A couple sits across me. Male and female. She is a sylph in a sundress, and from how high she is, I can tell half her height is her ass. She’s an octoroon this one, put here by Jehovah to test me. I prefer my women thin and dry like broomsticks but this one was ample in all the right places, she had it all: full firm tits, an ass that belonged to a Playboy magazine, a demonic side cleavage and then some. What am I to do with this knowledge, Yahweh?!

He is in black shorts, a beach boy shirt, and a Panama-style hat that Melania Trump would kill to have. He is sat languorously, drinking something brown on ice. But there is something about him. I can’t say what it was, and I can’t say I liked it. He pissed me off. The snarl of his mouth. The way she laughed at his jokes. Perhaps that’s it. I wanted to put a pillow over his face. I guessed him for a car dealer. They’ve got a look about them. They are the only ones who wear shorts and hats and have time to drink on a weekday. That was it, nothing else to report. He was neither handsome nor ugly, wasn’t anything, really. He just had that look. A proper fucking asshole.

It is a late afternoon in March, the sun is caught in a chiaroscuro of mood and mode, flickering like someone forgot to replace its batteries, and I am sat here orbiting the comet of their love. I put down a [Haruki] Murakami book that accuses my conscience: “When you are used to the kind of life—of never getting anything you want—you stop knowing what it is you want.” I get it. I once fell in love with a woman just because she recommended books to me.

If you ask me why I am here, I would lie. I am not really sure why I am here. I am in the Hemingways Watamu bar at 3PM, angling the bartender, telling lies to one another, far from God. The stereo sings softly to itself, continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental separations. I imagined what they fought about: her loud friends? His late-night reveries? I imagined relationships to be a rainbow…on one end could be a pot of gold, the other a pit of snakes. Which one you draw depends entirely on your view of rainbows, what you think of foreheads and a piece of string.

Their conversation floats through the air, her laughter hangs across the room, drifting about like a ferry waiting to dock. I wanted her. Bad. I was in the desert, and she looked like a glass of water. The bartender pierces her chuckle, and it fades into the background as he offers me an Old Wives’ Tale about some black guy—I don’t really know why I felt the need to mention his race—who came to the hotel, charmed his way in and accumulated up to 3 million bob in hotel fees.

“Kwani, he didn’t pay deposit?”

Nothing, the bartender, G— says, drowning in laughter.

3 million? A week? Showing off his clairvoyant skills, he tells me, he was with a woman. Obviously, not the bartender, the dine-and-dasher. We blabber on and on, a conversation that meanders and dithers—the economy, the guests, majini.

I ask G— what Malindi means, and he says, it is actually spelt “Mali Ndi,” meaning lots of wealth. Meh. It feels underwhelming. The sort of information that you are likely to find in a Magical Kenya brochure, or Lonely Planet or Wanderlust or TripAdvisor. The kind of name a white person would give their child to feel “indigenous” or “native” or “back to their roots..”

The couple across are getting giddy giddy, touchy touchy. Maybe Cyndi Lauper was onto something. Girls just wanna have fun. Men just want to have fun with girls. I think about something someone, perhaps, Murakami, wrote: There is no epidural for heartbreak. Yet, she is killing me softly with her chuckle. This is what heartbreaks do, hurt like a motherfucker. That a person, just by living, can damage another human being beyond repair.

A few hours earlier, some beach boys gave me a white pill that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. My eyes dried. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened.

Like I knew they were going to order a bottle of wine to their room, even before they did. I knew I’d never see them again. I didn’t care. I knew they’d do it tonight, and they’d do everything: him on top, her on top, sideways, scissoring.

With every sip, I could feel our bodies giving up so that only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. It was beautiful. It felt like the moment before the Messiah comes.

On cue, they stagger up, canoodling and coddling, hand in hand like Jesus and Judas must have been, when they both knew each other’s secret. They pass me by, and he smiles. He knew I knew he was full of it. Asshole. I am liking him more and more. I feel the Malindi—excuse me, Mali Ndi—breeze tingle my chest hairs. I could understand how a junkie might suddenly be gifted with piercing moments of almost mystical clarity. Or how a slave might become a friend to his master. I order another round. Plus a shot. I was right about her ass though. I swallow hard. A man dies of thirst while another is drowning.