One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [53]
“Saaaaay, Doctor, what I been dyin’ to know is what did this dream I dreamt the other night mean? You see, it was like I was me, in the dream, and then again kind of like I wasn’t me—like I was somebody else that looked like me—like—like my daddy! Yeah, that’s who it was. It was my daddy because sometimes when I saw me—him—I saw there was this iron bolt through the jawbone like daddy used to have—”
“Your father has an iron bolt through his jawbone?”
“Well, not anymore, but he did once when I was a kid. He went around for about ten months with this big metal bolt going in here and coming out here! God, he was a regular Frankenstein. He’d been clipped on the jaw with a pole ax when he got into some kinda hassle with this pond man at the logging mill—Hey! Let me tell you how that incident came about…”
Her face is still calm, as though she had a cast made and painted to just the look she wants. Confident, patient, and unruffled. No more little jerk, just that terrible cold face, a calm smile stamped out of red plastic; a clean, smooth forehead, not a line in it to show weakness or worry; flat, wide, painted-on green eyes, painted on with an expression that says I can wait, I might lose a yard now and then but I can wait, and be patient and calm and confident, because I know there’s no real losing for me.
I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don’t make any difference. One by one the patients are sneaking looks at her to see how she’s taking the way McMurphy is dominating the meeting, and they see the same thing. She’s too big to be beaten. She covers one whole side of the room like a Jap statue. There’s no moving her and no help against her. She’s lost a little battle here today, but it’s a minor battle in a big war that she’s been winning and that she’ll go on winning. We mustn’t let McMurphy get our hopes up any different, lure us into making some kind of dumb play. She’ll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don’t lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.
Right now, she’s got the fog machine switched on, and it’s rolling in so fast I can’t see a thing but her face, rolling in thicker and thicker, and I feel as hopeless and dead as I felt happy a minute ago, when she gave that little jerk—even more hopeless than ever before, on account of I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can’t help anymore than I could. Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in.
And I’m glad when it gets thick enough you’re lost in it and can let go, and be safe again.
There’s a Monopoly game going on in the day room. They’ve been at it for three days, houses and hotels everywhere, two tables pushed together to take care of all the deeds and stacks of play money. McMurphy talked them into making the game interesting by paying a penny for every dollar the bank issues them; the Monopoly box is loaded with change.
“It’s your roll, Cheswick.”
“Hold it a minute before he rolls. What’s a man need to buy thum hotels?”
“You need four houses on every lot of the same color, Martini. Now let’s go, for Christsakes.”
“Hold it a minute.”
There’s a flurry of money from that side of the table, red and green and yellow bills blowing in every direction.
“You buying a hotel or you playing happy new year, for Christsakes?”
“It’s your dirty roll, Cheswick.”