david bowie sleeps with 1001
arabian nights next to his bed
He reads from it a few pages each night, an ornate, garishly-illustrated 19th-century edition he won in an auction at Sotheby’s. It is a premise he recognizes from somewhere: the Sultan, who takes a new bride every night only to murder her in the morning, and Scheherazade, the talespinner who keeps herself alive day after day with a forever expanding mythology, serial reinvention.
Nearly nine years after the massive heart attack that effectively ended his musical career, and each gilt page he turns fills David Bowie with dread: he expects the Sultan to kill her, to tire of her guises, her artifice and her costumes—as all singular things are killed on restless nights, thousands upon thousands of them in a desert song.
(4,000 miles away, the Victoria and Albert Museum has opened a retrospective exhibition of his stage outfits and ephemera.)
He turns to his wife of over twenty years, Somali supermodel Iman (for whom he has written songs), and asks her to tell him a story that never ends, in a language he doesn’t understand. As she speaks, he traces the tattoo on her stomach with his finger, a ring of script he cannot read that she promises is his first name—David, a name she tells him cannot be properly articulated in the Arabic alphabet. He whispers, “Open, sesame,” into her skin, but she covers his mouth with her hand, and he swallows it. David Bowie wonders if Scheherazade ever lost herself among the frayed ends of her legends. He is concerned for the way these sagas end.
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