One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [107]
“You didn’t get this sp-spot here where the bug h-hhit.”
“That wasn’t a bug,” the guy said sullenly, scratching at it with his fingernail, “that was a bird.”
Martini called all the way from the other car that it couldn’t of been a bird. “There’d be feathers and bones if it was a bird.”
A man riding a bicycle stopped to ask what was the idea of all the green uniforms; some kind of club? Harding popped right up and answered him.
“No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? No? You must hurry on? Ah, he’s gone. Pity.” He turned to McMurphy. “Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn’t it? Food for thought there.”
Billy punched a beer can for the girl, and she flustered him so with her bright smile and her “Thank you, Billy,” that he took to opening cans for all of us.
While the pigeons fretted up and down the sidewalk with their hands folded behind their backs.
I sat there, feeling whole and good, sipping at a beer; I could hear the beer all the way down me—zzzth zzzth, like that. I had forgotten that there can be good sounds and tastes like the sound and taste of a beer going down. I took another big drink and started looking around me to see what else I had forgotten in twenty years.
“Man!” McMurphy said as he scooted the girl out from under the wheel and tight over against Billy. “Will you just look at the Big Chief slug down on that firewater!”—and slammed the car out into traffic with the doctor squealing behind to keep up.
He’d shown us what a little bravado and courage could accomplish, and we thought he’d taught us how to use it. All the way to the coast we had fun pretending to be brave. When people at a stop light would stare at us and our green uniforms we’d do just like he did, sit up straight and strong and tough-looking and put a big grin on our face and stare straight back at them till their motors died and their windows sunstreaked and they were left sitting when the light changed, upset bad by what a tough bunch of monkeys was just now not three feet from them, and help nowhere in sight.
As McMurphy led the twelve of us toward the ocean.
I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasn’t able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn’t able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren’t able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work—but I was able to see it.
The way you see the change in a person you’ve been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn’t notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example—a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-phtpht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.
Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across