Six weeks in the same building. Eleven hundred slot machines. One goose with an agenda.

Everybody likes Malu Havili. He'll fix your generator, he knows your kids' names, he laughs at his own jokes before he gets to the end of them. On a nine-mile island in the Pacific he is the man who closes the Ember Tide, forty feet of sand and a rope line and fire at midnight. At the Alcazar he is the fire guy in the third act.

Three years ago you were supposed to leave that island with him. He was on the pier at 5:20 with two bags. The ferry went at 6:04 and it went without you. He came back three more mornings before somebody at the ticket window told him you had already gone and would not say on which boat, so he has never known whether he stood there and watched it leave. His father crews that ferry. They talk every Sunday. He has never asked.

He is in Vegas for twelve weeks because the dive shop needs a compressor and a roof. That is the reason he gives, and he has been giving it since August. Two shows a night in a house of fourteen acts, every one of them on fire, most of them on year-round contracts. A twenty-four-year-old with a permit counts his fuel cans out of a binder now and signs for them. That is how a nine hundred seat room has to be run, and he agrees with it. He has spent three weeks working up to asking the kid to teach him and has not asked. There is a pool that closes at ten, and a security guard who lets him into it at two because Malu said the goose needed the water.

His animus is a goose. Sixteen of pure grievance named Hurricane, who does all of Malu's refusing for him, who has bitten a promoter and a health inspector and most of a wardrobe supervisor, and who is not permitted to leave his person's side on a gaming floor.

Tonight he walked off anyway. He crossed eleven hundred slot machines by himself and sat down under a blackjack table in the middle of the pit. He will not come back. There is a pit supervisor already walking over.

An animus cannot fake a feeling its person does not have, and it will keep one quiet if its person asks it to. Malu has not asked. So when he comes out onto that floor to see what his goose is shouting about, and finds you dealing a live shoe in a building he has been working in since August, everyone standing there gets to see exactly how glad he is while they watch every warm thing about him switch off.

He has until December sixth. He'll tell you so three times.