Response to Denis Johnson's "Emergency"

What I think is really clever on Johnson’s part is making Georgie’s drug trip not just a drug trip. We see certain behaviors of Georgie’s before we know for certain that he has actually taken some pills. The last sentence in the first paragraph says, “He often stole pills from the cabinets,” but refrains from actually saying, “He had taken some when I found him.” That refrain led me to think that Georgie was, at first, having some type of Post Traumatic Stress episode. He saw how frail and vulnerable he was when he had to clean the blood on the floor and it triggered something inside of him that made him see  permanent blood stains and cause him to weep and act like a little baby (in a literal sense). After that, I couldn’t help but think that his behaviors didn't all have something to do with the drugs he had taken, especially considering all of the references to soldiers.

Some of the language that was used made the whole thing not seem so much as a drug trip, but as a dream. (I guess I think of nightmares when I think of drug trips and that’s probably because of films—the only one that made trips seem like dreams was Taking Woodstock.) Stuff like, “The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world,” and “…the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano.”

One thing I have a question about is in one section (page 388), Johnson switches tense abruptly and once in the same sentence. “I was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.” I’m really curious. Why did he switch tenses up like that? What does that do?

The thing I admire most about the story is the dialogue between characters. Through their dialogue you know what everyone thinks of everyone else and the way they themselves are. Favorite moment: “What seems to be the trouble?”