One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey Read Free Book Online

pull the lab door to behind them, and I sweep up close and can snake out voices over the vicious zzzth-zzzth-zzzth of steel on whetstone.
    “What we got already at this ungodly hour of the morning?”
    “We got to install an Indwelling Curiosity Cutout in some nosy booger. Hurry-up job, she says, and I’m not even sure we got one of the gizmos in stock.”
    “We might have to call IBM to rush one out for us; let me check back in Supply—”
    “Hey; bring out a bottle of that pure grain while you’re back there: it’s getting so I can’t install the simplest frigging component but what I need a bracer. Well, what the hell, it’s better’n garage work…”
    Their voices are forced and too quick on the comeback to be real talk—more like cartoon comedy speech. I sweep away before I’m caught eavesdropping.
    The two big black boys catch Taber in the latrine and drag him. to the mattress room. He gets one a good kick in the shins. He’s yelling bloody murder. I’m surprised how helpless he looks when they hold him, like he was wrapped with bands of black iron.
    They push him face down on the mattress. One sits on his head, and the other rips his pants open in back and peels the cloth until Taber’s peach-colored rear is framed by the ragged lettuce-green. He’s smothering curses into the mattress and the black boy sitting on his head saying, “Tha’s right, Mistuh Taber, tha’s right…” The nurse comes down the hall, smearing Vaseline on a long needle, pulls the door shut so they’re out of sight for a second, then comes right back out, wiping the needle on a shred of Taber’s pants. She’s left the Vaseline jar in the room. Before the black boy can close the door after her I see the one still sitting on Taber’s head, dabbing at him with a Kleenex. They’re in there a long time before the door opens up again and they come out, carrying him across the hall to the lab. His greens are ripped clear off now and he’s wrapped up in a damp sheet…
    Nine o’clock young residents wearing leather elbows talk to Acutes for fifty minutes about what they did when they were little boys. The Big Nurse is suspicious of the crew-cut looks of these residents, and that fifty minutes they are on the ward is a tough time for her. While they are around, the machinery goes to fumbling and she is scowling and making notes to check the records of these boys for old traffic violations and the like…
    Nine-fifty the residents leave and the machinery hums up smooth again. The nurse watches the day room from her glass case; the scene before her takes on that blue-steel clarity again, that clean orderly movement of a cartoon comedy.
    Taber is wheeled out of the lab on a Gurney bed.
    “We had to give him another shot when he started coming up during the spine tap,” the technician tells her. “What do you say we take him right on over to Building One and buzz him with EST while we’re at it—that way not waste the extra Seconal?”
    “I think it is an excellent suggestion. Maybe after that take him to the electroencephalograph and check his head—we may find evidence of a need for brain work.”
    The technicians go trotting off, pushing the man on the Gurney, like cartoon men—or like puppets, mechanical puppets in one of those Punch and Judy acts where it’s supposed to be funny to see the puppet beat up by the Devil and swallowed headfirst by a smiling alligator…
    Ten o’clock the mail comes up. Sometimes you get the torn envelope…
    Ten-thirty Public Relation comes in with a ladies’ club following him. He claps his fat hands at the day-room door. “Oh, hello guys; stiff lip, stiff lip… look around, girls; isn’t it clean, so bright? This is Miss Ratched. I chose this ward because it’s
her
ward. She’s, girls, just like a mother. Not that I mean age, but you girls understand…”
    Public Relation’s shirt collar is so tight it bloats his face up when he laughs, and he’s laughing most of the time I