“I know, Bruce. Why do you get so upset? I’ve never understood what went on between you and your friend that made you get so defensive!”

“Well, heck, anyway!” he says and jams his fists in his pockets.

The nurse bends over and brushes a little place clean on the floor and puts her knee on it and starts kneading Sefelt back to some shape. She tells the black boy to stay with the poor old fellow and she’ll go send a Gurney down for him; wheel him into the dorm and let him sleep the rest of the day. When she stands she gives Fredrickson a pat on the arm, and he grumbles, “Yeah, I have to take Dilantin too, you know. That’s why I know what Seef has to face. I mean, that’s why I — well, heck—”

“I understand, Bruce, what both of you must go through, but don’t you think anything is better than that?”

Fredrickson looks where she points. Sefelt has pulled back halfway normal, swelling up and down with big wet, rattling breaths. There’s a punk-knot rising on the side of his head where he landed, and a red foam around the black boy’s stick where it goes into his mouth, and his eyes are beginning to roll back into the whites. His hands are nailed out to each side with the palms up and the fingers jerking open and shut, just the way I’ve watched men jerk at the Shock Shop strapped to the crossed table, smoke curling up out of the palms from the current. Sefelt and Fredrickson never been to the Shock Shop. They’re manufactured to generate their own voltage, store it in their spines and can be turned on remote from the steel door in the Nurses’ Station if they get out of line — be right in the best part of a dirty joke and stiffen like the jolt hit square in the small of the back. It saves the trouble of taking them over to that room.

The nurse gives Fredrickson’s arm a little shake like he’d gone to sleep, and repeats, “Even if you take into consideration the harmful effects of the medicine, don’t you think it’s better than that?”

As he stares down at the floor, Fredrickson’s blond eyebrows are raised like he’s seeing for the first time just how he looks at least once a month. The nurse smiles and pats his arm and heads for the door, glares at the Acutes to shame them for gathering around watching such a thing; when she’s gone, Fredrickson shivers and tries to smile.

“I don’t know what I got mad at the old girl about — I mean, she didn’t do anything to give me a reason to blow up like that, did she?”

It isn’t like he wants an answer; it’s more sort of realizing that he can’t put his finger on a reason. He shivers again and starts to slip back away from the group. McMurphy comes up and asks him in a low voice what is it they take?

“Dilantin, McMurphy, an anti-convulsant, if you must know.”

“Don’t it work or something?”

“Yeah, I guess it works all right — if you take it.”

“Then what’s the sweat about taking it or not?”

“Look, if you must know! Here’s the dirty sweat about taking it.” Fredrickson reaches up and grabs his lower lip between his thumb and finger, pulls it down to show gums ragged and pink and bloodless around long shiny teeth. “Your gungs,” he says, hanging onto the lip. “Dilantin gnakes your gungs rot. And a seizure gnakes you grit your teeth. And you—”

There’s a noise on the floor. They look to where Sefelt is moaning and wheezing, just as the black boy draws two teeth out with his taped stick.

Scanlon takes his tray and walks away from the bunch, saying, “Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Puts a man in one confounded bind, I’d say.”

McMurphy says, “Yeah, I see what you mean,” looking down into Sefelt’s gathering face. His face has commenced to take on that same haggard, puzzled look of pressure that the face on the floor has.

Whatever it was went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade movement is coming back: six-thirty out of bed, seven into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the Chronics and the cards for the Acutes. in the Nurses’ Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse float over the controls.

They take me with the Acutes sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. They take me once with them over to the library and I walk over to the technical section, stand there looking at the titles of books on electronics, books I recognize from that year I went to college; I remember inside the books are full of schematic drawings and equations and theories — hard, sure, safe things.

I want to look at one of the books, but I’m scared to. I’m scared to do anything. I feel like I’m floating in the dusty yellow air of the library, halfway to the bottom, halfway to the top. The stacks of books teeter above me, crazy, zig-zagging, running all different angles to one another. One shelf bends a little to the left, one to the right. Some of them are leaning over me, and I don’t see how the books keep from falling out. It goes up and up this way, clear out of sight, the rickety stacks nailed together with slats and two-by-fours, propped up with poles, leaning against ladders, on all sides of me. If I pulled one book out, lord knows what awful thing might result.

I hear somebody walk in, and it’s one of the black boys from our ward and he’s got Harding’s wife with him. They’re talking and grinning to each other as they come into the library.

“See here, Dale,” the black boy calls over to Harding where he’s reading a book, “look here who come to visit you. I tole her it wun’t visitin’ hours but you know she jus’ sweet-talk me into bringin’ her right on over here anyhow.” He leaves her standing in front of Harding and goes off, saying mysteriously, “Don’t you forget now, you hear?”

She blows the black boy a kiss, then turns to Harding, slinging her hips forward. “Hello, Dale.”

“Honey,” he says, but he doesn’t make any move to take the couple of steps to her. He looks around him at everybody watching.

She’s as tall as he is. She’s got on high-heeled shoes and is carrying a black purse, not by the strap, but holding it the way you hold a book. Her fingernails are red as drops of blood against the shiny black patent-leather purse.

“Hey, Mack,” Harding calls to McMurphy, who’s sitting across the room, looking at a book of cartoons. “If you’ll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I’ll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, ‘to my better half,’ but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don’t you?”

He tries to laugh, and his two slim ivory fingers dip into his shirt pocket for cigarettes, fidget around getting the last one from the package. The cigarette shakes as he places it between his lips. He and his wife haven’t moved toward each other yet.

McMurphy heaves up out of his chair and pulls his cap off as he walks over. Harding’s wife looks at him and smiles, lifting one of her eyebrows. “Afternoon, Miz Harding,” McMurphy says.

She smiles back bigger than before and says, “I hate Mrs. Harding, Mack; why don’t you call me Vera?”

They all three sit back down on the couch where Harding was sitting, and he tells his wife about McMurphy and how McMurphy got the best of the Big Nurse, and she smiles and says that it doesn’t surprise her a bit. While Harding’s telling the story he gets enthusiastic and forgets about his hands, and they weave the air in front of him into a picture clear enough to see, dancing the story to the tune of his voice like two beautiful ballet women in white. His hands can be anything. But as soon as the story’s finished he notices McMurphy and his wife are watching the hands, and he traps them between his knees. He laughs about this, and his wife says to him, “Dale, when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”