It’s a tape recorder somewhere getting all of this.
Harding looks around, sees everybody’s watching him, and he tries to laugh. The squeaking sound of that laugh is awful. He can’t stop it. But finally, he stops and lets his face fall into his waiting hands.
“Oh the bitch, the bitch, the bitch,” he whispers through his teeth.
McMurphy lights another cigarette and offers it to him; Harding takes it without a word. McMurphy watches while Harding’s twitching and jerking slows down and the face comes up from the hands.
“You are right,” Harding says, “about all of it.” He looks up at the other patients who are watching him. “No one’s ever dared say it before, but there’s not a man among us that doesn’t think it, that doesn’t feel just as you do about her and the whole business – feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.”
McMurphy frowns and asks, “What about that little doctor? He might be a little slow in the head, but not so much as not to be able to see how she’s taken over and what she’s doing.”
“Doctor Spivey… is exactly like the rest of us, McMurphy. He’s a frightened, ineffectual little rabbit, totally incapable of running this ward without our Miss Ratched’s help, and he knows it. And, worse, she knows that he knows it and reminds him every chance she gets.”
“Why doesn’t he fire her?”
“In this hospital,” Harding says, “it’s not in the doctor’s power to hire and fire. That power goes to the supervisor, and the supervisor is a woman, a dear old friend of Miss Ratched’s; they were Army nurses together in the thirties. We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are. He knows that Ratched can simply pick up the phone and call the supervisor and mention, for example, that the doctor, it seems, is making a great number of requisitions for Demerol —”
“What’s Demerol, Harding?”
“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.