One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [83]
“What do you think?” Harding says.
McMurphy starts. “She’s got one hell of a set of chabobs,” is all he can think of. “Big as Old Lady Ratched’s.”
“I didn’t mean physically, my friend, I mean what do you—”
“Hell’s bells, Harding!” McMurphy yells suddenly. “I don’t know what to think! What do you want out of me? A marriage counsellor? All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. I know what you want me to think; you want me to feel sorry for you, to think she’s a real bitch. Well, you didn’t make her feel like any queen either. Well, screw you and ‘what do you think?’ I’ve got worries of my own without getting hooked with yours. So just quit!” He glares around the library at the other patients. “Alla you! Quit bugging me, goddammit!”
And sticks his cap back on his head and walks back to his cartoon magazine across the room. All the Acutes are looking at each other with their mouths open. What’s he hollering at them about? Nobody’s been bugging him. Nobody’s asked him for a thing since they found out that he was trying to behave to keep his commitment from being extended. Now they’re surprised at the way he just blew up at Harding and can’t figure the way he grabs the book up from the chair and sits down and holds it up close in front of his face—either to keep people from looking at him or to keep from having to look at people.
That night at supper he apologizes to Harding and says he don’t know what hung him up so at the library. Harding says perhaps it was his wife: she frequently hangs people up. McMurphy sits staring into his coffee and says, “I don’t know, man. I just met her this afternoon. So she sure the hell isn’t the one’s been giving me bad dreams this last miserable week.”
“Why, Mis-tur McMurphy,” Harding cries, trying to talk like the little resident boy who comes to the meetings, “you simply must tell us about these dreams. Ah, wait until I get my pencil and pad.” Harding is trying to be funny to relieve the strain of the apology. He picks up a napkin and a spoon and acts like he’s going to take notes. “Now. Pre-cisely, what was it you saw in these—ah—dreams?”
McMurphy don’t crack a smile. “I don’t know, man. Nothing but faces, I guess—just faces.”
The next morning Martini is behind the control panel in the tub room, playing like he’s a jet pilot. The poker game stops to grin at his act.
“EeeeeeaahHOOoomeerr. Ground to air, ground to air: object sighted four-oh-sixteen-hundred—appears to be enemy missile. Proceed at once! EeeahhOOOmmmm.”
Spins a dial, shoves a lever forward and leans with the bank of the ship. He cranks a needle to “ON FULL” at the side of the panel, but no water comes out of the nozzles set around the square tile booth in front of him. They don’t use hydrotherapy anymore, and nobody’s turned the water on. Brand-new chrome equipment and steel panel never been used. Except for the chrome the panel and shower look just like the hydrotherapy outfits they used at the old hospital fifteen years ago: nozzles capable of reaching parts of the body from every angle, a technician in a rubber apron standing on the other side of the room manipulating the controls on that panel, dictating which nozzles squirt where, how hard, how hot—spray opened soft and soothing, then squeezed sharp as a needle—you hung up there between the nozzles in canvas straps, soaked and limp and wrinkled while the technician enjoyed his toy.
“EeeeaaooOOOoommm…. Air to ground, air to ground: missile sighted; coming into my sights now….”
Martini bends down and aims over the panel through the ring of nozzles. He closes one eye and peeps through the ring with the other eye.
“On target! Ready…Aim…Fi—!”
His hands jerk back from