face, like there was a spiraling light there instead of features, a hypnotizing swirl of cream white and blue and orange. He swallowed and waited for her to say something, but she wouldn’t; her skill, her fantastic mechanical power flooded back into her, analyzing the situation and reporting to her that all she had to do was keep quiet.
“They m-m-made me! Please, M-Miss Ratched, they may-may-
She checked her beam, and Billy’s face pitched downward, sobbing with relief. She put a hand on his neck and drew his cheek to her starched breast, stroking his shoulder while she turned a slow, contemptuous look across the bunch of us.
“It’s all right, Billy. It’s all right. No one else is going to harm you. It’s all right. I’ll explain to your mother.”
She continued to glare at us as she spoke. It was strange to hear that voice, soft and soothing and warm as a pillow, coming out of a face hard as porcelain.
“All right, Billy. Come along with me. You can wait over here in the doctor’s office. There’s no reason for you to be submitted to sitting out in the day room with these… friends of yours.”
She led him into the office, stroking his bowed head and saying, “Poor boy, poor little boy,” while we faded back down the hall silently and sat down in the day room without looking at one another or speaking. McMurphy was the last one to take a seat.
The Chronics across the way had stopped milling around and were settling into their slots. I looked at McMurphy out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it. He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round — in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn’t come out any more and somebody else had to take your place.
There was more phoning going on in the Nurses’ Station and a number of authorities showing up for a tour of the evidence. When the doctor himself finally came in, every one of these people gave him a look like the whole thing had been planned by him, or at least condoned and authorized. He was white and shaky under their eyes. You could see he’d already heard about most of what had gone on here, on his ward, but the Big Nurse outlined it for him again, in slow, loud details so we could hear it too. Hear it in the proper way, this time, solemnly, with no whispering or giggling while she talked. The doctor nodded and fiddled with his glasses, batting eyes so watery I thought he must be splashing her. She finished by telling him about Billy and the tragic experience we had put the poor boy through.
“I left him in your office. Judging from his present state, I suggest you see him right away. He’s been through a terrible ordeal. I shudder to think of the damage that must have been done to the poor boy.”
She waited until the doctor shuddered too.
“I think you should go see if you can speak with him. He needs a lot of sympathy. He’s in a pitiful state.”
The doctor nodded again and walked off toward his office. We watched him go.
“Mack,” Scanlon said. “Listen — you don’t think any of us are being taken in by this crap, do you? It’s bad, but we know where the blame lies — we ain’t blaming you.”
“No,” I said, “none of us blame you.” And wished I’d had my tongue pulled out as soon as I saw the way he looked at me.
He closed his eyes and relaxed. Waiting, it looked like. Harding got up and walked over to him and had just opened his mouth to say something when the doctor’s voice screaming down the hall smashed a common horror and realization onto everybody’s face.
“Nurse!” he yelled. “Good lord,
She ran, and the three black boys ran, down the hall to where the doctor was still calling. But not a patient got up. We knew there wasn’t anything for us to do now but just sit tight and wait for her to come to the day room to tell us what we all had known was one of the things that was bound to happen.
She walked straight to McMurphy.
“He cut his throat,” she said. She waited, hoping he would say something. He wouldn’t look up. “He opened the doctor’s desk and found some instruments and cut his throat. The poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself. He’s there now, in the doctor’s chair, with his throat cut.”
She waited again. But he still wouldn’t look up.
“First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives — gambling with human lives — as if you thought yourself to be a
She turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her, leaving a shrill, killing-cold sound ringing in the tubes of light over our heads.
First I had a quick thought to try to stop him, talk him into taking what he’d already won and let her have the last round, but another, bigger thought wiped the first thought away completely. I suddenly realized with a crystal certainty that neither I nor any of the half-score of us could stop him. That Harding’s arguing or my grabbing him from behind, or old Colonel Matterson’s teaching or Scanlon’s griping, or all of us together couldn’t rise up and stop him.
We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.
We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson, slow, mechanical gestures — and when he walked across the floor you could hear the iron in his bare heels ring sparks out of the tile.
Only at the last — after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light — only at the last, after the officials realized that the three black boys weren’t going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.
He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out:
A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender d defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.
I hung around another couple of weeks to see what was to come. Everything was changing. Sefelt and Fredrickson signed out together Against Medical Advice, and two days later another three Acutes left, and six more transferred to another ward. There was a lot of investigation about the party on the ward and about Billy’s death, and the doctor was informed that his resignation would be accepted, and he informed them that they would have to go the whole way and can him if they wanted him out.
The Big Nurse was over in Medical for a week, so for a while we had the little Jap nurse from Disturbed running the ward; that gave the guys a chance to change a lot of the ward policy. By the time the Big Nurse came back, Harding had even got the tub room back open and was in there dealing blackjack himself, trying to make that airy, thin voice of his sound like McMurphy’s auctioneer bellow. He was dealing when he heard her key hit the lock.
We all left the tub room and came out in the hall to meet her, to ask about McMurphy. She jumped back two steps when we approached, and I thought for a second she might run. Her face was bloated blue and out of shape on one side, closing one eye completely, and she had a heavy bandage around her throat. And a new white uniform. Some of the guys grinned at the front of it; in spite of its being smaller and tighter and more starched than her old uniforms, it could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.
Smiling, Harding stepped up close and asked what had become of Mack.
