One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [70]
“Pause for a minute and imagine, Alvin,” he says, his words cottony with smoke, “imagine what will happen to one of us when we’re alone in Individual Therapy with Mr. McMurphy. Imagine you are approaching a particularly painful breakthrough and he decides he’s just had all he can take of you—how would he put it?—your ‘damn fool collitch-kid pryin’!’ You tell him he mustn’t get hostile and he says ‘to hell with that,’ and tell him to calm down, in an authoritarian voice, of course, and here he comes, all two hundred and ten redheaded psychopathic Irishman pounds of him, right across the interviewing table at you. Are you—are any of us, for that matter—prepared to deal with Mr. McMurphy when these moments arise?”
He puts his size-ten pipe back in the corner of his mouth and spreads his hands on his knees and waits. Everybody’s thinking about McMurphy’s thick red arms and scarred hands and how his neck comes out of his T-shirt like a rusty wedge. The resident named Alvin has turned pale at the thought, like that yellow pipe smoke his buddy was blowing at him had stained his face.
“So you believe it would be wise,” the doctor asks, “to send him up to Disturbed?”
“I believe it would be at the very least safe,” the guy with the pipe answers, closing his eyes.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to withdraw my suggestion and go along with Robert,” Alvin tells them all, “if only for my own protection.”
They all laugh. They’re all more relaxed now, certain they’ve come round to the plan she was wanting. They all have a sip of coffee on it except the guy with the pipe, and he has a big to-do with the thing going out all the time, goes through a lot of matches and sucking and puffing and popping of his lips. It finally smokes up again to suit him, and he says, a little proudly, “Yes, Disturbed Ward for ol’ Red McMurphy, I’m afraid. You know what I think, observing him these few days?”
“Schizophrenic reaction?” Alvin asks.
Pipe shakes his head.
“Latent Homosexual with Reaction Formation?” the third one says.
Pipe shakes his head again and shuts his eyes. “No,” he says and smiles round the room, “Negative Oedipal.”
They all congratulate him.
“Yes, I think there is a lot pointing to it,” he says. “But whatever the final diagnosis is, we must keep one thing in mind: we’re not dealing with an ordinary man.”
“You—are very, very wrong, Mr. Gideon.”
It’s the Big Nurse.
Everybody’s head jerks toward her—mine too, but I check myself and pass the motion off like I’m trying to scrub a speck I just discovered on the wall above my head. Everybody’s confused all to hell for sure now. They figured they were proposing just what she’d want, just what she was planning to propose in the meeting herself. I thought so too. I’ve seen her send men half the size of McMurphy up to Disturbed for no more reason than there was a chance they might spit on somebody; now she’s got this bull of a man who’s bucked her and everybody else on the staff, a guy she all but said was on his way off the ward earlier this afternoon, and she says no.
“No. I don’t agree. Not at all.” She smiles around at all of them. “I don’t agree that he should be sent up to Disturbed, which would simply be an easy way of passing our problem on to another ward, and I don’t agree that he is some kind of extraordinary being—some kind of ‘super’ psychopath.”
She waits but nobody is about to disagree. For the first time she takes a sip of her coffee; the cup comes away from her mouth with that red-orange color on it. I stare at the rim of the cup in spite of myself; she couldn’t be wearing lipstick that color. That color on the rim of the cup must be from heat,