© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2016

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2016

…one flew east, one flew west,

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

Children’s folkverse

Part I

Three black boys in white suits are mopping up the hall when I come out of the dorm.

They usually get up before me and commit sex acts in the hall before I can catch them. I feel their hate.

When they hate like this, it’s better if they don’t see me. I walk along the wall quietly as dust in my canvas shoes, but they somehow feel my fear and they all look up, all three at once, their eyes’re glittering out of the black faces.

“Here’s the Chief. The super Chief, fellows. Ol’ Chief Broom. Here you go, Chief Broom.”

One of them puts a mop in my hand and points to the spot where I must clean today, and I go.

They start talking behind me, heads close together. Hospital secrets, hate and death. They think I’m deaf and dumb, so they’re not afraid to talk about their hate secrets when I’m nearby. Everybody thinks I’m deaf and dumb. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. I’m half Indian, and if this fact ever helped me in this dirty life, it helped me to be cagey, helped me all these years.

I’m mopping near the ward door when the Big Nurse opens it with a key. She comes in and locks the door behind her.

She’s carrying her wicker bag in the shape of a tool box. She’s had it during all the years I’ve been here. It’s of loose-weave and I can see inside it; there’s no compactor lipstick or woman things, that bag is full of the things she’s going to use in her duties today – wheels and cogs, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers’ pliers, rolls of copperwire…

She nods at me as she goes past me. I push the mop back to the wall and smile and try not to let her see my eyes – they can’t tell so much about you if your eyes are closed.

In my dark I hear how the things in her wicker bag clash as she passes me in the hall. When I open my eyes she’s near the glass Nurses’ Station where she’ll spend the day sitting at her desk and looking out of her window and making notes on what goes on in front of her in the day room during the next eight hours. Her face looks pleased and peaceful with the thought.

Then… she sees those black boys. They’re still talking in the hall. They didn’t hear how she came into the ward. They sense that she’s glaring down at them now, but it’s too late. It was a mistake to group up and whisper together when she was expected on the ward. She bends and advances on where they’re trapped at the end of the corridor. She knows what they’ve been saying, and I can see that she’s furious. She’s going to tear the black bastards limb from limb, she’s so furious. She looks around her. Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there who is hiding behind his mop and can’t call for help because he can’t talk. So she really lets herself go and her painted mouth twists, stretches to an open snarl. I hold my breath. My God, this time they’re gonna do it! This time they let the hate build up too high and they’re gonna tear one another to pieces before they realize what they’re doing!

But right at that moment all the patients start coming out of the dorms to check on what’s the hullabaloo about and she has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of her hideous real self. The patients are still half asleep. They see the head nurse. She is smiling and calm and cold as usual. She is telling the black boys that they shouldn’t stand in a group and gossip when it is Monday morning and there is such a lot to get done on the first morning of the week…

“…old Monday morning, you know, boys…”

“Yeah, Miz Ratched…

“…and we have a number of appointments this morning, so perhaps, if your group talking isn’t too urgent…”

“Yeah, Miz Ratched…”

She stops and nods at some of the patients who stand around and stare out of eyes all red and puffy with sleep. She nods once to each. Her face is smooth, like an expensive baby doll, and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils – everything works perfectly together except the orange color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing when those big, womanly breasts were put on that otherwise perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.

The men are still standing and waiting. They want to know what appointments she was telling the black boys about, so she remembers me and says, “And since it is Monday, boys, it will be a good start on the week if we shave poor Mr. Bromden first this morning, before breakfast, and see if we can’t avoid some of the noise he usually makes.”

Before anybody can turn to look for me I hide in the mop closet, shut the door after me, hold my breath. Shaving before you get breakfast is the worst time. When you got something under your belt you’re stronger and more wide awake, and the bastards who work for the Combine can’t use one of their machines on you in place of an electric shaver. But when you shave before breakfast – six-thirty in the morning – then what chance you got against one of their machines?

I hide in the mop closet and listen, my heart is beating in the dark, and I try not to be afraid, try to think of something else – try to think back and remember things about the village and the big Columbia River, think about one time when Papa and me were hunting birds near The Dalles… But as always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear of the present moment breaks the memory. I can feel that one black boy is coming up the hall. He is smelling out for my fear. He opens out his nostrils and he sniffs in fear from all over the ward. He’s smelling me now. He doesn’t know where I’m hiding, but he’s smelling and he’s hunting around. I try to keep still…

(Papa tells me to keep still, tells me that the dog senses a bird somewhere right close. We borrowed a pointer dog from a man in The Dalles. All the village dogs are mongrels, Papa says, no class at all; this here dog, he got instinct. I don’t say anything, but I already see the bird up in a tree, a gray knot of feathers. The dog is running in circles underneath. There is too much smell around, and he can’t point for sure. The bird is safe as long as he keeps still, but the dog is sniffing and circling, louder and closer. Then the bird breaks, spreads feathers, jumps out of the tree into the birdshot from Papa’s gun.)

The black boys catch me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag me back to the shaving room. I don’t fight or make any noise. If you yell it’s just tougher on you. I hold back the yelling till they get to my temples. I’m not sure it’s one of those substitute machines and not a shaver till it gets to my temples; then I can’t hold back. I yell so loudly that everybody puts their hands over their ears though they are behind a glass wall. Everybody yells at me, but no sound comes from the mouths. My sound soaks up all other sound. They start the fog machine again and it’s snowing down cold and white all over me like skim milk, so thick I might even be able to hide in it if they didn’t hold me. I can’t see six inches in front of me through the fog but I can hear over the noise I’m making that the Big Nurse is storming up the hall while she crashes patients out of her way with that wicker bag. I hear but I still can’t hush my yelling. I yell till she gets there. They hold me down while she jams wicker bag into my mouth and pushes it down with a mop handle.

When the fog clears and I can see, I’m sitting in the day room. They didn’t take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion. I don’t remember if I got breakfast or not. Probably not. I can remember some mornings when I was locked in Seclusion, the black boys brought breakfast things there, but they didn’t give anything to me, they ate it themselves.

This morning I don’t remember. They got so many pills down me that I don’t know a thing till I hear that the ward door opens. The ward door opening means that it’s at least eight o’clock.

Since eight o’clock the ward door opens and closes a thousand times a day. Every morning we sit in the day room, mix jigsaw puzzles after breakfast. When a key hits the lock, we wait to see what’s coming in. There’s nothing else to do. Sometimes a young resident comes in early to watch what we’re like Before Medication. BM, they call it. Sometimes it’s a visiting wife on high heels, who holds her purse tight over her belly. Sometimes it’s a group of grade-school teachers on a tour with that fool Public Relation man who’s always clapping his wet hands together and saying how overjoyed he is that mental hospitals had put an end to all the old-fashioned cruelty. “What a cheerful atmosphere, don’t you agree?” He’ll bustle around the schoolteachers, who stay in a close group for safety, and clap his hands together. “Oh, when I think back on the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, brutality, oh, I realize, ladies, that we have come a long way in our campaign!” Whoever comes in the door is usually somebody disappointing, but there’s always a chance otherwise, and when a key hits the lock, all the heads come up at once.

This morning the sound of the key in the lock is strange; it’s not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man’s voice calls down impatiently, “Admission, come sign for him,” and the black boys go.

Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns toward the day-room door. On most days I’m out of the day room and sweep the hall, and I can see who they’re signing in, but this morning the Big Nurse put a thousand pills down me and I can’t get out of 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 changed over. Ellis is a Chronic who came in as an Acute and became Chronic when they overloaded him in that brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition 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.