One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки

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.