12

A visiting doctor covered with gray cobwebs on his yellow skull is addressing the resident boys in the staff room.

I come sweeping past him. “Oh, and what’s this here.” He gives me a look like I’m some kind of bug. One of the residents points at his ears, signal that I’m deaf, and the visiting doctor goes on.

I push my broom up face to face with a big picture Public Relation brought in one time when it was fogged so thick I didn’t see him. The picture is a guy fly-fishing somewhere in the mountains, looks like the Ochocos near Paineville – snow on the peaks showing over the pines, long white aspen trunks lining the stream, sheep sorrel growing in sour green patches. The guy is flicking his fly in a pool behind a rock. It’s no place for a fly, it’s a place for a single egg on a number-six hook – he’d do better to drift the fly over those riffles downstream.

There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks. I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed. It’s a real nice place to stretch your legs and take it easy.

You forget – if you don’t sit down and make the effort to think back – forget how it was at the old hospital. They didn’t have nice places like this on the walls for you to climb into. They didn’t have TV or swimming pools or chicken twice a month. They didn’t have nothing but walls and chairs, confinement jackets it took you hours of hard work to get out of. They’ve learned a lot since then. “Come a long way,” says fat-faced Public Relation. They’ve made life look very pleasant with paint and decorations and chrome bathroom fixtures. “A man that would want to run away from a place as nice as this,” says fat-faced Public Relation, “why, there’d be something wrong with him.”

Out in the staff room the visiting authority is hugging his elbows and shivering like he’s cold while he answers questions the resident boys ask him. He’s thin and meatless, and his clothes flap around his bones. He stands there, hugging his elbows and shivering. Maybe he feels the cold snow wind off the peaks too.

13

It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, have to crawl around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs till I find my gobs of gum stuck there: Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.

14

There’s a shipment of frozen parts come downstairs – hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead.

What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.

15

I know how they work it, the fog machine. We had a whole platoon used to operate fog machines around airfields overseas. Whenever intelligence figured there might be a bombing attack, or if the generals had something secret they wanted to pull-out of sight, hid so good that even the spies on the base couldn’t see what went on – they fogged the field.

It’s a simple rig: you got an ordinary compressor sucks water out of one tank and a special oil out of another tank, and compresses them together, and from the black stem at the end of the machine blooms a white cloud of fog that can cover a whole airfield in ninety seconds. The first thing I saw when I landed in Europe was the fog those machines make. There were some interceptors close after our transport, and soon as it hit ground the fog crew started up the machines. We could look out the transport’s round, scratched windows and watch the jeeps draw the machines up close to the plane and watch the fog boil out till it rolled across the field and stuck against the windows like wet cotton.

You found your way off the plane by following a little referees’ horn the lieutenant kept blowing, sounded like a goose honking. Soon as you were out of the hatch you couldn’t see no more than maybe three feet in any direction. You felt like you were out on that airfield all by yourself. You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone. Sounds died and dissolved after a few yards, and you couldn’t hear any of the rest of your crew, nothing but that little horn squeaking and honking out of a soft furry whiteness so thick that your body just faded into white below the belt; other than that brown shirt and brass buckle, you couldn’t see nothing but white, like from the waist down you were being dissolved by the fog too.

And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

When they first used that fog machine on the ward, one they bought from Army Surplus and hid in the vents in the new place before we moved in, I kept looking at anything that appeared out of the fog as long and hard as I could, to keep track of it, just like I used to do when they fogged the airfields in Europe. Nobody’d be blowing a horn to show the way, there was no rope to hold to, so fixing my eyes on something was the only way I kept from getting lost. Sometimes I got lost in it anyway, got in too deep, trying to hide, and every time I did, it seemed like I always turned up at that same place, at that same metal door with the row of rivets like eyes and no number, just like the room behind that door drew me to it, no matter how hard I tried to stay away, just like the current generated by the fiends in that room was conducted in a beam along the fog and pulled me back along it like a robot. I’d wander for days in the fog, scared I’d never see another thing, then there’d be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I’d take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like à cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dials and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove. “Wait, I know that big bastard there – better rabbit-punch him or call for some more help or something. He’s an awful case for thrashing around.”

So I used to try not to get in too deep, for fear I’d get lost and turn up at the Shock Shop door. I looked hard at anything that came into sight and hung on like a man in a blizzard hangs on a fence rail. But they kept making the fog thicker and thicker, and it seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried, two or three times a month I found myself with that door opening in front of me to the acid smell of sparks and ozone. In spite of all I could do, it was getting tough to keep from getting lost.

Then I discovered something: I don’t have to end up at that door if I stay still when the fog comes over me and just keep quiet. The trouble was I’d been finding that door my own self because I got scared of being lost so long and went to hollering so they could track me. In a way, I was hollering for them to track me; I had figured that anything was better’n being lost for good, even the Shock Shop. Now, I don’t know. Being lost isn’t so bad.

All this morning I been waiting for them to fog us in again. The last few days they been doing it more and more. It’s my idea they’re doing it on account of McMurphy. They haven’t got him fixed with controls yet, and they’re trying to catch him off guard. They can see he’s due to be a problem; a half a dozen times already he’s roused Cheswick and Harding and some of the others to where it looked like they might actually stand up to one of the black boys – but always, just the time it looked like the patient might be helped, the fog would start, like it’s starting now.

I heard the compressor start pumping in the grill a few minutes back, just as the guys went to moving tables out of the day room for the therapeutic meeting, and already the mist is oozing across the floor so thick my pants legs are wet. I’m cleaning the windows in the door of the glass station, and I hear the Big Nurse pick up the phone and call the doctor to tell him we’re just about ready for the meeting, and tell him perhaps he’d best keep an hour free this afternoon for a staff meeting. “The reason being,” she tells him, “I think it is past time to have a discussion of the subject of Patient Randle McMurphy and whether he should be on this ward or not.” She listens a minute, then tells him, “I don’t think it’s wise to let him go on upsetting the patients the way he has the last few days.”

That’s why she’s fogging the ward for the meeting. She don’t usually do that. But now she’s going to do something with McMurphy today, probably ship him to Disturbed. I put down my window rag and go to my chair at the end of the line of Chronics, barely able to see the guys getting into their chairs and the doctor coming through the door wiping his glasses like he thinks the blurred look comes from his steamed lenses instead of the fog.

It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before.

I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit’s stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it’s so thick. In fact it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while. Floating makes me a little sick to the stomach at first. I can’t see a thing. I never had it so thick it floated me like this.

The words get dim and loud, off and on, as I float around, but as loud as they get, loud enough sometimes I know I’m right next to the guy that’s talking, I still can’t see a thing.

I recognize Billy’s voice, stuttering worse than ever because he’s nervous. “…fuh-fuh-flunked out of college be-be-cause I quit ROTC. I c-c-couldn’t take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call roll, call ‘Bibbit,’ I couldn’t answer. You were s-s-supposed to say heh-heh-heh… He’s choking on the word, like it’s a bone in his throat. I hear him swallow and start again. “You were supposed to say, ‘Here sir,’ and I never c-c-could get it out.”

His voice gets dim; then the Big Nurse’s voice comes cutting from the left. “Can you recall, Billy, when you first had speech trouble? When did you first stutter, do you remember?”

I can’t tell is he laughing or what. “Fir-first stutter? First stutter? The first word I said I st-stut-tered: m-m-m-m-mamma.”

Then the talking fades out altogether: I never knew that to happen before. Maybe Billy’s hid himself in the fog too. Maybe all the guys finally and forever crowded back into the fog.

A chair and me float past each other. It’s the first thing I’ve seen. It comes sifting out of the fog off to my right, and for a few seconds it’s right beside my face, just out of my reach. I been accustomed of late to just let things alone when they appear in the fog, sit still and not try to hang on. But this time I’m scared, the way I used to be scared. I try with all I got to pull myself over to the chair and get hold of it, but there’s nothing to brace against and all I can do is thrash the air, all I can do is watch the chair come clear, clearer than ever before to where I can even make out the fingerprint where a worker touched the varnish before it was dry, looming out for a few seconds, then fading on off again. I never seen it where things floated around this way. I never seen it this thick before, thick to where I can’t get down to the floor and get on my feet if I wanted to and walk around. That’s why I’m so scared; I feel I’m going to float off someplace for good this time.

I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It’s old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.

He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice as deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.

“No… The flag is… Ah-mer-ica. America is… the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is… the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is… tell-ah-vision.”

It’s true. It’s all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.

“Now… The cross is… Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I’m paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “Mexico is… the wal-nut. The hazelnut. The ay-corn. Mexico is… the rain-bow. The rain-bow is… wooden. Mexico is… woo-den.”

I can see what he’s driving at. He’s been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he’s been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn’t make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he’s saying. I’m trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that’s what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like the walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like the walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes… I see…

But the fog’s clogged my throat to where I can’t make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.

“Now… The green sheep is… Can-a-da. Canada is… the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”

I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I’m floating by myself again, more lost than ever.

This is the time, I tell myself. I’m going for good.

There’s old Pete, face like a searchlight. He’s fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn’t any fog at all. Or maybe he’s up right close and real small, I can’t be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up – he knew from the start he couldn’t do that – but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.

I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.

“I’m tired,” is what he says.

“I know you’re tired, Pete, but I can’t do you no good fretting about it. You know I can’t.”

Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.

Here comes Billy Bibbit, the way Pete come by. They’re all filing by for a last look. I know Billy can’t be more’n a few feet away, but he’s so tiny he looks like he’s a mile off. His face is out to me like the face of a beggar, needing so much more’n anybody can give. His mouth works like a little doll’s mouth.

“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.”

Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”

“I was in luh-love with her.”

I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can’t do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They’d of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.

Put your face away, Billy.

They keep filing past.

It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.

I’m further off than I’ve ever been. This is what it’s like to be dead. I guess this is what it’s like to be a Vegetable; you lose yourself in the fog. You don’t move. They feed your body till it finally stops eating; then they burn it. It’s not so bad. There’s no pain. I don’t feel much of anything other than a touch of chill I figure will pass in time.

I see my commanding officer pinning notices on the bulletin board, what we’re to wear today. I see the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.

I see Papa come loping out of a draw and slow up to try and take aim at a big six-point buck springing off through the cedars. Shot after shot puffs out of the barrel, knocking dust all around the buck. I come out of the draw behind Papa and bring the buck down with my second shot just as it starts climbing the rimrock. I grin at Papa.

I never knew you to miss a shot like that before, Papa. Eye’s gone, boy. Can’t hold a bead. Sights on my gun just now was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach pits.

Papa, I’m telling you: that cactus moon of Sid’s is gonna make you old before your time.

A man drinks that cactus moon of Sid’s boy, he’s already old before his time. Let’s go gut that animal out before the flies blow him.

That’s not even happening now. You see? There’s nothing you can do about a happening out of the past like that.

Look there, my man…

I hear whispers, black boys.

Look there, that old fool Broom, slipped off to sleep.

Tha’s right, Chief Broom, tha’s right. You sleep an’ keep outta trouble. Yasss.

I’m not cold any more. I think I’ve about made it. I’m off to where the cold can’t reach me. I can stay off here for good. I’m not scared any more. They can’t reach me. Just the words reach me, and those’re fading.

Well… in as much as Billy has decided to walk out on the discussion, does anyone else have a problem to bring before the group?

As a matter of fact, ma’am, there does happen to be something…

That’s that McMurphy. He’s far away. He’s still trying to pull people out of the fog. Why don’t he leave me be?

“…remember that vote we had a day or so back-about the TV time? Well, today’s Friday and I thought I might just bring it up again, just to see if anybody else has picked up a little guts.”

“Mr. McMurphy, the purpose of this meeting is therapy, group therapy, and I’m not certain these petty grievances – ”

“Yeah, yeah, the hell with that, we’ve heard it before. Me and some of the rest of the guys decided – ”

“One moment, Mr. McMurphy, let me pose a question to the group: do any of you feel that Mr. McMurphy is perhaps imposing his personal desires on some of you too much? I’ve been thinking you might be happier if he were moved to a different ward.”

Nobody says anything for a minute. Then someone says, “Let him vote, why dontcha? Why ya want to ship him to Disturbed just for bringing up a vote? What’s so wrong with changing time?”

“Why, Mr. Scanlon, as I recall, you refused to eat for three days until we allowed you to turn the set on at six instead of six-thirty.”

“A man needs to see the world news, don’t he? God, they coulda bombed Washington and it’d been a week before we’d of heard.”

“Yes? And how do you feel about relinquishing your world news to watch a bunch of men play baseball?”

“We can’t have both, huh? No, I suppose not. Well, what the dickens – I don’t guess they’ll bomb us this week.” “Let’s let him have the vote, Miss Ratched.”

“Very well. But I think this is an ample evidence of how much he is upsetting some of you patients. What is it you are proposing, Mr. McMurphy?”

“I’m proposing a revote on watching the TV in the afternoon.”

“You’re certain one more vote will satisfy you? We have more important things – ”

“It’ll satisfy me. I just’d kind of like to see which of these birds has any guts and which doesn’t.”

“It’s that kind of talk, Doctor Spivey, that makes me wonder if the patients wouldn’t be more content if Mr. McMurphy were moved.”

“Let him call the vote, why dontcha?”

“Certainly, Mr. Cheswick. A vote is now before the group. Will a show of hands be adequate, Mr. McMurphy, or are you going to insist on a secret ballot?”

“I want to see the hands. I want to see the hands that don’t go up, too.”

“Everyone in favor of changing the television time to the afternoon, raise his hand.”

The first hand that comes up, I can tell, is McMurphy’s, because of the bandage where that control panel cut into him when he tried to lift it. And then off down the slope I see them, other hands coming up out of the fog. It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.

Nobody says anything. I can feel how stunned everybody is, the patients as well as the staff. The nurse can’t figure what happened; yesterday, before he tried lifting that panel, there wasn’t but four or five men might of voted. But when she talks she don’t let it show in her voice how surprised she is.

“I count only twenty, Mr. McMurphy.”

“Twenty? Well, why not? Twenty is all of us there – ” His voice hangs as he realizes what she means. “Now hold on just a goddamned minute, lady – ”

“I’m afraid the vote is defeated.”

“Hold on just one goddamned minute!”

“There are forty patients on the ward, Mr. McMurphy. Forty patients, and only twenty voted. You must have a majority to change the ward policy. I’m afraid the vote is closed.”

The hands are coming down across the room. The guys know they’re whipped, are trying to slip back into the safety of the fog. McMurphy is on his feet.

“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch. You mean to tell me that’s how you’re gonna pull it? Count the votes of those old birds over there too?”

“Didn’t you explain the voting procedure to him, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid – a majority is called for, McMurphy. She’s right, she’s right.”

“A majority, Mr. McMurphy; it’s in the ward constitution.” “And I suppose the way to change the damned constitution is with a majority vote. Sure. Of all the chicken-shit things I’ve ever seen, this by God takes the cake!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. McMurphy, but you’ll find it written in the policy if you’d care for me to – ”

“So this’s how you work this democratic bullshit – hell’s bells!”

“You seem upset, Mr. McMurphy. Doesn’t he seem upset, Doctor? I want you to note this.”

“Don’t give me that noise, lady. When a guy’s getting screwed he’s got a right to holler. And we’ve been damn well screwed.”

“Perhaps, Doctor, in view of the patient’s condition, we should bring this meeting to a close early today – ”

“Wait! Wait a minute, let me talk to some of those old guys.”

“The vote is closed, Mr. McMurphy.”

“Let me talk to ‘em.”

He’s coming across the day room at us. He gets bigger and bigger, and he’s burning red in the face. He reaches into the fog and tries to drag Ruckly to the surface because Ruckly’s the youngest.

“What about you, buddy? You want to watch the World Series? Baseball? Baseball games? Just raise that hand up there – ”

“Fffffffuck da wife.”

“All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name – Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…”

Ellis’s hands are nailed to the wall, can’t be counted as a vote.

“I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You’re just making a spectacle of yourself.”

He don’t pay any attention to her. He comes on down the line of Chronics. “C’mon, c’mon, just one vote from you birds, just raise a hand. Show her you can still do it.”

“I’m tired,” says Pete and wags his head.

“The night is… the Pacific Ocean.” The Colonel is reading off his hand, can’t be bothered with voting.

“One of you guys, for cryin’ out loud! This is where you get the edge, don’t you see that? We have to do this – or we’re whipped! Don’t a one of you clucks know what I’m talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?

He’s standing over me in the mist. Why won’t he leave me be?

“Chief, you’re our last bet.”

The Big Nurse is folding her papers; the other nurses are standing up around her. She finally gets to her feet.

“The meeting is adjourned, then,” I hear her say. “And I’d like to see the staff down in the staff room in about an hour. So, if there is nothing el— ”

It’s too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won’t act like I order it. There’s no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn’t do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I’m in for trouble, but I can’t stop it. Mc-Murphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires…

No. That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself.

McMurphy whoops and drags me standing, pounding my back.

“Twenty-one! The Chief ’s vote makes it twenty-one! And by God if that ain’t a majority I’ll eat my hat!”

“Yippee,” Cheswick yells. The other Acutes are coming across toward me.

“The meeting was closed,” she says. Her smile is still there, but the back of her neck as she walks out of the day room and into the Nurses’ Station, is red and swelling like she’ll blow apart any second.

But she don’t blow up, not right off, not until about an hour later. Behind the glass her smile is twisted and queer, like we’ve never seen before. She just sits. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.

McMurphy looks up at the clock and he says it’s time for the game. He’s over by the drinking fountain with some of the other Acutes, down on his knees scouring off the baseboard. I’m sweeping out the broom closet for the tenth time that day. Scanlon and Harding, they got the buffer going up and down the hall, polishing the new wax into shining figure eights. McMurphy says again that he guesses it must be game time and he stands up, leaves the scouring rag where it lies. Nobody else stops work. McMurphy walks past the window where she’s glaring out at him and grins at her like he knows he’s got her whipped now. When he tips his head back and winks at her she gives that little sideways jerk of her head.

Everybody keeps on at what he’s doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.

“Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot.”

We can see the nurse’s face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody’s watching what she’s going to do – even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they’re watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.

That eye don’t faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don’t even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.

And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim – watching the TV screen.

The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses’ Station and calls across to him he’d better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.

“I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours.” Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. “Mr. McMurphy, I’m warning you!”

Everybody’s stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses’ Station toward McMurphy.

“You’re committed, you realize. You are… under the jurisdiction of me… the staff.” She’s holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. “Under jurisdiction and control – ”

Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.

“Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!”

I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.

“Mr. Har-ding!”

Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.

“You men – Stop this. Stop!”

And we’re all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she’s ranting and screaming behind us.

If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.