DEAD AIR

From the opening

People think a confession is a loud thing. It isn't. In twenty-four years of the graveyard shift I have learned that the truth arrives at a whisper, usually around two in the morning, usually from someone who has finally run out of places to hide it.

They call the number on the hour. They do not give their names. They tell me the thing — the affair, the theft, the hand that let go of the wheel — and I say the words the collar used to say: You are heard. You can set it down now. And most of them can. That is the trick of the trade. You can hand your worst night to a stranger in the dark and the dark will hold it for you.

What no one tells you is that the dark keeps a ledger. And the one confession I have never made — the only one that was ever owed to anybody — has been sitting at the bottom of that ledger for a quarter of a century, waiting for me to say it to the right person, in my own name, out loud, on the record.

I am running out of nights to do it.