One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (23 page)

And that afternoon in the meeting when Cheswick said that everybody’d agreed that there should be some kind of showdown on the cigarette situation, saying, “I ain’t no little kid to have cigarettes kept from me like cookies! We want something done about it, ain’t that right, Mack?” and waited for McMurphy to back him up, all he got was silence.

He looked over at McMurphy’s corner. Everybody did. McMurphy was there, studying the deck of cards that slid in and out of sight in his hands. He didn’t even look up. It was awfully quiet; there was just that slap of greasy cards and Cheswick’s heavy breathing.

“I want something
done
!” Cheswick suddenly yelled again. “I ain’t no little kid!” He stamped his foot and looked around him like he was lost and might break out crying any minute. He clenched both fists and held them at his chubby round chest. His fists made little pink balls against the green, and they were clenched so hard he was shaking.

He never had looked big; he was short and too fat and had a bald spot in the back of his head that showed like a pink dollar, but standing there by himself in the center of the day room like that he looked tiny. He looked at McMurphy and got no look back, and went down the line of Acutes looking for help. Each time a man looked away and refused to back him up, and the panic on his face doubled. His looking finally came to a stop at the Big Nurse. He stamped his foot again.

“I want something
done
! Hear me? I want
something
done! Something! Something! Some—”

The two big black boys clamped his arms from behind, and the least one threw a strap around him. He sagged like he’d been punctured, and the two big ones dragged him up to Disturbed; you could hear the soggy bounce of him going up the steps. When they came back and sat down, the Big Nurse turned to the line of Acutes across the room and looked at them. Nothing had been said since Cheswick left.

“Is there any more discussion,” she said, “on the rationing of cigarettes?”

Looking down the canceled row of faces hanging against the wall across the room from me, my eyes finally came to McMurphy in his chair in the corner, concentrating on improving his one-handed card cut… and the white tubes in the ceiling begin to pump their refrigerated light again … I can feel it, beams all the way into my stomach.

After McMurphy doesn’t stand up for us any longer, some of the Acutes talk and say he’s still outsmarting the Big Nurse, say that he got word she was about to send him to Disturbed and decided to toe the line a while, not give her any reason. Others figure he’s letting her relax,
then he’s going to spring something new on her, something wilder and more ornery than ever. You can hear them talking in groups, wondering.

But me, I
know
why. I heard him talk to the lifeguard. He’s finally getting cagey, is all. The way Papa finally did when he came to realize that he couldn’t beat that group from town who wanted the government to put in the dam because of the money and the work it would bring, and because it would get rid of the village: Let that tribe of fish Injuns take their stink and their two hundred thousand dollars the government is paying them and go some place else with it! Papa had done the smart thing signing the papers; there wasn’t anything to gain by bucking it. The government would of got it anyhow, sooner or later; this way the tribe would get paid good. It was the smart thing. McMurphy was doing the smart thing. I could see that. He was giving in because it was the smartest thing to do, not because of any of these other reasons the Acutes were making up. He didn’t say so, but I knew and I told myself it was the smart thing to do. I told myself that over and over: It’s safe. Like hiding. It’s the smart thing to do, nobody could say any different. I know what he’s doing.

Then one morning all the Acutes know too, know his real reason for backing down and that the reasons they been making up were just lies to kid themselves. He never says a thing about the talk he had with the lifeguard, but they know. I figure the nurse broadcast this during the night along all the little lines in the dorm floor, because they know all at once. I can tell by the way they look at McMurphy that morning when he comes in to the day room. Not looking like they’re mad with him, or even disappointed, because they can understand as well as I can that the only way he’s going to get the Big Nurse to lift his commitment is by acting like she wants, but still looking at him like they wished things didn’t have to be this way.

Even Cheswick could understand it and didn’t hold anything against McMurphy for not going ahead and making a big fuss over the cigarettes. He came back down from Disturbed on the same day that the nurse broadcast the information to the beds, and he told McMurphy himself that he could understand how he acted and that it was surely the sharpest thing to do, considering, and that if he’d thought about Mack being committed he’d never have put him on the spot like
he had the other day. He told McMurphy this while we were all being taken over to the swimming pool. But just as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish
something
mighta been done, though, and dove into the water. And got his fingers stuck some way in the grate that’s over the drain at the bottom of the pool, and neither the big lifeguard nor McMurphy nor the two black boys could pry him loose, and by the time they got a screwdriver and undid the grate and brought Cheswick up, with the grate still clutched by his chubby pink and blue fingers, he was drowned.

U
P AHEAD OF ME
in the lunch line I see a tray sling in the air, a green plastic cloud raining milk and peas and vegetable soup. Sefelt’s jittering out of the line on one foot with his arms both up in the air, falls backward in a stiff arch, and the whites of his eyes come by me upside down. His head hits the tile with a crack like rocks under water, and he holds the arch, like a twitching, jerking bridge. Fredrickson and Scanlon make a jump to help, but the big black boy shoves them back and grabs a flat stick out of his back pocket, got tape wrapped around it and covered with a brown stain. He pries Sefelt’s mouth open and shoves the stick between his teeth, and I hear the stick splinter with Sefelt’s bite. I can taste the slivers. Sefelt’s jerks slow down and get more powerful, working and building up to big stiff kicks that lift him to a bridge, then falling—lifting and falling, slower and slower, till the Big Nurse comes in and stands over him and he melts limp all over the floor in a gray puddle.

She folds her hands in front of her, might hold a candle, and looks down at what’s left of him oozing out of the cuffs of his pants and shirt. “Mr. Sefelt?” she says to the black boy.

“Tha’s right—
uhn
.” The black boy is jerking to get his stick back. “Mistuh
See
-fel’.”

“And Mr. Sefelt has been asserting he needs
no more medication
.” She nods her head, steps back a step out of the way of him spreading toward her white shoes. She raises her head and looks round her at the
circle of Acutes that’ve come up to see. She nods again and repeats, “… needs
no more medication
.” Her face is smiling, pitying, patient, and disgusted all at once—a trained expression.

McMurphy’s never seen such a thing. “What’s he got wrong with him?” he asks.

She keeps her eye on the puddle, not turning to McMurphy. “Mr. Sefelt is an epileptic, Mr. McMurphy. This means he may be subject to seizures like this at any time if he doesn’t follow medical advice. He knows better. We’d told him this would happen when he didn’t take his medication. Still, he will insist on acting foolish.”

Fredrickson comes out of the line with his eyebrows bristling. He’s a sinewy, bloodless guy with blond hair and stringy blond eyebrows and a long jaw, and he acts tough every so often the way Cheswick used to try to do—roar and rant and cuss out one of the nurses, say he’s gonna
leave
this stinkin’ place! They always let him yell and shake his fist till he quiets down, then ask him if you are
through
, Mr. Fredrickson, we’ll go start typing the release—then make book in the Nurses’ Station how long it’ll be till he’s tapping at the glass with a guilty look and asking to apologize and how about just
forgetting
those hotheaded things he said, just pigeonhole those old forms for a day or so, okay?

He steps up to the nurse, shaking his fist at her. “Oh, is that it? Is that it, huh? You gonna crucify old Seef just as if he was doing it to
spite
you or something?”

She lays a comforting hand on his arm, and his fist unrolls.

“It’s okay, Bruce. Your friend will be all right. Apparently he hasn’t been swallowing his Dilantin. I simply don’t know what he is doing with it.”

She knows as well as anybody; Sefelt holds the capsules in his mouth and gives them to Fredrickson later. Sefelt doesn’t like to take them because of what he calls “disastrous side effects,” and Fredrickson likes a double dose because he’s scared to death of having a fit. The nurse knows this, you can tell by her voice, but to look at her there, so sympathetic and kind, you’d think she was ignorant of anything at all between Fredrickson and Sefelt.

“Yeahhh,” says Fredrickson, but he can’t work his attack up again. “Yeah, well, you don’t need to act like it was as simple as just take the
stuff or don’t take it. You know how Seef worries about what he looks like and how women think he’s ugly and all that, and you know how he thinks the Dilantin—”

“I know,” she says and touches his arm again. “He also blames his falling hair on the drug. Poor old fellow.”

“He’s not that old!”

“I know, Bruce. Why do you get so
upset
? I’ve never understood what went on between you and your friend that made you get so
defensive
!”

“Well, heck, anyway!” he says and jams his fists in his pockets.

The nurse bends over and brushes a little place clean on the floor and puts her knee on it and starts kneading Sefelt back to some shape. She tells the black boy to stay with the poor old fellow and she’ll go send a Gurney down for him; wheel him into the dorm and let him sleep the rest of the day. When she stands she gives Fredrickson a pat on the arm, and he grumbles, “Yeah, I have to take Dilantin too, you know. That’s why I know what Seef has to face. I mean, that’s why I—well, heck—”

“I understand, Bruce, what
both
of you must go through, but don’t you think anything is better than
that
?”

Fredrickson looks where she points. Sefelt has pulled back halfway normal, swelling up and down with big wet, rattling breaths. There’s a punk-knot rising on the side of his head where he landed, and a red foam around the black boy’s stick where it goes into his mouth, and his eyes are beginning to roll back into the whites. His hands are nailed out to each side with the palms up and the fingers jerking open and shut, just the way I’ve watched men jerk at the Shock Shop strapped to the crossed table, smoke curling up out of the palms from the current. Sefelt and Fredrickson never been to the Shock Shop. They’re manufactured to generate their own voltage, store it in their spines and can be turned on remote from the steel door in the Nurses’ Station if they get out of line—be right in the best part of a dirty joke and stiffen like the jolt hit square in the small of the back. It saves the trouble of taking them over to that room.

The nurse gives Fredrickson’s arm a little shake like he’d gone to sleep, and repeats, “Even if you take into consideration the harmful effects of the medicine, don’t you think it’s better than
that
?”

As he stares down at the floor, Fredrickson’s blond eyebrows are raised like he’s seeing for the first time just how
he
looks at least once a month. The nurse smiles and pats his arm and heads for the door, glares at the Acutes to shame them for gathering around watching such a thing; when she’s gone, Fredrickson shivers and tries to smile.

“I don’t know
what
I got mad at the old girl about—I mean, she didn’t do anything to give me a reason to blow up like that, did she?”

It isn’t like he wants an answer; it’s more sort of realizing that he can’t put his finger on a reason. He shivers again and starts to slip back away from the group. McMurphy comes up and asks him in a low voice what
is
it they take?

“Dilantin, McMurphy, an anti-convulsant, if you must know.”

“Don’t it work or something?”

“Yeah, I guess it works all right—if you take it.”

“Then what’s the sweat about taking it or not?”

“Look, if you must know! Here’s the dirty sweat about taking it.” Fredrickson reaches up and grabs his lower lip between his thumb and finger, pulls it down to show gums ragged and pink and bloodless around long shiny teeth. “Your
gungs
,” he says, hanging onto the lip. “Dilantin gnakes your gungs rot. And a seizure gnakes you grit your teeth. And you—”

There’s a noise on the floor. They look to where Sefelt is moaning and wheezing, just as the black boy draws two teeth out with his taped stick.

Scanlon takes his tray and walks away from the bunch, saying, “Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Puts a man in one confounded
bind
, I’d say.”

McMurphy says, “Yeah, I see what you mean,” looking down into Sefelt’s gathering face. His face has commenced to take on that same haggard, puzzled look of pressure that the face on the floor has.

W
HATEVER IT WAS
went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade movement is coming back: six-thirty out of bed, seven into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the Chronics and the cards for the
Acutes … in the Nurses’ Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse float over the controls.

T
HEY TAKE ME
with the Acutes sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. They take me once with them over to the library and I walk over to the technical section, stand there looking at the titles of books on electronics, books I recognize from that year I went to college; I remember inside the books are full of schematic drawings and equations and theories—hard, sure, safe things.