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In the summer of 1973, the narrator works as a clerk in a hospital emergency room. Feeling bored on the overnight shift, he looks for his friend Georgie, an orderly. He finds Georgie high on drugs he’s stolen from the hospital. Georgie cries as he mops a spotless operating room floor, convinced it's covered in blood. The Family Services doctor is surprised to find Georgie still cleaning up. The narrator takes pills from Georgie's pockets.
In the early morning, Terrence Weber arrives at the emergency room with a large knife buried in the eye socket of his one good eye. The other eye is a prosthetic. Weber’s wife stabbed him while he slept, and amazingly, he can still see out of the eye. Nurse calls for the Family Services doctor, who takes his time coming because he fears that the patient’s case will be beyond his abilities.
While Georgie prepares Weber for surgery, Nurse assembles a team of specialists—an eye doctor, a brain surgeon, and an anesthesiologist. The Family Services doctor suspects that Georgie is either high or mentally deficient. Nurse responds that she has no problem with Georgie, as long as he does his job.
As the specialists discuss the best way to treat Weber, Georgie returns holding the knife, which he has pulled from the patient’s eye. Everyone stares, stunned speechless. The narrator remarks that his days and nights seem to blend together since he works double shifts with eight hours off in between, sleeping at the nurse’s station. The pills keep him awake but mentally detached.
After their shifts, the narrator and Georgie drive to a county fair in Georgie’s pickup truck. Not much happens there, and Georgie barely remembers it. Afterward, they get lost while driving around. Georgie accidentally runs over a rabbit and uses Weber’s hunting knife to gut it, planning to eat it the next day. The rabbit was pregnant, and Georgie extracts the babies without killing them.
Next, the pair drive dangerously fast down country roads, still lost. As the sun sets, Georgie drifts to a stop on the side of the road. He says they cannot continue because his truck has no headlights. The two men leave the truck and wander aimlessly in the forest as snow begins to fall. They lose sight of the truck and become lost in the woods.
Eventually, the pair discover what the narrator thinks is a military graveyard with rows of markers for fallen soldiers. The sky seems to tear open, and the narrator sees angels descending. Georgie breaks the narrator’s hallucination by pointing out that they’re actually seeing a drive-in movie lot. The angels are merely the actors projected on the screen. Georgie is astonished that the drive-in is showing the movie in a blizzard. The theater lot is deserted, and soon, the projection is cut.
Leaving the drive-in theater, the men eventually find Georgie’s truck. Georgie still insists they cannot go anywhere since the truck has no headlights. While they sit, the narrator informs Georgie that he has accidentally sat on the bunnies, killing them. Georgie asks the narrator if he ruins everything he touches. The narrator agrees that he does, indicating that that’s why his nickname is Fuckhead.
The two men sleep in the truck, awakening with the rising sun and a beautiful, snowy scene.
When the young men return to the hospital, it’s as if no time has passed. The hospital releases Weber that afternoon. Nurse says it’s a miracle that his injury didn’t leave him either blind or dead. He confesses that his wife stabbed him, trying to blind him for peeping on their sunbathing neighbor. When Weber shakes Georgie’s hand, Georgie does not remember him.
The narrator flashes back to an incident earlier that morning. They picked up a hitchhiker named Hardee on the drive back to town. The narrator knows him and had housed him the previous summer. Hardee reluctantly tells the two men he has been drafted and is AWOL, trying to escape to Canada. Georgie volunteers to help him get there. When Hardee asks Georgie what he does for a job, Georgie replies, “I save lives.”
