Chances are that when you hear the word
“tropical breeze,” you think of the rustle of palm fronds, the
billow of a floral-printed skirt, white sand, a sun-dappled sea,
distant laughter.
You're not likely to think of a
Saturday night on Sukhumvit Road, an abnormally strong wind thick
with tropical humidity, doing nothing to ameliorate the heat, nothing
to refresh. It's a couple of hours before all malls, restaurants, and
bars are ordered to close, and quite a few places are still open,
trying to get a last bit of trade before the tough times begin.
The staff at the malls are dejected,
trying to shutter their shops. The escalator stirs to life as I place
my foot at the base.
In August, the katabatic wind known as
the Foehn blasts out of the Alps, turning people – according to
legend, at least – to migraines, wifebeating, suicide, murder, a
phenomenon known as the Foehnkrankenheit. It is a
meteorological brother to the Santa Ana winds of Southern California,
shown to lead to the dispersion of the spores of the fungus
Coccidoides, which grows in
the lungs, primarily asymptomatically, but causing pneumonia in those
with weakened immune systems.
The
trains have emptied, traffic is reduced, the Chinese tourists are
gone, and if it wasn't so damn ominous, you'd say, on this Saturday
night, that Bangkok had never been more livable.
A
go-go bar plays pounding music, neon lights flashing for no one, a
woman in a gold lame and pancaked skin whitener pouting desperately
for me to come in.
I step
into an izakaya around the corner where the staff are mostly milling
around, a handful of customers remaining. Sitting next to me, a
chubby Japanese man shares a mackerel and a beer with a transsexual
hooker, the two attempting to banter in equally broken English, each
dropping a few lines of the other's native tongue in. She gets a bit
frustrated as the price negotiations begin. She manages to get him to
agree to 7,000 baht, and then gives him her bank account number for
him to transfer money to.
Camgirls must be making a fortune right now.
The
nice woman in my bed turns over under the duvet and puts a Taylor
Swift song on her phone, and threatens to cough on me if I change it.
“It was fun,” she says, and gives me a perfunctory kiss on the
way out the door. I still drink the last of the bourbon she wanted in
her morning coffee that she'd left in the mug on the patio table.
I was
going to go to China to see my sister, tuck into Sichuan hotpots,
climb holy mountains. That obviously got canceled. I was going to go
to Sri Lanka to explore tea plantations and colonial alleyways. That
got canceled too.
“War, war, war. This war talk's
spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring, I get so bored I
could scream!” – Scarlet
O'Hara
I
hunker down. I'm supplied with gin, frozen duck breasts, dried
lentils, and jasmine tea. My Internet connection is good, and there's
relatively little work to do from home – something that will change
in a few months as every company in the world will be passing
liabilities around like a hot potato. In the hot season my pool is
cool in the depths and warm at the surface.
At
night, every light in the Banyan Tree Hotel is off. It stands there
like the black monolith from 2001
at the end of the bed.
I shut
my laptop and collapse into a restless sleep, only to wake up the
next day, my sheets twisted, my heart pounding, to the chirps of the
orioles.
