One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [80]
He steps up to the nurse, shaking his fist at her. “Oh, is that it? Is that it, huh? You gonna crucify old Seef just as if he was doing it to spite you or something?”
She lays a comforting hand on his arm, and his fist unrolls.
“It’s okay, Bruce. Your friend will be all right. Apparently he hasn’t been swallowing his Dilantin. I simply don’t know what he is doing with it.”
She knows as well as anybody; Sefelt holds the capsules in his mouth and gives them to Fredrickson later. Sefelt doesn’t like to take them because of what he calls “disastrous side effects,” and Fredrickson likes a double dose because he’s scared to death of having a fit. The nurse knows this, you can tell by her voice, but to look at her there, so sympathetic and kind, you’d think she was ignorant of anything at all between Fredrickson and Sefelt.
“Yeahhh,” says Fredrickson, but he can’t work his attack up again. “Yeah, well, you don’t need to act like it was as simple as just take the stuff or don’t take it. You know how Seef worries about what he looks like and how women think he’s ugly and all that, and you know how he thinks the Dilantin—”
“I know,” she says and touches his arm again. “He also blames his falling hair on the drug. Poor old fellow.”
“He’s not that old!”
“I know, Bruce. Why do you get so upset? I’ve never understood what went on between you and your friend that made you get so defensive!”
“Well, heck, anyway!” he says and jams his fists in his pockets.
The nurse bends over and brushes a little place clean on the floor and puts her knee on it and starts kneading Sefelt back to some shape. She tells the black boy to stay with the poor old fellow and she’ll go send a Gurney down for him; wheel him into the dorm and let him sleep the rest of the day. When she stands she gives Fredrickson a pat on the arm, and he grumbles, “Yeah, I have to take Dilantin too, you know. That’s why I know what Seef has to face. I mean, that’s why I—well, heck—”
“I understand, Bruce, what both of you must go through, but don’t you think anything is better than that?”
Fredrickson looks where she points. Sefelt has pulled back halfway normal, swelling up and down with big wet, rattling breaths. There’s a punk-knot rising on the side of his head where he landed, and a red foam around the black boy’s stick where it goes into his mouth, and his eyes are beginning to roll back into the whites. His hands are nailed out to each side with the palms up and the fingers jerking open and shut, just the way I’ve watched men jerk at the Shock Shop strapped to the crossed table, smoke curling up out of the palms from the current. Sefelt and Fredrickson never been to the Shock Shop. They’re manufactured to generate their own voltage, store it in their spines and can be turned on remote from the steel door in the Nurses’ Station if they get out of line—be right in the best part of a dirty joke and stiffen like the jolt hit square in the small of the back. It saves the trouble of taking them over to that room.
The nurse gives Fredrickson’s arm a little shake like he’d gone to sleep, and repeats, “Even if you take into consideration the harmful effects of the medicine, don’t you think it’s better than that?”
As he stares down at the floor, Fredrickson’s blond eyebrows are raised like he’s seeing for the first time just how he looks at least once a month. The nurse smiles and pats his arm