19

Up 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 Mc-Murphy. “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.

20

Whatever 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.

21

They 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.

I want to look at one of the books, but I’m scared to. I’m scared to do anything. I feel like I’m floating in the dusty yellow air of the library, halfway to the bottom, halfway to the top. The stacks of books teeter above me, crazy, zig-zagging, running all different angles to one another. One shelf bends a little to the left, one to the right. Some of them are leaning over me, and I don’t see how the books keep from falling out. It goes up and up this way, clear out of sight, the rickety stacks nailed together with slats and two-by-fours, propped up with poles, leaning against ladders, on all sides of me. If I pulled one book out, lord knows what awful thing might result.

I hear somebody walk in, and it’s one of the black boys from our ward and he’s got Harding’s wife with him. They’re talking and grinning to each other as they come into the library.

“See here, Dale,” the black boy calls over to Harding where he’s reading a book, “look here who come to visit you. I told her it wun’t visitin’ hours but you know she jus’ sweet-talk me into bringin’ her right on over here anyhow.” He leaves her standing in front of Harding and goes off, saying mysteriously, “Don’t you forget now, you hear?”

She blows the black boy a kiss, then turns to Harding, slinging her hips forward. “Hello, Dale.”

“Honey,” he says, but he doesn’t make any move to take the couple of steps to her. He looks around him at everybody watching.

She’s as tall as he is. She’s got on high-heeled shoes and is carrying a black purse, not by the strap, but holding it the way you hold a book. Her fingernails are red as drops of blood against the shiny black patent-leather purse.

“Hey, Mack,” Harding calls to McMurphy, who’s sitting across the room, looking at a book of cartoons. “If you’ll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I’ll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, ‘to my better half,’ but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don’t you?”

He tries to laugh, and his two slim ivory fingers dip into his shirt pocket for cigarettes, fidget around getting the last one from the package. The cigarette shakes as he places it between his lips. He and his wife haven’t moved toward each other yet.

McMurphy heaves up out of his chair and pulls his cap off as he walks over. Harding’s wife looks at him and smiles, lifting one of her eyebrows. “Afternoon, Miz Harding,” McMurphy says.

She smiles back bigger than before and says, “I hate Mrs. Harding, Mack; why don’t you call me Vera?”

They all three sit back down on the couch where Harding was sitting, and he tells his wife about McMurphy and how McMurphy got the best of the Big Nurse, and she smiles and says that it doesn’t surprise her a bit. While Harding’s telling the story he gets enthusiastic and forgets about his hands, and they weave the air in front of him into a picture clear enough to see, dancing the story to the tune of his voice like two beautiful ballet women in white. His hands can be anything. But as soon as the story’s finished he notices McMurphy and his wife are watching the hands, and he traps them between his knees. He laughs about this, and his wife says to him, “Dale, when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”

It’s the same thing that McMurphy said about Harding’s laugh on that first day, but it’s different somehow; where McMurphy saying it calmed Harding down, her saying it makes him more nervous than ever.

She asks for a cigarette, and Harding dips his fingers in his pocket again and it’s empty. “We’ve been rationed,” he says, folding his thin shoulders forward like he was trying to hide the half-smoked cigarette he was holding, “to one pack a day. That doesn’t seem to leave a man any margin for chivalry, Vera my dearest.”

“Oh Dale, you never do have enough, do you?”

His eyes take on that sly, fevered skittishness as he looks at her and smiles. “Are we speaking symbolically, or are we still dealing with the concrete here-and-now cigarettes? No matter; you know the answer to the question, whichever way you intended it.”

“I didn’t intend nothing by it except what I said, Dale – ”

“You didn’t intend anything by it, sweetest; your use of ‘didn’t’ and ‘nothing’ constitutes a double negative. McMurphy, Vera’s English rivals yours for illiteracy. Look, honey, you understand that between ‘no’ and ‘any’ there is – ”

“All right! That’s enough! I meant it both ways. I meant it any way you want to take it. I meant you don’t have enough of nothing period!”

“Enough of anything, my bright little child.”

She glares at Harding a second, then turns to McMurphy sitting beside her. “You, Mack, what about you. Can you handle a simple little thing like offering a girl a cigarette?”

His package is already lying in his lap. He looks down at it like he wishes it wasn’t, then says, “Sure, I always got cigarettes. Reason is, I’m a bum. I bum them whenever I get the chance is why my pack lasts longer than Harding’s here. He smokes only his own. So you can see he’s more likely to run out than – ”

“You don’t have to apologize for my inadequacies, my friend. It neither fits your character nor complements mine.”

“No, it doesn’t,” the girl says. “All you have to do is light my cigarette.”

And she leans so far forward to his match that even clear across the room I could see down her blouse.

She talks some more about some of Harding’s friends who she wishes would quit dropping around the house looking for him. “You know the type, don’t you, Mack?” she says. “The hoity-toity boys with the nice long hair combed so perfectly and the limp little wrists that flip so nice.” Harding asks her if it was only him that they were dropping around to see, and she says any man that drops around to see her flips more than his damned limp wrists.

She stands suddenly and says it’s time for her to go. She takes McMurphy’s hand and tells him she hopes she sees him again sometime and she walks out of the library. McMurphy can’t say a word. At the clack of her high heels everybody’s head comes up again, and they watch her walk down the hall till she turns out of sight.

“What do you think?” Harding says.

McMurphy starts. “She’s got one hell of a set of cha-bobs,” is all he can think of. “Big as Old Lady Ratched’s.”

“I didn’t mean physically, my friend, I mean what do you – ”

“Hell’s bells, Harding!” McMurphy yells suddenly. “I don’t know what to think! What do you want out of me? A marriage counsellor? All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. I know what you want me to think; you want me to feel sorry for you, to think she’s a real bitch. Well, you didn’t make her feel like any queen either. Well, screw you and ‘what do you think?’ I’ve got worries of my own without getting hooked with yours. So just quit!” He glares around the library at the other patients. “Alla you! Quit bugging me, goddammit!”

And sticks his cap back on his head and walks back to his cartoon magazine across the room. All the Acutes are looking at each other with their mouths open. What’s he hollering at them about? Nobody’s been bugging him. Nobody’s asked him for a thing since they found out that he was trying to behave to keep his commitment from being extended. Now they’re surprised at the way he just blew up at Harding and can’t figure the way he grabs the book up from the chair and sits down and holds it up close in front of his face – either to keep people from looking at him or to keep from having to look at people.

That night at supper he apologizes to Harding and says he don’t know what hung him up so at the library. Harding says perhaps it was his wife; she frequently hangs people up. McMurphy sits staring into his coffee and says, “I don’t know, man. I just met her this afternoon. So she sure the hell isn’t the one’s been giving me bad dreams this last miserable week.”

“Why, Mis-tur McMurphy,” Harding cries, trying to talk like the little resident boy who comes to the meetings, “you simply must tell us about these dreams. Ah, wait until I get my pencil and pad.” Harding is trying to be funny to relieve the strain of the apology. He picks up a napkin and a spoon and acts like he’s going to take notes. “Now. Pre-cisely, what was it you saw in these – ah – dreams?”

McMurphy don’t crack a smile. “I don’t know, man. Nothing but faces, I guess – just faces.”

The next morning Martini is behind the control panel in the tub room, playing like he’s a jet pilot. The poker game stops to grin at his act.

“EeeeeeaahHOOoomeerr. Ground to air, ground to air: object sighted four-oh-sixteen-hundred – appears to be enemy missile. Proceed at once! EeeahhOOOmmmm.”

Spins a dial, shoves a lever forward and leans with the bank of the ship. He cranks a needle to “ON FULL” at the side of the panel, but no water comes out of the nozzles set around the square tile booth in front of him. They don’t use hydrotherapy any more, and nobody’s turned the water on. Brand-new chrome equipment and steel panel never been used. Except for the chrome the panel and shower look just like the hydrotherapy outfits they used at the old hospital fifteen years ago: nozzles capable of reaching parts of the body from every angle, a technician in a rubber apron standing on the other side of the room manipulating the controls on that panel, dictating which nozzles squirt where, how hard, how hot – spray opened soft and soothing, then squeezed sharp as a needle-you hung up there between the nozzles in canvas straps, soaked and limp and wrinkled while the technician enjoyed his toy.

“EeeeaaooOOOoommm.… Air to ground, air to ground: missile sighted; coming into my sights now…”

Martini bends down and aims over the panel through the ring of nozzles. He closes one eye and peeps through the ring with the other eye.

“On target! Ready… Aim… Fi—!”

His hands jerk back from the panel and he stands bolt upright, hair flying and both eyes bulging out at the shower booth so wild and scared all the card-players spin around in their chairs to see if they can see it too – but they don’t see anything in there but the buckles hanging among the nozzles on stiff new canvas straps.

Martini turns and looks straight at McMurphy. No one else. “Didn’t you see thum? Didn’t you?”

“See who, Mart? I don’t see anything.”

“In all those straps? Didn’t you?”

McMurphy turns and squints at the shower. “Nope. Not a thing.”

“Hold it a minute. They need you to see thum,” Martini says.

“Damn you, Martini, I told you I can’t see them! Understand? Not a blessed thing!”

“Oh,” Martini says. He nods his head and turns from the shower booth. “Well, I didn’t see thum either. I’s just kidding you.”

McMurphy cuts the deck and shuffles it with a buzzing snap. “Well – I don’t care for that sort of kiddin’, Mart.” He cuts to shuffle again, and the cards splash everywhere like the deck exploded between his two trembling hands.