One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

  "One of you guys, for cryin' out loud! This is where you get the edge, don't you see that? We have to do this--or we're whipped! Don't a one of you clucks know what I'm talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?

  He's standing over me in the mist. Why won't he leave me be?

  "Chief, you're our last bet."

  The Big Nurse is folding her papers; the other nurses are standing up around her. She finally gets to her feet.

  "The meeting is adjourned, then," I hear her say. "And I'd like to see the staff down in the staff room in about an hour. So, if there is nothing el--"

  It's too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won't act like I order it. There's no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn't do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I'm in for trouble, but I can't stop it. McMurphy's got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I'm fair game. He's doing it, wires ...

  No. That's not the truth. I lifted it myself.

  McMurphy whoops and drags me standing, pounding my back.

  "Twenty-one! The Chief's vote makes it twenty-one! And by God if that ain't a majority I'll eat my hat!"

  "Yippee," Cheswick yells. The other Acutes are coming across toward me.

  "The meeting was closed," she says. Her smile is still there, but the back of her neck as she walks out of the day room and into the Nurses' Station, is red and swelling like she'll blow apart any second.

  But she don't blow up, not right off, not until about an hour later. Behind the glass her smile is twisted and queer, like we've never seen before. She just sits. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.

  McMurphy looks up at the clock and he says it's time for the game. He's over by the drinking fountain with some of the other Acutes, down on his knees scouring off the baseboard. I'm sweeping out the broom closet for the tenth time that day. Scanlon and Harding, they got the buffer going up and down the hall, polishing the new wax into shining figure eights. McMurphy says again that he guesses it must be game time and he stands up, leaves the scouring rag where it lies. Nobody else stops work. McMurphy walks past the window where she's glaring out at him and grins at her like he knows he's got her whipped now. When he tips his head back and winks at her she gives that little sideways jerk of her head.

  Everybody keeps on at what he's doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.

  "Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot."

  We can see the nurse's face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody's watching what she's going to do--even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they're watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.

  That eye don't faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don't even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.

  And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim--watching the TV screen.

  The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses' Station and calls across to him he'd better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.

  "I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours." Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. "Mr. McMurphy, I'm warning you!"

  Everybody's stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses' Station toward McMurphy.

  "You're committed, you realize. You are ... under the jurisdiction of me ... the staff." She's holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. "Under jurisdiction and control--"

  Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.

  "Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!"

  I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.

  "Mr. Har-ding!"

  Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.

  "You men--Stop this. Stop!"

  And we're all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she's ranting and screaming behind us.

  If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

  Part II

  JUST AT THE EDGE of my vision I can see that white enamel face in the Nurses' Station, teetering over the desk, see it warp and flow as it tries to pull back into shape. The rest of the guys are watching too, though they're trying to act like they aren't. They're trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing but that blank TV in front of us, but anyone can see they're all sneaking looks at the Big Nurse behind her glass there, just the same as I am. For the first time she's on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all the eyes that you can't get away from.

  The residents, the black boys, all the little nurses, they're watching her too, waiting for her to go down the hall where it's time for the meeting she herself called, and waiting to see how she'll act now that it's known she can be made to lose control. She knows they're watching, but she don't move. Not even when they start strolling down to the staff room without her. I notice all the machinery in the wall is quiet, like it's still waiting for her to move.

  There's no more fog any place.

  All of a sudden I remember I'm supposed to clean the staff room. I always go down and clean the staff room during these meetings they have, been doing it for years. But now I'm too scared to get out of my chair. The staff always let me clean the room because they didn't think I could hear, but now that they saw me lift my hand when McMurphy told me to, won't they know I can hear? Won't they figure I been hearing all these years, listening to secrets meant only for their ears? What'll they do to me in that staff room if they know that?

  Still, they expect me to be in there. If I'm not, they'll know for sure that I can hear, be way ahead of me, thinking, You see? He isn't in here cleaning, don't that prove it? It's obvious what's to be done....

  I'm just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog.

  There's a black boy leaning against the wall near the door, arms crossed, pink tongue tip darting back and forth over his lips, watching us sitting in front of the TV set. His eyes dart back and forth like his tongue and stop on me, and I see his leather eyelids raise a little. He watches me fo
r a long time, and I know he's wondering about the way I acted in the group meeting. Then he comes off the wall with a lurch, breaking contact, and goes to the broom closet and brings back a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, drags my arms up and hangs the bucket bale over it, like hanging a kettle on a fireplace boom.

  "Le's go, Chief," he says. "Le's get up and get to your duties."

  I don't move. The bucket rocks on my arm. I don't make a sign I heard. He's trying to trick me. He asks me again to get up, and when I don't move he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and sighs, reaches down and takes my collar, and tugs a little, and I stand up. He stuffs the sponge in my pocket and points up the hall where the staff room is, and I go.

  And while I'm walking up the hall with the bucket, zoom, the Big Nurse comes past me with all her old calm speed and power and turns into the door. That makes me wonder.

  Out in the hall all by myself, I notice how clear it is--no fog any place. It's a little cold where the nurse just went past, and the white tubes in the ceiling circulate frozen light like rods of glowing ice, like frosted refrigerator coils rigged up to glow white. The rods stretch down to the staff-room door where the nurse just turned in at the end of the hall--a heavy steel door like the door of the Shock Shop in Building One, except there are numbers printed on this one, and this one has a little glass peephole up head-high to let the staff peek out at who's knocking. As I get closer I see there's light seeping out this peephole, green light, bitter as bile. The staff meeting is about to start in there, is why there's this green seepage; it'll be all over the walls and windows by the time the meeting is halfway through, for me to sponge off and squeeze in my bucket, use the water later to clear the drains in the latrine.

  Cleaning the staff room is always bad. The things I've had to clean up in these meetings nobody'd believe; horrible things, poisons manufactured right out of skin pores and acids in the air strong enough to melt a man. I've seen it.

  I been in some meetings where the table legs strained and contorted and the chairs knotted and the walls gritted against one another till you could of wrung sweat out the room. I been in meetings where they kept talking about a patient so long that the patient materialized in the flesh, nude on the coffee table in front of them, vulnerable to any fiendish notion they took; they'd have him smeared around in an awful mess before they were finished.

  That's why they have me at the staff meetings, because they can be such a messy affair and somebody has to clean up, and since the staff room is open only during the meetings it's got to be somebody they think won't be able to spread the word what's going on. That's me. I been at it so long, sponging and dusting and mopping this staff room and the old wooden one at the other place, that the staff usually don't even notice me; I move around in my chores, and they see right through me like I wasn't there--the only thing they'd miss if I didn't show up would be the sponge and the water bucket floating around.

  But this time when I tap at the door and the Big Nurse looks through the peephole she looks dead at me, and she takes longer than ordinary unlocking that door to let me in. Her face has come back into shape, strong as ever, it seems to me. Everybody else goes ahead spooning sugar in their coffee and borrowing cigarettes, the way they do before every meeting, but there's a tenseness in the air. I think it's because of me at first. Then I notice that the Big Nurse hasn't even sat down, hasn't even bothered to get herself a cup of coffee.

  She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes that door when I'm in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more. I know she's suspicious. I thought she might be too upset by the way McMurphy defied her to pay any attention to me, but she don't look shook at all. She's clearheaded and wondering now just how did Mr. Bromden hear that Acute McMurphy asking him to raise his hand on that vote? She's wondering how did he know to lay down his mop and go sit with the Acutes in front of that TV set? None of the other Chronics did that. She's wondering if it isn't time we did some checking on our Mr. Chief Bromden.

  I put my back to her and dig into the corner with my sponge. I lift the sponge up above my head so everybody in the room can see how it's covered with green slime and how hard I'm working; then I bend over and rub harder than ever. But hard as I work and hard as I try to act like I'm not aware of her back there, I can still feel her standing at the door and drilling into my skull till in a minute she's going to break through, till I'm just about to give up and yell and tell them everything if she don't take those eyes off me.

  Then she realizes that she's being stared at too--by all the rest of the staff. Just like she's wondering about me, they are wondering about her and what she's planning to do about that redhead back down there in the day room. They're watching to see what she'll say about him, and they don't care anything about some fool Indian on his hands and knees in the corner. They're waiting for her so she quits looking at me and goes and draws a cup of coffee and sits down, stirs sugar in it so careful the spoon never touches the side of the cup.

  It's the doctor who starts things off. "Now, people, if we can get things rolling?"

  He smiles around at the residents sipping coffee. He's trying not to look at the Big Nurse. She's sitting there so silent it makes him nervous and fidgety. He grabs out his glasses and puts them on for a look at his watch, goes to winding it while he talks.

  "Fifteen after. It's past time we started. Now. Miss Ratched, as most of you know, called this get-together. She phoned me before the Therapeutic Community meeting and said that in her opinion McMurphy was due to constitute a disturbance on the ward. Ever so intuitive, considering what went on a few minutes ago, don't you think?"

  He stops winding his watch on account of it's tight enough another twist is going to spray it all over the place, and he sits there smiling at it, drumming the back of his hand with pink little fingers, waiting. Usually at about this point in the meeting she'll take over, but she doesn't say anything.

  "After today," the doctor goes on, "no one can say that this is an ordinary man we're dealing with. No, certainly not. And he is a disturbing factor, that's obvious. So--ah--as I see it, our course in this discussion is to decide what action to take in dealing with him. I believe the nurse called this meeting--correct me if I'm off base here, Miss Ratched--to talk the situation out and unify the staff's opinion of what should be done about Mr. McMurphy?"

  He gives her a pleading look, but she still doesn't say anything. She's lifted her face toward the ceiling, checking for dirt most likely, and doesn't appear to have heard a thing he's been saying.

  The doctor turns to the line of residents across the room; all of them got the same leg crossed and coffee cup on the same knee. "You fellows," the doctor says, "I realize you haven't had adequate time to arrive at a proper diagnosis of the patient, but you have had a chance at observing him in action. What do you think?"

  The question pops their heads up. Cleverly, he's put them on the carpet too. They all look from him to the Big Nurse. Some way she has regained all her old power in a few short minutes. Just sitting there, smiling up at the ceiling and not saying anything, she has taken control again and made everyone aware that she's the force in here to be dealt with. If these boys don't play it just right they're liable to finish their training up in Portland at the alky hospital. They begin to fidget around like the doctor.

  "He's quite a disturbing influence, all right." The first boy plays it safe.

  They all sip their coffee and think about that. Then the next one says, "And he could constitute an actual danger."

  "That's true, that's true," the doctor says.

  The boy thinks he may have found the key and goes on. "Quite a danger, in fact," he says and moves forward in his chair. "Keep in mind that this man performed violent acts for the sole purpose of getting away from the work farm and into the comparative luxury of this hospital."

  "Planned violent acts," the first boy says.

  And the third boy mutters, "Of course, the very
nature of this plan could indicate that he is simply a shrewd con man, and not mentally ill at all."

  He glances around to see how this strikes her and sees she still hasn't moved or given any sign. But the rest of the staff sits there glaring at him like he's said some awful vulgar thing. He sees how he's stepped way out of bounds and tries to bring it off as a joke by giggling and adding, "You know, like 'He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum"'--but it's too late. The first resident turns on him after setting down his cup of coffee and reaching in his pocket for a pipe big as your fist.

  "Frankly, Alvin," he says to the third boy, "I'm disappointed in you. Even if one hadn't read his history all one should need to do is pay attention to his behavior on the ward to realize how absurd the suggestion is. This man is not only very very sick, but I believe he is definitely a Potential Assaultive. I think that is what Miss Ratched was suspecting when she called this meeting. Don't you recognize the arch type of psychopath? I've never heard of a clearer case. This man is a Napoleon, a Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun."

  Another one joins in. He remembers the nurse's comments about Disturbed. "Robert's right, Alvin. Didn't you see the way the man acted out there today? When one of his schemes was thwarted he was up out of his chair, on the verge of violence. You tell us, Doctor Spivey, what do his records say about violence?"

  "There is a marked disregard for discipline and authority," the doctor says.

  "Right. His history shows, Alvin, that time and again he has acted out his hostilities against authority figures--in school, in the service, in jail! And I think that his performance after the voting furor today is as conclusive an indication as we can have of what to expect in the future." He stops and frowns into his pipe, puts it back in his mouth, and strikes a match and sucks the flame into the bowl with a loud popping sound. When it's lit he sneaks a look up through the yellow cloud of smoke at the Big Nurse; he must take her silence as agreement because he goes on, more enthusiastic and certain than before.

  "Pause for a minute and imagine, Alvin," he says, his words cottony with smoke, "imagine what will happen to one of us when we're alone in Individual Therapy with Mr. McMurphy. Imagine you are approaching a particularly painful breakthrough and he decides he's just had all he can take of your--how would he put it?--your 'damn fool collitch-kid pryin'!' You tell him he mustn't get hostile and he says 'to hell with that,' and tell him to calm down, in an authoritarian voice, of course, and here he comes, all two hundred and ten redheaded psychopathic Irishman pounds of him, right across the interviewing table at you. Are you--are any of us, for that matter--prepared to deal with Mr. McMurphy when these moments arise?"