About ten years ago, I was on a train leaving New York City when I got a call on my cell phone.

“Hello,” the caller said. “Is this Michael Cunningham?”

“It is.”

“This is David Bowie. I hope I’m not calling at an inconvenient time.”

“Whoever you are,” I said, “this is a really cruel joke.”

It was surely the work of a friend, I thought—someone close enough to know that I’d listened to Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs approximately 10,000 times each when I was in college and that still, with college far, far behind me, I listened to Bowie at least once a week. That person might even know about my youthful attempts to look like David Bowie, which I maintained even though a pale, skinny kid walking the streets of Pasadena, California, in a bad (very bad) red dye job and a Ziggy Stardust T-shirt did not seem to read “rock star” to anyone but me. The prankster who was calling me, pretending to be Bowie, might have known that I’d been, essentially, waiting for that call for almost 35 years.

The caller said, “No, really, it’s David. How are you?”

And suddenly, it seemed possible that this was David Bowie, if for no other reason than I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who could manage such a convincing imitation of that particular dulcet, nuanced—and profoundly familiar—voice.

I believe I said something like, “Oh well, hello, David. What a nice surprise.”

This was during a bit of a lull in Bowie’s career. After his album Reality came out in 2003, he didn’t release any new music for a decade. In 2004, he had a heart attack. For the rest of his life, he was beset by health problems, including the cancer that would eventually kill him.

When he called me, though, he was looking to start a new project, a musical. I’d write the book, he said, and he’d write the music. He didn’t go into detail over the phone, but we made a date for lunch in New York the following week.

I confess that, after David clicked off, I felt ever so slightly…altered. I was someone who’d gotten a call from David Bowie. That teenager with the inept dye job, the one prone to singing “Space Oddity” in the frozen-foods section of the supermarket, had not vanished, after all. He had only been hibernating over the past several decades.

For our first meeting, David chose a perfectly good but unextraordinary Japanese restaurant in the West Village. When I arrived, he was already seated with the lovely woman who’d been his assistant for decades. He introduced her and told me he admired my books. I told him I admired his music.

I did not fall prostrate. I did not weep. I did not tell him that a number of his songs seemed to have worked their way into my DNA. Which was more to David’s credit than it was to mine. He was remarkably adept at managing the fact that he was David Bowie and you were not.

After we’d exchanged a smattering of small talk, I asked him if he had anything specific in mind about the musical he’d like us to work on. He admitted that he was intrigued by the idea of an alien marooned on Earth. He’d never been entirely satisfied with the alien he’d played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. He acknowledged that he’d like at least one of the major characters to be an alien.

I was intrigued by aliens, too. I’d just written a novella about alien immigrants who came to our world in droves because their planet was not at all the spired futurescape we like to imagine but, rather, a realm harsher and more desolate than the most hellish places on Earth. The aliens were only mildly surprised to learn, once they got to Earth, that they were despised and discriminated against and could only get jobs so lowly no earthling would take them.

And there was, of course, my own adolescent sense of myself as a marooned alien, with just David B. for company.

Aliens? Sure, I could do aliens.

I asked David if he had any other ideas. He promptly underwent a brief paroxysm of what I can only call English embarrassment, which differs from the American variety. American embarrassment generally involves shame and arises out of an identifiable act or an ill-considered remark, whereas the British are capable of being embarrassed about being embarrassed. And about every foolish act ever committed by anybody. I, for one, have always found it sexily endearing.

David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future. The plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.

It was not what I’d been expecting. Yes, David had recorded “Song for Bob Dylan,” for the album Hunky Dory, in 1971, but that was a song about Bob Dylan; it wasn’t a song supposedly written by Bob Dylan.