Emergency by Denis Johnson

Wow that was a weird short story... After reading that story, I was confused and amazed by what some pills can do to a person's thoughts! The story was told in first person, and the first person was not trustworthy due to their use of drugs and misconceptions that they had the reader believe. As untrustworthy as all the characters seemed, they were working in healthcare- which is an extremely scary thought! It seems as though the whole health care system in this Catholic Hospital is flawed, with employees taking pills from the cabinets and treating patients improperly. Georgie was supposed to be simply prepping Terrence Wilson, but he instead just took the hunter's knife from his eye and acted as if his actions would have no repercussions. The procedure was a VERY serious one, and I know this and I'm not even a doctor!!! What is even more ironic is that the doctor responded to Georgies actions with "Where did you get that?" and nothing else. The unordinary actions of the doctor, nurse, orderly, and Georgie were questionable and confusing. After the two main characters left the hospital, they seemed to be driving around pointlessly and experiencing hallucinations- graphic hallucinations. These hallucinations including wintery weather in a summer season as described by the narrator, rabbit encounters, and driving thousands of miles but probably only driving in circles pointlessly. The explanation of their travels to the final character we met, Hardee, also confused me. Georgie seemed to be all-knowing of the weird events that occured and Hardee didn't really question any of the things they said. Hardee seems to just randomly show up on the side of the road, and the narrator just happened to know who it was, so that was weird. To sum up this reading it was creepy, confusing, and I wasn't exactly impressed. The confusement was summed up in the last line when Georgie answered the question of what he does for a living with "I save lives." The fact that he pulled that knife from a victims head with no hesitation was weird, but he did save his life. The fact that he killed the mother rabbit but saved the babies does also prove that he saves lives. However despite all of these reasons, they all have hesistations to why this was a bad idea for him to perform any of that. Georgie might actually save lives and be more practical if he wasn't always drugged up, or surrounded by people who were drugged up.