One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

“Mr. McMurry.” It’s the Big Nurse. “Mr. McMurry, could you come here please?” It’s the Big Nurse. That black boy with the thermometer has gone and got her.

The Big Nurse tests a needle against her fingertip. “I’m afraid”—she stabs the needle down in the rubber-capped vial and lifts the plunger—“that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to take over. He is what we call a ‘manipulator,’ Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends.”

I recall some years back we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was an intolerable Ward Manipulator. For a while.”

Working alongside others like her who I call the “Combine,” which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside, has made her 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 back, and she’d been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long.

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 is how I learned about the way these things can be rigged.

The doctors last three weeks, three months. Until she finally settles for a little man with a big wide forehead and wide jowly cheeks and squeezed narrow across his tiny eyes like he once wore glasses that were way too small, wore them for so long they crimped his face in the middle, so now he has glasses on a string to his collar button; they teeter on the purple bridge of his little nose and they are always slipping one side or the other so he’ll tip 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.

The first one she gets five years after I been on the ward, a twisted sinewy dwarf the color of cold asphalt. His mother was raped in Georgia while his papa stood by tied to the hot iron stove with plow traces, blood streaming into his shoes. The boy watched from a closet, five years old and squinting his eye to peep out the crack between the door and the jamb, and he never grew an inch after.

The other two black boys come two years later, coming to work only about a month apart and both looking so much alike I think she had a replica made of the one who came first. They are tall and sharp and bony and their faces are chipped into expressions that never change, like flint arrowheads. Their eyes come to points. If you brush against their hair it rasps the hide right off you.

All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts with metal snaps down one side 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 figures to check himself in private or whisper some secret to another guy.

Ellis: go to your place at the wall, hands up to receive the nails and pee running down your leg. Pete: wag your head like a puppet. Scanlon: work your knobby hands on the table in front of you, constructing a make-believe bomb to blow up a make-believe world. Harding: begin talking, waving your dove hands in the air, then trap them under your armpits because grown men aren’t supposed to wave their pretty hands that way. Sefelt: begin moaning about your teeth hurting and your hair falling out. Everybody: breath in … and out … in perfect order; hearts all beating at the rate the OD cards have ordered. Sound of matched cylinders.

The speaker in the ceiling says, “Medications,” using the Big Nurse’s voice. We look in the glass case where she sits, but she’s nowhere near the microphone; in fact, she’s ten feet away from the microphone, tutoring one of the little nurses how to prepare a neat drug tray with pills arranged orderly. The Acutes line up at the glass door, A, B, C, D, then the Chronics, then the Wheelers (the Vegetables get theirs later, mixed in a spoon of applesauce). The guys file by and get a capsule in a paper cup—throw it to the back of the throat and get the cup filled with water by the little nurse

“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber—just for me?” She takes a quick look at the Big Nurse to see how the little flirting technique she is using is accepted, then looks back at the Acute. He still isn’t ready to swallow something he don’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, neither. 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—”

I got away once holding one of those same red capsules under my tongue, played like I’d swallowed it, and crushed it open later in the broom closet. For a tick of time, before it all turned into white dust, I saw it was a miniature electronic element like the ones I helped the Radar Corps work with in the

The ward is a factory for the Combine. It’s for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart;

A successful Dismissal like this is a product brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart and speaks good of her craft and the whole industry in general. Everybody’s happy with a Dismissal.

She was almost flustered for a second there. Some of the Acutes hide grins, and McMurphy takes a huge stretch, yawns, winks at Harding.

and one arrest—for Rape.” “Rape?” The doctor perks up. “Statutory, with a girl of—” “Whoa. Couldn’t make that stick,” McMurphy says to the doctor. “Girl wouldn’t testify.” “With a child of fifteen.” “Said she was seventeen, Doc, and she was plenty willin’.”

“Doctor”—he stands up to his full height, wrinkles his forehead, and holds out both arms, open and honest to all the wide world—“do I look like a sane man?”

Pete’s been a Chronic all his life. Even though he didn’t come into the hospital till he was better than fifty, he’d always been a Chronic. His head has two big dents, one on each side, where the doctor who was with his mother at horning time pinched his skull trying to pull him out.

“Tired …” “I said you goin’ to the dorm, old man!” The black boy jerked at his arm again, and Pete stopped wigwagging his head. He stood up straight and steady, and his eyes snapped clear. Usually Pete’s eyes are half shut and all murked up, like there’s milk in them, but this time they came clear as blue neon. And the hand on that arm the black boy was holding commenced to swell up. The staff and most of the rest of the patients were talking among themselves, not paying any attention to this old guy and his old song about being tired, figuring he’d be quieted down as usual and the meeting would go on. They didn’t see the hand on the end of that arm pumping bigger and bigger as he clenched and unclenched it. I was the only one saw it. I saw it swell and clench shut, flow in front of my eyes, become smooth—hard. A big rusty iron ball at the end of a chain. I stared at it and waited, while the black boy gave Pete’s arm another jerk toward the dorm. “Ol’ man, I say you got—” He saw the hand. He tried to edge back away from it, saying, “You a good boy, Peter,” but he was a shade too late. Pete had that big iron ball swinging all the way from his knees. The black boy whammed flat against the wall and stuck, then slid down to the floor like the wall there was greased. I heard tubes pop and short all over inside that wall, and the plaster cracked just the shape of how he hit.

This thought got them both at once and they froze, the big one and his tiny image, in exactly the same position, left foot forward, right hand out, halfway between Pete and the Big Nurse. That iron ball swinging in front of them and that snow-white anger behind them, they shook and smoked and I could hear gears grinding. I could see them twitch with confusion, like machines throttled full ahead and with the brake on.

Billy Bibbit and Cheswick change into hunched-over white rabbits, right before my eyes, but they are too ashamed to do any of the things Harding told them to do.

I see Billy Bibbit has changed back from a rabbit.

“Ah, it’s n-no use. I should just k-k-kill myself.”

“Why, if you mean do I think I could get a bone up over that old buzzard, no, I don’t believe I could….” “She’s not all that homely, McMurphy. Her face is quite handsome and well preserved. And in spite of all her attempts to conceal them, in that sexless get-up, you can still make out the evidence of some rather extraordinary breasts. She must have been a rather beautiful young woman.

“Just what I said: any of you sharpies here willing to take my five bucks that says that I can get the best of that woman—before the week’s up—without her getting the best of me? One week, and if I don’t have her to where she don’t know whether to shit or go blind, the bet is yours.”

And instead of fog sometimes she’ll let a clear chemical gas in through the vents, and the whole ward is set solid when the gas changes into plastic.

When nothing else is going on, you usually got the fog or the time control to contend

I could of watched McMurphy at that blackjack table all night, the way he dealt and talked and roped them in and led them smack up to the point where they were just about to quit, then backed down a hand or two to give them confidence and bring them along again.

He isn’t even kidding himself into thinking they fall for that. He let them win, and every one of us watching the game knows it. So do the players.

Oh, one more thing before I leave it in your hands tonight, Miss Pilbow; that new man sitting over there, the one with the garish red sideburns and facial lacerations—I’ve reason to believe he is a sex maniac.”)

His arms and neck and face are sunburned and bristled with curly orange hairs. He’s got tattoos on each big shoulder; one says “Fighting Leathernecks” and has a devil with a red eye and red horns and an M-1 rifle, and the other is a poker hand fanned out across his muscle—aces and eights. He puts his roll of clothes on the nightstand next to my bed and goes to punching at his pillow. He’s been assigned the bed right next to mine.

He’s still awake and he’s laughing to himself about something. He stops laughing and whispers, “Why, you sure did give a jump when I told you that coon was coming, Chief. I thought somebody told me you was deef.”

Right and left there are other things happening just as bad—crazy, horrible things too goofy and outlandish to cry about and too much true to laugh about—but the fog is getting thick enough I don’t have to watch. And somebody’s tugging at my arm. I know already what will happen: somebody’ll drag me out of the fog and we’ll be back on the ward and there won’t be a sign of what went on tonight and if I was fool enough to try and tell anybody about it they’d say, Idiot, you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don’t exist. But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?

It’s Mr. Turkle that pulls me out of the fog by the arm, shaking me and grinning. He says, “You havin’ a bad dream. Mistuh Bromden.”

This time he doesn’t untie the sheet but walks away from me to help two aides I never saw before and a young doctor lift old Blastic onto the stretcher and carry him out, covered with a sheet—handle him more careful than anybody ever handled him before in all his life.

The Big Nurse’s key hits the lock, and the black boy is up to her soon as she’s in the door, shifting from foot to foot like a kid asking to pee. I’m close enough I hear McMurphy’s name come into his conversation a couple of times, so I know he’s telling her about McMurphy brushing his teeth, completely forgetting to tell her about the old Vegetable who died during the night.

Oh, your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too po-o-or; they say I’m not worthy to enter your door.”’ Her face is puzzled at first; like the rest of us, it’s been so long since she’s heard singing it takes her a second to recognize what it is. “‘Hard livin’s my pleasure, my money’s my o-o-own, an’ them that don’t like me, they can leave me alone.”’ She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel.

Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips—stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her. Her own grin is giving way, sagging at the edges. “Good morning, Miss Rat-shed! How’s things on the outside?” “You can’t run around here—in a towel!” “No?” He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. “Towels against ward policy too? Well, I guess there’s nothin’ to do exce—” “Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”

If some of the patients could be out to see her now, McMurphy could start collecting his bets.

“You guess! You’ll do more than guess! You’ll get him a uniform this instant, Mr. Washington, or spend the next two weeks working on Geriatrics Ward! Yes. You may need a month of bedpans and slab baths to refresh your appreciation of just how little work you aides have to do on this ward. If this was one of the other wards, who do you think would be scouring the hall all day? Mr. Bromden here? No, you know who it would be. We excuse you aides from most of your housekeeping duties to enable you to see to the patients. And that means seeing that they don’t parade around exposed. What do you think would have happened if one of the young nurses had come in early and found a patient running round the halls without a uniform? What do you think!”

McMurphy just looks confused, like he don’t know how to take the outfit the black boy’s handing to him, what with one hand holding the toothbrush and the other hand holding up the towel. He finally winks at the nurse and shrugs and unwraps the towel, drapes it over her shoulder like she was a wooden rack. I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along. I think for a fact that she’d rather he’d of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She’s glaring at those big white whales leaping found on his shorts in pure wordless outrage. That’s more’n she can take. It’s a full minute before she can pull herself together enough to turn on the least black boy; her voice is shaking out of control, she’s so mad.

by this time some of the other patients are out of the dorm and wondering about the little clutch of us here in the hall. She closes her eyes and concentrates. She can’t have them see her face like this, white and warped with fury. She uses all the power of control that’s in her. Gradually the lips gather together again under the little white nose, run together, like the red-hot wire had got hot enough to melt, shimmer a second, then click solid as the molten metal sets, growing cold and strangely dull. Her lips part, and her tongue comes between them, a chunk of slag. Her eyes open again, and they have that strange dull and cold and flat look the lips have, but she goes into her good-morning routine like there was nothing different about her, figuring the patients’ll be too sleepy to notice.

“Good morning, Mr. Sefelt, are your teeth any better? Good morning Mr. Fredrickson, did you and Mr. Sefelt have a good night last night? You bed right next to each other, don’t you? Incidentally, it’s been brought to my attention that you two have made some arrangement with your medication—you are letting Bruce have your medication, aren’t you, Mr. Sefelt? We’ll discuss that later. Good morning, Billy; I saw your mother on the way in, and she told me to be sure to tell you she thought of you all the time and knew you wouldn’t disappoint her. Good morning, Mr. Harding—why, look, your fingertips are red and raw. Have you been chewing your fingernails again?”

“Hey, Billy boy, you remember that time in Seattle you and me picked up those two twitches? One of the best rolls I ever had.” Billy’s eyes bob up from his plate. He opens his mouth but can’t say a thing. McMurphy turns to Harding. “We’d never have brought it off, neither, picking them up on the spur of the moment that way, except that they’d heard tell of Billy Bibbit. Billy ‘Club’ Bibbit, he was known as in them days. Those girls were about to take off when one looked at him and says ‘Are you the renowned Billy Club Bibbit? Of the famous fourteen inches?’ And Billy ducked his head and blushed—like he’s doin’ now—and we were a shoo-in. And I remember, when we got them up to the hotel, there was this woman’s voice from over near Billy’s bed, says, ‘Mister Bibbit, I’m disappointed in you; I heard that you had four—four—for goodness sakes!”’

He gets seconds on everything and makes a date with the girl pours coffee in the kitchen for when he gets discharged, and he compliments the Negro cook on sunnysiding the best eggs he ever ate.

But McMurphy can’t keep still for that; he’s got to be up to something. After about two minutes of pushing food scraps around his plate with his spoon, he’s ready for more excitement. He hooks his thumbs in his pockets and tips back and one-eyes that clock up on the wall. Then he rubs his nose. “You know—that old clock up there puts me in mind of the targets at the target range at Fort Riley. That’s where I got my first medal, a sharpshooter medal. Dead-Eye Murphy. Who wants to lay me a pore little dollar that I can’t put this dab of butter square in the center of the face of that clock up there, or at least on the face?”

The black boy senses something is in the air, but he can’t see what. And he probably never would of known except old Colonel Matterson is gazing around, and he sees the butter stuck up on the wall and this causes him to point up at it and go into one of his lessons, explaining to us all in his patient, rumbling voice, just like what he said made sense. “The but-ter … is the Re-pub-li-can party….”

“You look deep in thought today, Mr. McMurphy.” “Oh, I’m a thinker all right,” McMurphy says, and they walk off together down the hall. When they come back what seems like days later, they’re both grinning and talking and happy about something. The doctor is wiping tears off his glasses and looks like he’s actually been laughing, and McMurphy is back as loud and full of brass and swagger as ever. He’s that way all through lunch, and at one o’clock he’s the first one in his seat for the meeting, his eyes blue and ornery from his place in the corner.