The Bung Plug of the Void

Tanner Goines. A name once only roared or whispered, which had gonged like a hammer on cast iron and thrummed beneath the titles of his legend: the ManBear of the Northwest Territories, the Ubermensch of the Aleutians, the Iron Slab of the Congo. Twice he’d dragged himself maimed and starving to a remote outpost trailing the wake of his dead crew, and many others he and his men had survived nature’s tyranny against incalculable odds. The first to summit Shanzidou, to encounter Basarwa encampments deep in the swamps of Africa, to witness the volcanic behemoth of Antarctica. The slayer of bears and jaguars. The wrangler of jungles and seeker of treasure — the finder of not a little among shipwrecks and buried temples and men’s magazines.

Tanner Goines: cancer patient. Senior citizen. Contemplator out hospital windows. The Bleary-Eyed Slow-Reader of Whispering Pines Retirement Home. The Stiff-Fingered Drinker of Warm Milk. He fought no wild beasts, clambered no wind-swept rock. The careening journey from his narrow bed to the washroom, to the courtyard and back, took much of the morning and twice along its route he stood before the mirror gathering his strength and his wits. A paltry specimen there in the polished glass: pouchy where he’d been firm as cordwood, lean and striated where he’d powerfully bulged through his rough woolen shirts. It was hardly a man there looking back. And the sole pride he could locate in his merciless self-conception was that he had, in fact, survived.

Man came to see him. Guy Tutledge, the editor-in-chief of Adventure magazine. He gave the impression that he’d taken off his tie and rolled up his sleeves moments before entering the room. His hair, graying at the temple, was a prepared mess and the lines of his face, deep as they were, spoke of laughing at dinner parties and presenting false smiles to advertisers. And yet Tanner would have lost an arm-wrestle to him and the fact broiled in his stomach as they sat across the small table from each other.

“You might not remember this” Guy said, a yellow pad before him, a chrome pen. “But I sure do. My first job at the magazine was copy-editing another profile on you. ‘The Tower of the Okavango Delta’.”

“1872”

“1870. Remember?”

How could he not? Tanner, “The Tower,” lifted his pajama shirt above his rickety torso and pointed at a six inch slash of scarlet in the pinkish-gray flesh over his heart.

“African fish eagle,” he said. “Inkwazi. Last time I bore a shiny crucifix into the bush. . .or out of it for that matter.”

“Yes, yes.” Guy looked to his notepad as though he wanted to write, hesitated.

“Go on, take your notes,” Tanner growled, shaking the hem of his shirt in urgency. “I don’t give a hoot what you young fellers think of me. Here is your Tower in ruins. Is that not what you came for?”

“Tanner, please.” Guy unfurled his fingers in a distasteful way, referencing the room. “There are no cameras here. It’s just you and me.”

Tanner replaced his shirt, blinked against a dizziness from the outburst, and laid his hands on the table. He wanted to travel back in time those few seconds and set this on a different course. He wanted to talk to Mr. Tutledge here for a few hours, really, to keep out the haunting that came at twilight. But The Jaguar of the Pantanal had never learned to apologize.

“What did you come for, then?” Tanner said, sullen-eyed, as though he’d lost the arm-wrestle just as any wager would predict.

It turned out that Guy Tutledge had been sent by a government agency to enlist him in one final feat of exploration. On January 1st of the new century, just six months past now, a kind of hole had opened up in the Atlantic Ocean. It was not a whirlpool precisely; observations suggested no water actually fell through into the void and measurements of the surface both proximate and distal evidenced no drop in sea level. It was simply a hole, about one mile wide and bottomlessly dark.

“It’s as though God forgot a single brushstroke late on the sixth day, Mr. Goines. Quite extraordinary. And so you must be asking yourself now: ‘What do they want with the old Iron Slab, precisely?”

Tanner Goines could only shake his head. He wasn’t sure he understood. He had questions about its appearance, about how it was discovered, how they’d known it wasn’t always there and what sorts of creatures might be found within it. But a picture was forming in his mind. And fear. Fear like an old, familiar smell from home.

“We want to send you in. We want you to drop down into it and report back what you’ve found.” Guy looked to the ceiling and let a small sigh pass his lips. “If possible, that is.”

On other journeys, in another life, the sea-wall had been cheek-to-jowl with hankie-waving well-wishers, men blowing celebratory horns like children under a brave new sun, women soldiering through the corseted heat to watch that heroic figure disappear over the horizon. Now, Tanner Goines stooped on the deck of the screw steamer Fortitude, waved ashore in ceremony while wrestling a glint into his eye, but the dozen men and women looking back to him were darkly prayerful, bore unapologetic concern on their faces, closed their eyes in forbearance as though this were some painful but necessary evil they’d willed themselves to witness out of an obligation they could not articulate.

As the ship left port, he stumbled his way below deck to his quarters — no captain now, was he, no authority, and none would bend to his command for anything more than some coffee — and collapsed into the wool, withered by the day of travel, the effort to meet the boat and climb aboard. As he fell through into the dream, the ship around him rumbled and heaved enormous, and, out beyond, the sea might have gone on forever. He’d stood on the prows of sailing vessels and cut the fogged sky with the blade of his will, he’d scurried up masts with a knife in his teeth, he’d reefed at sails chaotic in the wind until his fingertips burst and stayed the night telling whiskey myths to the most hardened men among them. Now, he snoozed. Now the sea weighed a million tons, must be bargained with, cowed to.

He dreamt of the man he had once called his son. Peter. Thirty two years old the last time Tanner considered the date. In the early stretch of the boy’s life, before he spoke and toddled, Tanner had made a fool of himself over the boy. Had prized the child’s seeming strength and bravery, had squatted down to make googly voices in pretend conversation. Had tossed the baby in the air and caught him. But the boy’s hair grew dark with passing months, where his own was fine, his wife’s fine. And nothing in the child’s face echoed his own. Splinters and broken glass. A sob-throated roar. Plaster and paint powdering the floor. And then self-flagellation like a wolf gnawing its leg to wrench free of a trap. And, afterward, life hardened and somehow hobbled though his grandest expeditions lay ahead. Concern for the boy, his growth unwitnessed and his mother willfully forgotten, haunted him like a specter, shook him awake in the middle of the night. Christmas time he mailed hastily written checks spotted with condensation from his rocks glass, tears from his eyes. They say he’d gone on to Harvard. They say he’d made something of himself. They say he claimed his father was dead and concocted his own surname from words he’d read in books.

This all the Tower dreamt of as the ship plunged and tilted, chugged and clattered. As dusk came on, he levered himself from the narrow bed and steeled his joints to venture the deck. In fair weather, the time between ports always hung in stilled anticipation, waiting like a chained dog for water and steam to carry them to their destination, where the moments would burst from their rack, the minutes and hours slip from their appointed posts down into the mud of how it all actually is. He found the railing, leaned on it for support, and framed his periphery with nothing but water. Slate grey to green, like stone bright white where it was chipped, and a sky like old plaster. Much speculation about the hole had been presented to him: that it was a place where the plates of the world had cracked open. That it represented a squirreling of the earth’s magnetosphere. That the space was camouflaged somehow, was made to appear wholly transparent. That God had gouged away a sector of reality to remind people of his existence. No one spoke about the whims of Neptune or Lir or Ægir, but it was these old gods that Tanner believed in. Capricious, prone to anger and lust, violent forces to be contended with, who could be bested — and who had if not him? He watched a lone bird make its orbits above the water, seeking some morsel to pluck from the waves.

“Nervous?”

Up came Guy Tutledge to lean the railing himself. He wore circular glasses and an outfit ordered out of a seafaring catalog — blue slicker over checkered flannel and a hat of which he hadn’t earned the first stitch.

The Jaguar grunted. “Not as nervous as you.”

“But they aren’t sending me,” Guy said. Tanner did not look at him, but he imagined there was a self-important rub of the chin or scratch of the ear. Men like Guy could not suffer simply being. They had to check for themselves constantly, the way one might pat their back pocket in a seedy part of town.

“Though I admit, I am steeling myself to watch you disappear over the edge.”
“Nervous.” The Tower scoffed and shook his heavy head, felt the pinions of his neck groan. “My life is in my hands and the beast’s.”

“Did you ever fear it? When you were younger? I seem to remember, in that article of ours. . .a certain attempt to outrun.”

“You can say it. Don’t make me spoon it to you so you can nod along without having to feel the word in your mouth.”

“Death.”

He turned to look at Guy Tutledge, who stood wind-tousled and pale, his eyes damp and red, a portable camera slung around his neck. And wasn’t he modern man and wasn’t this a good? Is this not what Tanner had hoped his son would have the opportunity to become? Comfortable, learned, poised to take only the risks he chose himself.

“I think you might have had some confusion about the direction in which I was running,” said Tanner.

The plan was to place Tanner in the basket of a hot air balloon and drift said balloon out over the hole, whereupon he would be lowered by a rope wrapped about a pulley housed in the basket and running several hundred feet to a hand-operated winch upon the deck of the Fortitude. Tanner would carry on his person a kodak, a waterproof field-book and pencil, a bottle of water, and a bowie knife strapped to his waist. This last his only mandate. Not a fool among this crew had tangled with so much as a cuttlefish.

“You wrestled all the wild beasts into submission for us, Mr. Goines,” cracked a smarmy wastrel with black snakes tattooed upon his arms.

“You’re damn right,” replied Tanner.

Someone had found him a cane and he sat now with it posted in front of him and his hands laid authoritatively on the pommel as he watched the men lay out the flaccid skin of the balloon, its wiry tentacles, as straight as the deck allowed. He wished they could cut out that foul smoke bellowing from the ship’s furnace and sail now in the incipient breeze, the faint leavings or presages of storms off elsewhere in the world. Tanner believed that whatever god it was that conjured chaos in the sky granted men of will a moment’s peace to gather themselves. He was finding that he quite needed it now.

“Mr. Goines?” One of the crew squatted beside him. He was a young man, as they all were to him now, and carried a flabbiness about him, smelled like old paperbacks, and the spectacles on his face would have kept him, without argument, from even tarring the bilge under the Tower’s command. Through their rims, though, was an earnestness younger than his years and a weariness far older. It was the look of a child who’d traveled to a birthday party and found himself too late, the rough-housing over, the cake devoured, and, worse, the children all somehow grown.

“Yes, son?” Tanner tried to bulge his wizened fist a bit on the cane.

“I just wanted to tell you that I . . .well, I admire you, sir.” And here a tremble entered his voice. He looked out to the clouds. “I always have. I’ve known of you so long I can’t actually remember my first encounter with your story.”
And the boy, the man, squatting there with an eye now on the preparations, the hustling about, recounted to Tanner the many books and articles he’d read about his exploits — far-flung and half-lies and tumultuous. And he explained that he had come to learn of the world this way, had found in them his own adventure, had heard in them the faint call of the sea that one man can hear in the echo of a conch shell and which for other men is simply noise.

“Well, I apologize that you must see me in this condition,” Tanner said, his voice leaden. “Meeting your hero shouldn’t be such a paltry thing.”

“Not at all, sir. You made life. . .comprehensible. And this. . .well, this might be the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a man do.”

“But merely a man.”

“No mere about it. And here you stand ready to cut the world down to size once again.”

“Though I can hardly stand.”

“Even better.”

Squeezing the Iron Slab into the basket and perching him on the stool between the tanks required the help of two men. Once ensconced, they handed him a glass of brandy and he sipped watching as they pumped the lifting cell at the head of the Rozière with helium, and he laughed with a roar as they tested his actuator and a great flame spewed forth inches above his head. As the preparations drew to a close, and at the crew’s encouragement, he hollered out anachronistic commands as though he’d piloted this very ship up out of the monstrous past.

“Secure the boom and trim that jib, you brigands,” he called, holding back a laugh.“Place the ferrule and rout the pastrel through the boss, you land-loving sons-a-whores!”

Guy Tutledge, flushed and drawn, uneasy on his feet, came up to the gondola for a last little chat. Tanner smiled at him, a barter-smile of mischief and implacability he’d learned in the bazaars of the Middle East.

“You going to be able to pry your way out of there?” Guy asked. He gave a perfunctory tug on the strap of Tanner’s harness.

“You watch and see how she’s done,” Tanner said.

“I look forward to it.” Guy warmed. “And the men, how have they been?”

“I don’t know as I’d trip the gates of hell with them, but they’re fine enough to lower rope.”

“They’re calling you the Bung-Plug of the Void, you know.”

“I’ve been called better names, but none fairer.”

“And maybe worse.”

“Says you.”

The head of the balloon lifted ghostly from the deck. The baggage of the firing cell uncreased and distended as the bulk of the thing, eggshell white and unmarked, ascended over their heads, the men of the crew watching, nudging it into place with long ropes. Two men from the government, unseen in the days asea and sweating in black suits, stood down the rail and watched as though something might occur there that needed taxing. One muttered a few words to the other out the side of his mouth.

“Who’re those monkeys?”

“Those are the men who most desperately require that the world make sense again.”

“Tell them that it never did.”

The bespectacled man of the crew came over and fired the tanks like the operator of a carnival game. The balloon billowed wide, pulled against the anchor points lag-bolted into the deck of the ship. He oriented the Tower on controlling the balloon, lift and descent, and explained what feeble means there were to point it in the horizontal direction he desired.

“I won’t wish you luck,” he said to Tanner. “I’ll settle for wishing you glory.”
They shook hands and Tanner waited until the man looked him dead in the eye. A son as all younger men are to all older in the revolving world. He asked the Tower if he was ready and the Tower felt himself the readiest man of all. And the balloon, with the help of a few long push-poles held by members of the crew, edged up over the railing — the basket catching its bottom inch and tilting him where he sat until it slipped over and found nothing beneath him but sea. Guy Tutledge took a photo and Tanner showed him a fist, showed him a few snarling teeth for the next. For the third and last, the Iron Slab of the Congo showed a smile.

Which of these would his son finally see upon the cover of a newspaper. Which of these, if any, would be the last glimpse? The crew waved. The men in suits edged to the railing, their anxiety a mere crimp in a stoicism like something issued by the government.

The balloon made easy work. He fired the tanks, they paid out rope to the basket, paid out wire to the tanks, paid out further rope that ran through the pulley and knotted just above his waist. Below him, the water chopped in greenish iron, and the sun cast coppery filaments across the surface in the places where it broke. And soon the hole could be seen. Were the water stone, it would appear as nothing more than a cutaway tooled circular by men. The water did not lap against or spill over its edge but seemed to move beneath it somehow, in a hidden dimension, as though an enormous cylinder made of nothing had been pressed into the sea. The space within its boundaries darkened with depth, until it was black beyond black, and Tanner found he could not look directly into its maw, a darkness in opposition to the brightness of the sun. It shied him, his very nerves shorted, and he eyed it cornerwise while pointing his gaze upon his tired looking hands.

He passed over the perimeter like the hand of magician to prove the absence of wires. The Fortitude a long way off now, seemingly, smeared as though across a baking desert. Of this he took a photo and then one down into the void. What could be seen in it but a grayish underexposure, a seeping blackness like an ink spill. The tanks fired and the balloon pulled tight against its leads and he’d come to the place where he was to drop, tilting and wavering like a leaf in counter-currents. He rose from the stool, chastizing his legs for their feeble stiffness, and opened the gate through which they’d loaded him — an artifact, really, as musty and fragile as some old pharaoh’s corpse. “A pharaoh’s nonetheless,” he muttered and nearly toppled as the basket swayed beneath him, catching himself up with a catlike hand on the railing. He turned and backed out until his heels braced against the threshold and then he waved to the men of the Fortitude. A long while later the rope whined in the pulley, first tightening against the slight pressure of his body, and then Tanner allowing it to drop him slowly toward the horizontal. He pushed off with legs that glittered with pins and dropped inch by inch, his weight in the harness, and the harness abraiding his flimsy skin through the canvas of his jump suit.

The mouth of the void came slowly. At first, he resisted it, in subtle ways tried to reach his body back up toward the gondola. And then, as if some vague freak-show was transforming into the erotic, his eyes drew down to his feet and then the darkness, his breath coming shallow, fast. As the soles of his boots breached the invisible surface, he found he was welcoming it like a rest after weeks cutting through the bush. Not mere necessity, but a craving of sorts, a residue of hunger with no stomach, of lust with no target. And something else. He had seen it, or rather, it had been there just beneath what his human eyes saw in the jaws of a tiger. In the delirium of starvation and hypothermia. In the snapping fibers of a rope bridge over gorges enormous. In the vermillion afterbirth of his non-son.

“Oh, Peter,” Tanner said, coming eye-level with the restive sea. “What has become — ”

In the broad yard of a home he owned decades ago, the live oak and the mulberry and the smell of lavender, a vitality in his body that must have been there always unfelt. A moment turning his face to the sky to feel the caressing breeze and then a tugging at his pant-leg. A dark-headed little boy, like the homunculus some tribes believe live in one’s head, necessitating a homunculus within, and further, a great chain of beings down into the microscopic and past. And the child cannot walk on his own but holds onto Tanner as though shipwrecked and cleaving to the flotsam — no, as if he’s found the wisest and most joyful tree among those in a lovely garden. He looks down into those eyes that are not his and lets a smile creak through the leather of his face and fall away and into the boy’s. And then he crouches down, rolls onto his back, and lets the boy climb up onto him, a babbling joy-cry as vain-glorious and primitive as any the Tower had ever mustered.

Months going by and the summer twisting in the rust and fogged breath of autumn, the boy’s squeals of laughter and rage and disappointment all one halting exhalation of “yes, I am” to the question Tanner cannot find words for. An inch of growth showing in the pale calf below his pant-cuff and Tanner headed out on expedition now less for glory, though that furnace still burns, and more to buy sweetbreads and picture books, to stake a trading company’s flag at the mouth of the Atbarah and trace its source and an anxious return with letters written to the man the boy might one day be — steering him toward it by a force of will and no other face at which to lean the prow but that of Guy Tutledge or that young swab who gripped his shoulder on the Fortitude. And home before the child wanders into school and out again after a summer flushing quail and teaching him the art of striking fire. And the woman forgiven as are forgiven the brambles and thorns for the protection they grant the very land one must live upon.

And years since descending into that hole in the world. The boy a quick wit and slow to tear and yet, under Tanner’s tentative aegis, a gentle soul inspecting the flowers and mourning just a little the ptarmigan and doves he ably wings in the meadow. And Tanner commissioned through some old-so-and-so to prospect for Canadian gold up where the sun refuses to set in stubborn rivalry with the trenchant snow. Home to bump hips with the woman as they bake the turkey, sweeten the potatoes, as the boy wheezes and squawks on the fiddle he’s learning day by day, the stumbly jig and tottering head accompaniment. Tanner the First Mate on a ship seeking pirate treasure sunk in seeming legend only. Peter a fearless and tiny horseman in jangling spurs. Tanner gone a year to fore a crew of surveyors in the Andes, decapitate a python with an ax, carry out the poisoned youngest on a stretcher made of vines. Peter now a reciter of poetry in his still-boyish voice, a master huntsman of the deep woods behind their home, a charmer of aunts and school-teachers and eventually the young women of the town. Tanner a contract hand on a freighter plying the Gulf of Mexico, Tanner a ballyhooed hunting guide for New York commodity barons seeking elk in Montana and the Goines family transplanting to Butte where even Mrs. Goines finds some solace in the way the light falls each evening. And there they live in rustic peace, feeling the seasons change in their bones and learning to love even the cold. Tanner a ballroom dancer on the hewn planks of their parlor, Peter spurting two inches in a year and then off to Stanford with hugs for his ma and his pa and a promise to write each week that is met with iron-clad faith for his father, though not there every moment, was actually there in the moments he was. And then Tanner hired, a signed letter from old Kid Gloves Harrison himself, to be ranger down in Sequoia National Park, and one more uproot for he and the wife, now warm to him as fresh pie and all their temperaments still fragile and yet beloved and familiar as Christmas ornaments on the tree he cuts out of the land they watch burn with sunset and cool into the ash of dusk.

Years pass. Men Tanner knows from ventures gone by come through and drink his scotch and poke in his fireplace and they laugh bawdy into the night. Poachers wilt under the staring eye of his revolver and apologize and promise to him. One day, Tanner fork-deep in pork and beans and Peter coming up the drive a man of letters now for a visit before moving his life across to New York to write for Adventure magazine, he asks Mrs. Goines what she’s thought of all this, the secret he knows never ruptured, never hinted, well-nigh forgotten, and she says “it has been a lovely life, Tanner. Just a fine, fine life.” And to this Tanner nods, nods and sighs a little relief, and then heads out to the porch to greet the young man who is his son. And years going by and further visits on that porch, further visits by the elder Goines to the city to see its steam and its buildings scrape the sky. And then a grandchild, a beautiful daughter-in-law like something carved from alabaster to make the choirs sing. The turn of the century coming up like a promise hardly believed in when it was made, and now as certain as sunrise and dew in the sweetgrass.

Tanner Goines lay one night an old man in flannel sheets and awoke deep in the iron cold of the Atlantic, submerged and shocked awake and flailing for a gasp of air. Swimming for the surface in heavy canvas soaked and salted and breaking the steely rim of the airborne world with a shout and groan. The Fortitude was perhaps a quarter mile off, the balloon from which he’d dropped hung in the air like some circumspect substitute for the moon.
The crew hooked him about the collar and dragged him onto the deck amid shouting and panic. Warm blankets were drawn around him, a pot of tea set at his feet, and no one knew who he was. Asking him and the name Tanner Goines ringing no gong whatsoever, prompting only further questions — about how an old man came to be adrift on the open sea, about who was tracking the fellow they’d sent into the hole. Tanner asking after Mr. Tutledge, as much a stranger as himself, looking over the crew for that bespectacled young adventurer and finding none familiar.

They quickly forgot about him, a problem to be solved once they’d returned to port, and, when he’d caught his breath and the shiver had departed his chest, Tanner stood and creaked up to the railing, looked out over the sea to the suspended balloon as it tilted and rocked in the breeze. A seabird, stowaway from their ship or lost out here in the breadth of the ocean, circled the Rozière as though finding a place to finally land. He reached into his shirt to feel for the scar over his heart. Nothing there but aged skin, the remains of a chest once barrel-shaped, once capable of gasping life even from smoke, of blowing out wildfire. Now he could feel the nodules of his ribs through what remained of his muscle.

“Send me back,” Tanner said, in a whisper, looking now to the boys tending the leads there on the deck. A fever of concentration, shouts, halved between laughter and panic, uncertain of victory or defeat or even what moment yet would decide between the two. “Just send me back, would you?”

Continue on Medium