Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

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 in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. …we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.

I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants.

…her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside…

…she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger… […] …she’s already big as a truck. … she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path!

“…look at the size of that foot of yours; big as a flatcar!” I looked down and saw how my foot was bigger than I’d ever remembered it, like McMurphy’s just saying it had blowed it twice its size.

…the hand on that arm the black boy was holding commenced to swell up. […] They didn’t see the hand on the end of that arm pumping bigger and bigger as he clenched and unclenched it. I was the only one saw it.

… Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy … stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her.

The Big Nurse’s eyes swelled out white as he got close. […] This was supposed to be her final victory over him, supposed to establish her rule once and for all. But here he comes and he’s big as a house!

“Sure,” I said, “they can do tattoos. But the arms, huh? The arms? They couldn’t do those. His arms were big!”