One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [81]
“I don’t know what I got mad at the old girl about—I mean, she didn’t do anything to give me a reason to blow up like that, did she?”
It isn’t that he wants an answer; it’s more sort of realizing that he can’t put his finger on a reason. He shivers again and starts to slip back away from the group. McMurphy comes up and asks him in a low voice what is it they take?
“Dilantin, McMurphy, an anti-convulsant, if you must know.”
“Don’t it work or something?”
“Yeah, I guess it works all right—if you take it.”
“Then what’s the sweat about taking it or not?”
“Look, if you must know! Here’s the dirty sweat about taking it.” Fredrickson reaches up and grabs his lower lip between his thumb and finger, pulls it down to show gums ragged and pink and bloodless around long shiny teeth. “Your gungs,” he says, hanging onto the lip. “Dilantin gnakes your gungs rot. And a seizure gnakes you grit your teeth. And you—”
There’s a noise on the floor. They look to where Sefelt is moaning and wheezing, just as the black boy draws two teeth out with his taped stick.
Scanlon takes his tray and walks away from the bunch, saying, “Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Puts a man in one confounded bind, I’d say.”
McMurphy says, “Yeah. I see what you mean,” looking down into Sefelt’s gathering face. His face has commenced to take on that same haggard, puzzled look of pressure that the face on the floor has.
Whatever it was went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade movement is coming back: six-thirty out of bed, seven into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the Chronics and the cards for the Acutes…in the Nurses’ Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse float over the controls.
They take me with the Acutes sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. They take me once with them over to the library and I walk over to the technical section, stand there looking at the titles of books on electronics, books I recognize from that year I went to college; I remember inside the books are full of schematic drawings and equations and theories—hard, sure, safe things.
I want to look at one of the books, but I’m scared to. I’m scared to do anything. I feel like I’m floating in the dusty yellow air of the library, halfway to the bottom, halfway to the top. The stacks of books teeter above me, crazy, zigzagging, running all different angles to one another. One shelf bends a little to the left, one to the right. Some of them are leaning over me, and I don’t see how the books keep from falling out. It goes up and up this way, clear out of sight, the rickety stacks nailed together with slats and two-by-fours. Propped up with poles, leaning against ladders, on all sides of me. If I pulled one book out, lord knows what awful thing might result.
I hear somebody walk in, and it’s one of the black boys from our ward and he’s got Harding’s wife with him. They’re talking and grinning to each other as they come into the library.
“See here, Dale,” the black boy calls over to Harding where he’s reading a book, “look here who come to visit you. I tole her it wun’t visitin’ hours but you know she jus’ sweet-talk me into bringin’ her right on over here anyhow.” He leaves her standing in front of Harding and goes off, saying mysteriously, “Don’t you forget now, you hear?”
She blows the black boy a kiss, then turns to Harding, slinging her hips forward. “Hello, Dale.”
“Honey,” he says, but he doesn’t make any move to take the couple of steps to her. He looks around him at everybody watching.
She’s as tall as he is. She’s got on high-heeled shoes and is carrying a black purse, not by the strap, but holding it the way you hold a book. Her fingernails are red as drops of blood against the shiny black patent-leather purse.
“Hey, Mack,” Harding calls to McMurphy, who’s sitting across the room, looking at a book of cartoons.