Emergency
By Denis Johnson, first published in The New Yorker
A man works in an emergency room alongside his friend, and they take a concoction of different drugs that blurs the lines between their current shift and their break as well as between reality and fiction.
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In the summer of 1973, a young Hospital clerk takes drugs with his friend Georgie during their double shift in an Emergency room. His exact memory of what occurs in the following hours becomes less than reliable. He finds Georgie delusionally mopping the floor of the operating room, convinced that it contains blood nobody else sees. He and the nurses both share concern and suspicion at the caution and stress that the dirty floor is causing Georgie. Soon after, a man named Terrence Weber enters the emergency room with a knife in his eye. As the group strategizes how to go about the removal, Terrence shares that his wife stabbed him in the eye for peeping on their neighbor. Eventually, Georgie, after being instructed not to, re-enters the room with Terrence’s knife now in his hand. The Clerk and Georgie leave the hospital and drive around after their shift ends. They stop through old fair grounds and continue on their way. When they run over a rabbit, Georgie demands they turn back and rescue the babies from the belly of their dead mother. The Clerk holds the small rabbit babies in his lap as they continue to drive. Eventually the pair arrive at an abandoned drive-in and they discover all the baby rabbits have been squished to death. They return back to the hospital to clock back in, and Georgie can no longer can remember the identity of Terrence Weber, the patient he had met earlier in the day.
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