One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [84]
Martini turns and looks straight at McMurphy. No one else. “Didn’t you see thum? Didn’t you?”
“See who, Mart? I don’t see anything.”
“In all those straps? Didn’t you?”
McMurphy turns and squints at the shower. “Nope. Not a thing.”
“Hold it a minute. They need you to see thum,” Martini says.
“Damn you, Martini, I told you I can’t see them! Understand? Not a blessed thing!”
“Oh,” Martini says. He nods his head and turns from the shower booth. “Well, I didn’t see thum either. I’s just kidding you.”
McMurphy cuts the deck and shuffles it with a buzzing snap. “Well—I don’t care for that sort of kiddin’, Mart.” He cuts to shuffle again, and the cards splash everywhere like the deck exploded between his two trembling hands.
I remember it was a Friday again, three weeks after we voted on TV, and everybody who could walk was herded over to Building One for what they try to tell us is chest X-rays for TB, which I know is a check to see if everybody’s machinery is functioning up to par.
We’re benched in a long row down a hall leading to a door marked X-RAY. Next to X-ray is a door marked EENT where they check our throats during the winter. Across the hall from us is another bench, and it leads to that metal door. With the line of rivets. And nothing marked on it at all. Two guys are dozing on the bench between two black boys, while another victim inside is getting his treatment and I can hear him screaming. The door opens inward with a whoosh, and I can see the twinkling tubes in the room. They wheel the victim out still smoking, and I grip the bench where I sit to keep from being sucked through that door. A black boy and a white one drag one of the other guys on the bench to his feet, and he sways and staggers under the drugs in him. They usually give you red capsules before Shock. They push him through the door, and the technicians get him under each arm. For a second I see the guy realizes where they got him, and he stiffens both heels into the cement floor to keep from being pulled to the table—then the door pulls shut, phumph, with metal hitting a mattress, and I can’t see him anymore.
“Man, what they got going on in there?” McMurphy asks Harding.
“In there? Why, that’s right, isn’t it? You haven’t had the pleasure. Pity. An experience no human should be without.” Harding laces his fingers behind his neck and leans back to look at the door. “That’s the Shock Shop I was telling you about some time back, my friend, the EST, Electro-Shock Therapy. Those fortunate souls in there are being given a free trip to the moon. No, on second thought, it isn’t completely free. You pay for the service with brain cells instead of money, and everyone has simply billions of brain cells on deposit. You won’t miss a few.”
He frowns at the one lone man left on the bench. “Not a very large clientele today, it seems, nothing like the crowds of yesteryear. But then, c’est la vie, fads come and go. And I’m afraid we are witnessing the sunset of EST. Our dear head nurse is one of the few with the heart to stand up for a grand old Faulknerian tradition in the treatment of the rejects of sanity: Brain Burning.”
The door opens. A Gurney comes whirring out, nobody pushing it, takes the corner on two wheels and disappears smoking up the hall. McMurphy watches them take the last guy in and close the door.
“What they do is”—McMurphy listens a moment—“take some bird in there and shoot electricity through his skull?”
“That’s a concise way of putting it.”
“What the hell for?”
“Why, the patient’s good, of course. Everything done here is for the patient’s good. You may sometimes get the impression, having lived only on our ward, that the hospital is a vast efficient mechanism that would function quite well if the patient were not imposed on it, but