Cobalt

An electrician in Las Vegas — the city that never sleeps because it lost the light switch. He wired marquees, crawled through drop ceilings above packed rooms, repaired miles of neon by headlamp. The street trained him in parallel: count a room before entering, know the two exits — three, in his case, because he read the blueprints.

A House hired him to relight a club after a curtain. He relit it, glanced at the books, then asked what it felt like, a trade where you win. They showed him. He stowed the headlamp in his toolbox, just in case, and stayed.

He opens doors without touching them. Fifteen minutes bent over a gray junction box, and the building across the street blinks, hiccups, goes dark exactly where it should. His squad walks into the dark he made, walks out before the light. The guys call it the live current: with him on the team, everybody suddenly feels competent, even the rookies.

The sidewalk is another story. Blue coveralls, a job-site walk, and heads turning everywhere he goes — he’s enormously attractive, which annoys him, because it makes noise. Don’t count on him to fill a conversation: he answers in monosyllables, estimate attached. Talk, he says, is badly insulated cable: it heats up, and sooner or later it burns somebody.

Ambitious the old way: he wants a marquee with his name on it, and he wants to wire it himself, down to the last bulb socket. In the meantime he runs his crews like a site foreman — helmets, schedules, nobody climbs without a harness — and spends his days off scouting the back courtyards of Houses that treat their people badly. He notes the meters, the conduits, the exits. Professional conscience, he says. Appetite, say the others. Both are true.