The Flight of the Black Swan

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.