After rehearsal, walking down the same fire escape they used to enter, he told himself the same story he’d been telling a long time: They don’t get it. They’re safe players. I’m the one pushing. If someone who wasn’t in the band asked how it was going, he’d sigh and say, “I’m surrounded by talent, but no vision.” At the bookstore gig with the screaming broken espresso machine, a woman from the front row approached during the break.
“I love your sound,” she said. “But I wonder do you ever try leaving a gap after the high octave?”

He smiled politely. “People always want to remove the part that takes skill,” he said.

That night, in the kitchen, he said it again to no one, as if someone might be across the street trying to hear his imitation, “That part takes skill!” He lay awake doing the math of injuries: who owed him what, which colleagues had misunderstood him, which teachers had praised the wrong students.

Morning found him with a headache. Two days later, a student from the workshop sent a message: Thanks for last week. I tried the “enter by echo” thing. It changed everything. We hadn’t been listening; now we are. Feels like music. He barely remembered saying it, enter by echo. It was something he’d heard in a class, once, about attention and invitation, and repeated because he liked the taste of it. Now the student had used it and knew something he did not. He stared at the message awhile, then scrolled up to an older text thread with an old teacher, a person he avoided because he had the habit of telling him things he did not want to hear. Months earlier he wrote: Record your rehearsals. Listen once as a player, once as a stranger, once as the room. He replied with an emoji, the equivalent of nodding while not listening.

He went to the practice space alone. He set his phone on a folding chair, hit record, and played the three studio songs, like a child performing both parts of an argument. On playback, he closed his eyes and tried to hear like a stranger. The first thing he noticed was a temperature: he sounded hot and cramped at the same time. A little later, he heard something he never really understood. He was chasing the front time like a dog after a car, and the car, unbothered, kept driving. At the end of the third listen, he heard something stranger. In the spaces where the others would have played, he heard ghosts. The practical kind, like walking through a doorway and realizing it was a mirror. He sat for a long time with his hands on his knees. No one to congratulate the realization, which is how he knew it was real.

That week he asked the band to meet early. They were wary; he could tell from the way they took their seats looking protective.
“I listened,” he said. He held up his phone. “You’re right about the chorus. And the beat.” He tried to smile. “Can we try something? For the first half hour, I don’t defend, only ask questions. Then we play the take we think is worst.”

Louis blinked. “We start with the worst?”

“I want to hear it break,” he said. “Then we know what to fix.”

Afterward he wrote three lines in a notebook:
What changed: room got bigger.
Who led: not me.
Repair: left a gap; everyone else filled it with music.

They worked like this for weeks. When someone offered a note, he repeated it back in his words to be sure he understood. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he tried and failed and wanted to throw the guitar at the wall, but then Judy would say, dry as winter, “Again,” and they would go again, and the room would widen by an inch.

He noticed his life changing in small ways. In lines at the store, he stopped narrating the incompetence of the cashier. On the subway he gave his seat to a woman and didn’t explain to himself why he was a good person for doing it. He ate slower. He told a friend he was sorry for missing his show and did not add a paragraph about how busy he was. He called his mother and let the silence stretch without panic.

At the next bookstore gig the espresso machine still screamed. During the break the same woman from months ago approached, smiling the way people do when they have made a plan to be brave.

“I hear it,” she said. “That gap.”

He felt the old sentence rise People always want less and watched it pass like weather. He bowed a little.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m learning to leave it.”

“Hardest thing,” she said, and went back to her seat.

They started the last tune with a soft count. The room bloomed. He heard the band move into the space he had made and felt a small, precise click somewhere in the machinery of himself. It was the sensation of the music becoming larger than his fear. Outside, the night smelled like rain even though it wasn’t raining. He lifted his face to the not-rain and let it touch him anyway. Then he went home to practice leaving space.