Apathy Emergency

            I think Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” is a story that describes the unpredictability of the world, about how what we think is true about the world is never as firmly true as we believe. Take, for example, the two characters in the short story: Georgie, the orderly, and the narrator, the clerk. When we think of hospitals, we think of places where everyone is a professional, everyone in the building is well-qualified to fulfill his or her position. This is clearly not the case with Georgie and the narrator, who go about the hospital high on pills. Georgie apparently haphazardly removes a hunting knife from a victim’s eye without warning anyone beforehand. As an orderly, he certainly has no qualifications to do that, sober or otherwise.

            The most incredible fact about the hospital is that no one really seems to care about anything. Like Georgie and the narrator, who are literally high, the other hospital staff we glimpse seem to operate as if in a dream, as if what happened to the patients was not truly important. The doctors don’t even have names—there is the brain man, the eye man, the Family Service person.

            When Georgie comes out of the operating room with the bloody knife in his hand, the hospital staff seem taken aback at first; however, in the next few lines, it becomes apparent that their speechlessness is really just apathy. The silence is finally broken when the I.C.U. nurse says, “Your shoelace is untied.”

            The epitome of apathy among the characters in the short story is perhaps best exemplified in a subtle thing the nurse tells the stab victim: “It’s just a miracle you didn’t end up sightless or at least dead.” Sightlessness is actually worse than death, if we take her words literally. We think of a hospital as the least apathetic of places, but Johnson is telling us that even the people who are perceived to be the most driven are not unaffected by apathy. We are most shocked by Georgie’s closing remark to the AWOL military recruit Hardee, when he tells him that he “saves lives” for a living. It is shocking because only at this point does it really sink in to us that we put our lives in the hands of people we don’t know, whose expertise we trust by faith.