One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [75]
“It’s chilly at the window there, Mr. Bromden,” the nurse tells me. “Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?”
“He cain’t hear,” the black boy tells her. “I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ’round.”
And I move and she draws back a step and says, “Yes, please do,” to the black boy. She’s fiddling with the chain runs down her neck. At home she locks herself in the bathroom out of sight, strips down, and rubs that crucifix all over that stain running from the corner of her mouth in a thin line down across her shoulders and breasts. She rubs and rubs and hails Mary to beat thunder, but the stain stays. She looks in the mirror, sees it’s darker’n ever. Finally takes a wire brush used to take paint off boats and scrubs the stain away, puts a nightgown on over the raw, oozing hide, and crawls in bed.
But she’s too full of the stuff. While she’s asleep it rises in her throat and into her mouth, drains out of that corner of her mouth like purple spit and down her throat, over her body. In the morning she sees how she’s stained again and somehow she figures it’s not really from inside her—how could it be? a good Catholic girl like her?—and she figures it’s on account of working evenings among a whole wardful of people like me. It’s all our fault, and she’s going to get us for it if it’s the last thing she does. I wish McMurphy’d wake up and help me.
“You get him tied in bed, Mr. Geever, and I’ll prepare a medication.”
In the group meetings there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn’t like.
“Why does the dorms have to be locked on the weekends?” Cheswick or somebody would ask. “Can’t a fellow even have the weekends to himself?”
“Yeah, Miss Ratched,” McMurphy would say. “Why?”
“If the dorms were left open, we have learned from past experience, you men would return to bed after breakfast.”
“Is that a mortal sin? I mean, normal people get to sleep late on the weekends.”
“You men are in this hospital,” she would say like she was repeating it for the hundredth time, “because of your proven inability to adjust to society. The doctor and I believe that every minute spent in the company of others, with some exceptions, is therapeutic, while every minute spent brooding alone only increases your separation.”
“Is that the reason that there has to be at least eight guys together before they can be taken off the ward to OT or PT or one of them Ts?”
“That is correct.”
“You mean it’s sick to want to be off by yourself?”
“I didn’t say that—”
“You mean if I go into the latrine to relieve myself I should take along at least seven buddies to keep me from brooding on the can?”
Before she could come up with an answer to that, Cheswick bounced to his feet and hollered at her, “Yeah, is that what you mean?” and the other Acutes sitting around the meeting would say, “Yeah, yeah, is that what you mean?”
She would wait till they all died down and the meeting was quiet again, then say quietly, “If you men can calm yourself enough to act like a group of adults at a discussion instead of children on the playground, we will ask the doctor if he thinks it would be beneficial to consider a change in the ward policy at this time. Doctor?”
Everybody knew the kind of answer the doctor would make, and before he even had the chance Cheswick would be off on another complaint. “Then what about our cigarettes, Miss Ratched?”
“Yeah, what about that,” the Acutes grumbled.
McMurphy turned to the doctor and put the question straight to him this time before the nurse had a chance to answer. “Yeah, Doc, what about our cigarettes? How does she have the right to keep