You found your way off the plane by following a little referees’ horn the lieutenant kept blowing, sounded like a goose honking. Soon as you were out of the hatch you couldn’t see no more than maybe three feet in any direction. You felt like you were out on that airfield all by yourself. You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone. Sounds died and dissolved after a few yards, and you couldn’t hear any of the rest of your crew, nothing but that little horn squeaking and honking out of a soft furry whiteness so thick that your body just faded into white below the belt; other than that brown shirt and brass buckle, you couldn’t see nothing but white, like from the waist down you were being dissolved by the fog too.
And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.
When they first used that fog machine on the ward, one they bought from Army Surplus and hid in the vents in the new place before we moved in, I kept looking at anything that appeared out of the fog as long and hard as I could, to keep track of it, just like I used to do when they fogged the airfields in Europe. Nobody’d be blowing a horn to show the way, there was no rope to hold to, so fixing my eyes on something was the only way I kept from getting lost. Sometimes I got lost in it anyway, got in too deep, trying to hide, and every time I did, it seemed like I always turned up at that same place, at that same metal door with the row of rivets like eyes and no number, just like the room behind that door drew me to it, no matter how hard I tried to stay away, just like the current generated by the fiends in that room was conducted in a beam along the fog and pulled me back along it like a robot. I’d wander for days in the fog, scared I’d never see another thing, then there’d be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I’d take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like а cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dials and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove. “Wait, I
know
that big bastard there—better rabbit-punch him or call for some more help or something. He’s an awful case for thrashing around.”
So I used to try not to get in too deep, for fear I’d get lost and turn up at the Shock Shop door. I looked hard at anything that came into sight and hung on like a man in a blizzard hangs on a fence rail. But they kept making the fog thicker and thicker, and it seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried, two or three times a month I found myself with that door opening in front of me to the acid smell of sparks and ozone. In spite of all I could do, it was getting tough to keep from getting lost.
Then I discovered something: I don’t have to end up at that door if I stay still when the fog comes over me and just keep quiet. The trouble was I’d been finding that door my own self because I got scared of being lost so long and went to hollering so they could track me. In a way, I was hollering for them
to
track me; I had figured that anything was better’n being lost for good, even the Shock Shop. Now, I don’t know. Being lost isn’t so bad.
All this morning I been waiting for them to fog us in again. The last few days they been doing it more and more. It’s my idea they’re doing it on account of McMurphy. They haven’t got him fixed with controls yet, and they’re trying to catch him off guard. They can see he’s due to be a problem; a half a dozen times already he’s roused Cheswick and Harding and some of the others to where it looked like they might actually stand up to one of the black boys—but always, just the time it looked like the patient might be helped, the fog would start, like it’s starting now.
I heard the compressor start pumping in the grill a few minutes back, just as the guys went to moving tables out of the day room for the therapeutic meeting, and already the mist is oozing across the floor so thick my pants legs are wet. I’m cleaning the windows in the door of the glass station, and I hear the Big Nurse pick up the phone and call the doctor to tell him we’re just about ready for the meeting, and tell him perhaps he’d best keep an hour free this afternoon for a staff meeting. “The reason being,” she tells him, “I think it is past time to have a discussion of the subject of Patient Randle McMurphy and whether he should be on this ward or not.” She listens a minute, then tells him, “I don’t think it’s wise to let him go on upsetting the patients the way he has the last few days.”
That’s why she’s fogging the ward for the meeting. She don’t usually do that. But now she’s going to do something with McMurphy today, probably ship him to Disturbed. I put down my window rag and go to my chair at the end of the line of Chronics, barely able to see the guys getting into their chairs and the doctor coming through the door wiping his glasses like he thinks the blurred look comes from his steamed lenses instead of the fog.
It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before.
I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit’s stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it’s so thick. In fact it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while. Floating makes me a little sick to the stomach at first. I can’t see a thing. I never had it so thick it floated me like this.
The words get dim and loud, off and on, as I float around, but as loud as they get, loud enough sometimes I know I’m right next to the guy that’s talking, I still can’t see a thing.
I recognize Billy’s voice, stuttering worse than ever because he’s nervous. “…fuh-fuh-flunked out of college be-be-cause I quit ROTC. I c-c-couldn’t take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call roll, call ‘Bibbit,’ I couldn’t answer. You were s-s-supposed to say heh—heh—heh… He’s choking on the word, like it’s a bone in his throat. I hear him swallow and start again. “You were supposed to say, ‘Here sir,’ and I never c-c-could get it out.”
His voice gets dim; then the Big Nurse’s voice comes cutting from the left. “Can you recall, Billy, when you first had speech trouble? When did you first stutter, do you remember?”
I can’t tell is he laughing or what. “Fir-first stutter? First stutter? The first word I said I st-stut-tered: m-m-m-m-mamma.”
Then the talking fades out altogether: I never knew that to happen before. Maybe Billy’s hid himself in the fog too. Maybe all the guys finally and forever crowded back into the fog.
A chair and me float past each other. It’s the first thing I’ve seen. It comes sifting out of the fog off to my right, and for a few seconds it’s right beside my face, just out of my reach. I been accustomed of late to just let things alone when they appear in the fog, sit still and not try to hang on. But this time I’m scared, the way I used to be scared. I try with all I got to pull myself over to the chair and get hold of it, but there’s nothing to brace against and all I can do is thrash the air, all I can do is watch the chair come clear, clearer than ever before to where I can even make out the fingerprint where a worker touched the varnish before it was dry, looming out for a few seconds, then fading on off again. I never seen it where things floated around this way. I never seen it this thick before, thick to where I can’t get down to the floor and get on my feet if I wanted to and walk around. That’s why I’m so scared; I feel I’m going to float off someplace for good this time.
I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It’s old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.
He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice as deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.
“No… The flag is… Ah-mer-ica. America is… the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is… the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is… tell-ah-vision.”
It’s true. It’s all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.
“Now… The cross is… Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I’m paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “ Mexico is… the wal-nut. The hazelnut. The ay-corn. Mexico is… the rain-bow. The rain-bow is… wooden. Mexico is… woo-den.”
I can see what he’s driving at. He’s been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he’s been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn’t make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he’s saying. I’m trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that’s what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like the walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it
feels
like the walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes… I see…
But the fog’s clogged my throat to where I can’t make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.
“Now… The green sheep is… Can-a-da. Canada is… the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”
I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I’m floating by myself again, more lost than ever.
This is the time, I tell myself. I’m going for good.
There’s old Pete, face like a searchlight. He’s fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn’t any fog at all. Or maybe he’s up right close and real small, I can’t be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up—he knew from the start he couldn’t do that—but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.
I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.
“I’m tired,” is what he says.
“I know you’re tired, Pete, but I can’t do you no good fretting about it. You know I can’t.”
Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.
Here comes Billy Bibbit, the way Pete come by. They’re all filing by for a last look. I know Billy can’t be more’n a few feet away, but he’s so tiny he looks like he’s a mile off. His face is out to me like the face of a beggar, needing so much more’n anybody can give. His mouth works like a little doll’s mouth.
“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.”
Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”
“I was in luh-love with her.”
I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He
has
to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can’t do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They’d of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.
Put your face away, Billy.
They keep filing past.
It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people
pushing
me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.