23 pages • 46 minutes read
Emergency
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Themes
Revelation and the Transfiguration of Vision
Vision and transfiguration feature heavily throughout “Emergency.” The story begins with Georgie mopping up blood that no one else can see. While Georgie is not sober, he nevertheless makes the deeply sober remark that “There’s so much goop inside of us, man […] and it all wants to get out” (57). The assertion touches on the inevitability, even the necessity, of suffering. Hallucination becomes revelation. Georgie then weeps—a symbolic “suffering” borne by his organs of vision. Soon walks in Terrence, a man with a hunting knife stabbed into his eye socket. Ironically, Terrence can still see out of the stabbed eye, but cannot out of his other eye, which is artificial—another association of affliction with revelation and reality.
After their shift, Georgie and Fuckhead have an exchange about the county fair they visited; Georgie claims he didn’t see any rides, and Fuckhead tells him he was wrong. For the two men, and for the reader, what is visible is always in flux, never secure, either somehow transforming or shifting into invisibility entirely. The drug use and general unreliability of the two characters call into question the veracity of their claims and underscore both characters’ desire for connection and their inability to achieve it.
At the same time as the drug use plays into the characters’ unreliability, that unreliability hangs in tension with the oddly imperative truths that the hallucinations embody: Later, outside the drive-in, Fuckhead has an almost religious experience—a vision—that turns out to be a film playing on a drive-in movie screen. In this case, somewhat akin to Georgie’s hallucination of blood, the illicit substances alter and even elevate Fuckhead’s vision, bearing something otherworldly and numinous, beautiful and terrible. This moment of drug-induced, fearful rapture is part of the story’s recurrent analogy between intoxication and salvific religion, and transfigured vision is a primary vehicle for the analogy.
After the screen goes black, the two characters find themselves in near-complete darkness in the middle of a snowscape. However, Georgie remarks that his eyes are adjusting to the darkness and that he is “starting to get [his] eyes back” (67), and Fuckhead agrees, noting that he can see some shapes, but begs Georgie to tell him “which ones are close and which ones are far off” (67). Fuckhead has trouble making sense of the world, and he craves guidance even from someone as unreliable as Georgie to give him some sense of the shape of things. Georgie, however, cannot provide that to him.
When Fuckhead awakes the next morning in the truck, he describes what he calls the most “important [thing] for [him] to remember” (69), a moment of transfigured vision that makes the world new again:
A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange […] I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched […] I saw bits of snow resembling an abundance of blossoms on the stems of the drive-in speakers—no, revealing the blossoms that were always there (69).
It is unclear whether this rebirth of vision results from Fuckhead’s ecstatic angelic encounter or whether or it results from some kind of defamiliarizing afterglow of the drugs wearing off—but, in either case, it prefaces a transformation of Fuckhead himself, wherein he realizes a difference between himself and Georgie.
In the final movement of the story, Georgie and Fuckhead pick up Hardee, a hitchhiker. Fuckhead describes how “the day was cloudless, blinding […] One star was so hot it showed, bright and blue, in the empty sky” (71). Despite his rootless, unreliable experiences, Fuckhead maintains a clarity and attention to small, natural beauties. Even in the face of the blinding sun, he accesses another kind of light—smaller, but nevertheless powerful.
Getting Lost
Fuckhead and Georgie periodically get lost over the course of the story, at least according to Fuckhead. First, they become lost after going to the county fair. Fuckhead says, “we drove for hours, literally hours, but we couldn’t find the road back to town” (63). Despite the clarity of the day, they cannot return home, and this sensation of being lost bothers Fuckhead; he periodically mentions it and seems concerned about finding their way back. Notably, Georgie never acknowledges being lost. When Fuckhead expresses concern about heading home, believing they have driven hundreds of miles, Georgie replies, “We’re right outside town, Fuckhead. We’ve just been driving around and around” (68). Both men are high, but Fuckhead feels more lost than Georgie. Georgie is also the character who figures things out first, discerning that they are at a drive-in before Fuckhead realizes it, and he pays closer attention to things, remembering the baby bunnies after Fuckhead forgot about them.
Being lost is a larger metaphor for Fuckhead’s spiritual state of being. He is adrift in the world, working a meaningless job even as he attempts to find beauty and awe in other aspects of his life. Ultimately, Johnson suggests a hopeful future for Fuckhead—at the end of the story, Georgie drives them back into town, and they “got back to work in time to resume everything as if it had never stopped happening and we’d never been anywhere else” (70). While their workplace is unchanged, Fuckhead himself has experienced beauty and gained a new perspective on his friend Georgie and the difference between the two of them. Georgie has a clear, positive, and confident view of himself, encompassed in his claim that he “save[s] lives” (72). Georgie is not lost in the way Fuckhead is, but Fuckhead’s ability to see and articulate this difference suggests that Georgie has something he wants and values.
Healing and Salvation
Johnson heavily uses irony to examine themes of healing and salvation throughout “Emergency.” The hospital, which should be a place of safety and professionalism, is staffed with useless, drugged support staff and an incompetent doctor. Despite this, the man who comes in with a potentially life-threatening injury not only survives, but survives at the hands of Georgie, who merely rips the knife out of his eye socket when none of the doctors are looking. Later, the nurse relays that the patient, Terrence, maintained excellent vision in his eye and had normal vital signs.
Healing, however, is something that works out only sometimes for Georgie. When he and Fuckhead run over the rabbit on the road, Georgie, perhaps out of guilt, attempts to save its unborn fetuses, giving them to Fuckhead to keep warm until they can find food for them. Fuckhead cannot handle this responsibility, however, and inadvertently kills the baby bunnies (although they had hardly been moving when he first took them). Georgie’s fixation on saving the bunnies underscores the way he views himself, which Johnson reveals in the final line of the story when Georgie says: “I save lives” (72). Fuckhead realizes that the key difference between himself and Georgie is that Georgie sees himself as a savior, intent on helping and rooted in action. Conversely, Fuckhead is a more passive character who cannot offer healing or salvation but wishes that he could. Fuckhead is, perhaps, the “Jesus’ son” of the collection’s title, embodying an adjacency to the sublime, but not actually a savior himself.
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