Story 6 Summary

"Emergency"

The narrator sets this story in the late summer of 1973, when he had been working in a hospital emergency room for a few weeks and had befriended an orderly named Georgie. Georgie, as the narrator describes him, regularly steals pills out of the medication stores, uses them, and as an example of how he is affected by his drug use, hallucinates blood on the floors even when he's cleaned it all up.

One night, a patient name Terrence comes into the emergency room with a knife sticking into the corner of his eye and through to his brain. As the chief nurse and the on-duty doctor decide what to do, Georgie prepares the patient for surgery and calmly takes the knife out of his eye. Terrence, it later turns out, can see out of that eye perfectly.

Later, Georgie and the narrator...