Major Ursa (A Short Story)

“Stop.”

I don’t stop. I tighten the straps around her arms and ratchet everything tight until the buckles click. The leather’s old and cracking and the chair smells like Dentist rubber.

“Stop,” she says. And I try to keep it clinical but my eyes meet hers and she‘s looking at me. My Ursa. She looks calm, but I squeeze a thin snake of Paxil paste onto my index finger anyway and I rub it on her ear like we used to do at the G-force accelerator. She was so scared. But she’s calm now. Her ear is wrinkled and see-through like a dried apricot, and I massage it until the paste disappears, and a strand of fur sticks up like a cowlick where the medicine clumped up. I’m not wearing gloves, so I probably get a taste too. Just as well, because my heart is weak. “Stop,” Ursa says again.

She was named for the constellation, the space bear, but Ursa was a chimp. And a guinea pig. And an astronaut. No wonder she was confused. No wonder her days were numbered.

Death comes inevitably to all the animals in the space program. Lab rats are expensive and one-time-use. They have to be purebred for statistical analysis, homogenized and hegemonized. Wonder-bred rodents, white and wired all the same. Chimpanzees are more complicated.

“Rats are dumb animals,” Ursa says. “Chimps have souls.” And I can’t deny it. With rats, you can pretend like they’re matches or Q-tips. Fixed commodity. Really expensive cotton balls that you blast with gas and incinerate when they’re spent. Snuff one and another takes its place. But chimps have souls. It’s just like the movies. They smoke cigars. They smile. Some suffer from chronic depression. Ursa had panic attacks, ergo the Paxil. Even before the mission, her eyes had this huge weight behind them. Almost like she knew she was destined for greater things. Like, primate prescience.

Once, when I was six, my hamster Cinnamon rolled out the back door in his hamster ball. He bounced down the patio steps and splashed into the swimming pool, and the plastic prison filled up slowly like some Houdini escape act. He bobbed up and down there helpless among the hundreds of drowned mosquitoes that my dad was too lazy to skim, and finally sank to the bottom.

Watching Ursa in her space-pod reminded me of that. The day of the launch we called her Major Ursa and grinned at the pun. Rocket scientists chuckled at the absurdity of a chimp pulling rank. I strapped her into the captain’s chair and bit my lip to stifle a smile because she almost looked official, sitting there at the control panel. Not because she was a chimp– I’d seen a dozen chimps blast off– but because she actually looked like she knew what she was doing, more than some expensive cotton ball. She grasped the throttle in her hairy paw and somehow endowed it with new meaning. The pressure door closed with a hiss. Countdown to launch and the rocket took off, trailing spiraling smoke like a cartoon cat-on-fire. And Ursa was gone.
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The engineers exchanged sheepish glances when the radio cut out, each too embarrassed to admit he was completely baffled, and we all feared the space pod and Ursa were lost forever, doomed to float unmanned into a vast inky oblivion. Days later, the earth shook and a sonic boom sounded, and the vessel streaked across the sky. It plowed across the desert floor and slowed to a halt. On target. On time. Unmanned. Ursa was still sitting at the console, no worse for wear. The pressure door opened and she turned to look at me, one furry hand on the steering wheel and the expression on her face like “want a ride?” I took her in my arms.

Back in the lab I ran the tests. Needles and CAT-scans and probes and pinpricks, and everything came back normal. Except a tumor. Death comes inevitably to all the animals in the space program.

“Stop,” she says. She can talk. But I’m not ready for it, and neither is she.
I fill the needle with Fatal Plus and imagine she’s floating. And the weight behind her eyes seems lifted. And I wonder what happened when we lost radio contact. What touched her in the static? “She can talk.” My own words echo in my head like a joke. I am a parody of a veterinarian and she only talks to me. I think it’s selfish, or maybe payback. And I almost kiss her because she understands. Instead, I part the fur on her arm and find a bald patch, and I swab the spot with cotton like it really matters. Ursa closes her eyes when I squeeze the needle.

Momma Always Said There’d Be Daze Like This

Some of my friends.