Emergency

“I want to go to church […] I’d like to worship. I would […] I need a quiet chapel about now.”

After their hospital shifts, Fuckhead and Georgie lie in the back of the truck, considering what to do. The desire for the sublime and salvation pervades the story, and in this moment Georgie voices his need to change something about his life. Fuckhead seems uncomfortable with Georgie’s desire, and he never lets on that he has heard or considered it.

“It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life, I’ve taken as much [LSD] as he has.”

The future Fuckhead, who narrates the story, remembers the county fair, where there was a man who advocated for LSD use. Fuckhead now sees himself in this man, demonstrating self-critical hindsight as he acknowledges how his younger self was careless or deluded; the younger Fuckhead “pit[ied]” the man without realizing their similarities.

“After that, we got lost. We drove for hours, literally hours, but we couldn’t find the road back to town.”

Throughout the story, Fuckhead repeatedly mentions feeling lost, underscoring his sense of aimlessness in life. This line also shows Fuckhead insisting on a particular measurement of time—“literally hours”—but the insistence is rendered somewhat impotent by the general unreliability of his narration, especially involving his sense of time.

“In a minute he was standing at the edge of the fields, cutting the scrawny little thing up, tossing away its organs. ‘I should have been a doctor,’ he cried.”

Georgie consistently sees himself as a savior, a characteristic that Fuckhead highlights at the end of the story. Georgie is reactive, not proactive, and his humorous claim that he should have been a doctor despite his somewhat terrifying (yet successful) approach to Terrence Weber’s eye injury underscores a complicated personality full of ego, compassion, and hope.

“He started driving along faster and faster, with a look of glory on his face. ‘We killed the mother and saved the children,’ he said.”

Georgie is delusional in his attempt to save the bunnies, but hopeful that doing so can atone for the initial sin of killing the mother. However ineffectual, it is, in Georgie’s mind, an act of salvation; the word describing his face, the look of “glory,” carries subtle religious undertones. Fuckhead seems less certain of this salvation, noting that the bunnies are barely moving, but he does what Georgie tells him to and tries to keep them warm.

“‘The summer’s over,’ I said.”

Fuckhead has been building towards a kind of epiphany or change over the course of the story, and the onset of the freak storm creates a near-religious (if also funny) experience at the drive-in. Despite the incongruity of mistaking movie figures for angels, Fuckhead seems altered by the experience. The next morning, he wakes up with a better sense of “what mattered.”

“On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.”

High on pills, Fuckhead experiences an everyday drive-in as something sublime. The vision he describes melds beauty with terror, and the experience of having such a vision “cut through [his] heart” is an allusion to the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, most famously depicted by the Italian sculptor Bernini. However, the heavenly imagery contrasts with the supremely earthly idea of messing one’s pants. The angels have faces that are “full of pity” (66) for Fuckhead, and when Georgie points out to him that it’s just a movie screen, he seems almost disappointed, saying, “I see. I thought it was something else” (67). As terrifying as it was, he was hoping the hallucination was real.

“A general greyness was giving birth to various shapes, it was true. ‘But which ones are close and which ones are far off?’ I begged him to tell me.”

Fuckhead takes on an air of desperation as he realizes that Georgie more clearly sees what is going on; they are in a snowscape, in darkness, but Georgie’s eyes are beginning to adjust. Fuckhead’s plea for Georgie to share his vision symbolizes his desire to make sense of the world—but also his trouble in doing so—and he seeks help from another human. Metaphorically, that he seeks help is a testament to his capacity for growth.

“‘We gotta get back. We’re a long way from home.’

‘No, we’re not.’

‘We must have come three hundred miles.’

‘We’re right outside town, Fuckhead. We’ve just been driving around and around.’” 

Georgie points out that Fuckhead is confused about their location, and this exchange suggests that Georgie has a better grip on something than Fuckhead does. Their conversation also underscores Fuckhead’s general sense of being lost and adrift in their world. This particular passage is the first time the reader hears the narrator’s name, and it emphasizes the reality of the epithet; it almost seems as though Georgie uses the word in earnest and is suggesting Fuckhead’s abject lack of comprehension.

“The truth was I’d forgotten all about them, and they were dead.”

When Georgie asks about the baby rabbits, Fuckhead realizes that they’ve shifted around in his shirt, and he’s squished them to death, ruining Georgie’s attempt at redemption after killing the mother rabbit. Fuckhead may be passive, but he is not apathetic: He tears up upon telling Georgie about the rabbits, and he remorsefully marvels at their tiny features, including their eyelids and whiskers. Fuckhead is complex—both careless and attentive.

“‘Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?’

‘No wonder they call me Fuckhead.’

‘It’s a name that’s going to stick.’

‘I realize that.’

‘“Fuckhead” is going to ride you to your grave.’”

The exchange with Georgie about Fuckhead’s name illuminates Fuckhead’s hopelessness about his role in the world. He does not argue with Georgie but merely agrees with him. Georgie points out that the name—and its signification of failure—will be inescapable. It is a vaguely fatalistic and even tragic remark, treating the word “Fuckhead” as what it actually is: a curse.

“What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren’t a problem yet, or they’d already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how the slave might become a friend to his master.”

Fuckhead has a kind of epiphany upon waking up in the truck, presumably now sober. He finds beauty and strangeness in the world that surrounds him and has a moment of reprieve from the memory of his failure with the bunnies. This state of mind allows him to imagine the impossible.

“That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?”

The future Fuckhead, narrating the story, attempts to explain his complex feelings about his prior self and world. He has trouble grasping it and remembering it, suggesting that external forces have removed it from him, and hindered his understanding of it.