#112 Emergency- Denis Johnson
A few years ago somebody left Tree of Smoke at my bar. The
book was on the Pulitzer short list. It was never claimed from the lost and
found so I took it home and read it, loved it, passed it on to the next person
in a fun read-it-forward string of events. I am very happy to be reading one
of his short stories.
Just like his book, everything here is completely off
kilter, bonkers, fubar. There is a bunch of craziness going on in an Emergency
room. The orderly has been mopping up the same blood from the O.R. floor for
hours. Its like the blood spot from Macbeth.
A man comes in with a knife sticking out of one eye, the
other eye is plastic, but he can still see.
“[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the
situation: the clerk- that is, me- standing next to the orderly, George, both
of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his
face.
‘What seems to be the problem?’ he said”
When asked by the hospital staff what happened:
“My wife did it, I was asleep”
“Do you want the police?”
“Not unless I die.”
Everyone in the story is messed up, or on drugs, it’s the
theatre of the absurd, or something out of the LSD crazed mind of Ken Kesey.
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