“Is there any more discussion,” she said, “on the rationing of cigarettes?”

Looking down the canceled row of faces hanging against the wall across the room from me, my eyes finally came to McMurphy in his chair in the corner, concentrating on improving his one-handed card cut… and the white tubes in the ceiling begin to pump their refrigerated light again… I can feel it, beams all the way into my stomach.

After McMurphy doesn’t stand up for us any longer, some of the Acutes talk and say he’s still outsmarting the Big Nurse, say that he got word she was about to send him to Disturbed and decided to toe the line a while, not give her any reason. Others figure he’s letting her relax, then he’s going to spring something new on her, something wilder and more ornery than ever. You can hear them talking in groups, wondering.

But me, I know why. I heard him talk to the lifeguard. He’s finally getting cagey, is all. The way Papa finally did when he came to realize that he couldn’t beat that group from town who wanted the government to put in the dam because of the money and the work it would bring, and because it would get rid of the village: Let that tribe of fish Injuns take their stink and their two hundred thousand dollars the government is paying them and go some place else with it! Papa had done the smart thing signing the papers; there wasn’t anything to gain by bucking it. The government would of got it anyhow, sooner or later; this way the tribe would get paid good. It was the smart thing. McMurphy was doing the smart thing. I could see that. He was giving in because it was the smartest thing to do, not because of any of these other reasons the Acutes were making up. He didn’t say so, but I knew and I told myself it was the smart thing to do. I told myself that over and over: It’s safe. Like hiding. It’s the smart thing to do, nobody could say any different. I know what he’s doing.

Then one morning all the Acutes know too, know his real reason for backing down and that the reasons they been making up were just lies to kid themselves. He never says a thing about the talk he had with the lifeguard, but they know. I figure the nurse broadcast this during the night along all the little lines in the dorm floor, because they know all at once. I can tell by the way they look at McMurphy that morning when he comes in to the day room. Not looking like they’re mad with him, or even disappointed, because they can understand as well as I can that the only way he’s going to get the Big Nurse to lift his commitment is by acting like she wants, but still looking at him like they wished things didn’t have to be this way.

Even Cheswick could understand it and didn’t hold anything against McMurphy for not going ahead and making a big fuss over the cigarettes. He came back down from Disturbed on the same day that the nurse broadcast the information to the beds, and he told McMurphy himself that he could understand how he acted and that it was surely the sharpest thing to do, considering, and that if he’d thought about Mack being committed he’d never have put him on the spot like he had the other day. He told McMurphy this while we were all being taken over to the swimming pool. But just as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish something mighta been done, though, and dove into the water. And got his fingers stuck some way in the grate that’s over the drain at the bottom of the pool, and neither the big lifeguard nor McMurphy nor the two black boys could pry him loose, and by the time they got a screwdriver and undid the grate and brought Cheswick up, with the grate still clutched by his chubby pink and blue fingers, he was drowned.

Up ahead of me in the lunch line I see a tray sling in the air, a green plastic cloud raining milk and peas and vegetable soup. Sefelt’s jittering out of the line on one foot with his arms both up in the air, falls backward in a stiff arch, and the whites of his eyes come by me upside down. His head hits the tile with a crack like rocks under water, and he holds the arch, like a twitching, jerking bridge. Fredrickson and Scanlon make a jump to help, but the big black boy shoves them back and grabs a flat stick out of his back pocket, got tape wrapped around it and covered with a brown stain. He pries Sefelt’s mouth open and shoves the stick between his teeth, and I hear the stick splinter with Sefelt’s bite. I can taste the slivers. Sefelt’s jerks slow down and get more powerful, working and building up to big stiff kicks that lift him to a bridge, then falling — lifting and falling, slower and slower, till the Big Nurse comes in and stands over him and he melts limp all over the floor in a gray puddle.

She folds her hands in front of her, might hold a candle, and looks down at what’s left of him oozing out of the cuffs of his pants and shirt. “Mr. Sefelt?” she says to the black boy.

“Tha’s right — uhn.” The black boy is jerking to get his stick back. “Mistuh See-fel’.”

“And Mr. Sefelt has been asserting he needs no more medication.” She nods her head, steps back a step out of the way of him spreading toward her white shoes. She raises her head and looks round her at the circle of Acutes that’ve come up to see. She nods again and repeats, “… needs no more medication.” Her face is smiling, pitying, patient, and disgusted all at once — a trained expression.

McMurphy’s never seen such a thing. “What’s he got wrong with him?” he asks.

She keeps her eye on the puddle, not turning to McMurphy. “Mr. Sefelt is an epileptic, Mr. McMurphy. This means he may be subject to seizures like this at any time if he doesn’t follow medical advice. He knows better. We’d told him this would happen when he didn’t take his medication. Still, he will insist on acting foolish.”

Fredrickson comes out of the line with his eyebrows bristling. He’s a sinewy, bloodless guy with blond hair and stringy blond eyebrows and a long jaw, and he acts tough every so often the way Cheswick used to try to do — roar and rant and cuss out one of the nurses, say he’s gonna leave this stinkin’ place! They always let him yell and shake his fist till he quiets down, then ask him if you are through, Mr. Fredrickson, we’ll go start typing the release — then make book in the Nurses’ Station how long it’ll be till he’s tapping at the glass with a guilty look and asking to apologize and how about just forgetting those hotheaded things he said, just pigeonhole those old forms for a day or so, okay?

He steps up to the nurse, shaking his fist at her. “Oh, is that it? Is that it, huh? You gonna crucify old Seef just as if he was doing it to spite you or something?”

She lays a comforting hand on his arm, and his fist unrolls.

“It’s okay, Bruce. Your friend will be all right. Apparently he hasn’t been swallowing his Dilantin. I simply don’t know what he is doing with it.”

She knows as well as anybody; Sefelt holds the capsules in his mouth and gives them to Fredrickson later. Sefelt doesn’t like to take them because of what he calls “disastrous side effects,” and Fredrickson likes a double dose because he’s scared to death of having a fit. The nurse knows this, you can tell by her voice, but to look at her there, so sympathetic and kind, you’d think she was ignorant of anything at all between Fredrickson and Sefelt.

“Yeahhh,” says Fredrickson, but he can’t work his attack up again. “Yeah, well, you don’t need to act like it was as simple as just take the stuff or don’t take it. You know how Seef worries about what he looks like and how women think he’s ugly and all that, and you know how he thinks the Dilantin—”

“I know,” she says and touches his arm again. “He also blames his falling hair on the drug. Poor old fellow.”

“He’s not that old!”