Читать книгу One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки - Кен Кизи, Ken Kesey - Страница 3

Three black boys in white suits are mopping up the hall when I come out of the dorm.

They usually get up before me and commit sex acts in the hall before I can catch them. I feel their hate.

When they hate like this, it’s better if they don’t see me. I walk along the wall quietly as dust in my canvas shoes, but they somehow feel my fear and they all look up, all three at once, their eyes’re glittering out of the black faces.

“Here’s the Chief. The super Chief, fellows. Ol’ Chief Broom. Here you go, Chief Broom.”

One of them puts a mop in my hand and points to the spot where I must clean today, and I go.

They start talking behind me, heads close together. Hospital secrets, hate and death. They think I’m deaf and dumb, so they’re not afraid to talk about their hate secrets when I’m nearby. Everybody thinks I’m deaf and dumb. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. I’m half Indian, and if this fact ever helped me in this dirty life, it helped me to be cagey, helped me all these years.

I’m mopping near the ward door when the Big Nurse opens it with a key. She comes in and locks the door behind her.

She’s carrying her wicker bag in the shape of a tool box. She’s had it during all the years I’ve been here. It’s of loose-weave and I can see inside it; there’s no compactor lipstick or woman things, that bag is full of the things she’s going to use in her duties today – wheels and cogs, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers’ pliers, rolls of copperwire…

She nods at me as she goes past me. I push the mop back to the wall and smile and try not to let her see my eyes – they can’t tell so much about you if your eyes are closed.

In my dark I hear how the things in her wicker bag clash as she passes me in the hall. When I open my eyes she’s near the glass Nurses’ Station where she’ll spend the day sitting at her desk and looking out of her window and making notes on what goes on in front of her in the day room during the next eight hours. Her face looks pleased and peaceful with the thought.

Then… she sees those black boys. They’re still talking in the hall. They didn’t hear how she came into the ward. They sense that she’s glaring down at them now, but it’s too late. It was a mistake to group up and whisper together when she was expected on the ward. She bends and advances on where they’re trapped at the end of the corridor. She knows what they’ve been saying, and I can see that she’s furious. She’s going to tear the black bastards limb from limb, she’s so furious. She looks around her. Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there who is hiding behind his mop and can’t call for help because he can’t talk. So she really lets herself go and her painted mouth twists, stretches to an open snarl. I hold my breath. My God, this time they’re gonna do it! This time they let the hate build up too high and they’re gonna tear one another to pieces before they realize what they’re doing!

But right at that moment all the patients start coming out of the dorms to check on what’s the hullabaloo about and she has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of her hideous real self. The patients are still half asleep. They see the head nurse. She is smiling and calm and cold as usual. She is telling the black boys that they shouldn’t stand in a group and gossip when it is Monday morning and there is such a lot to get done on the first morning of the week…

“…old Monday morning, you know, boys…”

“Yeah, Miz Ratched…

“…and we have a number of appointments this morning, so perhaps, if your group talking isn’t too urgent…”

“Yeah, Miz Ratched…”

She stops and nods at some of the patients who stand around and stare out of eyes all red and puffy with sleep. She nods once to each. Her face is smooth, like an expensive baby doll, and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils – everything works perfectly together except the orange color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing when those big, womanly breasts were put on that otherwise perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.

The men are still standing and waiting. They want to know what appointments she was telling the black boys about, so she remembers me and says, “And since it is Monday, boys, it will be a good start on the week if we shave poor Mr. Bromden first this morning, before breakfast, and see if we can’t avoid some of the noise he usually makes.”

Before anybody can turn to look for me I hide in the mop closet, shut the door after me, hold my breath. Shaving before you get breakfast is the worst time. When you got something under your belt you’re stronger and more wide awake, and the bastards who work for the Combine can’t use one of their machines on you in place of an electric shaver. But when you shave before breakfast – six-thirty in the morning – then what chance you got against one of their machines?

I hide in the mop closet and listen, my heart is beating in the dark, and I try not to be afraid, try to think of something else – try to think back and remember things about the village and the big Columbia River, think about one time when Papa and me were hunting birds near The Dalles… But as always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear of the present moment breaks the memory. I can feel that one black boy is coming up the hall. He is smelling out for my fear. He opens out his nostrils and he sniffs in fear from all over the ward. He’s smelling me now. He doesn’t know where I’m hiding, but he’s smelling and he’s hunting around. I try to keep still…

(Papa tells me to keep still, tells me that the dog senses a bird somewhere right close. We borrowed a pointer dog from a man in The Dalles. All the village dogs are mongrels, Papa says, no class at all; this here dog, he got instinct. I don’t say anything, but I already see the bird up in a tree, a gray knot of feathers. The dog is running in circles underneath. There is too much smell around, and he can’t point for sure. The bird is safe as long as he keeps still, but the dog is sniffing and circling, louder and closer. Then the bird breaks, spreads feathers, jumps out of the tree into the birdshot from Papa’s gun.)

The black boys catch me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag me back to the shaving room. I don’t fight or make any noise. If you yell it’s just tougher on you. I hold back the yelling till they get to my temples. I’m not sure it’s one of those substitute machines and not a shaver till it gets to my temples; then I can’t hold back. I yell so loudly that everybody puts their hands over their ears though they are behind a glass wall. Everybody yells at me, but no sound comes from the mouths. My sound soaks up all other sound. They start the fog machine again and it’s snowing down cold and white all over me like skim milk, so thick I might even be able to hide in it if they didn’t hold me. I can’t see six inches in front of me through the fog but I can hear over the noise I’m making that the Big Nurse is storming up the hall while she crashes patients out of her way with that wicker bag. I hear but I still can’t hush my yelling. I yell till she gets there. They hold me down while she jams wicker bag into my mouth and pushes it down with a mop handle.

When the fog clears and I can see, I’m sitting in the day room. They didn’t take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion. I don’t remember if I got breakfast or not. Probably not. I can remember some mornings when I was locked in Seclusion, the black boys brought breakfast things there, but they didn’t give anything to me, they ate it themselves.

This morning I don’t remember. They got so many pills down me that I don’t know a thing till I hear that the ward door opens. The ward door opening means that it’s at least eight o’clock.

Since eight o’clock the ward door opens and closes a thousand times a day. Every morning we sit in the day room, mix jigsaw puzzles after breakfast. When a key hits the lock, we wait to see what’s coming in. There’s nothing else to do. Sometimes a young resident comes in early to watch what we’re like Before Medication. BM, they call it. Sometimes it’s a visiting wife on high heels, who holds her purse tight over her belly. Sometimes it’s a group of grade-school teachers on a tour with that fool Public Relation man who’s always clapping his wet hands together and saying how overjoyed he is that mental hospitals had put an end to all the old-fashioned cruelty. “What a cheerful atmosphere, don’t you agree?” He’ll bustle around the schoolteachers, who stay in a close group for safety, and clap his hands together. “Oh, when I think back on the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, brutality, oh, I realize, ladies, that we have come a long way in our campaign!” Whoever comes in the door is usually somebody disappointing, but there’s always a chance otherwise, and when a key hits the lock, all the heads come up at once.

This morning the sound of the key in the lock is strange; it’s not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man’s voice calls down impatiently, “Admission, come sign for him,” and the black boys go.

Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns toward the day-room door. On most days I’m out of the day room and sweep the hall, and I can see who they’re signing in, but this morning the Big Nurse put a thousand pills down me and I can’t get out of the chair. Most days I can see how the Admission stands, full of fear, near the wall till the black boys come to sign for him and take him into the shower room, where they strip him and leave him shivering with the door open while they all three run to the Big Nurse. “We need that Vaseline,” they’ll tell the Big Nurse, “for the thermometer.” She looks from one to the other: “I’m sure you do,” and gives them a very big jar, “but, boys, don’t group up in there.” Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission. They’re grinning and turning that thermometer around in Vaseline till it’s coated the size of your finger.Then they shut the door and turn all the showers up so that you can’t hear anything except, the hiss of water on the green tile. I’m out there most days, and I see it like that.

But this morning I can only listen as they bring him in. Still, even though I can’t see him, I know he’s no ordinary Admission. When they tell him about the shower, he doesn’t just say a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud voice that he’s already plenty damn clean, thank you.

“They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I think they’d have washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they could have found the means. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I’ve got to get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. So at the sound of water I start to gather up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I’ve never been in an Institute of Psychology before.”

The patients look at one another’s puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. He is talking louder than he needs. He sounds as if he’s high above the black boys, talking down, as if he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, yelling at those below on the ground. He sounds big. He’s coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there, and the guys’re looking at him.

“Good mornin’, buddies.”

A paper Halloween bat’s hanging on a string above his head; he flicks it so it spins around.

“Mighty nice fall day.”

He talks a little like Papa, voice loud and strong, but he doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian – a chief – and hard and shiny as a gunbarrel. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, which haven’t been cut for a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the worn leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody hit him in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there and waits, and when nobody says anything to him, he begins to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden that it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.

He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, can’t say a word. Nobody tries to stop him. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound is around him – it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles, in the way he talks.

“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “’… and whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay… my money… down’,” and laughs again.

He walks to one of the card games, squints at an Acute’s cards, and shakes his head.

“Yes sir, that’s what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun and entertainment around the gaming table. Nobody left in that Pendleton Work Farm to make my days interesting any more, so I asked for a transfer, you see. Needed some new blood. Hooee, look at the way this bird holds his cards, showing them to everybody; man! I’ll trim you babies like little lambs.”

Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man puts his hand out for Cheswick to shake.

“Hello, buddy; what’s that you’re playing? Pinochle? Jesus, no wonder you don’t care nothing about showing your hand. Don’t you have a straight deck around here? I brought along my own deck, just in case, it has something in it other than face cards – and check the pictures, huh? Every one different.Fifty-two positions.”

Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards doesn’t help his condition.

“Easy now, don’t smudge them; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes the other players at least a week to even see the suit…”

He’s wearing faded work-farm pants and shirt. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a black motorcycle cap on his head and a leather jacket over one arm, and his boots are gray and dusty and heavy. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and starts to beat a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he’s too quick for them; he moves among the Acutes and shakes hands before the black boy can take good aim.

“You see, I got in a couple of fights at the work farm, to tell the pure truth, and the court ruled that I’m a psychopath. And do you think I’m going to argue with the court? Sure, I’m not. If it gets me out of those damned pea fields I’ll be whatever their little heart wants, be it psychopath or mad dog or werewolf, because I don’t care if I never see another weeding hoe to my dying day. Now they tell me a psychopath’s a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain’t wholly right, do you think? Hello, buddy, what do they call you? My name’s McMurphy and I’ll bet you two dollars here and now that you can’t tell me how many spots are in that pinochle hand you’re holding. Two dollars; what d’ya say? God damn, Sam! can’t you wait half a minute to prod me with that damn thermometer of yours?”

The new man stops for a minute to get the organization of the day room.

On one side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors think that they’re still sick enough and must be cured, practice arm wrestling and card tricks. Billy Bibbit tries to learn to roll a cigarette, and Martini walks around, discovering things under the tables and chairs. The Acutes move around a lot. They tell jokes to each other and laugh in their fists (nobody ever dares laugh aloud, the whole staff would be in with notebooks and a lot of questions) and they write letters with yellow, chewed pencils.

They spy on each other. Sometimes one man says something about himself that he didn’t aim to let slip, and one of his buddies at the table where he said it yawns and gets up and goes over to the big logbook by the Nurses’ Station and writes down the piece of information he heard.The Big Nurse says the book is of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, but I know that she just wants to get enough evidence and to send some guy to the Main Building where they’ll recondition him, overhaul him in the head and straighten out the trouble.

The guy that wrote the piece of information in the logbook gets a star by his name on the list and gets to sleep late the next day.

Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics. They keep them in the hospital not to cure them, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name. Chronics will stay in the hospital for ever, the staff concedes. Chronics are divided into Walkers like me, who can still get around if you feed them, and Wheelers and Vegetables. Most of Chronics are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired. Some of them are born with these flaws, others got the flaws after very bad beatings.

But there are some of us Chronics that are the result of the staff’s mistakes that were made a couple of years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic who came in as an Acute and became Chronic when they overloaded him in that brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, with the same horror on his face.They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed, or when they want to move so that I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when list check came around.

Ruckly is another Chronic who came in a few years ago as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a nuisance all over the place: he kicked the black boys and bit the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to cure. They strapped him to that table and shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You’ll pay for this, you damn tar babies.”

And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later. He was bald and the front of his face was an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs were stitched above his eyes. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; there’s no life, no light in his eyes. All day now he just holds an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turns it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture became gray as his eyes on both sides, so that you can’t tell any more what it used to be.

The staff, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I think that he’s better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all – they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he’d been in a fist-fight, and he’s the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He’ll maybe even go home in a month or two, with a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly with his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers some place in that broken machinery. He turns red and at first he can just make a little whistling sound in his throat. He’s trying so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise that makes your skin crawl – “Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.

Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old cavalry soldier from the First War who likes to lift the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or to teach some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen. He’s the oldest on the ward, but not the one who’s been here longest – his wife brought him in only a few years ago, when she wasn’t able to look after him herself any longer.

I’m the one who’s been here on the ward the longest, longer than anybody, since the Second World War. The Big Nurse has been here longer than me.

The Chronics and the Acutes don’t generally mingle. Each stays on his own side of the day room. The black boys want it that way. The black boys say that it’s more orderly that way. They move us in after breakfast and look at the grouping and nod. “That’s right, gennulmen, that’s the way. Now you keep it that way.”

But there is no need to say it because the Chronics don’t move around much, and the Acutes stay on their own side because they’re afraid that they may become Chronics someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll say to an Acute, whenever he goes into a bad mood, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is planned for your cure, or you’ll end up over on that side.

(Everybody on the ward is proud that the patients cooperate so well. There’s a little brass tablet on the wall right above the logbook, with the words on it: CONGRATULATIONS FOR COOPERATING WITH THE SMALLEST NUMBER OF PERSONNEL OF ANY WARD IN THE HOSPITAL. It’s a prize for cooperation.)

This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away that he’s not a Chronic. He goes right to the Acute side, grinning and shaking hands with everybody. At first I see that he’s making everybody there feel uneasy, especially with that big laugh of his. I see that McMurphy notices that he’s making them uneasy, but he doesn’t change his behavior.

“Damn, you boys don’t look so crazy to me.” He’s trying to relax them. “Which one of you is the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It’s my first day, and I want to make a good impression on the right man if he can prove to me that he is the right man. Who’s the boss loony here?”

He looks round to where some of the Acutes have stopped their card-playing “I’m thinking about taking over this whole show myself, so I want to talk with the top man. I’m gonna be sort of the gambling baron on this ward. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here.”

Nobody’s sure if this barrel-chested man with the scar and the wild grin is play-acting or if he’s crazy enough to be just like he talks, or both, but the Acutes are grinning now, not so uneasy any more, and glad that something out of the ordinary’s going on. They ask Harding if he’s boss loony. He lays down his cards.

Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think that you’ve seen him in the movies, a face too pretty for just a guy on the street. He’s got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he’s trying to hide inside himself. He’s got fine hands, so long and white. Sometimes they fly around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and hides them between his knees; it worries him that he’s got pretty hands.

He’s president of the Patient’s Council because he has a paper that says he graduated from college. This paper in a frame sits on his nightstand next to a picture of a woman in a bathing suit who also looks like you’ve seen her in the moving pictures. You can see Harding sitting on a towel behind her. Harding brags a lot about having such a woman for a wife, says she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she can’t get enough of him nights.

Harding assumes an important look, speaks up at the ceiling without looking at McMurphy. “Does this… gentleman have an appointment, Mr. Bibbit?” he asks Billy Bibbit.

Billy stutters when he speaks.“Do you have an appointment, Mr. McM-m-murphy? Mr. Harding is a busy man, nobody sees him without an ap-appointment.”

“This busy man Mr. Harding, is he the boss loony?” He looks at Billy with one eye, and Billy nods his head up and down real fast.

“Then you tell Boss Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital isn’t big enough for the two of us. I’m always top man everywhere. I was even boss pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton – so I think if I’m to be a loony, then I must be a good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yellow skunk and better be out of town by sunset.”

Harding leans back in his chair. “Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I’ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we’ll settle this affair once and for all.” Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high voice. “You might also warn him, just to be fair, that I have been boss loony on this ward for almost two years, and that I’m crazier than any man alive.”

“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy that I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”

“Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!”

“And you tell Mr. Harding right back” – he puts both hands on the table and leans down – “that I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.”

“I take off my hat,” Harding says, bows his head, and shakes hands with McMurphy. There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure just what.

All the other Acutes come up close to see what new sort this fellow is. Nobody like him has ever been on the ward before. They’re asking him with great interest where he’s from and what his business is. He says he’s a dedicated man. He says he was just a wanderer and bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; they taught him to play poker. Since then he has settled down and devoted himself to gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he wants to, if people would let him, he says, “but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man. Ever since I found my calling I’ve done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I like to fight too much. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a fight; that’s excusable, they say, that’s a hard-working feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know that you play a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal.”

He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.

“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the rules. To tell the truth, this fight I was doing in Pendleton was the first one in close to a year. I was out of practice. That’s why this guy was able to get up off the floor and get to the cops before I left town. A very tough individual…”

He laughs again and shakes hands and sits down to arm wrestle every time that black boy gets too near him with the thermometer. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics. You can’t tell if he’s really this friendly or if he’s got some gambler’s reason for trying to get acquainted with guys so far gone that a lot of them don’t even know their names.

Nobody can understand why he’s trying to get acquainted with everybody, but it’s better than mixing jigsaw puzzles. He keeps saying it’s a necessary thing to get around and meet the men he’ll be dealing with, part of a gambler’s job. But he must know he isn’t going to be dealing with no eighty-year-old organic who couldn’t do any more with a playing card than put it in his mouth and gum it awhile. Yet he looks like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

I’m the last one. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and starts to laugh again. All of a sudden I was afraid that he was laughing because he knew the truth about me: that the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, looking straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.

“Hooeee,” he said, “look what we got here.”

I remember all this part very well. I remember the way he closed one eye and laughed at me. I thought that he was winking at me because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act. “What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sitdown strike.” He looked over to the Acutes to see if they might laugh about his joke; when they just sniggered he looked back to me and winked again. “What’s your name, Chief?”

Billy Bibbit called across the room. “His n-n-nme is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom because he sweeps a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.”

McMurphy kept looking at me. “ I wonder how tall he is.”

“I think somebody m-m-measured him once at s-six feet seven; but even if he is big, he’s afraid of his own sh-sh-shadow. Just a bi-big deaf Indian.”

“When I saw him sittin’ here I thought he looked some Indian. But Bromden isn’t an Indian name. What tribe is he?”

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “He was here wh-when I c-came.”

“I have information from the doctor,” Harding said, “that he is only half Indian, a Columbia Indian, I think. The doctor said that his father was the tribal leader, hence this fellow’s title, Chief. As to the Bromden part of the name, I’m afraid my knowledge in Indian language doesn’t cover that.”

McMurphy leaned his head down near mine where I had to look at him. “Is that right? You deaf, Chief?”

“He’s de-de-deaf and dumb.”

McMurphy looked at my face a long time. Then he straightened back up and put his hand out. “Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can’t he? Deaf or whatever. By God, Chief, you may be big, but you shake my hand or I’ll think it an insult. And it’s not a good idea to insult the new boss loony of the hospital.”

When he said that he looked at Harding and Billy and made a face, but he left that hand in front of me, big as a dinner plate.

I remember very clearly the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he’d worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.

When that palm touched my hand, I felt his strength coming into it. It rang with blood and power: it grew near as big as his, I remember…

“Mr. McMurry.”

It’s the Big Nurse.

“Mr. McMurry, could you come here please?”

It’s the Big Nurse. That black boy with the thermometer has gone and told her. She’s tapping that thermometer against her wrist watch. She tries to size up this new man.

“Aide Williams tells me, Mr. McMurry, that you’ve been somewhat difficult about your admission shower. Is this true? I’m sorry to interrupt you and Mr. Bromden, but you do understand: everyone… must follow the rules.”

He gives that wink that she isn’t fooling him any more than I did. He looks up at her with one eye for a minute.

“Ya know, ma’am,” he says, “ya know – that is the exact thing somebody always tells me about the rules…”

He grins. They both smile, sizing each other up.

“…just when they think that I’m going to do something absolutely opposite.”

Then he lets my hand go.

In the glass Station the Big Nurse is filling hypodermics with some medication. One of the little nurses picks up the little tray of filled hypodermics but doesn’t carry them away just yet.

“What, Miss Ratched, do you think about this new patient? He’s good-looking and friendly and everything, but I think that he certainly wants to be a leader.”

The Big Nurse tests a needle against her fingertip. “I’m afraid that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to be a leader. He is what we call a ’manipulator’, Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends.”

“Oh. But in a mental hospital? What could his ends be?”

“Any number of things.” She smiles and continues to fill the hypodermics. “Comfort and an easy life, for example; the feeling of power and respect, perhaps; monetary profit – perhaps all of these things. Sometimes a manipulator’s own ends are simply the disorder in the ward for the sake of disorder. There are such people in our society. A manipulator can influence the other patients and lead to such great disorder that it may take months to get everything running smooth once more. With the present liberal philosophy in mental hospitals, a manipulator can do his work easily. Some years ago it was quite different. I remember some years ago we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was a strong Ward Manipulator. For a while.” She looks up from her work. Her eyes get pleased with the memory. “Mistur Tay-bur,” she says.

“But, Miss Ratched,” the other nurse says, “what possible motive can such man have?”

“You forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”

The Big Nurse gets really furious because of the slightest disorder on the ward. She walks around with that same doll smile, but down inside of her she’s tense as steel. I know, I can feel it. And she doesn’t relax a bit till she gets the things in order again and a man responsible for that disorder “adjusted to surroundings,” as she calls it.

Under her rule the ward Inside is almost completely adjusted to surroundings. But the thing is she can’t be on the ward all the time. She’s got to spend some time Outside. So she wants to adjust the Outside world too. She works together with others. I call them the “Combine.” It’s a huge organization, the aim of which is to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside. She is a real veteran at adjusting things. She was already the Big Nurse in the old place when I came in from the Outside so long ago, and she’d been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long.

She’s got more and more skillful over the years. Practice has strengthened her until now she uses a sure power that goes in all directions on thin wires too small for anybody’s eye except mine; I see how she sits in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, runs her network with mechanical insect skill, knows every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results that she wants. I was an electrician’s assistant in training camp before the Army shipped me to Germany and I had some electronics in my year in college. That is where I learned how these things can be manipulated.

There, in the center of those wires, she dreams of a world of precision and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients are obedient wheelchair Chronics with catheter tubes that run directly from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor. Year by year she gathers her ideal staff: doctors, all ages and types, come and rise up in front of her with ideas of their own about the way a ward should be run. Some of them are strong enough and stand behind their ideas, and she fixes these doctors with dry-ice eyes day in, day out, until they retreat with unnatural chills. “I tell you I don’t know what it is,” they say to the head of personnel department. “Since I started on that ward with that woman I feel like my veins are running ammonia. I shiver all the time, my kids won’t sit in my lap, my wife won’t sleep with me. I insist on a transfer-neurology, pediatrics, I just don’t care!”

It goes on for years. The doctors stay three weeks, three months. Until she finally chooses a little man with a big wide forehead and wide cheeks and very narrow across his very small eyes as if he once wore glasses that were too small, wore them for so long that they pressed his face in the middle, so now he has glasses on a string to his collar button; they don’t sit well on the purple bridge of his little nose and they are always slipping one side or the other, so he tips his head when he talks just to keep his glasses level. That’s her doctor.

Her three daytime black boys she acquires after more years of testing and rejecting thousands. They come at her in a long black row of sulky, big-nosed masks, hating her and her chalk doll whiteness from the first look they get. She tests them and their hate for a month or so, then lets them go because they don’t hate enough. She finally gets the three of them, one at a time over a number of years, who hate enough for her plan.

All of them black as telephones. The blacker they are, she learned from that long dark row that came before them, the more time they’ll devote to cleaning and scrubbing and keeping the ward in order. For example, all three of these boys’ uniforms are always spotless as snow. White and cold and stiff as her own.

All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts, and white shoes polished like ice, and the shoes have red rubber soles silent as mice up and down the hall. They never make any noise when they move. They materialize in different parts of the ward every time a patient wants to check himself in private or whisper some secret to another guy. A patient’ll be in a corner all by himself, when all of a sudden he’ll hear a squeak, and frost forms along his cheek, and he turns in that direction and there’s a cold stone mask floating above him against the wall. He just sees the black face. No body. The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and it seems that the black face and hands float against it like a ghost.

After years of training all three black boys understand the Big Nurse very well. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions that might be found by a visiting wife or schoolteacher. She doesn’t need to do it any more. The black boys do what she wants before she even thinks it.

So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks ward like a watchman’s clock. Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes are up and out of bed quickly because otherwise the black boys will prod them out, make them do a lot of work in the hall. The Wheelers swing dead legs out on the floor and wait like seated statues when somebody’ll bring chairs to them. The Vegetables piss the bed, electric shock and buzzer activates and rolls them off on the tile where the black boys can hose them down and get them in clean greens…

Six-forty-five: the shavers buzz and the Acutes line up in alphabetical order at the mirrors, A, B, C, D… The walking Chronics like me walk in when the Acutes are done, then the Wheelers are wheeled in.

Seven o’clock: the mess hall opens and the order of line-up reverses: the Wheelers first, then the Walkers, then the Acutes pick up trays, corn flakes, bacon and eggs, toast and this morning a canned peach on a piece of green, torn lettuce. Some of the Acutes bring trays to the Wheelers. Most Wheelers are just Chronics with bad legs, they feed themselves, but there’re three Wheelers that have got no action from the neck down whatsoever, not much from the neck up. These are called Vegetables. The black boys push them in, wheel them against a wall, and bring them identical trays of muddy-looking food for these toothless three: eggs, ham, toast, bacon, all chewed thirty-two times by the stainless-steel machine in the kitchen.

The black boys feed the Vegetables quickly. They open their mouths with the spoon without ceremony, and they curse them all the time:“This ol’ fart Blastic. I can’t tell no more if I’m feeding him bacon puree or chunks of his own fuckin’ tongue.”…

Seven-thirty: back to the day room. The Big Nurse looks out through her special glass and nods at what she sees. She pushes a button and things start. Everything is in order. Acutes: sit on their side of the day room and wait when cards and Monopoly games will be brought out. Chronics: sit on their side and wait for puzzles from the Red Cross box.

Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and jerking through some kind of foolish story that might be really funny if the cartoon figures weren’t real guys…

Seven-forty-five: the black boys move down the line of Chronics and tape catheters on the ones that will hold still for it. Catheters are second-hand condoms the ends of which are cut off and fixed to tubes that run down pantlegs to a plastic sack.My job is to wash them at the end of each day. The black boys tape the condom to the hairs; old Catheter Chronics are hairless as babies from tape removal…

Eight o’clock: the speaker in the ceiling says, “Medications” in the Big Nurse’s voice. The Acutes line up at the glass door, A, B, C, D, then the Chronics, then the Wheelers. The guys get a capsule and a paper cup with water from the nurse and wash the capsule down. Very seldom some fool might ask what medication it is.

“Wait just a moment, honey; what are these two little red capsules in here with my vitamin?”

I know him. He’s a big Acute, already getting the reputation of a troublemaker.

“It’s just medication, Mr. Taber, good for you. Swallow it.”

“But I mean what kind of medication. Christ, I can see that they’re pills —”

“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber – just for me?” He still isn’t ready to swallow something he doesn’t know what is, not even just for her.

“Miss, I don’t like to create trouble. But I don’t like to swallow something without knowing what it is. How do I know this isn’t one of those funny pills that makes me something I’m not?”

“Don’t get upset, Mr. Taber —”

“Upset? Christ, all I want to know —”

But the Big Nurse has come up quietly. “That’s all right, Miss Flinn,” she says. “If Mr. Taber chooses to act like a child, he will be treated as such. We’ve tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that’s not the answer. Hostility, hostility, that’s the thanks we get. You can go, Mr. Taber, if you don’t wish to take your medication orally.”

“All I wanted to know, for the —”

“You can go.”

He goes off and spends the morning thinking about those capsules. I once played as if I’d swallowed one of those same red capsules holding it under my tongue. I opened it later in the broom closet. For a tick of time, before it all turned into white dust, I saw that it was a miniature electronic element. I helped the Radar Corps work with such elements in the Army, microscopic wires and grids and transistors.This one was designed to dissolve on contact with air…

Eight-twenty: the cards and puzzles go out…

Eight-twenty-five: some Acute says that he liked to watch when his sister was taking her bath; the three guys at the table with him run to write it in the logbook…

Eight-thirty: the ward door opens and two technicians come in. They close the lab door behind them, and I sweep up close to the door and can hear their voices.

“What we got already at this ungodly hour of the morning?”

“We got to install a Curiosity Cutout in some nosy, fellow. She says that it must be done quickly.”

I sweep away before I’m caught eavesdropping.

The two big black boys catch Taber and drag him to the mattress room. He’s yelling and kicking, but they hold him tightly.

They push him face down on the mattress. One sits on his head, and the other pulls his pants down. He’s cursing into the mattress and the black boy sitting on his head is saying, “ Tha’s right, Mistuh Taber, tha’s right…” The nurse comes down the hall with ajar of Vaseline and a long needle, closes the door, so they’re out of sight for a second, then comes out, wiping the needle on a fragment of Taber’s pants. She’s left the Vaseline jar in the room. Before the black boy can close the door after her I see the one still sitting on Taber’s head, dabbing at him with a Kleenex. They’re in there a long time before the door opens up again and they come out, carrying him across the hall to the lab. He’s now wrapped up in a damp sheet…

Nine o’clock: young residents talk to Acutes for fifty minutes about what they did when they were little boys. The Big Nurse doesn’t like this time because she can’t control the process.

Nine-fifty: the residents leave and the everything is smooth again: that clean orderly movement of a cartoon comedy.

Taber is wheeled out of the lab on a Gurney bed. They’re taking him to Building One for EST (electric shock treatment).

The Big Nurse says to them, “Maybe after that take him to the electroencephalograph and check his head – we may find evidence of a need for brain work.”

Ten o’clock: the mail comes up. Sometimes you get the torn envelope…

Ten-thirty: Public Relation comes in. Members of a ladies’ club are following him. He claps his fat hands at the day-room door. “Oh, hello guys; look around, girls; isn’t it clean, so bright? This is Miss Ratched. I chose this ward because it’s her ward. She’s, girls, just like a mother. Not that I mean age, but you girls understand…”

He conducts these tours – serious women in blazer jackets, who nod to him as he points out how much things have become better over the years. He points out the TV, the big leather chairs, the sanitary drinking fountains; then they all go and have coffee in the Nurse’s Station.

Ten-forty, – forty-five, – fifty: patients go in and out of little rooms to different appointments for treatment.

The ward is a factory for the Combine. The hospital is for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches. When a finished product goes back out into society, all fixed up, good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart; something that came in all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component. He’s adjusted to surroundings finally…

“Why, I’ve never seen anything like the change in Maxwell Taber since he’s got back from that hospital; a little black and blue around the eyes, a little weight lost, and, you know what? he’s a new man. God, modern American science…”

And the light is on in his basement window long after midnight every night as the Delayed Reaction,which the technicians installed in him, lend speed to his fingers as he bends over the drugged figure of his wife, his two little girls just four and six, the neighbor he goes bowling with on Mondays; he adjusts them as he was adjusted. This is the way they spread it.

When he finally dies after a pre-set number of years, the town loves him dearly, and there’s his picture in the paper, showing him helping the Boy Scouts last year on Graveyard Cleaning Day, and his wife gets a letter from the headmaster of the high school how Maxwell Wilson Taber was an inspirational figure to the youth of our fine community.

A successful Dismissal like this is a product that brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart and speaks high of her skills and the whole industry in general. Everybody’s happy with a Dismissal.

But an Admission is a different story. Even the best-behaved Admission must be taught routine. An Admission might really make a hell of a mess and be a threat to the order. And, as I explain, the Big Nurse gets really angry if anything threatens her smooth organization.

At ten minutes to one the black boys are telling Acutes to clear the floor for the group meeting. All the tables are carried out of the day room.

The Big Nurse watches all this through her window. The day-room floor gets cleared of tables, and at one o’clock the doctor comes out of his office down the hall, nods once at the nurse as he goes past her window, and sits in his chair just to the left of the door. The patients sit down when he does; then the little nurses and the residents come in. When everybody’s down, the Big Nurse comes out into the day room, carrying the logbook and a basket full of notes. She sits just to the right of the door.

Soon after she’s sat down, Old Pete Bancini turns his face to McMurphy and starts complaining. “I’m tired. Whew. O Lord. Oh, I’m awfully tired…” he always does so whenever there’s a new man on the ward who might listen to him.

The Big Nurse doesn’t look at Pete. She’s going through the papers in her basket. “Somebody, go and sit beside Mr. Bancini,” she says. “Quiet him down so we can start the meeting.”

Billy Bibbit goes, sits down beside Pete and pats his knee. Pete realizes that nobody is going to listen to his complaint today. The nurse takes off her wrist watch and looks at the ward clock and puts the watch face toward her in the basket. She takes a folder from the basket.

“Now. Shall we get into the meeting?”

She looks around, smiling. The guys don’t look at her; they’re all looking at their nails. Except McMurphy. He’s sitting in an armchair in the corner, and he’s watching her every move. He’s still wearing his cap. A deck of cards in his lap opens and shuts with a loud sound. The nurse’s eyes stay on him for a second. She’s been watching his playing poker all morning and though no money has passed hands she suspects that he’s not exactly the type that is going to be happy with the ward rule of gambling for matches only. The deck opens and shuts again and then disappears somewhere in one of those big palms.

The nurse looks at her watch again and pulls a piece of paper out of the folder she’s holding, looks at it, and returns it to the folder. She puts the folder down and picks up the logbook.

“Now. At the end of Friday’s meeting… we were discussing Mr. Harding’s problem… concerning his young wife. He had stated that his wife’s bosom attracted stares from men on the street and that this made him uneasy.” She opens a place in the logbook. “According to the notes in the logbook, Mr. Harding says that she ’damn well gives the bastards reason to stare’. He also says that he knows her reason to look for sexual attention. He says, ’My dear sweet but illiterate wife thinks that any word or gesture that isn’t brutal is a word or gesture of weak dandyism’.”

She continues reading silently from the book for a while, then closes it.

“He has also stated that his wife’s big bosom at times gives him a feeling of inferiority. So. Does anyone care to touch upon this subject further?”

Harding shuts his eyes, and nobody else says anything. McMurphy looks around at the other guys to see if anybody is going to answer the nurse, then holds his hand up like a school kid in class; the nurse nods at him.

“Mr. – ah – McMurry?”

“Touch upon what?”

“What? Touch–”

“You ask, I believe, ’Does anyone care to touch upon’–”

“Touch upon the – subject, Mr. McMurry, the subject of Mr. Harding’s problem with his wife.”

“Oh. I thought you mean touch upon her – something else.”

“Now what could you —”

But she stops. Some of the Acutes hide grins, and McMurphy stretches himself, yawns, winks at Harding. Then the nurse, calm as anything, puts the logbook back in the basket and takes out another folder and opens it and starts reading.

“McMurry, Randle Patrick. Sent by the state from the Pendleton Farm for Correction.For diagnosis and possible treatment. Thirty-five years old. Never married. Distinguished Service Cross in Korea, for leading an escape from a Communist prison camp. A dishonorable discharge, afterward, for insubordination. Followed by a history of street brawls and barroom fights and a series of arrests for Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, repeated gambling, and one arrest – for Rape.”

“Rape?” The doctor looks up.

“Statutory, with a girl of —”

“Whoa. Couldn’t stick that,” McMurphy says to the doctor. “Girl wouldn’t testify.”

“With a child of fifteen.”

“Said she was seventeen, Doc, and she was plenty willin’.”

“A court doctor’s examination of the child proved entry, repeated entry, the record states —”

“So willin’, in fact, I began to sew my pants shut.”

“The child refused to testify in spite of the doctor’s findings. It seems, there was intimidation. Defendant left town shortly after the trial.”

“Hoo boy, I had to leave. Doc, let me tell you” – he leans forward to the doctor across the room, lowering his voice – “that little hustler would have actually frazzled me by the time she reached legal sixteen.”

The nurse closes up the folder and passes it across the doorway to the doctor.

The doctor puts his glasses on. He’s smiling a little as he turns through the folder, but he doesn’t let himself laugh. The doctor closes the folder when he gets to the end, and puts his glasses back in his pocket. He looks at McMurphy.

“You’ve no other psychiatric history, Mr. McMurry?”

“McMurphy, Doc.”

“Oh? But I thought – the nurse was saying —”

He opens the folder again, looks through the record for another minute before he closes it, and puts his glasses back in his pocket. “Yes. McMurphy. That is correct. I beg your pardon.”

“It’s okay, Doc. That lady there made the mistake. I’ve known some people who did that. I had this uncle whose name was Hallahan, and he went with a woman once who acted as if she couldn’t remember his name right and called him Hooligan just to get his goat. It went on for months before he stopped her. Stopped her well, too.”

“Oh? How did he stop her?” the doctor asks.

McMurphy grins and rubs his nose with his thumb. “Ah-ah, now, I can’t tell that. I keep Uncle Hallahan’s method a strict secret, you see, in case I need to use it myself someday.”

He says it and looks right at the nurse. She smiles right back at him, and he looks over at the doctor. “Now; what were you asking about my record, Doc?”

“Yes. I asked if you’ve any previous psychiatric history. Any analysis, any time spent in any other institution?”

“Well, speaking of state and county coolers —”

“Mental institutions.”

“Ah. No, this is my first trip. But I am crazy, Doc. I really am. Well here – let me show you here. I believe that other doctor at the work farm…”

He gets up and comes across the room, leans over the doctor’s shoulder and thumbs through the folder in his lap. “Believe he wrote something, back at the back here somewhere…”

“Yes? I missed that. Just a moment.” The doctor takes his glasses out again and puts them on and looks to where McMurphy is pointing.

“Right here, Doc. The nurse didn’t read it while she was summarizing my record. Where it says, ’Mr. McMurphy has evidenced repeated – I just want to make sure I’m understood completely, Doc – ’repeated outbreaks of passion that suggest the possible diagnosis of psychopath.’ He told me that ’psychopath’ means I fight and fuh – pardon me, ladies – means that I am, as he put it, overzealous in my sexual relations. Doctor, is that very serious?”

He asks it with such a little-boy look of worry all over his broad, tough face that the doctor bends his head to hide another little smile in his collar, and his glasses fall from his nose back in his pocket. All of the Acutes are smiling too, now, and even some of the Chronics.

“I mean that overzealousness, Doc, have you ever been troubled by it?”

The doctor wipes his eyes. “No, Mr. McMurphy, I’ll admit I haven’t. I am interested, however, that the doctor at the work farm added this statement: ’But there’s the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis to escape the hard work of the work farm’.” He looks up at McMurphy. “And what about that, Mr. McMurphy?”

“Doctor” – he stands up to his full height, wrinkles his forehead, and holds out both arms, open and honest to all the wide world – “do I look like a saneman?”

The doctor can’t answer because he tries not to snigger again. McMurphy turns away from the doctor and asks the same thing of the Big Nurse: “Do I?” She doesn’t answer. She stands up and takes the folder away from the doctor and puts it back in the basket under her watch. She sits back down.

“Perhaps, Doctor, you should advise Mr. McMurry on the rules of these Group Meetings.”

“Ma’am,” McMurphy says, “have I told you about my uncle Hallahan and the woman who didn’t pronounce his name properly?”

She looks at him for a long time without her smile. Finally she says, “I beg your pardon, Mack-Murph-y.” She turns back to the doctor. “Now, Doctor, if you would explain…”

The doctor folds his hands and leans back. “Yes. I think I’ll explain the complete theory of our Therapeutic Community, while we’re at it. Though I usually speak about it later. Yes. A good idea, Miss Ratched, a fine idea.”

“Certainly the theory too, doctor, but what I had in mind was the rule that the patients stay seated during the meeting”.

“Yes. Of course. Then I will explain the theory. Mr. McMurphy, one of the first things is that the patients stay seated during the meeting.”

“Sure, Doctor. I just got up to show you that thing in my record book.”

He goes back to his chair, stretches himself again and yawns, sits down, and moves around for a while like a dog coming to rest. When he’s comfortable, he looks over at the doctor, waiting.

“As to the theory…” The doctor takes a deep, happy breath.

McMurphy doesn’t say anything all the rest of the meeting. Just sits and watches and doesn’t miss a thing that happens or a word that’s said. The doctor talks about his theory until the Big Nurse finally decides he’s used up time enough and asks him to stop so they can talk about Harding, and they talk the rest of the meeting about that.

McMurphy sits forward in his chair a couple of times during the meeting as if he might have something to say, but he decides better and leans back. There’s a puzzled expression on his face. He thinks that something strange is going on here. He can’t quite put his finger on it. There’s something strange about a place where the men don’t laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks that he’ll just wait awhile and see what the story is in this new place before he makes any kind of play. That’s a good rule for a clever gambler: watch the game awhile before you draw yourself a hand.

I’ve heard that theory of the Therapeutic Community enough times to repeat it forwards and backwards – how a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he’ll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he’s out of place; that society decides who’s sane and who isn’t. The doctor goes into the theory every time we get a new patient on the ward. He says that the goal of the Therapeutic Community is a democratic ward; the patients themselves run this ward and work toward becoming normal citizens, who will go back Outside onto the street. He says that the chief method of therapy is the discussing of all personal, emotional problems in the group,in front of patients and staff. Talk, he says, discuss, confess. And if a friend says something during the course of your everyday conversation, write it down in the logbook, where the staff can see it. It’s not, as the movies call it, “squealing,” it’s helping your fellow. Bring these old sins into the open, participate in Group Discussion, help yourself and your friends probe into the secrets of the subconscious. There should be no need for secrets among friends.

Our goal, he usually ends by saying, is to make this as much like your own democratic, free neighborhoods as possible – a little world Inside that is a small prototype of the big world Outside in which you will one day take your place again.

At this point the Big Nurse usually stops him, and in the pause old Pete stands up and tells everybody how tired he is, and the nurse tells somebody to calm him, so the meeting can continue, and Pete is usually calmed and the meeting goes on.

Only once, four or five years ago, it was different. The doctor had finished his speech, and the nurse had asked, “Who will start? Tell us about those old secrets.” And she’d put all the Acutes in a trance by sitting there in silence for twenty minutes after the question. When twenty minutes had passed, she looked at her watch and said, “So, there’s not a man among you that has done something that he has never confessed?” She reached in the basket for the logbook. “Must we go over past history?”

At the sound of those words coming from her mouth, some acoustic device in the walls turned on. The Acutes stiffened. Their mouths opened in unison. Her eyes stopped on the first man along the wall.

His mouth worked. “I robbed a cash register in a service station.”

She moved to the next man.

“I tried to take my little sister to bed.”

Her eyes clicked to the next man.

“I – one time – wanted to take my brother to bed.”

“I killed my cat when I was six. Oh, God forgive me, I stoned her to death and said my neighbor did it.”

“I lied about trying. I did take my sister!”

“So did I! So did I!”

“And me! And me!”

It was better than she’d dreamed. They were all shouting, telling things that wouldn’t ever let them look one another in the eye again. The nurse was nodding at each confession and saying ’Yes, yes, yes’.

Then old Pete was on his feet. “I’m tired!” he shouted, a strong, angry tone to his voice that no one had ever heard before.

Everyone stopped shouting. They were somehow ashamed. It was as if he had suddenly said something that was real and true and important and it had put all their childish shouting to shame. The Big Nurse was furious. She turned and glared at him, the smile left her face.

“Somebody, calm poor Mr. Bancini,” she said.

Two or three got up. They tried to calm, pat him on his shoulder. But Pete didn’t stop. “Tired! Tired!” he kept on.

Finally the nurse sent one of the black boys to take him out of the day room by force. She forgot that the black boys didn’t hold any control over people like Pete.

Pete’s been a Chronic all his life. Even though he didn’t come into the hospital till he was over fifty, he’d always been a Chronic. His head had been traumatized at the time of his birth by the tongs with which the doctor had jerked him out. And this made him forever as simple as a kid of six.

But one good thing – being simple like that put him out of the influence of the Combine. They weren’t able to adjust him. So they let him get a simple job on the railroad, where he waved a red, green or yellow lantern at the trains according to the position of the switch. And his head wagged according to the position of that switch. And he never had any controls installed in him.

That’s why the black boy didn’t have any influence over him. But the black boy didn’t think of that any more than the nurse did when she ordered to take Pete from the day room. The black boy walked right up and gave Pete’s arm a jerk toward the door.

“Tha’s right, Pete. Let’s go to the dorm.”

Pete shook his arm free. “I’m tired,” he warned.

“C’mon, old man. Let’s go to bed and be still like a good boy.”

“Tired…”

“I said you goin’ to the dorm, old man!”

The black boy jerked at his arm again, Pete stopped wagging his head. He stood up straight and steady, and his eyes came clear as blue neon. And the hand on that arm that the black boy was holding became a strong fist. Nobody was paying any attention to this old guy and his old song about being tired. Everybody thought that he would be calmed down as usual and the meeting would go on. They didn’t see the hand that had turned into a strong fist. Only I saw it. I stared at it and waited, while the black boy gave Pete’s arm another jerk toward the dorm.

“Ol’ man, I say you got —”

He saw the fist, but he was a bit too late. Pete’s fist pressed the black boy into the wall, the plaster cracked and he then slid down to the floor.

The nurse ordered the other two black boys to take Pete. They almost reached Pete when they remembered that Pete wasn’t wired under control like the rest of us.

Pete stood there in the middle of the floor, swinging that fist back and forth at his side. Everybody was watching him now. He looked from the big black boy to the little one, and when he saw that they weren’t going to come any closer he turned to the patients.

“You see – it’s a lot of boloney,” he told them, “it’s all a lot of boloney.”

The Big Nurse began to move toward her wicker bag. “Yes, yes, Mr. Bancini,” she was saying, “now if you’ll just be calm —”

“That’s all it is, a lot of boloney, nothing else.” His voice lost its strength, became urgent as if he didn’t have much time to finish what he had to say. “You see, I can’t help it, I can’t – don’t you see. I was born dead. Not you. You weren’t born dead. Ahhhh, it’s been hard…”

He started to cry. He couldn’t make the words come out right anymore; he opened and closed his mouth to talk but he couldn’t sort the words into sentences any more. He shook his head to clear it and blinked at the Acutes:

“Ahhhh, I… tell… you… I tell you.”

His fist became an open hand again. He held it cupped out in front of him as if he was offering something to the patients.

“I can’t help it. I was born a failure. I had so many injuries that I died. I was born dead. I can’t help it. I’m tired. I’m giving up trying. You got chances. You got it easy. I was born dead an’ life was hard. I’m tired. I’m tired out talking and standing up. I’ve been dead fifty-five years.”

The Big Nurse gave him a shot. There wasn’t really any need for the shot; his head had already begun to wag back and forth and his eyes were dull. The effort of the last couple of minutes had worn him out finally and completely, once and for all – you could just look at him and tell he was finished.

He had come to life for maybe a minute to try to tell us something, something none of us tried to understand, and the effort had drained him dry.

“I’m… tired…”

“Now. I think if you two boys are brave enough, Mr. Bancini will go to bed like a good fellow.”

“…aw-fully tired.”

Pete never tried anything like that again, and he never will. Now, when he starts acting up during a meeting and they try to calm him, he always calms. He’ll still get up from time to time and wag his head and let us know how tired he is, but it’s not a complaint or excuse or warning any more – he’s finished with that; it’s like an old useless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

At two o’clock the group meeting is over.The nurse looks at her watch and tells us to bring the tables back into the room and we’ll resume this discussion again at one tomorrow. The Acutes click out of their trance, look for an instant in Harding’s direction. Their faces burn with shame; they feel that they have woken up to the fact that they have been played for fools again. They all are avoiding Harding. They’ve been maneuvered again into grilling one of their friends as if he was a criminal and they were all prosecutors and judge and jury. For forty-five minutes they have been cutting a man to pieces, almost as if they enjoyed it, asking him: What’s he think is the matter with him that he can’t please the little lady; why’s he insist that she has never had anything to do with another man; how’s he expect to get well if he doesn’t answer honestly? – questions and insinuations till now they feel bad about it.

McMurphy’s eyes follow all of this. He doesn’t get out of his chair. He looks puzzled again. He sits in his chair for a while, watching the Acutes.Then finally he stands up from his arm chair, yawns and stretches, and walks over to where Harding is off by himself.

McMurphy looks down at Harding a minute.Then he takes a nearby chair and straddle sit like a tiny horsein front of Harding. Harding is staring straight ahead, humming to himself, trying to look calm. But he isn’t calm at all.

McMurphy lights a cigarette, puts his cigarette between his teeth and looks at Harding for a while, then starts talking with that cigarette wagging up and down in his lips.

“Well say, buddy, is this the usual procedure for these Group Ther’py meetings?”

“Usual procedure?” Harding’s humming stops. He still stares ahead, past McMurphy’s shoulder.

“Flock of chickens at a peckin’ party?”

Harding’s head turns with a jerk and his eyes find McMurphy. He sits back in his chair and tries to look relaxed.

“A ’pecking’ party?” I fear I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Why then, I’ll just explain it to you.” McMurphy raises his voice. He doesn’t look at the other Acutes behind him, but he’s talking specially to them. “The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peck at it, see, till they tear the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spots in the process, then it’s their turn. And a few more get spots and get pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin’ party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I’ve seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it – with chickens – is to put blinders on them. So’s they can’t see.”

Harding leans back in the chair. “A pecking party. That certainly is a pleasant analogy, my friend.”

“And that meeting, buddy, if you want to know the dirty truth, reminded me of a flock of dirty chickens.”

“So that makes me the chicken with the spot of blood, friend?”

“That’s right, buddy.”

“And you want to know somethin’ else, buddy? You want to know who pecks that first peck?”

Harding doesn’t answer and waits.

“It’s that old nurse, that’s who.”

Harding is trying to act calm.

“So,” he says, “it’s as simple as that, as stupidly simple as that. You’re on our ward six hours and have already simplified all the work of Freud, Jung, and Maxwell Jones and summed it up in one analogy: it’s a ’peckin party’.”

“I’m not talking about Fred Yoong and Maxwell Jones, buddy, I’m just talking about that meeting and what that nurse and those other bastards did to you.”

“Did to me?”

“That’s right. It seems that you have done something to make some enemies here in this place, buddy.”

“It seems that you don’t understand that any question or discussion raised by Miss Ratched is done solely for therapeutic reasons? I see that you haven’t understood a word of Doctor Spivey’s theory of the Therapeutic Community. I’m disappointed in you, my friend, oh, very disappointed. This morning I thought that you were more intelligent. But I was mistaken.”

“The hell with you, buddy.”

“Oh, yes; I forgot to add that I noticed your primitive brutality also this morning. Psychopath with definite sadistic tendencies, probably motivated by an egomania. Yes. As you see, all these natural talents certainly make you a competent therapist quite capable of criticizing Miss Ratched’s meeting procedure, in spite of the fact that she is an experienced psychiatric nurse with twenty years in the field. Yes, with your talent, my friend, you could work subconscious miracles, soothe the aching identity and heal the wounded superego. You could probably cure the whole ward, Vegetables and all, in six short months.”

McMurphy asks him calmly, “And you really think that these meetings are to cure you?”

“The staff desires our cure as much as we do. They aren’t monsters. Miss Ratched may be a strict middle-aged lady, but she’s not some kind of giant monster of the poultry clan, sadistically pecking out our eyes.”

“No, buddy, not that. She isn’t peckin’ at your eyes. She’s peckin’ at your balls, buddy, at your everlovin’ balls.”

Harding tries to grin, but his face and lips are so white that the grin is lost. He stares at McMurphy. McMurphy takes the cigarette out of his mouth and repeats what he said.

“Right at your balls. No, that nurse isn’t some kind of monster chicken, buddy, she is a ball-cutter. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em, old and young, men and women. Seen ’em all over the country and in the homes – people who try to make you weak so that they can make you follow their rules, live according to their rules. And the best way to do this, to make you knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin you where it hurts the worst. If you’re in a fight against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker, then watch for his knee, he’s gonna go for your balls. There’s nothing worse. It makes you sick, it takes every bit of strength you got. And that’s what that old buzzard is doing, going for your balls, your vitals.”

“Our dear Miss Ratched? Our sweet, smiling, tender angel of mercy, Mother Ratched, a ball-cutter? Why, friend, that’s most unlikely.”

“Buddy, don’t give me that tender little mother crap. She may be a mother, but she’s tough as knife metal. She fooled me with that kindly little old mother bit for maybe three minutes when I came in this morning, but no longer. I don’t think she’s really fooled any of you guys for any six months or a year, neither. Hooowee, I’ve seen some bitches in my time, but she takes the cake.”

“A bitch? But a moment ago she was a ball-cutter, then a buzzard – or was it a chicken? Your metaphors are bumping into each other, my friend.”

“The hell with that; she’s a bitch and a buzzard and a ball-cutter, and don’t kid me, you know what I’m talking about.”

Harding continues to argue.

“Why, look here, my friend Mr. McMurphy, our Miss Ratched is a real angel of mercy, and everyone knows it. She works hard for the good of all, day after day, five long days a week. That takes heart, my friend, heart. In fact, she even further serves mankind on her weekends by doing generous volunteer work about town. She prepares various canned goods, cheese, soap and presents it to some poor young couple having a difficult time financially.” His hands fly in the air, making the picture he is describing. “Ah, look: There she is, our nurse. Her gentle knock on the door. The ribboned basket. The young couple overjoyed to the point of speechlessness. The husband open-mouthed, the wife weeping openly. She places the basket in the center of the floor. And when our angel leaves – throwing kisses, smiling – she is so full of human kindness within her large bosom, that she is beside herself with generosity. Be-side herself, do you hear? Pausing at the door, she draws the young wife to one side and offers her twenty dollars of her own: ’Go, you poor unfortunate child, go, and buy yourself a decent dress. I realize that your husband can’t afford it, but here, take this, and go.’ And the couple is forever indebted to her generosity.”

When he stops talking, the ward is completely silent. I don’t hear anything except a weak reeling rhythm. It’s a tape recorder somewhere getting all of this.

Harding looks around, sees everybody’s watching him, and he tries to laugh. The squeaking sound of that laugh is awful. He can’t stop it. But finally, he stops and lets his face fall into his waiting hands.

“Oh the bitch, the bitch, the bitch,” he whispers through his teeth.

McMurphy lights another cigarette and offers it to him; Harding takes it without a word. McMurphy watches while Harding’s twitching and jerking slows down and the face comes up from the hands.

“You are right,” Harding says, “about all of it.” He looks up at the other patients who are watching him. “No one’s ever dared say it before, but there’s not a man among us that doesn’t think it, that doesn’t feel just as you do about her and the whole business – feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.”

McMurphy frowns and asks, “What about that little doctor? He might be a little slow in the head, but not so much as not to be able to see how she’s taken over and what she’s doing.”

“Doctor Spivey… is exactly like the rest of us, McMurphy. He’s a frightened, ineffectual little rabbit, totally incapable of running this ward without our Miss Ratched’s help, and he knows it. And, worse, she knows that he knows it and reminds him every chance she gets.”

“Why doesn’t he fire her?”

“In this hospital,” Harding says, “it’s not in the doctor’s power to hire and fire. That power goes to the supervisor, and the supervisor is a woman, a dear old friend of Miss Ratched’s; they were Army nurses together in the thirties. We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are. He knows that Ratched can simply pick up the phone and call the supervisor and mention, for example, that the doctor, it seems, is making a great number of requisitions for Demerol —”

“What’s Demerol, Harding?”

“Demerol, my friend, is a synthetic opiate, twice as addictive as heroin. Doctors are often addicted to it.”

“That little fart? Is he a dope addict?”

“I’m certain I don’t know.”

“Then why does she accuse him of —”

“Oh, you’re not paying attention, my friend. No. She doesn’t need to accuse. She has a genius for insinuation. Did she, in the course of our discussion today, ever once accused me of anything? Yet it seems that I have been accused of a lot of things, of jealousy and paranoia, of not being man enough to satisfy my wife, of having relations with male friends of mine, of holding my cigarette in an affected manner, even – it seems to me – accused of having nothing between my legs but a patch of hair – and soft and downy and blond hair at that! Ball-cutter? Oh, you underestimate her!”

Harding takes McMurphy’s hand in both of his.

“This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolfs about. And he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t fight the wolf. Now, would that be wise? Would it?”

He starts his awful laugh again.

“Mr. McMurphy… my friend… I’m not a chicken, I’m a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us here are rabbits, hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not here because we are rabbits – we’d be rabbits wherever we were – we’re all here because we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.”

“Man, you’re talkin’ like a fool. You mean to tell me that you’re gonna sit back and let some old blue-haired woman talk you into being a rabbit?”

“Not talk me into it, no. I was born a rabbit. Just look at me. I simply need the nurse to make me happy with my role.”

“You’re no damned rabbit!”

“See the ears? the little button tail?”

“You’re talking like a crazy ma —”

“Like a crazy man?”

“Damn it, Harding, I didn’t mean it like that. You aren’t crazy that way. I mean – hell, I’ve been surprised how sane you guys all are.”

Harding says, “Mr. Bibbit, hop around for Mr. McMurphy here. Mr. Cheswick, show him how furry you are.”

But Billy Bibbit and Cheswick are too ashamed to do any of the things Harding told them to do.

“Ah, McMurphy, perhaps, the fellows are feeling guilty for their behavior at the meeting. Cheer up, friends, you’ve no reason to feel ashamed. It is all as it should be. It’s not the rabbit’s place to stick up for his fellow. That would have been foolish. No, you were wise, cowardly but wise.”

McMurphy turns in his chair and looks the other Acutes up and down. “I’m not so sure that they shouldn’t be ashamed. Personally, I thought it was shameful the way they acted on her side against you. For a minute there I thought I was back in a Red Chinese prison camp…”

Harding points his cigarette at McMurphy. “In fact you too, Mr. McMurphy, though you behave like a cowboy, are probably just as soft and rabbit-souled as we are.”…

“Yeah, what makes me a rabbit, Harding? My psychopathic tendencies? Is it my fightin’ tendencies, or my fuckin’ tendencies? Must be the fuckin’, mustn’t it? Yeah, that probably makes me a rabbit —”

“Yes. Um. But that simply shows that you are a healthy, functioning and adequate rabbit, where as most of us are sexually weak. Failures, we are weak little rabbits, without any sexual ability.”

“Wait a minute; that’s not what I say —”

“No. You were right. When you said, that the nurse was concentrating her pecking at the balls, it was true. We’re all afraid that we’re losing or have already lost our sexuality. We’re weak rabbits of the rabbit world!”

“Harding! Shut your damned mouth!”

Harding looks at McMurphy and speaks so softly that I have to push my broom to his chair to hear what he says.

“Friend… you… may be a wolf.”

“Goddammit, I’m no wolf and you’re no rabbit.”

McMurphy turns from Harding to the rest of the Acutes. “Here; all you guys. What the hell is the matter with you? You aren’t as crazy as all this, thinking you’re some animal.”

“No,” Cheswick says and steps in beside McMurphy. “No, by God, not me. I’m not any rabbit.”

“That’s the boy, Cheswick. And the rest of you. Why are you afraid of some fifty-year-old woman? What can she do to you, anyway?”

“Yeah, what?” Cheswick says and glares around at the others.

“Well, when she asks one of those questions, why don’t you tell her to go to hell?”McMurphy says.

The Acutes are coming closer to them. Harding says, “My friend, if you continue to tell people to go to hell, you will go to the Shock Shop, perhaps even to an operation, an —”

“Damn it, Harding, what does that mean?”

“The Shock Shop, Mr. McMurphy, is jargon for the EST machine, the Electro Shock Therapy.”

“What does this thing do?”

“You are strapped to a table. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Electricity through the brain and you have therapy and a punishment for your go-to-hell behavior. After these treatments and a man could become like Mr. Ellis there against the wall. An idiot at thirty-five. Or look at Chief Broom beside you.”

Harding points his cigarette at me. I go on with my sweeping.

“I’ve heard that the Chief, years ago, received more than two hundred shock treatments when they were really the vogue. Look at him: a giant janitor. There’s your Vanishing American, a six-foot-eight sweeping machine, who is afraid of its own shadow. That, my friend, may be done to us.”

McMurphy looks at me a while, then turns back to Harding.

“Look at you here: you say the Chief is afraid of his own shadow, but I never saw a more afraid-looking bunch in my life than you guys.”

“Not me!” Cheswick says.

“Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even afraid to open up and laugh. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. A man lets a woman beat him down till he can’t laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he’s got on his side. He’ll begin to think she’s tougher than he is and —”

“Tell me, Mr. McMurphy, how does a man show a woman who’s boss, I mean other than laughing at her? How does he show her who’s king of the mountain? A man like you should be able to tell us that. You don’t beat her, do you? No, then she calls the law. You don’t lose your temper and shout at her; she’ll win by using soothing sounds. Have you ever tried to keep up an angry front in the face of such consolation? So you see, my friend, it is somewhat as you stated: man has only one truly effective weapon against the crushing force of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip society, more and more people are discovering how to make that weapon useless and conquer those who have been the conquerors till the present moment —”

“Lord, Harding, but you do come on,” McMurphy says.

“– and do you think, McMurphy, that you could effectively use your weapon against our champion? Do you think you could use it against Miss Ratched? Ever?”

And he points toward the glass case. Everybody’s head turns to look. She’s in there, looking out through her window, got a tape recorder hidden somewhere, getting all this down – already planning how to work it into the schedule.

The nurse sees that everybody is looking at her and she nods and they all turn away. McMurphy takes off his cap and runs his hands into that red hair. Now everybody is looking at him; they’re waiting for his answer and he knows it. He feels that he’s been trapped some way. He puts the cap back on and rubs the stitch marks on his nose.

“Why, if you mean do I think I could get a bone up over that old buzzard, no, I don’t think I could…”

“Ah, McMurphy. Her face is quite handsome and well preserved. And she has some rather extraordinary breasts. Still – for the sake of argument, could you get it up over her even if she wasn’t old, even if she was young and had the beauty of Helen?”

“I don’t know Helen, but I understand what you’re drivin’ at. And you’re by God right. I couldn’t get it up over old frozen face there even if she had the beauty of Marilyn Monroe.”

“There you are. She’s won.”

That’s it. Harding leans back and everybody waits for what McMurphy’s going to say next. McMurphy can see he’s backed up against the wall. He looks at the faces a minute, then shrugs and stands up from his chair.

“Well, I damn well don’t want to have some old fiend of a nurse after me with three thousand volts. Not when it’s just an adventure for me.”

“No. You’re right.”

Harding’s won the argument, but nobody looks too happy. I’m glad that McMurphy is going to be cagey after all and isn’t going to agree to a game where he can’t win, but I know how the guys feel; I’m not so happy myself. McMurphy lights another cigarette. Nobody’s moved yet. They’re all still standing there, grinning and uncomfortable. McMurphy rubs his nose again and looks away from the bunch of faces around him, looks back at the nurse and chews his lip.

“But you say… she doesn’t send you up to that other ward unless she makes you crack in some way and you end up cursing her out or breaking a window or something like that?”

“Unless you do something like that.”

“You’re sure of that, now? Because I have an interesting idea how to pick up a good purse off you birds in here. But I had a hell of a time getting out of that other hole; I don’t want to be jumping out of the fryin’ pan into the fire.”

“Absolutely certain. She’s powerless unless you do something to honestly deserve EST. If you’re tough enough and don’t let her get to you, she can’t do a thing.”

“So if I behave myself, she can’t do nothing to me? Am I safe to try to beat her at her own game? If I come on nice as pie to her, whatever else I insinuate, she isn’t going to get furious and have me electrocuted?”

“Those are the rules we play by. Of course, she always wins, my friend, always, she gets inside everyone in the end. But you’re safe as long as you keep control. As long as you don’t lose your temper and give her reason to request the therapeutic benefits of Electro Shock, you are safe. To keep one’s temper is the most important thing. And you? With your red hair and black record?”

“Okay. All right.” McMurphy rubs his palms together. “Here’s what I’m thinkin’. You birds think that you got quite the champion in there, don’t you? The woman who always wins. How many of you are willing to take my five bucks if I cannot get the best of that woman – before the end of the week – without her getting the best of me? One week, and if she doesn’t lose her power, the bet is yours.”

“You’re betting on this?” Cheswick is hopping from foot to foot and rubbing his hands together like McMurphy rubs his. “You’re damned right.”

Harding and some of the others say that they don’t understand it.

“It’s simple enough. I like to gamble. And I like to win. And I think I can win this gamble, okay? I’ll tell you something: I found out a few things about this place before I came out here. Damn near half of you guys in here get compensation, three, four hundred a month and not a thing in the world to do with it. I thought I might take advantage of this and maybe make both our lives a little more rich. I’m a gambler and I’m not in the habit of losing. And I don’t think a woman can be more man than me, I don’t care whether I can get it up for her or not. She may have the element of time, but I got a pretty long winning history myself.”

He pulls off his cap, spins it on his finger, and catches it behind his back in his other band.

“Another thing: I’m in this place because that’s the way I planned it, because it’s a better place than a work farm. I’m no loony. Your nurse doesn’t know this. These things give me an edge I like. So I’m saying: five bucks to each of you if I can’t get her goat within a week. And she’ll show, just one time, that she isn’t so unbeatable as you think.”

Harding and other Acutes agree to bet.

The Big Nurse likes to play with the time. She is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she decides to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands run around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through changes of light at a furious speed: morning, noon, and night – light on, light off – day and dark, and everybody must move according to that fake time; awful speed of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night. And so you go through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees that everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she changes the speed back to normal.

She likes to turn up the speed on days when you got somebody to visit you or when some video show is brought from Portland. That’s when she speeds things up.

But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn that dial to a stop and freeze the sun there on the screen. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three. You sit solid and you can’t move, you can’t walk, you can’t swallow and you can’t breathe. You can only move your eyes and see petrified Acutes across the room, with cards in their hands. And instead of fog sometimes she’ll let a clear chemical gas in through the vents, and the whole ward is set solid when the gas changes into plastic.

Lord knows how long we hang this way.

We’re free from this time control in the fog; then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everything else.

They haven’t really fogged the place full force all day today, not since McMurphy came in. Today something’s happened: there hasn’t been any of these things all day, not since shaving. This afternoon everything is going according to the usual schedule. At four-thirty the second shift comes on duty. The Big Nurse dismisses the black boys and takes a last look around the ward. Behind the glass I see that she tells everyone good evening. She turns on the speaker in the day room: “Good evening, boys. Behave yourselves.” And turns the music up louder than ever.Then she leaves the ward and locks the door behind her.

Then, till night, we eat and shower and go back to sit in the day room. The Acutes sit and play cards.

The speakers in the ceiling are still making music. The music comes off a long tape from the Nurses’ Station. We all know the tape so well by heart that we don’t any of us consciously hear it. But McMurphy hasn’t got used to it yet. He’s dealing blackjack for cigarettes, and the speaker’s right over the card table.

“I wish some idiot in that nurses’ hothouse would turn down that music! Hooee! Does that thing play night and day, Harding?”

Harding cocks his ear to the ceiling. “Oh, yes, the so-called music. You see, that’s a recording playing up there, my friend. We seldom hear the radio. The world news might not be therapeutic. And we’ve all heard that recording so many times now it simply slides out of our hearing. Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?”

“Do they leave it on all the time, like a waterfall?” McMurphy says.

“Not when we sleep,” Cheswick says, “but all the rest of the time, and that’s the truth.”

“The hell with that. I’ll tell that coon over there to turn it off or get his fat little ass kicked!”

He starts to stand up, and Harding touches his arm. “Friend, for that you’ll be branded aggressive. Are you so eager to lose the bet?”

McMurphy slowly sits down, saying, “Horse ma-nu-ure.”

They continue to play cards right up to the lights out at nine-thirty. McMurphy wins and laughs a lot. That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long. He gave up trying and settled down to serious dealing. They won the deal off him a time or two, but he always bought it back or fought it back, and the cigarettes on each side of him grew in bigger and bigger pyramid piles.

Then just before nine-thirty he started letting them win. He let them win it all back. He paid out the last couple of cigarettes and lays down the deck.