One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (7 page)

“Right here, Doc. The nurse left this part out 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 I am he put it
over
zealous in my sexual relations. Doctor, is that real serious?”

He asks it with such a little-boy look of worry and concern all over his broad, tough face that the doctor can’t help bending his head to hide another little snicker in his collar, and his glasses fall from his nose dead center 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: ‘Don’t overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis to escape the drudgery 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 sane man?”

The doctor is working so hard to keep from giggling again he can’t answer. McMurphy pivots away from the doctor and asks the same thing of the Big Nurse: “
Do
I?” Instead of answering she stands up and takes the manila 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 protocol of these Group Meetings.”

“Ma’am,” McMurphy says, “have I told you about my uncle Hallahan and the woman who used to screw up his name?”

She looks at him for a long time without her smile. She has the ability to turn her smile into whatever expression she wants to use on somebody, but the look she turns it into is no different, just a calculated and mechanical expression to serve her purpose. 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 suppose What I should do is explain the complete
theory
of our Therapeutic Community, while we’re at it. Though I usually save it until 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 remain seated during the course of the meeting,”

“Yes. Of course. Then I will explain the theory. Mr. McMurphy, one of the first things is that the patients remain seated during the course of the meeting. It’s the only way, you see, for us to maintain order.”

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

He goes over to his chair, gives another big stretch and yawn, 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.

“Ffffuck da wife,” Ruckly says. McMurphy hides his mouth behind the back of his hand and calls across the ward to Ruckly in a scratchy whisper, “Whose wife?” and Martini’s head snaps up, eyes wide and staring. “Yeah,” he says, “whose wife? Oh. Her? Yeah, I see her.
Yeah
.”

“I’d give a lot to have that man’s eyes,” McMurphy says of Martini and then 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 hush so they can get on to Harding, and they talk the rest of the meeting about that.

McMurphy sits forward in his chair a couple of times during the meeting like he might have something to say, but he decides better and leans back. There’s a puzzled expression coming over his face. Something strange is going on here, he’s finding out. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Like the way nobody will laugh. Now he thought sure there would be a laugh when he asked Ruckly, “Whose wife?” but there wasn’t even a sign of one. The air is pressed in by the walls, too tight for laughing. There’s something strange about a place where the men won’t let themselves loose and 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 he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new place before he makes any kind of play. That’s a good rule for a smart gambler: look the game over 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; how society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up. All that stuff. Every time we get a new patient on the ward the doctor goes into the theory with both feet; it’s pretty near the only time he takes things over and runs the meeting. He tells how the goal of the Therapeutic Community is a democratic ward, run completely by the patients and their votes, working toward making worth-while citizens to turn back Outside onto the street. Any little gripe, any grievance, anything you want changed, he says, should be brought up before the group and discussed instead of letting it fester inside of you. Also you should feel at ease in your surroundings to the extent you can freely discuss emotional problems in front of patients and staff. Talk, he says, discuss, confess. And if you hear a friend say something during the course of your everyday conversation, then list it in the log book for the staff to see. It’s not, as the movies call it, “squealing,” it’s helping your fellow. Bring these old sins into the open where they can be washed by the sight of all. And 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 intention, 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 made-to-scale prototype of the big world Outside that you will one day be taking your place in again.

He’s maybe got more to say, but about this point the Big Nurse usually hushes him, and in the lull old Pete stands up and wigwags that battered copper-pot head and tells everybody how tired he is, and the nurse tells somebody to go hush him up too, so the meeting can continue, and Pete is generally hushed and the meeting goes on.

Once, just one time that I can remember, four or five years back, did it go any different. The doctor had finished his spiel, and the nurse had opened right up with, “Now. Who will start? Let out those old secrets.” And she’d put all the Acutes in a trance by sitting there in silence for twenty minutes after the question, quiet as an electric alarm about to go off, waiting for somebody to start telling something about themselves. Her eyes swept back and forth over them as steady as a turning beacon. The day room was clamped silent for twenty long minutes, with all of the patients stunned where they sat. When twenty minutes had passed, she looked at her watch and said, “Am I to take it that there’s not a man among you that has committed some act that he has never admitted?” She reached in the basket for the log book. “Must we go over past history?”

That triggered something, some acoustic device in the walls, rigged to turn on at just the sound of those words coming from her mouth. The Acutes stiffened. Their mouths opened in unison. Her sweeping 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; each one jumped like a shooting-gallery target.

“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 to outdo one another, going further and further, no way of stopping, telling things that wouldn’t ever let them look one another in the eye again. The nurse nodding at each confession and saying Yes, yes, yes.

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

Everyone hushed. 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 hollering to shame. The Big Nurse was furious. She swiveled and glared at him, the smile dripping over her chin; she’d just had it going so good.

“Somebody see to poor Mr. Bancini,” she said.

Two or three got up. They tried to soothe him, pat him on his shoulder. But Pete wasn’t being hushed. “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 better than fifty, he’d always been a Chronic. His head has two big dents, one on each side, where the doctor who was with his mother at horning time pinched his skull trying to pull him out. Pete had looked out first and seer. all the delivery-room machinery waiting for him and somehow realized what he was being born into, and had grabbed on to everything handy in there to try to stave off being born. The doctor reached in and got him by the head with a set of dulled ice tongs and jerked him loose and figured everything was all right. But Pete’s head was still too new, and soft as clay, and when it set, those two dents left by the tongs stayed. And this made him simple to where it took all his straining effort and concentration and will power just to do the tasks that came easy to a kid of six.

But one good thing—being simple like that put him out of the clutch of the Combine. They weren’t able to mold him into a slot. So they let him get a simple job on the railroad, where all he had to do was sit in a little clapboard house way out in the sticks on a lonely switch and wave a red lantern at the trains if the switch was one way, and a green one if it was the other, and a yellow one if there was a train someplace up ahead. And he did it, with main force and a gutpower they couldn’t mash out of his head, out by himself on that switch. And he never had any controls installed.

That’s why the black boy didn’t have any say over him. But the black boy didn’t think of that right off any more than the nurse did when she ordered Pete removed from the day room. The black boy walked right up and gave Pete’s arm a jerk toward the door, just like you’d jerk the reins on a plow horse to turn him.

“Tha’s right, Pete. Less go to the dorm. You disturbin’ ever’body.”

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

“C’mon, old man, you makin’ a fuss. Less us 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, and Pete stopped wigwagging his head. He stood up straight and steady, and his eyes snapped clear. Usually Pete’s eyes are half shut and all murked up, like there’s milk in them, but this time they came clear as blue neon. And the hand on that arm the black boy was holding commenced to swell up. The staff and most of the rest of the patients were talking among themselves, not paying any attention to this old guy and his old song about being tired, figuring he’d be quieted down as usual and the meeting would go on. They didn’t see the hand on the end of that arm pumping bigger and bigger as he clenched and unclenched it. I was the only one saw it. I saw it swell and clench shut, flow in front of my eyes, become smooth—hard. A big rusty iron ball at the end of a chain. 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 hand. He tried to edge back away from it, saying, “You a good boy, Peter,” but he was a shade too late. Pete had that big iron ball swinging all the way from his knees. The black boy whammed flat against the wall and stuck, then slid down to the floor like the wall there was greased. I heard tubes pop and short all over inside that wall, and the plaster cracked just the shape of how he hit.

The other two—the least one and the other big one—stood stunned. The nurse snapped her fingers, and they sprang into motion. Instant movement, sliding across the floor. The little one beside the other like an image in a reducing mirror. They were almost to Pete when it suddenly struck them what the other boy should of known, that Pete wasn’t wired under control like the rest of us, that he wasn’t about to mind just because they gave him an order or gave his arm a jerk. If they were to take him they’d have to take him like you take a wild bear or bull, and with one of their number out cold against the baseboards, the other two black boys didn’t care for the odds.

This thought got them both at once and they froze, the big one and his tiny image, in exactly the same position, left foot forward, right hand out, halfway between Pete and the Big Nurse. That iron ball swinging in front of them and that snowwhite anger behind them, they shook and smoked and I could hear gears grinding. I could see them twitch with confusion, like machines throttled full ahead and with the brake on.

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