One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [15]
Seven-thirty back to the day room. The Big Nurse looks out through her special glass, always polished till you can’t tell it’s there, and nods at what she sees, reaches up and tears a sheet off her calendar one day closer to the goal. She pushes a button for things to start. I hear the wharrup of a big sheet of tin being shook someplace. Everybody come to order. Acutes: sit on your side of the day room and wait for cards and Monopoly games to be brought out. Chronics: sit on your side and wait for puzzles from the Red Cross box. Ellis: go to your place at the wall, hands up to receive the nails and pee running down your leg. Pete: wag your head like a puppet. Scanlon: work your knobby hands on the table in front of you, constructing a make-believe bomb to blow up a make-believe world. Harding: begin talking, waving your dove hands in the air, then trap them under your armpits because grown men aren’t supposed to wave their pretty hands that way. Sefelt: begin moaning about your teeth hurting and your hair falling out. Everybody: breath in…and out…in perfect order; hearts all beating at the rate the OD cards have ordered. Sound of matched cylinders.
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren’t for the cartoon figures being real guys….
Seven-forty-five the black boys move down the line of Chronics taping catheters on the ones that will hold still for it. Catheters are second-hand condoms the ends clipped off and rubber-banded to tubes that run down pantlegs to a plastic sack marked DISPOSABLE NOT TO BE RE-USED, which it is my job to wash out at the end of each day. The black boys anchor the condom by taping it to the hairs; old Catheter Chronics are hairless as babies from tape removal….
Eight o’clock the walls whirr and hum into full swing. The speaker in the ceiling says, “Medications,” using the Big Nurse’s voice. We look in the glass case where she sits, but she’s nowhere near the microphone; in fact, she’s ten feet away from the microphone, tutoring one of the little nurses how to prepare a neat drug tray with pills arranged orderly. The Acutes line up at the glass door, A, B, C, D, then the Chronics, then the Wheelers (the Vegetables get theirs later, mixed in a spoon of applesauce). The guys file by and get a capsule in a paper cup—throw it to the back of the throat and get the cup filled with water by the little nurse and wash the capsule down. On rare occasions some fool might ask what he’s being required to swallow.
“Wait just a shake, honey; what are these two little red capsules in here with my vitamin?”
I know him. He’s a big, griping Acute, already getting the reputation of being a troublemaker.
“It’s just medication, Mr. Taber, good for you. Down it goes, now.”
“But I mean what kind of medication. Christ, I can see that they’re pills—”
“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber—just for me?” She takes a quick look at the Big Nurse to see how the little flirting technique she is using is accepted, then looks back at the Acute. He still isn’t ready to swallow something he don’t know what is, not even just for her.
“Miss, I don’t like to create trouble. But I don’t like to swallow something without knowing what it is, neither. How do I know this isn’t one of those funny pills that makes me something I’m not?”
“Don’t get upset, Mr. Taber—”
“Upset? All I want to know, for the lova Jesus—”
But the Big Nurse has come up quietly, locked her hand on his arm, paralyzes him all the way to the shoulder. “That’s all right, Miss Flinn,” she says. “If Mr. Taber chooses to act like a child, he may have to be treated as such. We’ve tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that’s not the answer. Hostility, hostility, that’s the thanks we get. You can go, Mr. Taber, if you don’t wish to take your medication orally.”
“All I wanted to know, for the—”
“You can go.”
He goes off, grumbling, when she frees his arm, and spends the morning moping around the latrine,