One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [79]
Then one morning all the Acutes know too, know his real reason for backing down and that the reasons they been making up were just lies to kid themselves. He never says a thing about the talk he had with the lifeguard, but they know. I figure the nurse broadcast this during the night along all the little lines in the dorm floor, because they know all at once. I can tell by the way they look at McMurphy that morning when he comes into the day room. Not looking like they’re mad with him, or even disappointed, because they can understand as well as I can that the only way he’s going to get the Big Nurse to lift his commitment is by acting like she wants, but still looking at him like they wished things didn’t have to be this way.
Even Cheswick could understand it and didn’t hold anything against McMurphy for not going ahead and making a big fuss over the cigarettes. He came back down from Disturbed on the same day that the nurse broadcast the information to the beds, and he told McMurphy himself that he could understand how he acted and that it was surely the sharpest thing to do, considering, and that if he’d thought about Mack being committed he’d never have put him on the spot like he had the other day. He told McMurphy this while we were all being taken over to the swimming pool. But just as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish something mighta been done, though, and dove into the water. And got his fingers stuck some way in the grate that’s over the drain at the bottom of the pool, and neither the big lifeguard nor McMurphy nor the two black boys could pry him loose, and by the time they got a screwdriver and undid the grate and brought Cheswick up, with the grate still clutched by his chubby pink and blue fingers, he was drowned.
Up ahead of me in the lunch line I see a tray sling in the air, a green plastic cloud raining milk and peas and vegetable soup. Sefelt’s jittering out of the line on one foot with his arms both up in the air, falls backward in a stiff arch, and the whites of his eyes come by me upside down. His head hits the tile with a crack like rocks under water, and he holds the arch, like a twitching, jerking bridge. Fredrickson and Scanlon make a jump to help, but the big black boy shoves them back and grabs a flat stick out of his back pocket, got tape wrapped around it and covered with a brown stain. He pries Sefelt’s mouth open and shoves the stick between his teeth, and I hear the stick splinter with Sefelt’s bite. I can taste the slivers. Sefelt’s jerks slow down and get more powerful, working and building up to big stiff kicks that lift him to a bridge, then falling—lifting and falling, slower and slower, till the Big Nurse comes in and stands over him and he melts limp all over the floor in a gray puddle.
She folds her hands in front of her, might hold a candle, and looks down at what’s left of him oozing out of the cuffs of his pants and shirt. “Mr. Sefelt?” she says to the black boy.
“Tha’s right—uhn.” The black boy is jerking to get his stick back. “Mistuh See-fel’.”
“And Mr. Sefelt has been asserting he needs no more medication.” She nods her head, steps back a step out of the way of him spreading toward her white shoes. She raises her head and looks around her at the circle of Acutes that’ve come up to see. She nods again and repeats,…“needs no more medication.” Her face is smiling, pitying, patient, and disgusted all at once—a trained expression.
McMurphy’s never seen such a thing. “What’s he got wrong with him?” he asks.
She keeps her eye on the puddle, not turning to McMurphy. “Mr. Sefelt is an epileptic, Mr. McMurphy. This means he may be subject to seizures like this at any time if he doesn’t follow medical advice. He knows better. We’d told him this would happen when he didn’t take his medication. Still, he will insist on acting foolish.”
Fredrickson