One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Кен КизиЧитать онлайн книгу.
all day today, not since McMurphy came in. Today something’s happened: there hasn’t been any of these things all day, not since shaving. This afternoon everything is going according to the usual schedule. At four-thirty the second shift comes on duty. The Big Nurse dismisses the black boys and takes a last look around the ward. Behind the glass I see that she tells everyone good evening. She turns on the speaker in the day room: “Good evening, boys. Behave yourselves.” And turns the music up louder than ever.Then she leaves the ward and locks the door behind her.
Then, till night, we eat and shower and go back to sit in the day room. The Acutes sit and play cards.
The speakers in the ceiling are still making music. The music comes off a long tape from the Nurses’ Station. We all know the tape so well by heart that we don’t any of us consciously hear it. But McMurphy hasn’t got used to it yet. He’s dealing blackjack for cigarettes, and the speaker’s right over the card table.
“I wish some idiot in that nurses’ hothouse would turn down that music! Hooee! Does that thing play night and day, Harding?”
Harding cocks his ear to the ceiling. “Oh, yes, the so-called music. You see, that’s a recording playing up there, my friend. We seldom hear the radio. The world news might not be therapeutic. And we’ve all heard that recording so many times now it simply slides out of our hearing. Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?”
“Do they leave it on all the time, like a waterfall?” McMurphy says.
“Not when we sleep,” Cheswick says, “but all the rest of the time, and that’s the truth.”
“The hell with that. I’ll tell that coon over there to turn it off or get his fat little ass kicked!”
He starts to stand up, and Harding touches his arm. “Friend, for that you’ll be branded aggressive. Are you so eager to lose the bet?”
McMurphy slowly sits down, saying, “Horse ma-nu-ure.”
They continue to play cards right up to the lights out at nine-thirty. McMurphy wins and laughs a lot. That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long. He gave up trying and settled down to serious dealing. They won the deal off him a time or two, but he always bought it back or fought it back, and the cigarettes on each side of him grew in bigger and bigger pyramid piles.
Then just before nine-thirty he started letting them win. He let them win it all back. He paid out the last couple of cigarettes and lays down the deck.
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