One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (38 page)

I staggered toward the little round chicken-wired window in the door of the room and tapped it with my knuckles. I saw an aide coming up the hall with a tray for me and knew this time I had them beat.

There had been times when I’d wandered around in a daze for as long as two weeks after a shock treatment, living in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, that gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying, where you know you’re not unconscious any more but don’t know yet what day it is or who you are or what’s the use of coming back at all—for two weeks. If you don’t have a reason to wake up you can loaf around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you want to bad enough I found you can come fighting right out of it. This time I came fighting out of it in less than a day, less time than ever.

And when the fog was finally swept from my head it seemed like I’d just come up after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.

They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship.
Yeh!

Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.

Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.

I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten-thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”

He insisted it wasn’t hurting him. He wouldn’t even take his capsules. But every time that loudspeaker called for him to forgo breakfast and prepare to walk to Building One, the muscles in his jaw went taut and his whole face drained of color, looking thin and scared—the face I had seen reflected in the windshield on the trip back from the coast.

I left Disturbed at the end of the week and went back to the ward. I had a lot of things I wanted to say to him before I went, but he’d just come back from a treatment and was sitting following the ping-pong ball with his eyes like he was wired to it. The colored aide and the blond one took me downstairs and let me onto our ward and locked the door behind me. The ward seemed awful quiet after Disturbed. I walked to our day room and for some reason stopped at the door; everybody’s face turned up to me with a different look than they’d ever given me before. Their faces lighted up as if they were looking into the glare of a sideshow platform. “Here, in fronta your very eyes,” Harding spiels, “is the
Wild
man who broke the arm… of the black boy! Hey-ha, lookee, lookee.” I grinned back at them, realizing how McMurphy must’ve felt these months with these faces screaming up at him.

All the guys came over and wanted me to tell them everything that had happened: how was he acting up there? What was he doing? Was it true, what was being rumored over at the gym, that they’d been hitting him every day with EST and he was shrugging it off like water, makin’ book with the technicians on how long he could keep his eyes open after the poles touched.

I told them all I could, and nobody seemed to think a thing about me all of a sudden talking with people—a guy who’d been considered deaf and dumb as far back as they’d known him, talking, listening, just like anybody. I told them everything that they’d heard was true, and tossed in a few stories of my own. They laughed so hard about some of the things he’d said to the nurse that the two Vegetables under their wet sheets on the Chronics’ side grinned and snorted along with the laughter, just like they understood.

When the nurse herself brought the problem of Patient McMurphy up in group the next day, said that for some unusual reason he did not seem to be responding to EST at all and that more drastic means might be required to make contact with him, Harding said, “Now, that is possible, Miss Ratched, yes—but from what I hear about your dealings upstairs with McMurphy, he hasn’t had any difficulty making contact with you.”

She was thrown off balance and flustered so bad with everybody in the room laughing at her, that she didn’t bring it up again.

She saw that McMurphy was growing bigger than ever while he was upstairs where the guys couldn’t see the dent she was making on him, growing almost into a legend. A man out of sight can’t be made to look weak, she decided, and started making plans to bring him back down to our ward. She figured the guys could see for themselves then that he could be as vulnerable as the next man. He couldn’t continue in his hero role if he was sitting around the day room all the time in a shock stupor.

The guys anticipated this, and that as long as he was on the ward for them to see she would be giving him shock every time he came out of it. So Harding and Scanlon and Fredrickson and I talked over how we could convince him that the best thing for everybody concerned would be his escaping the ward. And by the Saturday when he was brought back to the ward—footworking into the day room like a boxer into a ring, clasping his hands over his head and announcing the champ was back—we had our plan all worked out. We’d wait until dark, set a mattress on fire, and when the firemen came we’d rush him out the door. It seemed such a fine plan we couldn’t see how he could refuse.

But we didn’t think about its being the day he’d made a date to have the girl, Candy, sneak onto the ward for Billy.

They brought him back to the ward about ten in the morning—“Fulla piss an’ vinegar, buddies; they checked my plugs and cleaned my points, and I got a glow on like a Model T spark coil. Ever use one of those coils around Halloween time?
Zam!
Good clean fun.” And he batted around the ward bigger than ever, spilled a bucket of mop water under the Nurses’ Station door, laid a pat of butter square on the toe of the least black boy’s white suede shoes without the black boy noticing, and smothered giggles all through lunch while it melted to show a color Harding referred to as a “most suggestive yellow,”—bigger than ever, and each time he brushed close by a student nurse she gave a yip and rolled her eyes and pitter-patted off down the hall, rubbing her flank.

We told him of our plan for his escape, and he told us there was no hurry and reminded us of Billy’s date. “We can’t disappoint Billy Boy, can we, buddies? Not when he’s about to cash in his cherry. And it should be a nice little party tonight if we can pull it off; let’s say maybe it’s my going-away party.”

It was the Big Nurse’s weekend to work—she didn’t want to miss his return—and she decided we’d better have us a meeting to get something settled. At the meeting she tried once more to bring up her suggestion for a more drastic measure, insisting that the doctor consider such action “before it is too late to help the patient.” But McMurphy was such a whirligig of winks and yawns and belches while she talked, she finally hushed, and when she did, he gave the doctor and all the patients fits by agreeing with everything she said.

“Y’know, she might be right, Doc; look at the good that few measly volts have done me. Maybe if we
doubled
the charge I could pick up channel eight, like Martini; I’m tired of layin’ in bed hallucinatin’ nothing but channel four with the news and weather.”

The nurse cleared her throat, trying to regain control of her meeting. “I wasn’t suggesting that we consider more shock, Mr. McMurphy—”

“Ma’am?”

“I was suggesting—that we consider an operation. Very simple, really. And we’ve had a history of past successes eliminating aggressive tendencies in certain hostile cases—”

“Hostile? Ma’am, I’m friendly as a pup. I haven’t kicked the tar out of an aide in nearly two weeks. There’s been no cause to do any cuttin’, now, has there?”

She held out her smile, begging him to see how sympathetic she was. “Randle, there’s no cutting involve—”

“Besides,” he went on, “it wouldn’t be any use to lop ‘em off; I got another pair in my nightstand.”

“Another—pair?”

“One about as big as a baseball, Doc.”

“Mr. McMurphy!” Her smile broke like glass when she realized she was being made fun of.

“But the other one is big enough to be considered normal.”

He went on like this clear up to the time we were ready for bed. By then there was a festive, county-fair feeling on the ward as the men whispered of the possibility of having a party if the girl came with drinks. All the guys were trying to catch Billy’s eye and grinning and winking at him every time he looked. And when we lined up for medication McMurphy came by and asked the little nurse with the crucifix and the birthmark if he could have a couple of vitamins. She looked surprised and said she didn’t see that there was any reason why not and gave him some pills the size of birds’ eggs. He put them in his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to swallow them?” she asked.

“Me? Lord no, I don’t need vitamins. I was just gettin’ them for Billy Boy here. He seems to me to have a peaked look of late—tired blood, most likely.”

“Then—why don’t you give them to Billy?”

“I will, honey, I will, but I thought I’d wait till about midnight when he’d have the most need for them”—and walked to the dorm with his arm crooked around Billy’s flushing neck, giving Harding a wink and me a goose in the side with his big thumb as he passed us, and left that nurse pop-eyed behind him in the Nurses’ Station, pouring water on her foot.

You have to know about Billy Bibbit: in spite of him having wrinkles in his face and specks of gray in his hair, he still looked like a kid—like a jug-eared and freckled-faced and buck-toothed kid whistling barefoot across one of those calendars, with a string of bullheads dragging behind him in the dust—and yet he was nothing like this. You were always surprised to find when he stood up next to one of the other men he was just as tall as anyone, and that he wasn’t jug-eared or freckled or buck-toothed at all under a closer look, and was, in fact, thirty-some years old.

I heard him give his age only one time, overheard him, to tell the truth, when he was talking to his mother down in the lobby. She was receptionist down there, a solid, well-packed lady with hair revolving from blond to blue to black and back to blond again every few months, a neighbor of the Big Nurse’s, from what I’d heard, and a dear personal friend. Whenever we’d go on some activity Billy would always be obliged to stop and lean a scarlet cheek over that desk for her to dab a kiss on. It embarrassed the rest of us as much as it did Billy, and for that reason nobody ever teased him about it, not even McMurphy.

One afternoon, I don’t recall how long back, we stopped on our way to activities and sat around the lobby on the big plastic sofas or outside in the two-o’clock sun while one of the black boys used the phone to call his bookmaker, and Billy’s mother took the opportunity to leave her work and come out from behind her desk and take her boy by the hand and lead him outside to sit near where I was on the grass. She sat stiff there on the grass, tight at the bend with her short round legs out in front of her in stockings, reminding me of the color of bologna skins, and Billy lay beside her and put his head in her lap and let her tease at his ear with a dandelion fluff. Billy was talking about looking for a wife and going to college someday. His mother tickled him with the fluff and laughed at such foolishness.

“Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

“Mother, I’m th-th-thirty-one years old!”

She laughed and twiddled his ear with the weed. “
Sweet
heart, do I look like the mother of a middle-aged man?”

She wrinkled her nose and opened her lips at him and made a kind of wet kissing sound in the air with her tongue, and I had to admit she didn’t look like a mother of any kind. I didn’t believe myself that he could be thirty-one years old till later when I edged up close enough to act a look at the birth date on his wristband.

At midnight, when Geever and the other black boy and the nurse went off duty, and the old colored fellow, Mr. Turkle, came on for his shift, McMurphy and Billy were already up, taking vitamins, I imagined. I got out of bed and put on a robe and walked out to the day room, where they were talking with Mr. Turkle. Harding and Scanlon and Sefelt and some of the other guys came out too. McMurphy was telling Mr. Turkle what to expect if the girl did come,—reminding him, actually, because it looked like they’d talked it all over beforehand a couple of weeks back. McMurphy said that the thing to do was let the girl in the
window
, instead of risking having her come through the lobby, where the night supervisor might be. And to unlock the Seclusion Room then. Yeah, won’t that make a fine honeymoon shack for the lovers? Mighty secluded. (“Ahh, McM-Murphy,” Billy kept trying to say.) And to keep the lights out. So the supervisor couldn’t see in. And close the dorm doors and not wake up every slobbering Chronic in the place. And to keep
quiet
; we don’t want to disturb them.

“Ah, come on, M-M-Mack,” Billy said.

Mr. Turkle kept nodding and bobbing his head, appearing to fall half asleep. When McMurphy said, “I guess that pretty well covers things,” Mr. Turkle said, “No—not en-tiuhly,” and sat there grinning in his white suit with his bald yellow head floating at the end of his neck like a balloon on a stick.