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.

All the other Acutes come up close to see what new sort this fellow is. Nobody like him has ever been on the ward before. They’re asking him with great interest where he’s from and what his business is. He says he’s a dedicated man. He says he was just a wanderer and bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; they taught him to play poker. Since then he has settled down and devoted himself to gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he wants to, if people would let him, he says, “but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man. Ever since I found my calling I’ve done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I like to fight too much. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a fight; that’s excusable, they say, that’s a hard-working feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know that you play a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal.”

He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.

“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the rules. To tell the truth, this fight I was doing in Pendleton was the first one in close to a year. I was out of practice. That’s why this guy was able to get up off the floor and get to the cops before I left town. A very tough individual…”

He laughs again and shakes hands and sits down to arm wrestle every time that black boy gets too near him with the thermometer. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics. You can’t tell if he’s really this friendly or if he’s got some gambler’s reason for trying to get acquainted with guys so far gone that a lot of them don’t even know their names.

Nobody can understand why he’s trying to get acquainted with everybody, but it’s better than mixing jigsaw puzzles. He keeps saying it’s a necessary thing to get around and meet the men he’ll be dealing with, part of a gambler’s job. But he must know he isn’t going to be dealing with no eighty-year-old organic who couldn’t do any more with a playing card than put it in his mouth and gum it awhile. Yet he looks like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

I’m the last one. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and starts to laugh again. All of a sudden I was afraid that he was laughing because he knew the truth about me: that the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, looking straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.

“Hooeee,” he said, “look what we got here.”

I remember all this part very well. I remember the way he closed one eye and laughed at me. I thought that he was winking at me because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act. “What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sitdown strike.” He looked over to the Acutes to see if they might laugh about his joke; when they just sniggered he looked back to me and winked again. “What’s your name, Chief?”

Billy Bibbit called across the room. “His n-n-nme is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom because he sweeps a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.”

McMurphy kept looking at me. “ I wonder how tall he is.”

“I think somebody m-m-measured him once at s-six feet seven; but even if he is big, he’s afraid of his own sh-sh-shadow. Just a bi-big deaf Indian.”

“When I saw him sittin’ here I thought he looked some Indian. But Bromden isn’t an Indian name. What tribe is he?”

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “He was here wh-when I c-came.”

“I have information from the doctor,” Harding said, “that he is only half Indian, a Columbia Indian, I think. The doctor said that his father was the tribal leader, hence this fellow’s title, Chief. As to the Bromden part of the name, I’m afraid my knowledge in Indian language doesn’t cover that.”

McMurphy leaned his head down near mine where I had to look at him. “Is that right? You deaf, Chief?”

“He’s de-de-deaf and dumb.”

McMurphy looked at my face a long time. Then he straightened back up and put his hand out. “Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can’t he? Deaf or whatever. By God, Chief, you may be big, but you shake my hand or I’ll think it an insult. And it’s not a good idea to insult the new boss loony of the hospital.”

When he said that he looked at Harding and Billy and made a face, but he left that hand in front of me, big as a dinner plate.

I remember very clearly the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he’d worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.

When that palm touched my hand, I felt his strength coming into it. It rang with blood and power: it grew near as big as his, I remember…

“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 told her. She’s tapping that thermometer against her wrist watch. She tries to size up this new man.

“Aide Williams tells me, Mr. McMurry, that you’ve been somewhat difficult about your admission shower. Is this true? I’m sorry to interrupt you and Mr. Bromden, but you do understand: everyone… must follow the rules.”

He gives that wink that she isn’t fooling him any more than I did. He looks up at her with one eye for a minute.

“Ya know, ma’am,” he says, “ya know – that is the exact thing somebody always tells me about the rules…”

He grins. They both smile, sizing each other up.

“…just when they think that I’m going to do something absolutely opposite.”

Then he lets my hand go.

In the glass Station the Big Nurse is filling hypodermics with some medication. One of the little nurses picks up the little tray of filled hypodermics but doesn’t carry them away just yet.

“What, Miss Ratched, do you think about this new patient? He’s good-looking and friendly and everything, but I think that he certainly wants to be a leader.”

The Big Nurse tests a needle against her fingertip. “I’m afraid that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to be a leader. He is what we call a ’manipulator’, Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends.”

“Oh. But in a mental hospital? What could his ends be?”

“Any number of things.” She smiles and continues to fill the hypodermics. “Comfort and an easy life, for example; the feeling of power and respect, perhaps; monetary profit – perhaps all of these things. Sometimes a manipulator’s own ends are simply the disorder in the ward for the sake of disorder. There are such people in our society. A manipulator can influence the other patients and lead to such great disorder that it may take months to get everything running smooth once more. With the present liberal philosophy in mental hospitals, a manipulator can do his work easily. Some years ago it was quite different. I remember some years ago we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was a strong Ward Manipulator. For a while.” She looks up from her work. Her eyes get pleased with the memory. “Mistur Tay-bur,” she says.

“But, Miss Ratched,” the other nurse says, “what possible motive can such man have?”

“You forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”

The Big Nurse gets really furious because of the slightest disorder on the ward. She walks around with that same doll smile, but down inside of her she’s tense as steel. I know, I can feel it. And she doesn’t relax a bit till she gets the things in order again and a man responsible for that disorder “adjusted to surroundings,” as she calls it.

Under her rule the ward Inside is almost completely adjusted to surroundings. But the thing is she can’t be on the ward all the time. She’s got to spend some time Outside. So she wants to adjust the Outside world too. She works together with others. I call them 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.