Only the Animals

The protagonist of “Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space,” Plautus is a Russian tortoise. She’s thoughtful, perceptive, and is very concerned with ensuring her own safety. Thus, she’s concerned when her first owner, the hermit Oleg, begins trying to predict the future by breaking tortoise shells—and she chooses to leave him when he embraces Christianity, which she’s heard associates tortoises with sin. Plautus lives with a number of famous writers throughout her long life. She leaves Oleg initially in the hopes of becoming Leo Tolstoy’s tortoise, but is disappointed to discover he’s already dead. However, her years with his daughter, Alexandra, introduce Plautus to a new way of thinking. At this point, she begins to consider solitude, and what it means for a person (or tortoise) to choose to be alone. She finds Alexandra, who chooses to be by herself, an inspiration. From her next owner, Virginia Woolf, Plautus learns to appreciate the human-animal relationship more. Woolf is a kind owner to her and is distraught when Plautus first arrives at Woolf’s house with an infection due to having Tolstoy’s last words carved into her shell. Fortunately for Plautus, though, the carving does help her survive in the years after Woolf’s death. While living with George Orwell, Plautus first learns about space and decides she’d like to go there. After more than a decade of trying, Plautus finally gets herself into the Dr. Yazdovsky’s Soviet labs that put animals in space. Plautus spends several years studying to go to space, during which she interviews any animals that do survive their trips to space for insights. Plautus is so interested in going to space that she doesn’t question why people send animals to space knowing they’ll die—in her mind, it’s an honor. So Plautus is thrilled when she’s slated to be the first animal to orbit the moon. She dies after several days in space, believing that there, she’s going to finally understand what it means to be totally alone.