One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Кен КизиЧитать онлайн книгу.
the chair. Most days I can see how the Admission stands, full of fear, near the wall till the black boys come to sign for him and take him into the shower room, where they strip him and leave him shivering with the door open while they all three run to the Big Nurse. “We need that Vaseline,” they’ll tell the Big Nurse, “for the thermometer.” She looks from one to the other: “I’m sure you do,” and gives them a very big jar, “but, boys, don’t group up in there.” Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission. They’re grinning and turning that thermometer around in Vaseline till it’s coated the size of your finger.Then they shut the door and turn all the showers up so that you can’t hear anything except, the hiss of water on the green tile. I’m out there most days, and I see it like that.
But this morning I can only listen as they bring him in. Still, even though I can’t see him, I know he’s no ordinary Admission. When they tell him about the shower, he doesn’t just say a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud voice that he’s already plenty damn clean, thank you.
“They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I think they’d have washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they could have found the means. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I’ve got to get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. So at the sound of water I start to gather up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I’ve never been in an Institute of Psychology before.”
The patients look at one another’s puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. He is talking louder than he needs. He sounds as if he’s high above the black boys, talking down, as if he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, yelling at those below on the ground. He sounds big. He’s coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there, and the guys’re looking at him.
“Good mornin’, buddies.”
A paper Halloween bat’s hanging on a string above his head; he flicks it so it spins around.
“Mighty nice fall day.”
He talks a little like Papa, voice loud and strong, but he doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian – a chief – and hard and shiny as a gunbarrel. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, which haven’t been cut for a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the worn leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody hit him in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there and waits, and when nobody says anything to him, he begins to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden that it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.
He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, can’t say a word. Nobody tries to stop him. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound is around him – it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles, in the way he talks.
“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “’… and whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay… my money… down’,” and laughs again.
He walks to one of the card games, squints at an Acute’s cards, and shakes his head.
“Yes sir, that’s what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun and entertainment around the gaming table. Nobody left in that Pendleton Work Farm to make my days interesting any more, so I asked for a transfer, you see. Needed some new blood. Hooee, look at the way this bird holds his cards, showing them to everybody; man! I’ll trim you babies like little lambs.”
Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man puts his hand out for Cheswick to shake.
“Hello, buddy; what’s that you’re playing? Pinochle? Jesus, no wonder you don’t care nothing about showing your hand. Don’t you have a straight deck around here? I brought along my own deck, just in case, it has something in it other than face cards – and check the pictures, huh? Every one different.Fifty-two positions.”
Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards doesn’t help his condition.
“Easy now, don’t smudge them; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes the other players at least a week to even see the suit…”
He’s wearing faded work-farm pants and shirt. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a black motorcycle cap on his head and a leather jacket over one arm, and his boots are gray and dusty and heavy. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and starts to beat a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he’s too quick for them; he moves among the Acutes and shakes hands before the black boy can take good aim.
“You see, I got in a couple of fights at the work farm, to tell the pure truth, and the court ruled that I’m a psychopath. And do you think I’m going to argue with the court? Sure, I’m not. If it gets me out of those damned pea fields I’ll be whatever their little heart wants, be it psychopath or mad dog or werewolf, because I don’t care if I never see another weeding hoe to my dying day. Now they tell me a psychopath’s a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain’t wholly right, do you think? Hello, buddy, what do they call you? My name’s McMurphy and I’ll bet you two dollars here and now that you can’t tell me how many spots are in that pinochle hand you’re holding. Two dollars; what d’ya say? God damn, Sam! can’t you wait half a minute to prod me with that damn thermometer of yours?”
The new man stops for a minute to get the organization of the day room.
On one side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors think that they’re still sick enough and must be cured, practice arm wrestling and card tricks. Billy Bibbit tries to learn to roll a cigarette, and Martini walks around, discovering things under the tables and chairs. The Acutes move around a lot. They tell jokes to each other and laugh in their fists (nobody ever dares laugh aloud, the whole staff would be in with notebooks and a lot of questions) and they write letters with yellow, chewed pencils.
They spy on each other. Sometimes one man says something about himself that he didn’t aim to let slip, and one of his buddies at the table where he said it yawns and gets up and goes over to the big logbook by the Nurses’ Station and writes down the piece of information he heard.The Big Nurse says the book is of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, but I know that she just wants to get enough evidence and to send some guy to the Main Building where they’ll recondition him, overhaul him in the head and straighten out the trouble.
The guy that wrote the piece of information in the logbook gets a star by his name on the list and gets to sleep late the next day.
Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics. They keep them in the hospital not to cure them, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name. Chronics will stay in the hospital for ever, the staff concedes. Chronics are divided into Walkers like me, who can still get around if you feed them, and Wheelers and Vegetables. Most of Chronics are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired. Some of them are born with these flaws, others got the flaws after very bad beatings.
But there are some of us Chronics that are the result of the staff’s mistakes that were made a couple of years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got