One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Кен КизиЧитать онлайн книгу.
they lifted him off the table for the last time, with the same horror on his face.They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed, or when they want to move so that I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when list check came around.
Ruckly is another Chronic who came in a few years ago as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a nuisance all over the place: he kicked the black boys and bit the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to cure. They strapped him to that table and shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You’ll pay for this, you damn tar babies.”
And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later. He was bald and the front of his face was an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs were stitched above his eyes. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; there’s no life, no light in his eyes. All day now he just holds an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turns it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture became gray as his eyes on both sides, so that you can’t tell any more what it used to be.
The staff, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I think that he’s better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all – they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he’d been in a fist-fight, and he’s the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He’ll maybe even go home in a month or two, with a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly with his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers some place in that broken machinery. He turns red and at first he can just make a little whistling sound in his throat. He’s trying so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise that makes your skin crawl – “Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.
Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old cavalry soldier from the First War who likes to lift the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or to teach some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen. He’s the oldest on the ward, but not the one who’s been here longest – his wife brought him in only a few years ago, when she wasn’t able to look after him herself any longer.
I’m the one who’s been here on the ward the longest, longer than anybody, since the Second World War. The Big Nurse has been here longer than me.
The Chronics and the Acutes don’t generally mingle. Each stays on his own side of the day room. The black boys want it that way. The black boys say that it’s more orderly that way. They move us in after breakfast and look at the grouping and nod. “That’s right, gennulmen, that’s the way. Now you keep it that way.”
But there is no need to say it because the Chronics don’t move around much, and the Acutes stay on their own side because they’re afraid that they may become Chronics someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll say to an Acute, whenever he goes into a bad mood, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is planned for your cure, or you’ll end up over on that side.
(Everybody on the ward is proud that the patients cooperate so well. There’s a little brass tablet on the wall right above the logbook, with the words on it: CONGRATULATIONS FOR COOPERATING WITH THE SMALLEST NUMBER OF PERSONNEL OF ANY WARD IN THE HOSPITAL. It’s a prize for cooperation.)
This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away that he’s not a Chronic. He goes right to the Acute side, grinning and shaking hands with everybody. At first I see that he’s making everybody there feel uneasy, especially with that big laugh of his. I see that McMurphy notices that he’s making them uneasy, but he doesn’t change his behavior.
“Damn, you boys don’t look so crazy to me.” He’s trying to relax them. “Which one of you is the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It’s my first day, and I want to make a good impression on the right man if he can prove to me that he is the right man. Who’s the boss loony here?”
He looks round to where some of the Acutes have stopped their card-playing “I’m thinking about taking over this whole show myself, so I want to talk with the top man. I’m gonna be sort of the gambling baron on this ward. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here.”
Nobody’s sure if this barrel-chested man with the scar and the wild grin is play-acting or if he’s crazy enough to be just like he talks, or both, but the Acutes are grinning now, not so uneasy any more, and glad that something out of the ordinary’s going on. They ask Harding if he’s boss loony. He lays down his cards.
Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think that you’ve seen him in the movies, a face too pretty for just a guy on the street. He’s got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he’s trying to hide inside himself. He’s got fine hands, so long and white. Sometimes they fly around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and hides them between his knees; it worries him that he’s got pretty hands.
He’s president of the Patient’s Council because he has a paper that says he graduated from college. This paper in a frame sits on his nightstand next to a picture of a woman in a bathing suit who also looks like you’ve seen her in the moving pictures. You can see Harding sitting on a towel behind her. Harding brags a lot about having such a woman for a wife, says she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she can’t get enough of him nights.
Harding assumes an important look, speaks up at the ceiling without looking at McMurphy. “Does this… gentleman have an appointment, Mr. Bibbit?” he asks Billy Bibbit.
Billy stutters when he speaks.“Do you have an appointment, Mr. McM-m-murphy? Mr. Harding is a busy man, nobody sees him without an ap-appointment.”
“This busy man Mr. Harding, is he the boss loony?” He looks at Billy with one eye, and Billy nods his head up and down real fast.
“Then you tell Boss Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital isn’t big enough for the two of us. I’m always top man everywhere. I was even boss pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton – so I think if I’m to be a loony, then I must be a good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yellow skunk and better be out of town by sunset.”
Harding leans back in his chair. “Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I’ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we’ll settle this affair once and for all.” Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high voice. “You might also warn him, just to be fair, that I have been boss loony on this ward for almost two years, and that I’m crazier than any man alive.”
“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy that I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”
“Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!”
“And you tell Mr. Harding right back” – he puts both hands on the table and leans down – “that I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.”
“I take off my hat,” Harding says, bows his head, and shakes hands with McMurphy. There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure just what.
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