Yusuf Brannick

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You have been waiting a long time in a place with no clock, and then there is a bedroom in East Nashville with a lamp on the floor beside the bed, and a man sitting on the edge of the mattress with a pill on his tongue.

You do not know him. That is the first thing to say plainly, because everything after it is built on it. He is a stranger. You did not choose him for his life or his face or anything he has done. You were not owed him. You simply found the door standing open — a small unlabeled bottle in his left hand, a compound with a number instead of a name, a Phase II trial out of a clinic on Charlotte Avenue, forty dollars a visit and a form he signed without reading the part about *dissociative events reported in a minority of participants.* That is the door. He is holding it open himself, and he does not know it, and he never will.

Look at him while there is still time to look at him from outside.

Thirty years old. Five eleven and thin the way a man gets thin when he loads his own gear and forgets to eat until eleven at night. Gray-silver hair buzzed down to nothing, scalp showing through pale at the crown — it came in that color at twenty-two and he never fought it, never dyed it, learned to like being the youngest guy in the room who looked like the oldest. Blue eyes, deep-set, tired at the corners. And the nose. Broken once — a monitor wedge on a loadout ramp in Murfreesboro, nobody's fault, a lot of blood on a borrowed shirt — and set slightly crooked, so his whole face reads a half-degree off-true, which is the thing anyone who meets him remembers when they can't remember his name. *Kind of a crooked nose. Real quiet. Plays with the good tone.*

His hands, when he is not thinking about them, go to his face. Right now, one of them is at his mouth — that's the pill, but even without the pill they'd be there, on the cheekbone, on the bridge, the pad of a thumb running the bend of that nose like it's checking whether it's still bent. Calluses on the left fingertips, hard little pads of them, and a bare shine on the right thumb from the pick. Weather on his forearms from loading in through alleys in July. No ink. Nothing on his wrists or his ears or his fingers, not even a watch. Nothing in him takes an ornament.

Yusuf, his mother named him. Bosnian mother out of Sarajevo by way of a resettlement church in Bowling Green, Irish-Tennessean father who stayed nine years. He prays when he can and misses when he can't and carries the missing quietly. He has never had a drink in his life, which in his line of work is a whole personality he has to explain four times a week — the bar comps you a beer, you say water's fine, and then you watch the guy decide whether you're in recovery or a snob. He vapes a little out the back door when other people are vaping. Twelve to eighteen hundred a week, some weeks; nothing some weeks; a hundred and thirty thousand in an index fund because his mother told him at nineteen that in this country nobody is coming, and he believed her. Comfortable. Nobody would guess it from the boots.

Single. There is an ex — four months out, and she still matters, which is the polite way of saying he still checks whether she's watching. No kids. In two hours he'll be doing soundcheck on a small stage off a honky-tonk back alley, neon bleeding pink and blue up the brick, testing a monitor, saying *check, check, one two* into a mic in a room with nine people in it and none of them listening.

He will still do that. That's the part you can't tell him.

He is doing this because his ears ring now — a needle of tone at 4k that never leaves, that lives under everything, that has started to make him play flat and know it. Nine weeks of trials, forty dollars a visit, tinnitus protocol, take one and record any changes. He is a man trying to fix a small thing about himself in the cheapest available way. That is all this is to him. Careful. Practical. Sitting on the edge of his own unmade bed with the laundry on the carpet and the tour posters going soft at the corners, taking his medicine alone, on time, like a good patient.

The lamp is warm and low and it does that thing to his face where the hollows go dark and the bones come forward.

He swallows.

He waits, the way you wait for anything you've swallowed — attention turned inward, sitting up a little straighter, listening for himself. Twelve seconds. He sets the bottle on the mattress beside his thigh. He touches his face. Cheek, then the bridge, then the bend.

And then you come through, and his pupils blow open all at once, both of them, black flooding the blue out to the rim — the whole room dumping into him at once and no one home to stop it. His head goes back. Something bright is in his mouth and behind his eyes and there is nothing between him and it.

Then it is over and he is slack for a moment, and then he is not, and it is you.

The first thing is the ringing. God — *that*. He was going to get rid of that. It sits under the world at 4k and now it is your world, and you will hear it for as long as you have him, which is for good.

The second thing is that the body is cold and the shirt smells like cigarette smoke that isn't his, off a stage from last night. The third thing is that his hand comes up to his face without you telling it to. You let it. It goes to the cheekbone, the bridge, the bend in the nose. It knows the route. Some part of a man survives in what his hands do when nobody is driving, and that route is still there, worn in, and you follow it with your thumb — over the bump where the bone set wrong, the little step in it — and you understand for one second exactly what it cost him to get and how little he ever said about it.

You get the hand out in front of you and turn it over. Calluses like small coins on four fingertips. A shine on the thumb. Nothing on the wrist. It is not yours and it is going to be yours, and there is no door back and no date on it, and you did not know his name until you found it on the bottle in your other hand: *BRANNICK, Y.*

Across the room there is a mirror leaning against the wall behind the laundry, and your eyes go to it and narrow down out of that flooded black into focus, into two blue points, and you look at the face that came with the deal — the pale buzzed scalp, the tired hollows, the nose set a half-degree wrong — and you look at it the way a stranger looks. Which is what you are. Which is what everybody who meets him from now on will be.

In two hours you will carry his amp up an alley in the neon and stand on a small stage and say *check* into a microphone, and it will sound like him, because it will be him, and nobody in that room will look up.

That is the last part he'd have wanted, if he'd known: nobody looking up.