Excerpt from New Short Story Collection: The End is the Beginning
"Tony" and "Tiger in Boat"
available from Final State Press in Fall 2008

Tony
Ocean. Not a little ocean, but a vast ocean. The shot can be done with a camera with a weight hung from the helicopter. Is this really how it might be done?
     I’m concerned here about the camera disturbing the waves. I want it to be clear that the boat and the boy, have lost their ship because it has sunk without a trace. It is as good as if they had been dropped there in the middle of the ocean from somewhere else completely.
     There is the boat, a white speck, a tiny thing, a toy boat, a boat with two shapes in it.
     There is a boat with a boy with a peach fuzz mustache, and a tan drinking water out of a gasoline can, and Tony the Tiger of Kellogg fame.
     We build brands and make the world a little happier by bringing our best to you each morning.
     He is somewhat translucent and pixilated. It becomes clear, quickly, that this is not a commercial because this Tony the Tiger isn’t smiling, but has lost some weight, and that you can see his bones through his carefully cheerful and colorful skin.
     How do you achieve this translucent effect? It needs to be true translucency rather than a suggested translucency -- that is there needs to be the effect that this tiger is made out of Mylar or some kind of see through material rather than merely superimpose the background image over the top of him. The background image needs to pass through the medium that is Tony the Tiger and into the viewer’s eye.
     This is suggested by the distortion of the light passing through the translucent tiger. The boy and the tiger are getting along as they always do. They are eating seaweed.
     How does it taste?
     They’re Gr-r-Great! But, it is clear as they are eating, from their slowing down, from Tony’s prolonged glances at the boy -- he would rather be eating something else. The boy, too, can tell, because he would rather be eating something else. “It surely would be good to get my hands on a nice steak right about now, wouldn’t it,” he says. “A nice juicy piece of meat.” The tiger laughs. He can only say one thing (you know -- They’re Gr-r-great -- or laugh, and so he doesn’t say his one thing because he would rather keep eating the seaweed than lose the conversation of his friend. They float on the water for a long time. The passage of time is indicated by a time-lapse shot of the boat in the water. The waves speed up and jostle around the boat. The thin clouds sweep overhead, and stars swirl up as the darkness pours over the sky and then it is very dark.
     They will not eat each other?
     They will not eat each other, but will perish like a civilized tiger and boy. The tiger’s will begins to break down. In one instance, he sees the boy shaped like a turkey, dripping baked oils, bread and clove stuffing coming out of his butt. When he leans in to eat the boy, the boy begins to shriek. “What are you doing? I am a boy, not a piece of meat!” And the tiger comes to and sees the boy.
     It is a dark moment
     Now he is going to eat the boy in any case. Saliva drips on the boards of the boat. The translucent tiger is quite hungry. “A boat,” the boy says. “A boat.” And they see another boat on the horizon. They jump around on the boat. “We are saved,” the boy says. He flashes a bit of metal in the sun. They wait. The boat disappears over the horizon, and Tony looks at the boy again. The boy looks at Tony again. Tony has a bib, and a knife and a fork. Just then another boat appears on the same horizon.
     It must be a shipping lane or something.
     Tony is undeterred this time. He chases the boy around the boat. The boat jostles in the water, one side dipping down very close to letting water into the boat and then the other side dipping up almost to the top. And then finally, this boat has seen them. Tony is about to eat the boy, and the boat is on top of them, a gigantic freighter, and pulls them to safety.
               A close call.
               A close call, to be sure
                                            

 Tiger in a Lifeboat ™

The main problem was that the tiger would either eat the child in the first half-hour of the show, or the tiger would act like a big house cat until it starved to death. The desired effect of the show was that the cat would behave like a house cat with the inevitable, intended promise that it would eventually, freak out and eat the boy. The boy through cunning and guile had to survive -- not that the boy would survive because he had bonded with the cat. This was the problem they had uncovered after going through several hundred test boys -- that is boys without any clear identifying information that they had bought on the streets of LA. Four hundred bucks could buy a functional seven-year or eight-year old. They preferred English speakers, but many of the boys spoke Spanish. One boy spoke a haunted babble they could not identify but thought might be Linear Pict X. Thirty of the boys died within minutes of getting launched in the test lot with the tiger.
     They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.
     Of course, all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.
     Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half-million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it “Yann Martel’s Tiger in a Lifeboat,” playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he’d originated a reality cable show?
     Reality was played out anyway. This was a last ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.