One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

  "He's skulled," McMurphy hissed. "Somebody's gonna have to go out and help him."

  I heard a toilet flush behind me, and the door opened and Harding was caught in the hall light as he went out, pulling up his pajamas. I heard the supervisor gasp at the sight of him and he told her to pardon him, but he hadn't seen her, being as it was so dark."

  "It isn't dark."

  "In the latrine, I meant. I always switch off the lights to achieve a better bowel movement. Those mirrors, you understand; when the light is on the mirrors seem to be sitting in judgment over me to arbitrate a punishment if everything doesn't come out right."

  "But Aide Turkle said he was cleaning in there ..."

  "And doing quite a good job, too, I might add--considering the restrictions imposed on him by the dark. Would you care to see?"

  Harding pushed the door open a crack, and a slice of light cut across the latrine floor tile. I caught a glimpse of the supervisor backing off, saying she'd have to decline his offer but she had further rounds to make. I heard the ward door unlock again up the hall, and she let herself off the ward. Harding called to her to return soon for another visit, and everybody rushed out and shook his hand and pounded his back for the way he'd pulled it off.

  We stood there in the hall, and the wine went around again. Sefelt said he'd as leave have that vodka if there was something to mix it with. He asked Mr. Turkle if there wasn't something on the ward to put in it and Turkle said nothing but water. Fredrickson asked what about the cough sirup? "They give me a little now and then from a half-gallon jug in the drug room. It's not bad tasting. You have a key for that room, Turkle?"

  Turkle said the supervisor was the only one on nights who had a key to the drug room, but McMurphy talked him into letting us have a try at picking the lock. Turkle grinned and nodded his head lazily. While he and McMurphy worked at the lock on the drug room with paper clips, the girls and the rest of us ran around in the Nurses' Station opening files and reading records.

  "Look here," Scanlon said, waving one of those folders. "Talk about complete. They've even got my first-grade report card in here. Aaah, miserable grades, just miserable."

  Bill and his girl were going over his folder. She stepped back to look him over. "All these things, Billy? Phrenic this and pathic that? You don't look like you have all these things."

  The other girl had opened a supply drawer and was suspicious about what the nurses needed with all those hot-water bottles, a million of 'em, and Harding was sitting on the Big Nurse's desk, shaking his head at the whole affair.

  McMurphy and Turkle got the door of the drug room open and brought out a bottle of thick cherry-colored liquid from the ice box. McMurphy tipped the bottle to the light and read the label out loud.

  "Artificial flavor, coloring, citric acid. Seventy per cent inert materials--that must be water--and twenty per cent alcohol--that's fine--and ten per cent codeine Warning Narcotic May Be Habit Forming." He unscrewed the bottle and took a taste of it, closing his eyes. He worked his tongue around his teeth and took another swallow and read the label again. "Well," he said, and clicked his teeth together like they'd just been sharpened, "if we cut it a leetle bit with the vodka, I think it'll be all right. How are we fixed for ice cubes, Turkey, old buddy?"

  Mixed in paper medicine cups with the liquor and the port wine, the sirup had a taste like a kid's drink but a punch like the cactus apple wine we used to get in The Dalles, cold and soothing on the throat and hot and furious once it got down. We turned out the lights in the day room and sat around drinking it. We threw the first couple of cups down like we were taking our medication, drinking it in serious and silent doses and looking one another over to see if it was going to kill anybody. McMurphy and Turkle switched back and forth from the drink to Turkle's cigarettes and got to giggling again as they discussed how it would be to lay that little nurse with the birthmark who went off at midnight.

  "I'd be scared," Turkle said, "that she might go to whuppin' me with that big ol' cross on that chain. Wun't that be a fix to be in, now?"

  "I'd be scared," McMurphy said, "that just about the time I was getting my jollies she'd reach around behind me with a thermometer and take my temperature!"

  That busted everybody up. Harding stopped laughing long enough to join the joking.

  "Or worse yet," he said. "Just lie there under you with a dreadful concentration on her face, and tell you--oh Jesus, listen--tell you what your pulse was!"

  "Oh don't ... oh my Gawd ..."

  "Or even worse, just lie there and be able to calculate your pulse and temperature both--sans instruments!"

  "Oh Gawd, oh please don't ..."

  We laughed till we were rolling about the couches and chairs, choking and teary-eyed. The girls were so weak from laughing they had to try two or three times to get to their feet. "I gotta ... go tinkle," the big one said and went weaving and giggling toward the latrine and missed the door, staggered into the dorm while we all hushed one another with fingers to the lips, waiting, till she gave a squeal and we heard old Colonel Marterson roar, "The pillow is ... a horse!"--and come whisking out of the dorm right behind her in his wheelchair.

  Sefelt wheeled the colonel back to the dorm and showed the girl where the latrine was personally, told her it was generally used by males only but he would stand at the door while she was in there and guard against intrusions on her privacy, defend it against all comers, by gosh. She thanked him solemnly and shook his hand and they saluted each other and while she was inside here came the colonel out of the dorm in his wheelchair again, and Sefelt had his hands full keeping him out of the latrine. When the girl came out of the door he was trying to ward off the charges of the wheelchair with his foot while we stood on the edge of the fracas cheering one guy or the other. The girl helped Sefelt put the colonel back to bed, and then the two of them went down the hall and waltzed to music nobody could hear.

  Harding drank and watched and shook his head. "It isn't happening. It's all a collaboration of Kafka and Mark Twain and Martini."

  McMurphy and Turkle got to worrying that there might still be too many lights, so they went up and down the hall turning out everything that glowed, even the little knee-high night lights, till the place was pitch black. Turkle got out flashlights, and we played tag up and down the hall with wheelchairs from storage, having a big time till we heard one of Sefelt's convulsion cries and went to find him sprawled twitching beside that big girl, Sandy. She was sitting on the floor brushing at her skirt, looking down at Sefelt. "I never experienced anything like it," she said with quiet awe.

  Fredrickson knelt beside his friend and put a wallet between his teeth to keep him from chewing his tongue, and helped him get his pants buttoned. "You all right, Seef? Seef?"

  Sefelt didn't open his eyes, but he raised a limp hand and picked the wallet out of his mouth. He grinned through his spit. "I'm all right," he said. "Medicate me and turn me loose again."

  "You really need some medication, Seef?"

  "Medication."

  "Medication," Fredrickson said over his shoulder, still kneeling. "Medication," Harding repeated and weaved off with his flashlight to the drug room. Sandy watched him go with glazed eyes. She was sitting beside Sefelt, stroking his head in wonderment.

  "Maybe you better bring me something too," she called drunkenly after Harding. "I never experienced anything to come even close to it."

  Down the hall we heard glass crash and Harding came back with a double handful of pills; he sprinkled them over Sefelt and the woman like he was crumbling clods into a grave. He raised his eyes toward the ceiling.

  "Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic end. I've finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We shall be all of us shot at dawn. One hundred
cc's apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we'll face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines! Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of existence."

  He sagged against the wall and slid to the floor, pills hopping out of his hands in all directions like red and green and orange bugs. "Amen," he said and closed his eyes.

  The girl on the floor smoothed down her skirt over her long hardworking legs and looked at Sefelt still grinning and twitching there under the lights beside her, and said, "Never in my life experienced anything to come even halfway near it."

  Harding's speech, if it hadn't actually sobered people, had at least made them realize the seriousness of what we were doing. The night was getting on, and some thought had to be given to the arrival of the staff in the morning. Billy Bibbit and his girl mentioned that it was after four o'clock and, if it was all right, if people didn't mind, they'd like to have Mr. Turkle unlock the Seclusion Room. They went off under an arch of flashlight beams, and the rest of us went into the day room to see what we could decide about cleaning up. Turkle was all but passed out when he got back from Seclusion, and we had to push him into the day room in a wheel chair.

  As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with half a dozen other guys and a couple of girls--right on the Big Nurse's ward! Drunk and running and laughing and carrying on with women square in the center of the Combine's most powerful stronghold! I thought back on the night, on what we'd been doing, and it was near impossible to believe. I had to keep reminding myself that it had truly happened, that we had made it happen. We had just unlocked a window and let it in like you let in the fresh air. Maybe the Combine wasn't all-powerful. What was to stop us from doing it again, now that we saw we could? Or keep us from doing other things we wanted? I felt so good thinking about this that I gave a yell and swooped down on McMurphy and the girl Sandy walking along in front of me, grabbed them both up, one in each arm, and ran all the way to the day room with them hollering and kicking like kids. I felt that good.

  Colonel Matterson got up again, bright-eyed and full of lessons, and Scanlon wheeled him back to bed. Sefelt and Martini and Fredrickson said they'd better hit the sack too. McMurphy and I and Harding and the girl and Mr. Turkle stayed up to finish off the cough sirup and decide what we were going to do about the mess the ward was in. Me and Harding acted like we were the only ones really very worried about it; McMurphy and the big girl just sat there and sipped that sirup and grinned at each other and played hand games in the shadows, and Mr. Turkle kept dropping off to sleep. Harding did his best to try to get them concerned.

  "All of you fail to compren' the complexities of the situation," he said.

  "Bull," McMurphy said.

  Harding slapped the table. "McMurphy, Turkle, you fail to realize what has occurred here tonight. On a mental ward. Miss Ratched's ward! The reekerputions will be ... devastating!"

  McMurphy bit the girl's ear lobe. Turkle nodded and opened one eye and said, "Tha's true. She'll be on tomorrow, too."

  "I, however, have a plan," Harding said. He got to his feet. He said McMurphy was obviously too far gone to handle the situation himself and someone else would have to take over. As he talked he stood straighter and became more sober. He spoke in an earnest and urgent voice, and his hands shaped what he said. I was glad he was there to take over.

  His plan was that we were to tie up Turkle and make it look like McMurphy'd snuck up behind him, tied him up with oh, say, strips of torn sheet, and relieved him of his keys, and after getting the keys had broken into the drug room, scattered drugs around, and raised hell with the files just to spite the nurse--she'd believe that part--then he'd unlocked the screen and made his escape.

  McMurphy said it sounded like a television plot and it was so ridiculous it couldn't help but work, and he complimented Harding on his clear-headedness. Harding said the plan had its merits; it would keep the other guys out of trouble with the nurse, and keep Turkle his job, and get McMurphy off the ward. He said McMurphy could have the girls drive him to Canada or Tiajuana, or even Nevada if he wanted, and be completely safe; the police never press too hard to pick up AWOLs from the hospital because ninety per cent of them always show back up in a few days, broke and drunk and looking for that free bed and board. We talked about it for a while and finished the cough sirup. We finally talked it to silence. Harding sat back down.

  McMurphy took his arm from around the girl and looked from me to Harding, thinking, that strange, tired expression on his face again. He asked what about us, why didn't we just up and get our clothes on and make it out with him?

  "I'm not quite ready yet, Mack," Harding told him.

  "Then what makes you think I am?"

  Harding looked at him in silence for a time and smiled, then said, "No, you don't understand. I'll be ready in a few weeks. But I want to do it on my own, by myself, right out that front door, with all the traditional red tape and complications. I want my wife to be here in a car at a certain time to pick me up. I want them to know I was able to do it that way."

  McMurphy nodded. "What about you, Chief?"

  "I figure I'm all right. Just I don't know where I want to go yet. And somebody should stay here a few weeks after you're gone to see that things don't start sliding back."

  "What about Billy and Sefelt and Fredrickson and the rest?"

  "I can't speak for them," Harding said. "They've still got their problems, just like all of us. They're still sick men in lots of ways. But at least there's that: they are sick men now. No more rabbits, Mack. Maybe they can be well men someday. I can't say."

  McMurphy thought this over, looking at the backs of his hands. He looked back up to Harding.

  "Harding, what is it? What happens?"

  "You mean all this?"

  McMurphy nodded.

  Harding shook his head. "I don't think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I'm not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was--shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn't the practices, I don't think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me--and the great voice of millions chanting, 'Shame. Shame. Shame.' It's society's way of dealing with someone different."

  "I'm different," McMurphy said. "Why didn't something like that happen to me? I've had people bugging me about one thing or another as far back as I can remember but that's not what--but it didn't drive me crazy."

  "No, you're right. That's not what drove you crazy. I wasn't giving my reason as the sole reason. Though I used to think at one time, a few years ago, my turtleneck years, that society's chastising was the sole force that drove one along the road to crazy, but you've caused me to re-appraise my theory. There's something else that drives people, strong people like you, my friend, down that road."

  "Yeah? Not that I'm admitting I'm down that road, but what is this something else?"

  "It is us." He swept his hand about him in a soft white circle and repeated, "Us."

  McMurphy halfheartedly said, "Bull," and grinned and stood up, pulling the girl to her feet. He squinted up at the dim clock. "It's nearly five. I need me a little shut-eye before my big getaway. The day shift doesn't come on for another two hours yet; let's leave Billy and Candy down there a while longer. I'll cut out about six. Sandy, honey, maybe an hour in the dorm would sober us up. What do you say? We got a long drive tomorrow, whether it's Canada or Mexico or wherever."

  Turkle and Harding and I stoo
d up too. Everybody was still weaving pretty much, still pretty drunk, but a mellow, sad feeling had drifted over the drunk. Turkle said he'd boot McMurphy and the girl out of bed in an hour.

  "Wake me up too," Harding said. "I'd like to stand there at the window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask 'Who wawz that'er masked man?' as you ride--"

  "The hell with that. You guys both get in bed, and I don't want to ever see hide nor hair of you again. You get me?"

  Harding grinned and nodded but he didn't say anything. McMurphy put his hand out, and Harding shook it. McMurphy tipped back like a cowboy reeling out of a saloon and winked.

  "You can be bull goose loony again, buddy, what with Big Mack outa the way."

  He turned to me and frowned. "I don't know what you can be, Chief. You still got some looking to do. Maybe you could get you a job being the bad guy on TV rasslin'. Anyway, take 'er easy."

  I shook his hand, and we all started for the dorm. McMurphy told Turkle to tear up some sheets and pick out some of his favorite knots to be tied with. Turkle said he would. I got into my bed in the graying light of the dorm and heard McMurphy and the girl get into his bed. I was feeling numb and warm. I heard Mr. Turkle open the door to the linen room out in the hall, heave a long, loud, belching sigh as he pulled the door closed behind him. My eyes got used to the dark, and I could see McMurphy and the girl snuggled into each other's shoulders, getting comfortable, more like two tired little kids than a grown man and a grown woman in bed together to make love.

  And that's the way the black boys found them when they came to turn on the dorm lights at six-thirty.