He pulls off his cap, spins it on his finger, and catches it behind his back in his other hand, neat as you please.
“Another thing: I’m in this place because that’s the way I planned it, pure and simple, because it’s a better place than a work farm. As near as I can tell I’m no loony, or never knew it if I was. Your nurse don’t know this; she’s not going to be looking out for somebody coming at her with a trigger-quick mind like I obviously got. These things give me an edge I like. So I’m saying five bucks to each of you that wants it if I can’t put a betsy bug up that nurse’s butt within a week.”
“I’m still not sure I – ”
“Just that. A bee in her butt, a burr in her bloomers. Get her goat. Bug her till she comes apart at those neat little seams, and shows, just one time, she ain’t so unbeatable as you think. One week. I’ll let you be the judge whether I win or not.”
Harding takes out a pencil and writes something on the pinochle pad.
“Here. A lien on ten dollars of that money they’ve got drawing dust under my name over in Funds. It’s worth twice that to me, my friend, to see this unlikely miracle brought off.”
McMurphy looks at the paper and folds it. “Worth it to any of the rest of you birds?” Other Acutes line up now, taking turns at the pad. He takes the pieces of paper when they’re finished, stacking them on his palm, pinned under a big stiff thumb. I see the pieces of paper crowd up in his hand. He looks them over.
“You trust me to hold the bets, buddies?”
“I believe we can be safe in doing that,” Harding says. “You won’t be going any place for a while.”
6
One Christmas at midnight on the button, at the old place, the ward door blows open with a crash, in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry. The black boys get him cornered in the hall with flashlights. I see he’s all tangled in the tinsel Public Relation has been stringing all over the place, and he’s stumbling around in it in the dark. He’s shading his red eyes from the flashlights and sucking on his mustache.
“Ho ho ho,” he says. “I’d like to stay but I must be hurrying along. Very tight schedule, ya know. Ho ho. Must be going…”
The black boys move in with the flashlights. They kept him with us six years before they discharged him, clean-shaven and skinny as a pole.
The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night – throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light’s screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.
She’s given to turning up the speed this way on days like, say, when you got somebody to visit you or when the VFW brings down a smoker show from Portland – times like that, times you’d like to hold and have stretch out.
That’s when she speeds things up.
But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn that dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don’t move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three and she’s liable to let them hang there till we rust. You sit solid and you can’t budge, you can’t walk or move to relieve the strain of sitting, you can’t swallow and you can’t breathe. The only thing you can move is your eyes and there’s nothing to see but petrified Acutes across the room waiting on one another to decide whose play it is. The old Chronic next to me has been dead six days, and he’s rotting to the chair. And instead of fog sometimes she’ll let a clear chemical gas in through the vents, and the whole ward is set solid when the gas changes into plastic.
Lord knows how long we hang this way.
Then, gradually, she’ll ease the dial up a degree, and that’s worse yet. I can take hanging dead still better’n I can take that sirup-slow hand of Scanlon across the room, taking three days to lay down a card. My lungs pull for the thick plastic air like getting it through a pinhole. I try to go to the latrine and I feel buried under a ton of sand, squeezing my bladder till green sparks flash and buzz across my forehead.
I strain with every muscle and bone to get out of that chair and go to the latrine, work to get up till my arms and legs are all ashake and my teeth hurt. I pull and pull and all I gain is maybe a quarter-inch off the leather seat. So I fall back and give up and let the pee pour out, activating a hot salt wire down my left leg that sets off humiliating alarms, sirens, spotlights, everybody up yelling and running around and the big black boys knocking the crowd aside right and left as the both of them rush headlong at me, waving awful mops of wet copper wires cracking and spitting as they short with the water.
About the only time we get any let-up from this time control is in the fog; then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everything else. (They haven’t really fogged the place full force all day today, not since McMurphy came in. I bet he’d yell like a bull if they fogged it.)
When nothing else is going on, you usually got the fog or the time control to contend with, but today something’s happened: there hasn’t been any of these things worked on us all day, not since shaving. This afternoon everything is matching up. When the swing shift comes on duty the clock says four-thirty, just like it should. The Big Nurse dismisses the black boys and takes a last look around the ward. She slides a long silver hatpin out of the iron-blue knot of hair back of her head, takes off her white cap and sets it careful in a cardboard box (there’s mothballs in that box), and drives the hatpin back in the hair with a stab of her hand.
Behind the glass I see her tell everyone good evening. She hands the little birthmarked swing-shift nurse a note; then her hand reaches out to the control panel in the steel door, clacks on the speaker in the day room: “Good evening, boys. Behave yourselves.” And turns the music up louder than ever. She rubs the inside of her wrist across her window; a disgusted look shows the fat black boy who just reported on duty that he better get to cleaning it, and he’s at the glass with a paper towel before she’s so much as locked the ward door behind her.
The machinery in the walls whistles, sighs, drops into a lower gear.
Then, till night, we eat and shower and go back to sit in the day room. Old Blastic, the oldest Vegetable, is holding his stomach and moaning. George (the black boys call him Ruba-dub[15]) is washing his hands in the drinking fountain. The Acutes sit and play cards and work at getting a picture on our TV set by carrying the set every place the cord will reach, in search of a good beam.
The speakers in the ceiling are still making music. The music from the speakers isn’t transmitted in on a radio beam is why the machinery don’t interfere. The music comes off a long tape from the Nurses’ Station, a tape we all know so well by heart that there don’t any of us consciously hear it except new men like McMurphy. He hasn’t got used to it yet. He’s dealing blackjack for cigarettes, and the speaker’s right over the card table. He’s pulled his cap way forward till he has to lean his head back and squint from under the brim to see his cards. He holds a cigarette between his teeth and talks around it like a stock auctioneer I saw once in a cattle auction in The Dalles.