I wake up, because there is lightning outside. The thunder is booming across the peaks. All the birds, and a bat. They've found refuge in our flat. The thing about where we are staying is that there are no windows. We are staying in a flat in the rainforest, open to the air. And because one giant wall is missing, the moisture of the rain glides through like a mist.
I fix a coffee. It's four-thirty in the morning, and out of sheer excitement, I can't sleep. I rumble about. When the lightning strikes, I see my wife in the mosquito netting, who won't be awake for hours.
When the lightning strikes again, I catch a glimpse of the scrabble board. From last night: the empty glasses of rum. With the flies stuck on. I look at the scrabble board, with the pieces all messed up because of the wind.
I look at my leftover words, how I gave up.
How do you spell "cacao" anyway?
We are so far removed from the rest of St. Lucia that on a thunder-stricken morning in a landscape of rain and fog and the green of giant trees everywhere, it's easy to imagine a Caribbean without human life.
What would it be like here, if the world went bad? A world of poverty and disease, where the air is sooty and most of the animals are dead, where the tourists retreat from the Caribbean in the urgency of life's concerns, and all that is left are hopeless people shitting in plastic pails and salvaging the mahogany of old abandoned hotels.
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