One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [40]
When you take one of these red pills you don’t just go to sleep; you’re paralyzed with sleep, and all night long you can’t wake, no matter what goes on around you. That’s why the staff gives me the pills; at the old place I took to waking up at night and catching them performing all kinds of horrible crimes on the patients sleeping around me.
I lie still and slow my breathing, waiting to see if something is going to happen. It is dark my lord and I hear them slipping around out there in their rubber shoes; twice they peek in the dorm and run a flashlight over everybody. I keep my eyes shut and keep awake. I hear a wailing from up on Disturbed, loo loo looo—got some guy wired to pick up code signals.
“Oh, a beer, I think, for the long night ahead,” I hear a black boy whisper to the other. Rubber shoes squeak off toward the Nurses’ Station, where the refrigerator is. “You like a beer, sweet thing with a birthmark? Fo’ the long night ahead?”
The guy upstairs hushes. The low whine of the devices in the walls gets quieter and quieter, till it hums down to nothing. Not a sound across the hospital—except for a dull, padded rumbling somewhere deep in the guts of the building, a sound that I never noticed before—a lot like the sound you hear when you’re standing late at night on top of a big hydroelectric dam. Low, relentless, brute power.
The fat black boy stands out there in the hall where I can see him, looking all around and giggling. He walks toward the dorm door, slow, wiping the wet gray palms in his armpits. The light from the Nurses’ Station throws his shadow on the dorm wall big as an elephant, gets smaller as he walks to the dorm door and looks in. He giggles again and unlocks the fuse box by the door and reaches in. “Tha’s right, babies, sleep tight.”
Twists a knob, and the whole floor goes to slipping down away from him standing in the door, lowering into the building like a platform in a grain elevator!
Not a thing but the dorm floor moves, and we’re sliding away from the walls and door and the windows of the ward at a hell of a clip—beds, bedstands, and all. The machinery—probably a cog-and-track affair at each corner of the shaft—is greased silent as death. The only sound I hear is the guys breathing, and that drumming under us getting louder the farther down we go. The light of the dorm door five hundred yards back up this hole is nothing but a speck, dusting the square sides of the shaft with a dim powder. It gets dimmer and dimmer till a faraway scream comes echoing down the sides of the shaft—“Stay back!”—and the light goes out altogether.
The floor reaches some kind of solid bottom far down in the ground and stops with a soft jar. It’s dead black, and I can feel the sheet around me choking off my wind. Just as I get the sheet untied, the floor starts sliding forward with a little jolt. Some kind of castors under it I can’t hear. I can’t even hear the guys around me breathing, and I realize all of a sudden it’s because that drumming’s gradually got so loud I can’t hear anything else. We must be square in the middle of it. I go to clawing at that damned sheet tied across me and just about have it loose when a whole wall slides up, reveals a huge room of endless machines stretching clear out of sight, swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, faces blank and dreamy in firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces.
It—everything I see—looks like it sounded, like the inside of a tremendous dam. Huge brass tubes disappear upward in the dark. Wires run to transformers out of sight. Grease and cinders catch on everything, staining the couplings and motors and dynamos red and coal black.
The workers all move at the same smooth sprint, an easy, fluid stride. No one’s