Ken Kesey - One flew over cuckoo's nest

“Okay, I’m looking at it. It don’t look any bigger than hay bales I’ve bucked up onto truck beds.”

“I’m afraid, my friend, that this contrivance will weigh a bit more than your bales of hay.”

“About a quarter-ton more, I’d bet,” Fredrickson says.

“He’s right, Mack,” Cheswick says. “It’d be awful heavy.”

“Hell, are you birds telling me I can’t lift that dinky little gizmo?”

“My friend, I don’t recall anything about psychopaths being able to move mountains in addition to their other noteworthy assets.”

“Okay, you say I can’t lift it. Well by God…”

McMurphy hops off the table and goes to peeling off his green jacket; the tattoos sticking half out of his T-shirt jump around the muscles on his arms.

“Then who’s willing to lay five bucks? Nobody’s gonna convince me I can’t do something till I try it. Five bucks…”

“McMurphy, this is as foolhardy as your bet about the nurse.”

“Who’s got five bucks they want to lose? You hit or you sit. …”

The guys all go to signing liens at once; he’s beat them so many times at poker and blackjack they can’t wait to get back at him, and this is a certain sure thing. I don’t know what he’s driving at; broad and big as he is, it’d take three of him to move that panel, and he knows it. He can just look at it and see he probably couldn’t even tip it, let alone lift it. It’d take a giant to lift it off the ground. But when the Acutes all get their IOUs signed, he steps up to the panel and lifts Billy Bibbit down off it and spits in his big callused palms and slaps them together, rolls his shoulders.

“Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin’ myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There’s liable to be crackin’ cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back. …”

“By golly, he might do it,” Cheswick mutters.

“Sure, maybe he’ll talk it off the floor,” Fredrickson says.

“More likely he’ll acquire a beautiful hernia,” Harding says. “Come now, McMurphy, quit acting like a fool; there’s no man can lift that thing.”

“Stand back, sissies, you’re using my oxygen.”

McMurphy shifts his feet a few times to get a good stance, and wipes his hands on his thighs again, then leans down and gets hold of the levers on each side of the panel. When he goes to straining, the guys go to hooting and kidding him. He turns loose and straightens up and shifts his feet around again.

“Giving up?” Fredrickson grins.

“Just limbering up. Here goes the real effort” — and grabs those levers again.

And suddenly nobody’s hooting at him any more. His arms commence to swell, and the veins squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift.

But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.

He opens his eyes and looks around at us. One by one he looks at the guys — even at me — then he fishes in his pockets for all the IOUs he won the last few days at poker. He bends over the table and tries to sort them, but his hands are froze into red claws, and he can’t work the fingers.

Finally he throws the whole bundle on the floor — probably forty or fifty dollars’ worth from each man — and turns to walk out of the tub room. He stops at the door and looks back at everybody standing around.

“But I tried, though,” he says. “Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?”

And walks out and leaves those stained pieces of paper on the floor for whoever wants to sort through them.

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.

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.

There’s a shipment of frozen parts come Tin 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.