On "Steady hands at Seattle General"

Denis Johnson's "Steady hands at Seattle General" follows a narrator who seems to have been in an accident, and is staying at a hospital where he is given drugs and feels faded. The narrator meets a man who has a bullet wound in  his head, and they begin conversing. The narrator tells the man that he is a writer, and that he would like to write a poem about him. As the narrator continues asking the man questions, the man tells him that he's been shot by both of his wives. He seems to be pessimistic about life, seeing no depth or maybe hiding in fear from the genuine disintegration of his life. The survival of two bullets to the head seems to give him the feeling that he can evade death, rendering him careless and numb. Other than the bullet holes, the man constantly complains about his weight gain though he claims to not eat. The "on-the-surface" dialogue provides the reader with insight into the characters' mindsets when reading between the lines, and lets the reader feel their masket suffering.

"Inside of two days I was shaving myself, and I even shaved a couple of new arrivals, because the drugs they injected me with had an amazing effect. I call it amazing because only hours before they’d wheeled me through corridors in which I hallucinated a soft, summery rain. In the hospital rooms on either side, objects-vases, ashtrays, beds-had looked wet and scary, hardly bothering to cover up their true meanings." The narrator is clearly attempting to evade the reality of his life and of the unknown trigger that led him to his stay in the hospital. He uses drugs as a means of escape, caging himself in an alternate universe instead of comming to terms with his dilemmas. The drugs, nevertheless, also make him realize the terrifying aspects of the hospital, and the dialogue with the man seems to distract him from his worries. When the narrator explains his question to the man, "Well, maybe I mean alive in a deeper sense. You could be talking , and still not be alive in a deeper sense," the reader gets a feeling that he is talking about himself and about his feelings of aimlessness and death. The connection between the two characters on a deeper level encourages the reader to imagine the possible illness of the narrator.