The felines return to their castle and remember that they have still have a ton of cash to burn

I just finished writing the next chapter of my fake novel BRYAN THE TYGER, in which we cats return to our castle and remember that we still have money in our bank account, so we go on another shopping spree.

[I got tired of graffiti-ing tygers onto junk ads, so, for the next few days, the obligatory images that accompany these announcements will be just lazy attempts at hand-drawing copies of ad photos with felt tip marker.]

P.S.

In other news: my Public Private Diary is fully printed; also I made a list of my latest novels that have been printed but not included in any collection.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Myala and I now gallop back to our castle. We park the Mystical Merkabah in the garage; then we dash upstairs to tell our kitty friends Nous and Zephyros all about our latest adventure.

“Our stint at the New York Stock Exchange exceeded our expectations,” I announce. “I’d call that a wild ride!”

“Yes,” sez Myala, “a great many ‘recently retired’ traders would agree: it was a sizzling success!”

At the kittens’ request, we relay the Christian names of all the 3,000 stockbrokers who whipped themselves into the heavens, starting with Don, followed by Larry; then Martha; Aquila; Priscilla; Silas; Tim; Phebe; Ebenezer; Apollo; Stephen; Peter “the Rock”; Linus . . . etc.

“Whoa, that’s a lot of traders!” Nous meows; “I bet if you etched their names onto a slab of black granite, it would end up being so long that it would resemble a strip of ticker tape.”

“Which would be fitting,” sez Myala, “as ticker tape was the earliest dedicated financial communications medium to transmit stock-price information over telegraph lines.”

“Ah, that’s right,” I say; “I was just reading about that! By the way, did you know that the term ‘ticker’ came from the sound made by the machine as it—”

“Heroes! Heroes!” little Zephyros interrupts — he insists on addressing Myala and I this way, despite our expressly forbidding it, on account of the fact that we’re more than ten times his size (remember: Zephyros is only a tiny, neutered ex-housecat; and his spouse Nous is a spayed kitty from a distant harem; while Myala is a Glowing Black Panther from Planet Jupiter, and I Bryan am a Burning Tyger in the Forests of the Night) — “Heroes! Heroes! What are you going to do NOW!? For you have beaten the highest possible level of adventure: Nothing more fantastic can even exist! You went to the New York Stock Exchange and accomplished the mission of bringing salvation to the unsavable, and you even forgave the unforgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit that permeates us all! So does this mean that you shall withdraw from public ser­vice and spend more time with Nous and myself, here at our castle?”

Myala and I wake up just in time to realize that a question has been asked (we both fell asleep during Zephyros’ oration); so I answer:

“Um . . . sure.”

“Really? You will!? Yippee!” Zephyros begins to purr and prance around us in circles and lick our fur.

“Wait,” I say; “—we will what. What did I just agree to?”

“You said that you’ll stop adventuring so much,” sez Zephyros; “and instead spend a whole lot more time here at the house with me and Nous, playing with cat toys and filling the litter-box.”

“Oh, no-no-no-no-no,” I raise my mighty forepaw; “sorry, Zeph, but I wasn’t paying attention when you asked your question. Myala and I will never stop going on adventures: that’s our calling. And I dislike being cooped up in this castle; it drains my soul, to be stuck here for even a day or two — jeesh, after a month indoors, I’m ready to kill and eat a chicken! That’s how degrading and undignified ‘civilized life’ is. You should know this: you’re an ex-housecat. (Incidentally, you yourself are free to roam about wherever you like, as far as you want: you’re nobody’s pet anymore — I don’t know why you and Nous spend so much time inside this castle.) But, yeah, to answer your question, Myala and I will definitely be heading out on a new adventure soon; we just gotta figure out what’s the next pressing concern in this sector of the galaxy.”

“Hey,” sez Myala, “did we ever end up spending any of the money that we won at all the casinos?”

I stare at the fireplace, trying to remember; then I say, “Yeah, that’s what we went to Manna-hata for: to play the stock market.”

“But we didn’t bet any of our money,” Myala sez; “we just spent the whole time giving chariot rides to the brokers.”

I blink and furrow my brow. “Jeepers, you’re right,” I place my paw against the side of my head, because I find this info such a shock. “I should check our bank balance, to see how much we need to spend . . . Nous! Zephyros!” I shout to my castle-mates: “Where is the cat-phone?”

Nous fetches the cat-phone from the dead room. (We refer to this chamber of our castle as “the dead room” because that label sounds to us like the opposite of a “living room”; for this area of our abode contains nothing lively or exciting, but only dull items like filing cabinets filled with law­yerly documents, and office devices like fax machines. This is also where we keep our abacus.) The cat-phone is just a regular push-button telephone that connects to a landline, but its receiver is custom-designed to fit the feline face; plus I own the “Jungle Beast” model, whose enormous buttons are easier to press with my mighty right forepaw.

To check our bank balance, I dial the number that offers an automatic report. I enter the proper extension; then I enter my account number and my secret passcode. The synthetic voice, which sounds like a feminine version of the “DAVE” supercomputer, declares that our account has a balance in the high hundreds of thousands of trillions of caesars. I hold the phone receiver out so that my Cat Fam can hear the fake woman repeat the amount:

“That’s almost a million trillion!” Myala remarks from the divan.

I nod, “It’s probably because of our Nevada winnings.”

Myala then springs down, stands firm, and announces sternly: “We need to spend this money, pronto.”

“I agree,” I say.

We then turn to our castle-mates, the kitty-cats Nous and Zephyros, who have witnessed our detective work and are privy to this financial revelation:

“Friends, instead of choosing our own adventure, it seems that our next adventure has chosen us.”

Myala then sez: “Yes, Bryan and I shall forthwith need to pay an emergency visit to all the eateries, diners, and restaurants of this realm. We’ll most likely end up trotting around the whole globe.”

§

So Myala and I visit all the eateries, diners, and restaurants in our homeland; then we proceed to the neighboring countries and eat at their establishments, trying everything from high-cuisine to street-food. (It’s all so scrumptious!) We even stop and chat with a hotdog vendor.

Then, after consuming every dish available to order at all the diners in the whole wide world, we go to all the clothing shops and buy up all their clothes: really fashionable items like hats, shirts, pants, shoes, and coats — and we just drop them in the street, wherever we are (we make sure that these articles land on dry, clean ground, for we do not want them to get soiled); and we affix to these garments neon-colored post-it notes that say “Take me; wear me!” because we feel sorry for humankind because they lack fur. (They’re all bald and devoid of claws and saber-teeth.)

Also we purchase a shit-ton of real estate with our Nevada winnings. (If you suspected that we never do end up investing in the stock market but instead squander all our wealth on the needs of the populace, just to leave them looking stylish, then you are correct: congratulations on a perfect guess!) The total number of residences that we seal deals on amounts to zillions upon zillions of homes — and each now sits with its front door open and the keys dangling from the lock, behind a sign that sez:

Free real estate: inhabit me now! (And please remove this sign once you’ve moved in, to avoid confusion.)

We also buy a trillion fleets of fighter jets, and we pack each craft till it’s bursting with non-perishable foodstuffs. Then we shoot all these items of dry soup and canned corn at the populace. Thus, a majority of the people end up in a swoon, at the sight of so many high-speed groceries incoming.

Subsequently we burn all the planes that we just bought. We do this by parking them side by side and lighting a match, and I toss the match into the first aeroplane, which immediately explodes, and this causes the next fighter jet in line to explode likewise as a result, and the whole long string of aircraft explodes one-by-one like a trail of dominoes. And when you zoom out to view the landscape from a God’s-eye view, the burning planes spell out a message:

“TYGER BRYAN SAVES THE WORLD.”

Now the thick black-and-orange toxic fumes from that last charade end up engulfing the planet, which threatens to suffocate all breathing creatures — much like when the total population of ibex got snuffed out; except Myala and I are not hungry enough to consume the rest of this world’s inhabitants — thus it becomes necessary to translocate all Earth-life back over to Jupiter temporarily. Again, rather than us choosing it, our adventure has chosen us. As it is written: 

Many designs are in a Tyger’s mind,
But it is Fate’s plan that is accomplished.

(Proverbs 19:21)

Thus our motto during this mission is “Carry a Torch for Planet Earth,” as, in the meantime, our once-lovely globe becomes our old flame.