One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Кен КизиЧитать онлайн книгу.
the “Combine.” It’s a huge organization, the aim of which is to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside. She is a real veteran at adjusting things. She was already the Big Nurse in the old place when I came in from the Outside so long ago, and she’d been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long.
She’s got more and more skillful over the years. Practice has strengthened her until now she uses a sure power that goes in all directions on thin wires too small for anybody’s eye except mine; I see how she sits in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, runs her network with mechanical insect skill, knows every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results that she wants. I was an electrician’s assistant in training camp before the Army shipped me to Germany and I had some electronics in my year in college. That is where I learned how these things can be manipulated.
There, in the center of those wires, she dreams of a world of precision and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients are obedient wheelchair Chronics with catheter tubes that run directly from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor. Year by year she gathers her ideal staff: doctors, all ages and types, come and rise up in front of her with ideas of their own about the way a ward should be run. Some of them are strong enough and stand behind their ideas, and she fixes these doctors with dry-ice eyes day in, day out, until they retreat with unnatural chills. “I tell you I don’t know what it is,” they say to the head of personnel department. “Since I started on that ward with that woman I feel like my veins are running ammonia. I shiver all the time, my kids won’t sit in my lap, my wife won’t sleep with me. I insist on a transfer-neurology, pediatrics, I just don’t care!”
It goes on for years. The doctors stay three weeks, three months. Until she finally chooses a little man with a big wide forehead and wide cheeks and very narrow across his very small eyes as if he once wore glasses that were too small, wore them for so long that they pressed his face in the middle, so now he has glasses on a string to his collar button; they don’t sit well on the purple bridge of his little nose and they are always slipping one side or the other, so he tips his head when he talks just to keep his glasses level. That’s her doctor.
Her three daytime black boys she acquires after more years of testing and rejecting thousands. They come at her in a long black row of sulky, big-nosed masks, hating her and her chalk doll whiteness from the first look they get. She tests them and their hate for a month or so, then lets them go because they don’t hate enough. She finally gets the three of them, one at a time over a number of years, who hate enough for her plan.
All of them black as telephones. The blacker they are, she learned from that long dark row that came before them, the more time they’ll devote to cleaning and scrubbing and keeping the ward in order. For example, all three of these boys’ uniforms are always spotless as snow. White and cold and stiff as her own.
All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts, and white shoes polished like ice, and the shoes have red rubber soles silent as mice up and down the hall. They never make any noise when they move. They materialize in different parts of the ward every time a patient wants to check himself in private or whisper some secret to another guy. A patient’ll be in a corner all by himself, when all of a sudden he’ll hear a squeak, and frost forms along his cheek, and he turns in that direction and there’s a cold stone mask floating above him against the wall. He just sees the black face. No body. The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and it seems that the black face and hands float against it like a ghost.
After years of training all three black boys understand the Big Nurse very well. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions that might be found by a visiting wife or schoolteacher. She doesn’t need to do it any more. The black boys do what she wants before she even thinks it.
So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks ward like a watchman’s clock. Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes are up and out of bed quickly because otherwise the black boys will prod them out, make them do a lot of work in the hall. The Wheelers swing dead legs out on the floor and wait like seated statues when somebody’ll bring chairs to them. The Vegetables piss the bed, electric shock and buzzer activates and rolls them off on the tile where the black boys can hose them down and get them in clean greens…
Six-forty-five: the shavers buzz and the Acutes line up in alphabetical order at the mirrors, A, B, C, D… The walking Chronics like me walk in when the Acutes are done, then the Wheelers are wheeled in.
Seven o’clock: the mess hall opens and the order of line-up reverses: the Wheelers first, then the Walkers, then the Acutes pick up trays, corn flakes, bacon and eggs, toast and this morning a canned peach on a piece of green, torn lettuce. Some of the Acutes bring trays to the Wheelers. Most Wheelers are just Chronics with bad legs, they feed themselves, but there’re three Wheelers that have got no action from the neck down whatsoever, not much from the neck up. These are called Vegetables. The black boys push them in, wheel them against a wall, and bring them identical trays of muddy-looking food for these toothless three: eggs, ham, toast, bacon, all chewed thirty-two times by the stainless-steel machine in the kitchen.
The black boys feed the Vegetables quickly. They open their mouths with the spoon without ceremony, and they curse them all the time:“This ol’ fart Blastic. I can’t tell no more if I’m feeding him bacon puree or chunks of his own fuckin’ tongue.”…
Seven-thirty: back to the day room. The Big Nurse looks out through her special glass and nods at what she sees. She pushes a button and things start. Everything is in order. Acutes: sit on their side of the day room and wait when cards and Monopoly games will be brought out. Chronics: sit on their side and wait for puzzles from the Red Cross box.
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and jerking through some kind of foolish story that might be really funny if the cartoon figures weren’t real guys…
Seven-forty-five: the black boys move down the line of Chronics and tape catheters on the ones that will hold still for it. Catheters are second-hand condoms the ends of which are cut off and fixed to tubes that run down pantlegs to a plastic sack.My job is to wash them at the end of each day. The black boys tape the condom to the hairs; old Catheter Chronics are hairless as babies from tape removal…
Eight o’clock: the speaker in the ceiling says, “Medications” in the Big Nurse’s voice. The Acutes line up at the glass door, A, B, C, D, then the Chronics, then the Wheelers. The guys get a capsule and a paper cup with water from the nurse and wash the capsule down. Very seldom some fool might ask what medication it is.
“Wait just a moment, honey; what are these two little red capsules in here with my vitamin?”
I know him. He’s a big Acute, already getting the reputation of a troublemaker.
“It’s just medication, Mr. Taber, good for you. Swallow it.”
“But I mean what kind of medication. Christ, I can see that they’re pills —”
“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber – just for me?” He still isn’t ready to swallow something he doesn’t know what is, not even just for her.
“Miss, I don’t like to create trouble. But I don’t like to swallow something without knowing what it is. How do I know this isn’t one of those funny pills that makes me something I’m not?”
“Don’t get upset, Mr. Taber —”
“Upset? Christ, all I want to know —”
But the Big Nurse has come up quietly. “That’s all right, Miss Flinn,” she says. “If Mr. Taber chooses to act like a child, he will be treated as such. We’ve tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that’s not the answer. Hostility, hostility, that’s the thanks we get. You can go, Mr. Taber, if you don’t wish to take your medication orally.”
“All I wanted to know, for the —”
“You can go.”
He goes off and spends the morning thinking about those capsules. I once played as if I’d swallowed one of those same