Synopsis: Bring Me the Head of Kabuki Blue

"Bring Me the Head of Kabuki Blue" is the story of Mark Leach, a PR executive (or perhaps a journalist working during the final days of the newspaper industry – the protagonist is a frustratingly unreliable narrator) and the author of “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s longest novel. Leach is struggling to write a write a 30,000-word science fiction novella based on several public domain short stories of Philip K. Dick. But he is experiencing writer’s block. Imagine it: he has written a 17–million-word monster, but struggles to turn out a paltry 30,000 words.
Leach is abducted by space aliens, who are here on a special fact-finding visit to Earth. These aliens are Cicadians, a race of extraterrestrial insects that have evolved without the development of sight as a basis of communication. The shamans of this alien race would on occasion have dreams of Earth and its many sights, including random scenes from “Kabuki Blues,” a circa 1980s play at the Caravan of Dreams, a Fort Worth theater created by billionaire Ed Bass.

Due to their unique evolution without sight the holy men were incapable of describing these experiences to the rest of their race. They just knew that the place they dreamt of was their heaven. Meanwhile their race was modeled around sound and music, encompassing much more of the auditory spectrum than the limited human hearing. In fact, from their perspective, humans were capable of hearing but nearly deaf. Their language involved the telepathic projection of tone and note patterns in precise gradations and following mathematical formulas.

An aerial clock (aka flying saucer) carrying members of this race arrives on Earth and they abduct Leach as a cover up for plugging autonomous nanobots into his body. They disseminate the nanobots via a special cuckoo clock (this comes from one of the PKD short stories) that substitutes the traditional bird with a sentient android head of Philip K. Dick rendered in shades of blue – their conception of the deity who rules Earth.

The nanobots are a digitized form of the aliens with a link back to the ship – essentially allowing everyone to experience Mark Leach by proxy. The nanobots are supposed to be passive, serving only as a means of relaying the mystic experience of sight to an entire race. Soon the alien presence in the nanobots become bored with Leach’s novel writing attempts, which are bland, schmaltzy schlock based on the low-budget Sci Fi movies and TV shows that he constantly watches. As a consequence of this boredom, the nanobots turn from being passive to active, controlling what Leach watches as well as feeding him mathematical formulas (based in part on “Kabuki Blues”) that he begins to use as the basis of his fiction writing and filmmaking.

Leach quits his job and moves to New York City, where he writes an experimental novel titled “Bring Me the Head of Kabuki Blue,” incorporating a fusion of the competing literary utopias of William Burroughs and Sally Miller Gearhart. He becomes a respected avant-garde artist. The active role the nanobots take in the relationship begins to transform Leach into a living robot. At this point the aliens make themselves known and offer to remove the nanobots and restore his humanity, but Leach refuses. He sees himself as a genuine artist where as before he was of no consequence, an artificial newspaper/PR drone doing what he did simply for a regular paycheck. Leach decides to give up his robot body to be transformed into a buzzing swarm of nanobots which will invade the brain of one of the aliens. This will also lead to the eventual death of the alien host but it offers Leach a chance of experiencing their world of sounds, the Musica universalis (aka “music of the spheres”). In other words, our heaven.

Before he leaves Earth, Leach asks the aliens to create an audience of robot humans like himself to attend the drive-in movie premier of “Next Year at Marienbad,” his 168-hour creation about a postmodern prophet who believes he is called on by God to make a movie that will bring about the death of time and the birth of a new religion. A machine creates a movie watched by other machines.

The premier is heavily foreshadowed throughout the novel. Leach meets other real people (Sally Miller Gearhart, Williams Burroughs and Ed Bass) who are in attendance along with the robot humans.