Denis Johnson's "Emergency!" follows two employees of a Catholic hospital, one a clerk, the other an orderly. The story centers around one day in which the characters handle a particularly strange patient, and then go on a drug fueled misadventure. Along the way, we learn more about the men as they fail to grow in the face of strange adversity.
Johnson establishes a bar-tale mood to this story early on that gives it a poignant sense of realism. In the introduction, the narrator says something like "This story takes place back when I was..." This let's us know the story is seen from a first person perspective, and is a recollection, spotty and perhaps too mired in personal reflection. An introduction like that is almost like a verbal warning label for when some drunk at a bar is about to spew out some nonsense. The real strength of this story comes from the pacing. The flow of the story makes you feel the waves of hallucination coming and going with the drugs the characters are taking. When the narrators sober he can very clearly see the ridiculousness of his cohort. He also can very acutely feel the horror at the moment we all realize this drugged up orderly has taken it on himself to remove the knife from the patients eye. To the narrators credit he is the first person to ask if the patient is alright. From the moment his drugs begin to take affect, the story moves feverishly through fair grounds, to roadside animal rescue, to drive-in theater hallucinations. It's a whirlwind of sensory input and poorly thought out reaction. It stays like this until the eventual come down during what, I can only imagine, must have been a very hard morning. The story ends on a positive, if somewhat unrealistic, note. In the end the orderly is promising aide to a hitchhiker, and we're left knowing he probably won't deliver. It's still a nice thought.
This story is an excellent anecdote. What I found most interesting was the seeming lack of the narrator to come to any conclusions, or learn anything. Here all this strangeness is flying around, and our main characters seem ultimately unnaffected. We're offered insight that the narrator later comes to, but we're never shown the characters coming to these insights at the time of the event. We're led to believe that years later, with reflection, these insights were gained. A great example is when the narrator is telling us how a moment encapsulates the difference between him and the orderly. When the moment of that insight arrives, the narrator's younger self seems almost oblivious.
