Кен Кизи – One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки (страница 5)
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.
All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts, 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 wants to check himself in private or whisper some secret to another guy. A patient’ll be in a corner all by himself, when all of a sudden he’ll hear a squeak, and frost forms along his cheek, and he turns in that direction and there’s a cold stone mask floating above him against the wall. He just sees the black face. No body. The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and it seems that the black face and hands float against it like a ghost.
After years of training all three black boys understand the Big Nurse very well. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions that might be found by a visiting wife or schoolteacher. She doesn’t need to do it any more. The black boys do what she wants before she even thinks it.
So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks ward like a watchman’s clock. Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes are up and out of bed quickly because otherwise the black boys will prod them out, make them do a lot of work in the hall. The Wheelers swing dead legs out on the floor and wait like seated statues when somebody’ll bring chairs to them. The Vegetables piss the bed, electric shock and buzzer activates and rolls them off on the tile where the black boys can hose them down and get them in clean greens…
Six-forty-five: the shavers buzz and the Acutes line up in alphabetical order at the mirrors, A, B, C, D… The walking Chronics like me walk in when the Acutes are done, then the Wheelers are wheeled in.
Seven o’clock: the mess hall opens and the order of line-up reverses: the Wheelers first, then the Walkers, then the Acutes pick up trays, corn flakes, bacon and eggs, toast and this morning a canned peach on a piece of green, torn lettuce. Some of the Acutes bring trays to the Wheelers. Most Wheelers are just Chronics with bad legs, they feed themselves, but there’re three Wheelers that have got no action from the neck down whatsoever, not much from the neck up. These are called Vegetables. The black boys push them in, wheel them against a wall, and bring them identical trays of muddy-looking food for these toothless three: eggs, ham, toast, bacon, all chewed thirty-two times by the stainless-steel machine in the kitchen.
The black boys feed the Vegetables quickly. They open their mouths with the spoon without ceremony, and they curse them all the time:“This ol’ fart Blastic. I can’t tell no more if I’m feeding him bacon puree or chunks of his own fuckin’ tongue.”…
Seven-thirty: back to the day room. The Big Nurse looks out through her special glass and nods at what she sees. She pushes a button and things start. Everything is in order. Acutes: sit on their side of the day room and wait when cards and Monopoly games will be brought out. Chronics: sit on their side and wait for puzzles from the Red Cross box.
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and jerking through some kind of foolish story that might be really funny if the cartoon figures weren’t real guys…
Seven-forty-five: the black boys move down the line of Chronics and tape catheters on the ones that will hold still for it. Catheters are second-hand condoms the ends of which are cut off and fixed to tubes that run down pantlegs to a plastic sack.My job is to wash them at the end of each day. The black boys tape the condom to the hairs; old Catheter Chronics are hairless as babies from tape removal…
Eight o’clock: the speaker in the ceiling says, “Medications” in the Big Nurse’s voice. The Acutes line up at the glass door, A, B, C, D, then the Chronics, then the Wheelers. The guys get a capsule and a paper cup with water from the nurse and wash the capsule down. Very seldom some fool might ask what medication it is.
“Wait just a moment, honey; what are these two little red capsules in here with my vitamin?”
I know him. He’s a big Acute, already getting the reputation of a troublemaker.
“It’s just medication, Mr. Taber, good for you. Swallow it.”
“But I mean what kind of medication. Christ, I can see that they’re pills —”
“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber – just for me?” He still isn’t ready to swallow something he doesn’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. 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 —”
“Upset? Christ, all I want to know —”
But the Big Nurse has come up quietly. “That’s all right, Miss Flinn,” she says. “If Mr. Taber chooses to act like a child, he will be treated as such. We’ve tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that’s not the answer. Hostility, hostility, that’s the thanks we get. You can go, Mr. Taber, if you don’t wish to take your medication orally.”
“All I wanted to know, for the —”
“You can go.”
He goes off and spends the morning thinking about those capsules. I once played as if I’d swallowed one of those same red capsules holding it under my tongue. I opened it later in the broom closet. For a tick of time, before it all turned into white dust, I saw that it was a miniature electronic element. I helped the Radar Corps work with such elements in the Army, microscopic wires and grids and transistors.This one was designed to dissolve on contact with air…
Eight-twenty: the cards and puzzles go out…
Eight-twenty-five: some Acute says that he liked to watch when his sister was taking her bath; the three guys at the table with him run to write it in the logbook…
Eight-thirty: the ward door opens and two technicians come in. They close the lab door behind them, and I sweep up close to the door and can hear their voices.
“What we got already at this ungodly hour of the morning?”
“We got to install a Curiosity Cutout in some nosy, fellow. She says that it must be done quickly.”
I sweep away before I’m caught eavesdropping.
The two big black boys catch Taber and drag him to the mattress room. He’s yelling and kicking, but they hold him tightly.
They push him face down on the mattress. One sits on his head, and the other pulls his pants down. He’s cursing into the mattress and the black boy sitting on his head is saying, “ Tha’s right, Mistuh Taber, tha’s right…” The nurse comes down the hall with ajar of Vaseline and a long needle, closes the door, so they’re out of sight for a second, then comes out, wiping the needle on a fragment 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. He’s now wrapped up in a damp sheet…
Nine o’clock: young residents talk to Acutes for fifty minutes about what they did when they were little boys. The Big Nurse doesn’t like this time because she can’t control the process.
Nine-fifty: the residents leave and the everything is smooth again: that clean orderly movement of a cartoon comedy.
Taber is wheeled out of the lab on a Gurney bed. They’re taking him to Building One for EST (electric shock treatment).
The Big Nurse says to them, “Maybe after that take him to the electroencephalograph and check his head – we may find evidence of a need for brain work.”
Ten o’clock: the mail comes up. Sometimes you get the torn envelope…
Ten-thirty: Public Relation comes in. Members of a ladies’ club are following him. He claps his fat hands at the day-room door. “Oh, hello guys; 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…”