Vision and transfiguration feature heavily throughout “Emergency.” The story begins with Georgie mopping up blood that no one else can see. While Georgie is not sober, he nevertheless makes the deeply sober remark that “There’s so much goop inside of us, man […] and it all wants to get out” (57). The assertion touches on the inevitability, even the necessity, of suffering. Hallucination becomes revelation. Georgie then weeps—a symbolic “suffering” borne by his organs of vision. Soon walks in Terrence, a man with a hunting knife stabbed into his eye socket. Ironically, Terrence can still see out of the stabbed eye, but cannot out of his other eye, which is artificial—another association of affliction with revelation and reality.

After their shift, Georgie and Fuckhead have an exchange about the county fair they visited; Georgie claims he didn’t see any rides, and Fuckhead tells him he was wrong. For the two men, and for the reader, what is visible is always in flux, never secure, either somehow transforming or shifting into invisibility entirely. The drug use and general unreliability of the two characters call into question the veracity of their claims and underscore both characters’ desire for connection and their inability to achieve it.