One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Кен Кизи
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Книга для чтения на английском языке
moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.
She’s given to turning up the speed this way on days like, say, when you got somebody to visit you or when the VFW brings down a smoker show from Portland – times like that, times you’d like to hold and have stretch out.
That’s when she speeds things up.
But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn that dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don’t move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three and she’s liable to let them hang there till we rust. You sit solid and you can’t budge, you can’t walk or move to relieve the strain of sitting, you can’t swallow and you can’t breathe. The only thing you can move is your eyes and there’s nothing to see but petrified Acutes across the room waiting on one another to decide whose play it is. The old Chronic next to me has been dead six days, and he’s rotting to the chair. 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.
Then, gradually, she’ll ease the dial up a degree, and that’s worse yet. I can take hanging dead still better’n I can take that sirup-slow hand of Scanlon across the room, taking three days to lay down a card. My lungs pull for the thick plastic air like getting it through a pinhole. I try to go to the latrine and I feel buried under a ton of sand, squeezing my bladder till green sparks flash and buzz across my forehead.
I strain with every muscle and bone to get out of that chair and go to the latrine, work to get up till my arms and legs are all ashake and my teeth hurt. I pull and pull and all I gain is maybe a quarter-inch off the leather seat. So I fall back and give up and let the pee pour out, activating a hot salt wire down my left leg that sets off humiliating alarms, sirens, spotlights, everybody up yelling and running around and the big black boys knocking the crowd aside right and left as the both of them rush headlong at me, waving awful mops of wet copper wires cracking and spitting as they short with the water.
About the only time we get any let-up from this time control is 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. I bet he’d yell like a bull if they fogged it.)
When nothing else is going on, you usually got the fog or the time control to contend with, but today something’s happened: there hasn’t been any of these things worked on us all day, not since shaving. This afternoon everything is matching up. When the swing shift comes on duty the clock says four-thirty, just like it should. The Big Nurse dismisses the black boys and takes a last look around the ward. She slides a long silver hatpin out of the iron-blue knot of hair back of her head, takes off her white cap and sets it careful in a cardboard box (there’s mothballs in that box), and drives the hatpin back in the hair with a stab of her hand.
Behind the glass I see her tell everyone good evening. She hands the little birthmarked swing-shift nurse a note; then her hand reaches out to the control panel in the steel door, clacks on the speaker in the day room: “Good evening, boys. Behave yourselves.” And turns the music up louder than ever. She rubs the inside of her wrist across her window; a disgusted look shows the fat black boy who just reported on duty that he better get to cleaning it, and he’s at the glass with a paper towel before she’s so much as locked the ward door behind her.
The machinery in the walls whistles, sighs, drops into a lower gear.
Then, till night, we eat and shower and go back to sit in the day room. Old Blastic, the oldest Vegetable, is holding his stomach and moaning. George (the black boys call him Ruba-dub[15]) is washing his hands in the drinking fountain. The Acutes sit and play cards and work at getting a picture on our TV set by carrying the set every place the cord will reach, in search of a good beam.
The speakers in the ceiling are still making music. The music from the speakers isn’t transmitted in on a radio beam is why the machinery don’t interfere. The music comes off a long tape from the Nurses’ Station, a tape we all know so well by heart that there don’t any of us consciously hear it except new men like McMurphy. He hasn’t got used to it yet. He’s dealing blackjack for cigarettes, and the speaker’s right over the card table. He’s pulled his cap way forward till he has to lean his head back and squint from under the brim to see his cards. He holds a cigarette between his teeth and talks around it like a stock auctioneer I saw once in a cattle auction in The Dalles.
“…hey-ya, hey-ya, come on, come on,” he says, high, fast; “I’m waitin’ on you suckers, you hit or you sit. Hit, you say? well well well and with a king up the boy wants a hit. Whaddaya know. So Comin’ at you and too bad, a little lady for the lad and he’s over the wall and down the road, up the hill and dropped his load. Comin’ at you, Scanlon, and I wish some idiot in that nurses’ hothouse would turn down that frigging music! Hooee! Does that thing play night and day, Harding? I never heard such a driving racket in my life.”
Harding gives him a blank look. “Exactly what noise is it you’re referring to, Mr. McMurphy?”
“That damned radio. Boy. It’s been going ever since I come in this morning. And don’t come on with some baloney that you don’t hear it.”
Harding cocks his ear to the ceiling. “Oh, yes, the so-called music. Yes, I suppose we do hear it if we concentrate, but then one can hear one’s own heartbeat too, if he concentrates hard enough.” He grins at McMurphy. “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, the way the sound of a waterfall soon becomes an unheard sound to those who live near it. Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?”
(I still hear the sound of the falls on the Columbia, always will – always – hear the whoop of Charley Bear Belly stabbed himself a big chinook, hear the slap of fish in the water, laughing naked kids on the bank, the women at the racks… from a long time ago.)
“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, that is exactly the kind of statement that gets one branded assaultive. Are you so eager to forfeit the bet?”
McMurphy looks at him. “That’s the way it is, huh? A pressure game? Keep the old pinch on?”
“That’s the way it is.”
He slowly lowers himself back into his seat, saying, “Horse muh-noo-ur.”
Harding looks about at the other Acutes around the card table. “Gentlemen, already I seem to detect in our redheaded challenger a most unheroic decline of his TV-cowboy stoicism.”
He looks at McMurphy across the table, smiling, McMurphy nods at him and tips his head back for the wink and licks his big thumb. “Well sir, of Professor Harding sounds like he’s getting cocky. He wins a couple of splits and he goes to comin’ on like a wise guy. Well well well; there he sits with a deuce showing and here’s a pack of Mar-boros says he backs down.… Whups, he sees me, okeedokee, Perfessor, here’s a trey, he wants another, gets another deuce, try for the big five, Perfessor? Try for that big double pay, or play it safe? Another pack says you won’t. Well well well, the Perfessor sees me, this tells the tale, too bad, another lady and the Perfessor flunks his exams…”
The next song starts up from the speaker, loud and clangy and a lot of accordion. McMurphy takes a look up at the speaker, and his spiel gets louder and louder to match it.
“…hey-ya
ruba-dub – (разг.) рукомойник