Sleep Donation

The Whistle — Blower’s Hotline

The good news, or the mixed news, it might be fairer to say, is that I will not be performing this information-transfusion for the first time.

Last night, I called the hotline. Actually, I called the hotline about a hundred times. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t speak, I lost track of how many times I dropped the call, and then the seventieth or the eleven hundredth time that I dialed this hotline, for no reason I was able to discern, I heard myself begin.

After the phone clicked down, I woke up to what I’d done.

Maybe I will take that leave of absence now, after all.

I slumped, cored and cold, the way I used to feel after Drives. I sat watching the gray phone where it levitated on the wall, but no human from the Corps called me back; I wonder who picks up these messages.

All that dial tone I ingested must have come roaring out of me. To get the whole thing across properly, with all its nuances, I had to call back several times, resuming where I’d left off. When I finished, the scraped white moon was out. Near the end of my transmission, I heard myself, insanely, thanking the chittering machine for recording so much tape, and I felt a quakey relief, thinking that at last I was rid of it, that events would now rush to meet us, but at least I’d been honest, or as honest as I could be, starting with my first association with the Harkonnens. I leaned my head against the wall, listening to the droning silence. I exhausted myself with speculations about whether I’d set the wrong or the right outcome in motion. Unsurprisingly, last night I couldn’t sleep. I wondered what, if anything, would happen as a result of the phone call—if even now some dream or nightmare was massing into our future, gathering like weather, becoming real. But I also thought, with the sly old happiness, No matter what tomorrow brings, you can be sure of at least one thing, Edgewater: tonight you’ve given Dori’s story to a stranger.