One flew over cuckoo's nest

that be a fix to be in, now?”

“I’d be scared,” McMurphy said, “that just about the time I was getting my jellies 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 Matterson 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… 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 hard-working 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