Emergency by Denis Johnson Summary

Emergency, told in the first person, describes the narrator's experience with Georgie, an orderly at the hospital where the narrator does administrative work. Georgie is moderately unbalanced; the beginning of the story describes a patient who comes in with a knife in his eye. As the staff tries to page numerous specialists and tries to figure out how to deal with the problem, Georgie just pulls the knife out of the man's face. Later, Georgie and the narrator go for a drive together, looking for the county fair and possibly for a chapel, which is what Georgie wants to see. The men end up caught in a blizzard and stay in the car overnight. Eventually, they make it out and go back to work late, where the narrator remembers an encounter they had with a hitchhiker whom...