“Demerol, my friend, is a synthetic opiate, twice as addictive as heroin. Doctors are often addicted to it.”

“That little fart? Is he a dope addict?”

“I’m certain I don’t know.”

“Then why does she accuse him of —”

“Oh, you’re not paying attention, my friend. No. She doesn’t need to accuse. She has a genius for insinuation. Did she, in the course of our discussion today, ever once accused me of anything? Yet it seems that I have been accused of a lot of things, of jealousy and paranoia, of not being man enough to satisfy my wife, of having relations with male friends of mine, of holding my cigarette in an affected manner, even – it seems to me – accused of having nothing between my legs but a patch of hair – and soft and downy and blond hair at that! Ball-cutter? Oh, you underestimate her!”

Harding takes McMurphy’s hand in both of his.

“This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolfs about. And he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t fight the wolf. Now, would that be wise? Would it?”

He starts his awful laugh again.

“Mr. McMurphy… my friend… I’m not a chicken, I’m a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us here are rabbits, hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not here because we are rabbits – we’d be rabbits wherever we were – we’re all here because we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.”

“Man, you’re talkin’ like a fool. You mean to tell me that you’re gonna sit back and let some old blue-haired woman talk you into being a rabbit?”

“Not talk me into it, no. I was born a rabbit. Just look at me. I simply need the nurse to make me happy with my role.”

“You’re no damned rabbit!”

“See the ears? the little button tail?”

“You’re talking like a crazy ma —”

“Like a crazy man?”

“Damn it, Harding, I didn’t mean it like that. You aren’t crazy that way. I mean – hell, I’ve been surprised how sane you guys all are.”

Harding says, “Mr. Bibbit, hop around for Mr. McMurphy here. Mr. Cheswick, show him how furry you are.”

But Billy Bibbit and Cheswick are too ashamed to do any of the things Harding told them to do.

“Ah, McMurphy, perhaps, the fellows are feeling guilty for their behavior at the meeting. Cheer up, friends, you’ve no reason to feel ashamed. It is all as it should be. It’s not the rabbit’s place to stick up for his fellow. That would have been foolish. No, you were wise, cowardly but wise.”

McMurphy turns in his chair and looks the other Acutes up and down. “I’m not so sure that they shouldn’t be ashamed. Personally, I thought it was shameful the way they acted on her side against you. For a minute there I thought I was back in a Red Chinese prison camp…”

Harding points his cigarette at McMurphy. “In fact you too, Mr. McMurphy, though you behave like a cowboy, are probably just as soft and rabbit-souled as we are.”…

“Yeah, what makes me a rabbit, Harding? My psychopathic tendencies? Is it my fightin’ tendencies, or my fuckin’ tendencies? Must be the fuckin’, mustn’t it? Yeah, that probably makes me a rabbit —”

“Yes. Um. But that simply shows that you are a healthy, functioning and adequate rabbit, where as most of us are sexually weak. Failures, we are weak little rabbits, without any sexual ability.”

“Wait a minute; that’s not what I say —”

“No. You were right. When you said, that the nurse was concentrating her pecking at the balls, it was true. We’re all afraid that we’re losing or have already lost our sexuality. We’re weak rabbits of the rabbit world!”

“Harding! Shut your damned mouth!”

Harding looks at McMurphy and speaks so softly that I have to push my broom to his chair to hear what he says.

“Friend… you… may be a wolf.”

“Goddammit, I’m no wolf and you’re no rabbit.”

McMurphy turns from Harding to the rest of the Acutes. “Here; all you guys. What the hell is the matter with you? You aren’t as crazy as all this, thinking you’re some animal.”

“No,” Cheswick says and steps in beside McMurphy. “No, by God, not me. I’m not any rabbit.”

“That’s the boy, Cheswick. And the rest of you. Why are you afraid of some fifty-year-old woman? What can she do to you, anyway?”

“Yeah, what?” Cheswick says and glares around at the others.

“Well, when she asks one of those questions, why don’t you tell her to go to hell?”McMurphy says.

The Acutes are coming closer to them. Harding says, “My friend, if you continue to tell people to go to hell, you will go to the Shock Shop, perhaps even to an operation, an —”

“Damn it, Harding, what does that mean?”

“The Shock Shop, Mr. McMurphy, is jargon for the EST machine, the Electro Shock Therapy.”

“What does this thing do?”

“You are strapped to a table. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Electricity through the brain and you have therapy and a punishment for your go-to-hell behavior. After these treatments and a man could become like Mr. Ellis there against the wall. An idiot at thirty-five. Or look at Chief Broom beside you.”

Harding points his cigarette at me. I go on with my sweeping.

“I’ve heard that the Chief, years ago, received more than two hundred shock treatments when they were really the vogue. Look at him: a giant janitor. There’s your Vanishing American, a six-foot-eight sweeping machine, who is afraid of its own shadow. That, my friend, may be done to us.”

McMurphy looks at me a while, then turns back to Harding.

“Look at you here: you say the Chief is afraid of his own shadow, but I never saw a more afraid-looking bunch in my life than you guys.”

“Not me!” Cheswick says.

“Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even afraid to open up and laugh. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. A man lets a woman beat him down till he can’t laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he’s got on his side. He’ll begin to think she’s tougher than he is and —”

“Tell me, Mr. McMurphy, how does a man show a woman who’s boss, I mean other than laughing at her? How does he show her who’s king of the mountain? A man like you should be able to tell us that. You don’t beat her, do you? No, then she calls the law. You don’t lose your temper and shout at her; she’ll win by using soothing sounds. Have you ever tried to keep up an angry front in the face of such consolation? So you see, my friend, it is somewhat as you stated: man has only one truly effective weapon against the crushing force of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip society, more and more people are discovering how to make that weapon useless and conquer those who have been the conquerors till the present moment —”

“Lord, Harding, but you do come on,” McMurphy says.

“– and do you think, McMurphy, that you could effectively use your weapon against our champion? Do you think you could use it against Miss Ratched? Ever?”

And he points toward the glass case. Everybody’s head turns to look. She’s in there, looking out through her window, got a tape recorder hidden somewhere, getting all this down – already planning how to work it into the schedule.

The nurse sees that everybody is looking at her and she nods and they all turn away. McMurphy takes off his cap and runs his hands into that red hair. Now everybody is looking at him; they’re waiting for his answer and he knows it. He feels that he’s been trapped some way. He puts the cap back on and rubs the stitch marks on his nose.

“Why, if you mean do I think I could get a bone up over that old buzzard, no, I don’t think I could…”

“Ah, McMurphy. Her face is quite handsome and well preserved. And she has some rather extraordinary breasts. Still – for the sake of argument, could you get it up over her even if she wasn’t old, even if she was young and had the beauty of Helen?”

“I don’t know Helen, but I understand what you’re drivin’ at. And you’re by God right. I couldn’t get it up over old frozen face there even if she had the beauty of Marilyn Monroe.”

“There you are. She’s won.”

That’s it. Harding leans back and everybody waits for what McMurphy’s going to say next. McMurphy can see he’s backed up against the wall. He looks at the faces a minute, then shrugs and stands up from his chair.

“Well, I damn well don’t want to have some old fiend of a nurse after me with three thousand volts. Not when it’s just an adventure for me.”

“No. You’re right.”

Harding’s won the argument, but nobody looks too happy. I’m glad that McMurphy is going to be cagey after all and isn’t going to agree to a game where he can’t win, but I know how the guys feel; I’m not so happy myself. McMurphy lights another cigarette. Nobody’s moved yet. They’re all still standing there, grinning and uncomfortable. McMurphy rubs his nose again and looks away from the bunch of faces around him, looks back at the nurse and chews his lip.

“But you say… she doesn’t send you up to that other ward unless she makes you crack in some way and you end up cursing her out or breaking a window or something like that?”

“Unless you do something like that.”

“You’re sure of that, now? Because I have an interesting idea how to pick up a good purse off you birds in here. But I had a hell of a time getting out of that other hole; I don’t want to be jumping out of the fryin’ pan into the fire.”

“Absolutely certain. She’s powerless unless you do something to honestly deserve EST. If you’re tough enough and don’t let her get to you, she can’t do a thing.”

“So if I behave myself, she can’t do nothing to me? Am I safe to try to beat her at her own game? If I come on nice as pie to her, whatever else I insinuate, she isn’t going to get furious and have me electrocuted?”

“Those are the rules we play by. Of course, she always wins, my friend, always, she gets inside everyone in the end. But you’re safe as long as you keep control. As long as you don’t lose your temper and give her reason to request the therapeutic benefits of Electro Shock, you are safe. To keep one’s temper is the most important thing. And you? With your red hair and black record?”

“Okay. All right.” McMurphy rubs his palms together. “Here’s what I’m thinkin’. You birds think that you got quite the champion in there, don’t you? The woman who always wins. How many of you are willing to take my five bucks if I cannot get the best of that woman – before the end of the week – without her getting the best of me? One week, and if she doesn’t lose her power, the bet is yours.”

“You’re betting on this?” Cheswick is hopping from foot to foot and rubbing his hands together like McMurphy rubs his. “You’re damned right.”

Harding and some of the others say that they don’t understand it.

“It’s simple enough. I like to gamble. And I like to win. And I think I can win this gamble, okay? I’ll tell you something: I found out a few things about this place before I came out here. Damn near half of you guys in here get compensation, three, four hundred a month and not a thing in the world to do with it. I thought I might take advantage of this and maybe make both our lives a little more rich. I’m a gambler and I’m not in the habit of losing. And I don’t think a woman can be more man than me, I don’t care whether I can get it up for her or not. She may have the element of time, but I got a pretty long winning history myself.”

He pulls off his cap, spins it on his finger, and catches it behind his back in his other band.

“Another thing: I’m in this place because that’s the way I planned it, because it’s a better place than a work farm. I’m no loony. Your nurse doesn’t know this. These things give me an edge I like. So I’m saying: five bucks to each of you if I can’t get her goat within a week. And she’ll show, just one time, that she isn’t so unbeatable as you think.”

Harding and other Acutes agree to bet.

The Big Nurse likes to play with the time. She is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she decides to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands run around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through changes of light at a furious speed: morning, noon, and night – light on, light off – day and dark, and everybody must move according to that fake time; awful speed of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night. And so you go through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees that everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she changes the speed back to normal.

She likes to turn up the speed on days when you got somebody to visit you or when some video show is brought from Portland. That’s when she speeds things up.

But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn that dial to a stop and freeze the sun there on the screen. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three. You sit solid and you can’t move, you can’t walk, you can’t swallow and you can’t breathe. You can only move your eyes and see petrified Acutes across the room, with cards in their hands. 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.

Lord knows how long we hang this way.

We’re free from this time control in the fog; then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everything else.

They haven’t really fogged the place full force all day today, not since McMurphy came in. Today something’s happened: there hasn’t been any of these things all day, not since shaving. This afternoon everything is going according to the usual schedule. At four-thirty the second shift comes on duty. The Big Nurse dismisses the black boys and takes a last look around the ward. Behind the glass I see that she tells everyone good evening. She turns on the speaker in the day room: “Good evening, boys. Behave yourselves.” And turns the music up louder than ever.Then she leaves the ward and locks the door behind her.

Then, till night, we eat and shower and go back to sit in the day room. The Acutes sit and play cards.

The speakers in the ceiling are still making music. The music comes off a long tape from the Nurses’ Station. We all know the tape so well by heart that we don’t any of us consciously hear it. But McMurphy hasn’t got used to it yet. He’s dealing blackjack for cigarettes, and the speaker’s right over the card table.

“I wish some idiot in that nurses’ hothouse would turn down that music! Hooee! Does that thing play night and day, Harding?”

Harding cocks his ear to the ceiling. “Oh, yes, the so-called music. You see, that’s a recording playing up there, my friend. We seldom hear the radio. The world news might not be therapeutic. And we’ve all heard that recording so many times now it simply slides out of our hearing. Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?”

“Do they leave it on all the time, like a waterfall?” McMurphy says.

“Not when we sleep,” Cheswick says, “but all the rest of the time, and that’s the truth.”

“The hell with that. I’ll tell that coon over there to turn it off or get his fat little ass kicked!”

He starts to stand up, and Harding touches his arm. “Friend, for that you’ll be branded aggressive. Are you so eager to lose the bet?”

McMurphy slowly sits down, saying, “Horse ma-nu-ure.”

They continue to play cards right up to the lights out at nine-thirty. McMurphy wins and laughs a lot. That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long. He gave up trying and settled down to serious dealing. They won the deal off him a time or two, but he always bought it back or fought it back, and the cigarettes on each side of him grew in bigger and bigger pyramid piles.

Then just before nine-thirty he started letting them win. He let them win it all back. He paid out the last couple of cigarettes and lays down the deck.