Ken Kesey - One flew over cuckoo's nest

“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. McMurphy’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. Harding!”

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.

Just at the edge of my vision I can see that white enamel face in the Nurses’ Station, teetering over the desk, see it warp and flow as it tries to pull back into shape. The rest of the guys are watching too, though they’re trying to act like they aren’t. They’re trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing but that blank TV in front of us, but anyone can see they’re all sneaking looks at the Big Nurse behind her glass there, just the same as I am. For the first time she’s on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all the eyes that you can’t get away from.

The residents, the black boys, all the little nurses, they’re watching her too, waiting for her to go down the hall where it’s time for the meeting she herself called, and waiting to see how she’ll act now that it’s known she can be made to lose control. She knows they’re watching, but she don’t move. Not even when they start strolling down to the staff room without her. I notice all the machinery in the wall is quiet, like it’s still waiting for her to move.