One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [127]
I feel that frost in my belly.
We get up to that door, and there’s a sound behind like bees stirred up. Two men in front of us, reeling under the red capsules, one bawling like a baby, saying, “It’s my cross, thank you Lord, it’s all I got, thank you Lord….”
The other guy waiting is saying, “Guts ball, guts ball.” He’s the lifeguard from the pool. And he’s crying a little too.
I won’t cry or yell. Not with McMurphy here.
The technician asks us to take off our shoes, and McMurphy asks him if we get our pants slit and our heads shaved too. The technician says no such luck.
The metal door looks out with its rivet eyes.
The door opens, sucks the first man inside. The lifeguard won’t budge. A beam like neon smoke comes out of the black panel in the room, fastens on his cleat-marked forehead and drags him in like a dog on a leash. The beam spins him around three times before the door closes, and his face is scrambled fear. “Hut one,” he grunts. “Hut two! Hut three!”
I hear them in there pry up his forehead like a manhole cover, clash and snarl of jammed cogs.
Smoke blows the door open, and a Gurney comes out with the first man on it, and he rakes me with his eyes. That face. The Gurney goes back in and brings the lifeguard out. I can hear the yell-leaders spelling out his name.
The technician says, “Next group.”
The floor’s cold, frosted, crackling. Up above the light whines, tube long and white and icy. Can smell the graphite salve, like the smell in a garage. Can smell acid of fear. There’s one window, up high, small, and outside I see those puffy sparrows strung up on a wire like brown beads. Their heads sunk in the feathers against the cold. Something goes to blowing wind over my hollow bones, higher and higher, air raid! air raid!
“Don’t holler, Chief…. ’’
Air raid!
“Take ’er easy, I’ll go first. My skull’s too thick for them to hurt me. And if they can’t hurt me they can’t hurt you.”
Climbs on the table without any help and spreads his arms out to fit the shadow. A switch snaps the clasps on his wrists, ankles, clamping him into the shadow. A hand takes off his wristwatch, won it from Scanlon, drops it near the panel, it springs open, cogs and wheels and the long dribbling spiral of spring jumping against the side of the panel and sticking fast.
He don’t look a bit scared. He keeps grinning at me.
They put the graphite salve on his temples. “What is it?” he says. “Conductant,” the technician says. “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?”
They smear it on. He’s singing to them, makes their hands shake.
“‘Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Cholly…. ’”
Put on those things like headphones, crown of silver thorns over the graphite at his temples. They try to hush his singing with a piece of rubber hose for him to bite on.
“‘Mage with thoothing lan-o-lin.’”
Twist some dials, and the machine trembles, two robot arms pick up soldering irons and hunch down on him. He gives me the wink and speaks to me, muffled, tells me something, says something to me around that rubber hose just as those irons get close enough to the silver on his temples—light arcs across, stiffens him, bridges him up off the table till nothing is down but his wrists and ankles and out around that crimped black rubber hose a sound like hooeee! and he’s frosted over completely with sparks.
And out the window the sparrows drop smoking off the wire.
They roll him out on a Gurney, still jerking, face frosted white. Corrosion. Battery acid. The technician turns to me.
Watch that other moose. I know him. Hold him!
It’s not a will-power thing anymore.
Hold him! Damn. No more of these boys without Seconal.
The clamps bite my wrists and ankles.
The graphite salve has iron filings in it, temples scratching.
He said something when he winked. Told me something.
Man bends over, brings two irons toward the ring