

  My father was the last straw.

  “The lady with the big earrings?” he said. “Sure, I remember her. She gave me the creeps. She cornered me near the men’s room and told me to be careful. She said your mother wasn’t using birth control. If it wasn’t for that woman, you’d probably have another brother or sister.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  I had no visions that night at the Sage and Cedar Motel. No out-of-body experiences. No dreams of Jacob professing his eternal love from beyond the grave. He didn’t appear to me in the reflection of the mirror, or float an ashtray across the room, or cause the TV to spontaneously combust, or anything else I’d asked him for out loud. I waited up as long as I could for something to happen. Nothing did.

  I was back in the car not long after the sun came up. Within ten minutes I passed a sign that said: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING CALIFORNIA.

  I only looked back once.

  I drove east for most of the morning, but as soon as I got to Flagstaff, I realized I was on the exact route Jacob and I had planned. Over a long lunch I reevaluated my direction. I flipped a coin, turned left, and proceeded north.

  By mid-afternoon I found myself at the edge of a giant canyon in southern Utah. I detected an unyielding vibe in Utah. There was something about the way certain people looked at me that gave me the impression they had four right angles in the corners of their heads. I was wearing an old pair of Levi’s and a crisp, white cotton shirt that buttoned down the front, but I didn’t have a bra on—I just didn’t feel like wearing one that day—and I got stared at like I was some kind of flower-child sinner. I liked the canyon though. It was weird and immense. The majesty of the rock formations, worn down by the wrath of the past, made me feel completely insignificant. I parked on a turnout and, with my journal in-hand, I walked about a hundred yards, to a place where I could sit and look out over the entire gorge.

  I stayed there for a long time, to watch the sunset and write down a lot of corny thoughts about Jacob.

  “Thoughts are king, Trixie. King,” he’d said.

  When the sky burned pink like a flower on fire, a soft gust of wind brushed my shoulders and gave me chills. There wasn’t another human being in sight, yet in some inexplicable way, I sensed I wasn’t alone. I’m sure it was nothing more than wishful thinking on my part, but for the first time since I lost Jacob, I thought I felt his presence. I even convinced myself that I smelled him in the air. I guess the feeling that came over me could be described as joy, but only if joy can be profoundly painful. It rushed like a river down into my abysmal emptiness, but no matter how long or how far it flowed, I knew it could n
ever reach the bottom.

  I missed my unforgettable friend.

  The days will always be brighter because he existed.

  The nights will always be darker because he’s gone.

  And no matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

  It was there I wrote in my journal that the colossal chasm below me seemed to reach deep into the soul of the earth, identical in dimension to the hole inside of me.

  I closed my notebook and scribbled three words on the cover. Finally, it had a name. I wondered if Jacob could see it, and if he approved. I wondered if anyone else would ever know or understand what those words really meant.

  I stayed there and pondered my future for a while longer, but it was getting dark and I wanted to make it out of Utah that night. I wasn’t sure what kind of place I was looking for, but Utah wasn’t it.

  I put away my notebook, stood up, and went back to the car.

  I had to keep going.

  About the Author

  Hi. I’m Trixie Jordan, the cynical but loveable main chick in God-Shaped Hole. I’m somewhere northeast of the Grand Canyon. How did I get here? You’ll understand once you’re done reading. But that’s neither here nor there. I want to tell you a little about my friend and creator, Tiffanie DeBartolo.

  Tiffanie was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1970, and she eventually earned a degree in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley.

  Before she started writing novels, she penned three screenplays–one of which she directed and saw released in theaters nationwide called Dream for an Insomniac which starred Ione Skye and Jennifer Aniston. Still, Tiffanie says she was never cut out to be a filmmaker. She claims she doesn’t have any talent in that department. She doesn’t see the world through the eyes of a camera lens. To her, it’s all about the beauty of the words.