"'You're a God-damn fool. Yo have no right to care what I think of your work, what I am or why I'm here. You're too good for that. But if you want to know it--I think you're the best sculptor we've got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are but what men could be--and should be. Because you've gone beyond the probably and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I've ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man. And so I didn't come here to do you a favor or because I felt sorry for you or because you need a job pretty badly. I came for a simple, selfish reason--the same reason that makes a man choose the cleanest food he can find. It's a law of survival, isn't it?--the seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.'"
"The house drifted past. He yawned and winked. 'Taught me to love, bless her sweet ass.'
Then--as he was talking--a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected and expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do. ...
While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live, a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors--for all of us to dream ourselves into."
"'... Maybe it came too late. I don't know. Young people think that you forge what happens on the way when you get there. But you don't. Something stays. I'll always remember how I was a boy--in a little place down in Georgia, that was--and how I ran errands for the harness maker, and the kids laughed when carriages drove by and splashed mud all over my pants. That's how long ago I decided that some day I'd have a house of my own, the kind of a house that carriages stop before. After that, no matter how hard it got to be at times, I'd always think of that house, and it helped. Afterward, there were years when I was afraid of it--I could have built it, but I was afraid. Well, now the time has come. Do you understand, Mr. Roark? Austen said you'd be just the man who'd understand. '
'Yes,' said Roark eagerly, 'I do.' ...
... When Roark began to speak Mr. Mundy listened, in polite astonishment. He did not seem to resent the words. They did not penetrate.
'Don't you see?' Roark was saying. 'It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your life or your achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life.'
Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again ia bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them."
"He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton."
"That'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."
"'Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it--and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of the masses is determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large gall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a façade cut up into the floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.'
'Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house.'
'I intended that,' said Roark."
"Rourke extended his hand and Mike's grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark's skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled:
'Run along, boss, run a long. Don't clog up the works like that.'"
"'Can't you be human for once in your life?'
'What?'
'Human! Simple. Natural.'
'But I am.'
'Can't you ever relax?'
Roark smiled, because he was sitting on the window sill, leaning sloppily against the wall, his long legs hanging loosely, the cigarette held without pressure between limp fingers.
'That's not what I mean!' said Keating. 'Why can't you go out for a drink with me?'
'What for?'
'Do you have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you, everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable--and unimportant?'
'No.'
'Don't you ever get tired of the heroic?'
'What's heroic about me?'
'Nothing. Everything. I don't know. It's not what you do. It's what you make people feel around you.'
'What?'
'The un-normal. The strain. When I'm with you--it's always like a choice. Between you--and the rest of the world. I don't want that kind of a choice. I don't want to be an outsider, I want to belong. There's so much in the world that's simple and pleasant. It's not all fighting and renunciation. It is--with you.'
'What have I ever renounced?'
'Oh, you'll never renounce anything! You'd walk over corpses for what you want. But it's what you've renounced by never wanting it.'
'That's because you can't want both.'
'Both what?'
'Look, Peter. I've never told you any of those things about me. What makes you see them? I've never asked you to make a choice between me and anything else. What makes you feel that there is a choice involved? What makes you uncomfortable when you feel that--since you're so sure I'm wrong?'
'I... I don't know.' He added: 'I don't know what you're talking about.' And then he asked suddenly:
'Howard, why do you hate me?'
'I don't hate you.'
'Well, that's it! Why don't you hate me at least?'
'Why should I?'
'Just to give me something. I know you can't like me. You can't like anybody. So it would be kinder to acknowledge people's existence by hating them.'
'I'm not kind, Peter.'
And as Keating found nothing to say, Roark added:
'Go home, Peter. You got what you wanted. Let it go at that. See you Monday.'"
"'What I was wonderin', Chief, are you biding your time towards the day you decide to lay into them?'
'No,' I told him. 'I couldn't.'
'Couldn't tell them off? It's easier than you think.'
'You're... lot bigger, tougher'n I am,' I mumbled.
'How's that? I didn't get you, Chief.'
I worked some spit down in my throat. 'You are bigger and tougher than I am. You can do it.'
'Me? Are you kidding? Criminy, look at you; you stand a head taller'n any man on the ward. There ain't a man here you couldn't turn every way but loose, and that's a fact!'
'No. I'm way too little. I used to be big, but not no more. You're twice the size of me.'"
"I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wondered if I could ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all."
"When the fog was on the ward I used to hide in it to get out of going. The pool always scared me; I was always afraid I'd step in over my head and drown, be sucked off down the drain and clean out to sea. I used to be real brave around water when I was a kid on the Columbia; I'd walk the scaffolding around the falls with all the other men, scrambling around with water roaring green and white all around me and the mist making rainbows, without even any hobnails like the men wore. But when I saw my Papa start getting scared of things, I got scared too, got so I couldn't even stand a shallow pool."
"It's too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won't act like I order it. There's no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn't do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I'm in for trouble, but I can't stop it. McMurphy's got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I'm fair game. He's doing it, wires...
No. That's not the truth. I lifted it myself."
"I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands an red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin. I'd see him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? These were the kinds of things you'd expect from Billy Bibbit or Harding. Harding had hands that looked like they should have done paintings, though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks for doghouses. McMurphy wasn't like that. He hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he'd let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit."
"And later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was. There'd be my face in the mirror, dark and hard with big, high cheekbones like the cheek underneath them had been hacked with a hatchet, eyes all black and hard and mean-looking, just like papa's eyes or the eyes of all those tough, mean-looking Indians you see on TV, and I'd think, That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don't seem like I ever have been me. How can McMurphy be what he is?"
"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."
"'Dennis, I can't help it,' he whispered. 'Sometimes I feel like I'm not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.'
'Is LeBay there?' I asked him.
'He's always here,' Arnie groaned, 'Oh God, always! Except--'
'The car?'
'When Christine... when she goes, then he's with her. That's the only time he's... he's...'
Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:
'Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!'
Then nothing for maybe five seconds--nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.
I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.
'It's all going to happen just like he said,' LeBay told me. 'Let it go, boy. Maybe I won't drive over you.'"
 |
| Delirious (1991) |
"Did he really want to know? He didn't. In fact, there were times when he didn't want the car at all. There were times when he felt he would be better off just... well, junking it. Not that he ever would, or could. It was just that, sometimes (in the sweaty, shaking aftermath of that dream last night, for instance), he felt that if he got rid of it, he would be... happier.
The radio suddenly spat an almost feline burst of static.
'Don't worry,' Arnie whispered. He ran his hand slowly over the dashboard, loving the feel of it. Yes, the car frightened him sometimes. And he supposed his father was right; it had changed his life to some degree. But he could no more junk it than he could commit suicide."
"Engines. That's something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don't know what the fuck they are or what they're supposed to do. There are clues, but that's all. The drug thing is like that, and the booze thing, and the sex thing, and sometimes other stuff too--a summer job that generates a new interest, a trip, a course in school. Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that's really fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside."
"I sat there behind the wheel of my car, not sure what I should do, wishing I was someplace else, anyplace else, trying on shoes at Thom McAn's, filling out a credit application in a discount store, standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhea and no dime. Anyplace, man. It didn't have to be Monte Carlo. Mostly I sat there wishing I was older. Wishing we were both older.
But that was a copout job. I knew what to do. Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest. We sat that way for maybe five minutes, and then I drove him to his house and dropped him off. After that I went home myself. Neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that. No one came along the sidewalk and saw us parked at the curb. I suppose if someone had, we would have looked like a couple of queers. I sat there and held him and loved him the best I could and wondered how come it had to be that I was Arnie Cunningham's only friend, because right then, believe me, I didn't want to be his friend. "
"Citizens, the time for pussyfooting is over. The time for dillying, for dallying. No more can we use rhetoric as a replacement for deeds. No more can I hide behind words, yearning instead of learning, using sentiment to substitute for--see, I'm doing it again. No, this is a new era, a new me. ... I have wasted too much time already. Love is sweet and life is short."
