Oh, I have so many questions. All unusable. I prefer questions to answers. Being on the way is better, you can open the windows and let the wind mess up your hair. I love messing up my hair. I could hold a garage sale with all the questions I’ve accumulated here – I have so many, piled up like pieces of junk. I also have freezing hands. I’m in a park. It’s cold and very windy.

Yesterday the organiser held a goodbye party. We stayed up drinking until late. I had the Bowie record I’d bought in my rucksack. It was a nice surprise to find that the guests knew ‘Wild is the Wind’ so well, and we even sang it all together. An excellent goodbye party. I remembered the musical, Chicago. Wild is the Windy City.

At the American Airlines counter, I was served by a woman of around sixty who was dressed as a witch. ‘Where’s your broom?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, we modern witches travel by Thunderbird. The next time you see a Thunderbird, watch out: there’ll be a witch like me inside it,’ she said, handing back my passport.

On the plane, I catch a potent whiff of BO from the woman two seats away. I wish I could open the window. We’ve just gone through some turbulence. The pilot’s turning circles, or so it seems. Sharp bends and turbulence, what terror is made of. I remember that Bolaño character, the pilot who writes poems in the air.

Stopover in Dallas. At the airline counter, I got the costume of the man who served me wrong. I thought he was a black rabbit, but actually he was a bat. A man of fifty, I’d guess. ‘Let me show you what I really am,’ he said, stepping out from behind the counter and stretching his arms to display his purple satin wings. He flapped them a few times.

Now I’m going to write something important: bats have smaller ears than rabbits. And Halloween allows the United States a childlike breathing space, a playful interlude. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the president of the United States dressed as a pumpkin in the middle of a government meeting.

In Mexico, despite La Catrina and sugar skulls, death is a sensitive subject. The facts mean we can’t be flippant about it. If the Mexican president put on a fancy-dress costume, for example, he’d be dragged out of his office feet first.