Indeterminacy 94

Some years ago on May 30, Mary Fleming noticed a strange amanita
growing near her house in Upper Nyack. She picked the plant,
volva and all, and put it to dry in the sun on top of her station
wagon. A little later before driving into town she took the
mushroom off the car and put it up on an outside window sill,
also in the sun. When she did this, she may have been thinking,
consciously or unconsciously, of putting the mushroom out of the
reach of her cats. She had, at the time, nine of them. At any
rate, when she returned home after having run an errand in Nyack,
two Siamese cats, Poom Poom, a mother, and One Yen, her kitten,
were busy eating the amanita. Three other cats, not Siamese,
were standing nearby interested in what was going on. Only about
a third of the amanita remained uneaten. Six hours later, the
Siamese became ill. They vomited and had diarrhea. Instead of
walking, they staggered around. They suffered peristalsis.
Eventually they were quite unconscious. They couldn’t move at
all. When Mary Fleming took them to the doctor, they were “like
two fur boards.” They were given injections of atropine. They
recovered completely. Twelve days later there was a
thunderstorm. One Yen, the kitten, died in the driveway. Autopsy
showed that the cause of death was heart attack. The mother, Poom
Poom, still lives but has never had another litter. ¶ That’s one
story. Another version is quite different. It wasn’t a cat that
died in the driveway, but a dog. What happened was that five days
before the thunderstorm, Mary Fleming went to Trinidad where her
husband was collecting snakes. She stayed there for a month.
Back home in July she found that three of the cats that had
recovered from the mushroom poisoning were sick. This means —
since One Yen was already dead — that at least two of the
ordinary cats not only observed the Siamese eating the amanita
but themselves partook. 2 − 1 + 2 = 3. The three cats who were
sick in July were taken to the doctor who said they had
enteritis. He was able to cure them. The cause of One Yen’s death
is unknown. Perhaps it was the atropine. Since Mary Fleming was
in Trinidad there was no autopsy. One thing is certain: Poom Poom
is sterile.

- John Cage