One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (9 page)

“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’s face and hands are moving faster than ever now, a speeded film of gestures, grins, grimaces, sneers. The more he tries to stop it, the faster it goes. When he lets his hands and face move like they want to and doesn’t try to hold them back, they flow and gesture in a way that’s real pretty to watch, but when he worries about them and tries to hold back he becomes a wild, jerky puppet doing a high-strung dance. Everything is moving faster and faster, and his voice is speeding up to match.

“Why, see here, my friend Mr. McMurphy, my psychopathic sidekick, our Miss Ratched is a veritable angel of mercy and why just
everyone
knows it. She’s unselfish as the wind, toiling thanklessly for the good of all, day after day, five long days a week. That takes heart, my friend, heart. In fact, I have been informed by sources—I am not at liberty to disclose my sources, but I might say that Martini is in contact with the same people a good part of the time—that she even
further
serves mankind on her weekends off by doing generous volunteer work about town. Preparing a rich array of charity—canned goods, cheese for the binding effect, soap—and presenting it to some poor young couple having a difficult time financially.” His hands flash in the air, molding 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 appraises their dwelling. Promises to send them money for—scouring powder, yes. She places the basket in the center of the floor. And when our angel leaves—throwing kisses, smiling ethereally—she is so
intoxicated
with the sweet milk of human kindness that her deed has generated within her large bosom, that she is beside herself with generosity. Be-
side
herself, do you hear? Pausing at the door, she draws the timid young bride to one side and offers her twenty dollars of her own: ‘Go, you poor unfortunate underfed child, go, and buy yourself a
decent
dress. I
realize
your husband can’t afford it, but here, take this, and
go
.’ And the couple is forever indebted to her benevolence.”

He’s been talking faster and faster, the cords stretching out in his neck. When he stops talking, the ward is completely silent. I don’t hear anything but a faint reeling rhythm, what I figure is a tape recorder somewhere getting all of this.

Harding looks around, sees everybody’s watching him, and he does his best to laugh. A sound comes out of his mouth like a nail being crowbarred out of a plank of green pine; Eee-eee-eee. He can’t stop it. He wrings his hands like a fly and clinches his eyes at the awful sound of that squeaking. But he can’t stop it. It gets higher and higher until finally, with a suck of breath, he 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 is still watching Harding’s face in front of him there, with a kind of puzzled wonder, looking at it like it’s the first human face he ever laid eyes on. He 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 come out and 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 fart of a 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.”

Harding takes a long pull off the cigarette and lets the smoke drift out with his talk. “Doctor Spivey… is exactly like the rest of us, McMurphy, completely conscious of his inadequacy. He’s a frightened, desperate, ineffectual little rabbit, totally incapable of running this ward without our Miss Ratched’s help, and he knows it. And, worse, she
knows
he knows it and reminds him every chance she gets. Every time she finds he’s made a little slip in the bookwork or in, say, the charting you can just imagine her in there grinding his nose in it.”

“That’s right,” Cheswick says, coming up beside McMurphy, “grinds our noses in our mistakes.”

“Why don’t he fire her?”

“In this hospital,” Harding says, “the doctor doesn’t hold the power of hiring and firing. 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 all Ratched has to do is pick up that phone you see sitting at her elbow and call the supervisor and mention, oh, say, that the doctor seems to be making a
great
number of requisitions for Demerol—”

“Hold it, Harding, I’m not up on all this shop talk.”

“Demerol, my friend, is a synthetic opiate, twice as addictive as heroin. Quite common for doctors to be addicted to it.”

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

“I’m certain I don’t know.”

“Then where does she get off with accusing him of—”

“Oh, you’re not paying attention, my friend. She
doesn’t
accuse. She merely needs to insinuate, insinuate anything, don’t you see? Didn’t you notice today? She’ll call a man to the door of the Nurses’ Station and stand there and ask him about a Kleenex found under his bed. No more, just ask. And he’ll feel like he’s lying to her, whatever answer he gives. If he says he was cleaning a pen with it, she’ll say, ‘I see, a pen,’ or if he says he has a cold in his nose, she’ll say, ‘I see, a cold,’ and she’ll nod her neat little gray coiffure and smile her neat little smile and turn and go back into the Nurses’ Station, leave him standing there wondering just what
did
he use that Kleenex for.”

He starts to tremble again, and his shoulders fold back around him.

“No. She doesn’t need to accuse. She has a genius for insinuation. Did you ever hear her, in the course of our discussion today, ever
once
hear her accuse me of anything? Yet it seems I have been accused of a multitude 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 hushes all of a sudden and leans forward to take McMurphy’s hand in both of his. His face is tilted oddly, edged, jagged purple and gray, a busted wine bottle.

“This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. 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 wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?”

He lets go McMurphy’s hand and leans back and crosses his legs, takes another long pull off the cigarette. He pulls the cigarette from his thin crack of a smile, and the laugh starts up again—eee-eee-eee, like a nail coming out of a plank.

“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 in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not in here
because
we are rabbits—we’d be rabbits wherever we were—we’re all in 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 wiggly nose? the cute little button tail?”

“You’re talking like a crazy ma—”

“Like a crazy man? How astute.”

“Damn it, Harding, I didn’t mean it like that. You ain’t crazy that way. I mean—hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street—”

“Ah yes, the asshole on the street.”

“But not, you know, crazy like the movies paint crazy people. You’re just hung up and—kind of—”

“Kind of rabbit-like, isn’t that it?”

“Rabbits,
hell!
Not a thing like rabbits, goddammit.”

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

Billy Bibbit and Cheswick change into hunched-over white rabbits, right before my eyes, but they are too ashamed to do any of the things Harding told them to do.

“Ah, they’re bashful, McMurphy. Isn’t that sweet? Or, perhaps, the fellows are ill at ease because they didn’t stick up for their friend. Perhaps they are feeling guilty for the way they once again let her victimize them into being her interrogators. 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.”

“Look here, Harding,” Cheswick says.

“No, no, Cheswick. Don’t get irate at the truth.”

“Now look here; there’s been times when I’ve said the same things about old lady Ratched that McMurphy has been saying.”

“Yes, but you said them very quietly and took them all back later. You are a rabbit too, don’t try to avoid the truth. That’s why I hold no grudge against you for the questions you asked me during the meeting today. You were only playing your role. If you had been on the carpet, or you Billy, or you Fredrickson, I would have attacked you just as cruelly as you attacked me. We mustn’t be ashamed of our behavior; it’s the way we little animals were meant to behave.”

McMurphy turns in his chair and looks the other Acutes up and down. “I ain’t so sure but what they should be ashamed. Personally, I thought it was damned crummy the way they swung in on her side against you. For a minute there I thought I was back in a Red Chinese prison camp…”

“Now by God, McMurphy,” Cheswick says, “you listen here.”

McMurphy turns and listens, but Cheswick doesn’t go on. Cheswick never goes on; he’s one of these guys who’ll make a big fuss like he’s going to lead an attack, holler charge and stomp up and down a minute, take a couple steps, and quit. McMurphy looks at him where he’s been caught off base again after such a tough-sounding start, and says to him, “A hell of a lot like a Chinese prison camp.”

Harding holds up his hands for peace. “Oh, no, no, that isn’t right. You mustn’t condemn us, my friend. No. In fact…”

I see that sly fever come into Harding’s eye again; I think he’s going to start laughing, but instead he takes his cigarette out of his mouth and points it at McMurphy—in his hand it looks like one of his thin, white fingers, smoking at the end.

“…you too, Mr. McMurphy, for all your cowboy bluster and your sideshow swagger, you too, under that crusty surface, are probably just as soft and fuzzy and rabbit-souled as we are.”

“Yeah, you bet. I’m a little cottontail. Just what is it makes me a rabbit, Harding? My psychopathic tendencies? Is it my fightin’ tendencies, or my fuckin’ tendencies? Must be the fuckin’, mustn’t it? All that whambam-thank-you-ma’am. Yeah, that whambam, that’s probably what makes me a rabbit—”

“Wait; I’m afraid you’ve raised a point that requires some deliberation. Rabbits are noted for that certain trait, aren’t they? Notorious, in fact, for their whambam. Yes. Um. But in any case, the. point you bring up simply indicates that you are a healthy, functioning and adequate rabbit, whereas most of us in here even lack the sexual ability to make the grade as adequate rabbits. Failures, we are—feeble, stunted, weak little creatures in a weak little race. Rabbits,
sans
whambam; a pathetic notion.”

“Wait a minute; you keep twistin’ what I say—”

“No. You were right. You remember, it was you that drew our attention to the place where the nurse was concentrating her pecking? That was true. There’s not a man here that isn’t afraid he is losing or has already lost his whambam. We comical little creatures can’t even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that’s how weak and inadequate we are. Hee. We are—the
rabbits
, one might say, of the rabbit world!”

He leans forward again, and that strained, squeaking laugh of his that I been expecting begins to rise from his mouth, his hands flipping around, his lace twitching.

“Harding! Shut your damned mouth!”

It’s like a slap. Harding is hushed, chopped off cold with his mouth still open in a drawn grin, his hands dangling in a cloud of blue tobacco smoke. He freezes this way a second; then his eyes narrow into sly little holes and he lets them slip over to McMurphy, speaks so soft that I have to push my broom up right next to his chair to hear what he says.