The Himbim from Nimbim
Ann Patty
Word Count 1545
Last spring, one large koi, and one fascinating man vanished. Flash had lit up my woodland pond for nine years. The man, Michael Malone, was a pass-along from the London Review of Books personals, an Australian, who months after the fact, responded to my friend Kathy’s ad. She was otherwise involved, so she forwarded him my information. I was alone in the country, recovering from a broken heart. It was winter, and the pond was frozen.
Each year, in the late autumn, I transfer the koi I have bought in the spring from my small pond by the house to my large pond in the woods. Koi are a Japanese carp, with an infinite variety of color, pattern and scalation. They can live up to one hundred years and grow as long as three or four feet. The carp’s ideogram is a symbol of strength and perseverance, and koi are known in Japanese poetry as a symbol of love and affection. The first year I transferred fourteen koi of various sizes. Only two survived: Goldie and Flash, the two largest. Over the years, the others were eaten either by blue herons, fishing animals, or other fish, but Goldie and Flash survived and continued to grow.
Michael Malone first appeared in my email inbox just before Christmas, by six page letter of introduction. He described himself as a bookaholic, interested in establishing a network of pen friends to keep him from ‘dying of boredom,’ living, as he did in the isolated rain forest near Nimbim, New South Wales. “I live beside a pleasant creek in the wilds, but I used to live high above Sydney Harbor. The sea, and particularly the sea at night, has always captivated me.” He wrote about his solitary, late night walks along the Sydney harbor, about the rare peace he found there.
Like him, I had recently left my apartment in New York City for a solitary life in the woods. I’d traded a view of the mighty Hudson, with its constant traffic of ships and barges and tugboats, for the silent beauty of a small pond in the woods.
I looked up Nimbim on the internet and discovered it to be the marijuana capital of Australia and, amazing coincidence, sister city to Woodstock, NY, just across the river from me. I began referring to him as the Himbim from Nimbim.
Michael was 55, a former aeronautical engineer, and a gifted writer—lyrical, articulate, engaging. His letters revealed a cultured, well-read, politically engaged man who drove a motorcycle named Rocinante as well as an ancient Land Rover he called Queequeg. He sent along a speech he’d written to introduce himself at the local Toastmasters, asking my opinion on it. It told how, as a child he lived the characters in the books he’d read. As an adult, he had traveled T. E. Lawrence’s route from Akaba to Damascus, visited Auschwitz, Gettysburg, Oscar Wilde’s gravesite. The speech was filled with lovely descriptions but revealed nothing truly personal about him. It exposed no bones, drew no blood. When my next email pointed this out, he replied, “That was my intention.”
At first, Michael expressed self-consciousness about writing to a long time book editor. But I assured him he was a natural writer. I had recently joined a writing workshop, I told him. He couldn’t be more self-conscious about writing than I, whose work was not up to my own exacting standards. He asked if he could join my writing group from afar, so I sent him the exercise my teacher assigned to every new student: ten years, two pages, no sentence longer than three words. A few emails later, he completed the exercise.
“Three years old. Inside the gate. Cold metal bars. Can’t go around. Can’t climb over. Long wait now. Dusk’s gathering gloom. Brother Gervase comes. Very angry giant. Michael come inside. They’ll never come. They’ve gone away.”
He’d been abandoned by his parents at age three into the care of the Christian Brothers of Bindoon, a now disgraced and shut-down boy’s home. The boys lived near starvation, often hungry enough to forage for worms, maggots, pig slop, while the brothers feasted on meat and wine. They were worked to the bone under physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Seven boys were buried on the grounds. Michael was assigned to the workshop, to hold the metal welding frame for Brother Linus, the solderer. Michael served as his ground. Those years of voltage running through him had done lasting damage to his spine.
I was stunned, appalled. I was hooked. Here was a real story. I wanted more.
We began trading written pieces, as well as long emails, and it was through the pieces that I learned more of the details of his early life. In them, his writing was raw, filled with pain, strength, and rage. My own pieces were elegiac, descriptions of trees and plants and animals on my property, which led me no further than my own garden-variety neuroses.
That spring, Goldie and Flash again appeared in the pond. They were now over 24 inches, too big for the blue heron to catch, I was told. Goldie was long and thin, orange-gold top to tail. Flash was a beauty, delicate white gold with just a hint of pink pearl, a butterfly koi with tail and dorsal fins that swayed as she swam. She was a prom dress of a fish – fancy, elegant, like fan coral. Flash was poetry. Goldie was solidity. It was Flash my eyes followed as the two roiled together for the food pellets I threw them. Watching them was mesmerizing, like watching fire in water.
The next spring Flash appeared with a four-inch gash on her side. Had the blue heron caught her briefly in its mouth, before she shimmied away? Of course, the scar only increased her beauty.
Michael’s emails continued, reliably, every week for over a year. One April email warned me, “I’ll be offline in July as I’m off to New Guinea to walk the Kokoda Track, which is immortalized in Australian folklore as the site of a WW 2 campaign against the Japanese.” It was a grueling one hundred twenty-mile trek through mountains, rain forests, over rope bridges, prey to monsoons, leeches, tarantulas, and all sorts of predatory wildlife.
He reminded me of the Vietnam Vets with whom I’d sat at a retreat with the Zen master Thict Nact Hahn. Most of them were working hard to cultivate gentleness; even after all these years, they were still traumatized, subject to sudden flares of rage and sorrow. Many of the vets undertook long treks; five of them had walked coast to coast across the United States the summer before. I wrote to Michael about them. “ I like your comment about the Vietnam vets going on major walks to walk away their demons,” he wrote back “but I think you may have it the wrong way around… They were walking to find their demons.” I didn’t really understand what he meant. The vets’ demons, and his, were so obvious, what was left to find?
In early May, Michael wrote that he had been experiencing shortness of breath and upper abdominal pain. He underwent all sorts of medical tests and was awaiting the full results. Then suddenly, a short, alarming email: “This wretched illness which I now have seems to be a cross between AIDS and EBOLA. I’ve been ordered to report to the Nimbim Hospital to be pumped full of various antibiotics.”
He wrote again three days later. He’d just fled the hospital after witnessing five admissions for drug overdoses in 36 hours. “I’ve never told you the truth about Nimbim, Ann, but in my next letter I shall.”
Against doctors’ orders, he was taking “a sort of retreat here on my own” for the weekend and would write me Monday.
Then silence.
A week, two weeks, three weeks.
I tried to rouse him: “So you fled the hospital, then you disappeared. I just need to know you’re OK and not suffering somewhere.”
Nothing.
A month later: “Are you OK? Yes or No will do. Worried.”
Silence.
July passed into August. My friend Kathy, who’d passed his email to me, and so was engaged in the mystery, called Nimbim, population 800. The local hospital knew of no one named Michael Malone, and suggested she call the police. I didn’t encourage her to pursue that.
The following spring, although Goldie appeared on schedule. Flash was gone. John, the fish man, told me it’s unusual for a koi the size of Flash simply to disappear. “Usually, you find them floating atop the water amidst the melting ice in spring,” he said, “It’s unusual not to. Probably, someday, if you dredge your pond, you’ll find the skeleton buried in muck at the bottom.”
Finally, after a year’s silence, I sent Michael a letter. I have a post office box address to which I’d once sent him a postcard which he received five weeks later, so at least I know he did exist in some physical form. If he’s dead, I imagine, in time, my letter will come back to me.
“Dear Michael, Did you disappear into cyberspace? Did you ever exist? I hate a story without an ending.
*
Ann is the author of LIVING WITH A DEAD LANGUAGE; My Romance with Latin (Viking/Penguin, 2016) . Her essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Linga Franca, Society for Classical Studies, Oprah.com, The Bucket, Publishers’ Weekly, and The Toast. She was the founder and publisher of The Poseidon Press and an executive editor at Crown Publishers and Harcourt. She currently rusticates in the Hudson Valley, with her husband and dog.