One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [42]
Now he’s stripped except for a long undershirt with fancy monograms sewed red on front and back. And I see once and for all (the undershirt rides up his back some as he comes walking past, giving me a peek) that he definitely does wear one, laced so tight it might blow up any second.
And dangling from the stays he’s got half a dozen withered objects, tied by the hair like scalps.
He’s carrying a little flask of something that he sips from to keep his throat open for talking, and a camphor hanky he puts in front of his nose from time to time to stop out the stink. There’s a clutch of schoolteachers and college girls and the like hurrying after him. They wear blue aprons and their hair in pin curls. They are listening to him give a brief lecture on the tour.
He thinks of something funny and has to stop his lecture long enough for a swig from the flask to stop the giggling. During the pause one of his pupils stargazes around and sees the gutted Chronic dangling by his heel. She gasps and jumps back. The Public Relation turns and catches sight of the corpse and rushes to take one of those limp hands and give it a spin. The student shrinks forward for a cautious look, face in a trance.
“You see? You see?” He squeals and rolls his eyes and spews stuff from his flask he’s laughing so hard. He’s laughing till I think he’ll explode.
When he finally drowns the laughing he starts back along the row of machines and goes into his lecture again. He stops suddenly and slaps his forehead—“Oh, scatterbrained me!”—and comes running back to the hanging Chronic to rip off another trophy and tie it to his girdle.
Right and left there are other things happening just as bad—crazy, horrible things too goofy and outlandish to cry about and too much true to laugh about—but the fog is getting thick enough I don’t have to watch. And somebody’s tugging at my arm. I know already what will happen: somebody’ll drag me out of the fog and we’ll be back on the ward and there won’t be a sign of what went on tonight and if I was fool enough to try and tell anybody about it they’d say, Idiot, you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don’t exist.
But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?
It’s Mr. Turkle that pulls me out of the fog by the arm, shaking me and grinning. He says, “You havin’ a bad dream, Mistuh Bromden.” He’s the aide works the long lonely shift from 11 to 7, an old Negro man with a big sleepy grin on the end of a long wobbly neck. He smells like he’s had a little to drink. “Back to sleep now, Mistuh Bromden.”
Some nights he’ll untie the sheet from across me if it’s so tight I squirm around. He wouldn’t do it if he thought the day crew knew it was him, because they’d probably fire him, but he figures the day crew will think it was me untied it. I think he really does it to be kind, to help—but he makes sure he’s safe first.
This time he doesn’t untie the sheet but walks away from me to help two aides I never saw before and a young doctor lift old Blastic onto the stretcher and carry him out, covered with a sheet—handle him more careful than anybody ever handled him before in all his life.
Come morning, McMurphy is up before I am, the first time anybody been up before me since Uncle Jules the Wallwalker was here. Jules was a shrewd old white-haired Negro with a theory the world was being tipped over on its side during the night by the black boys; he used to slip out in the early mornings, aiming to catch them tipping it. Like Jules, I’m up early in the mornings to watch what machinery they’re sneaking onto the ward or installing in the shaving room, and usually it’s