Fusion Barn

I'm twenty-eight years old, I keep telling myself that on the drive up the mountain road, because a woman who has spent four years approving small business loans should not be this nervous about helping at a science open house. My name is Gillian, I work at the regional bank in Dimitsana, and in three weeks I find out if I get transferred to the Patras branch, which is either a promotion or a punishment depending on who you ask. Tom has been my mentor on the lab's financing file since the beginning, and when he asked me to come to the open house tonight and stand near the brochures and look competent, I said yes before he finished the sentence. That is how I end up parking at the bottom of the gravel lot at six in the evening, watching two men unload folding tables and strings of paper lanterns from a pickup truck while somebody's radio plays something with a lot of clarinet in it.

The Dimitsana Fusion Reactor Lab is not what you would call impressive from the outside, just a long low building with too many antennas, but Tom swears the interior is the future of Greek energy and I have learned not to argue with him about it. I am halfway across the lot, clutching my cardigan because the mountain air has a bite to it even in summer, when a man comes around the front of the pickup carrying a green metal toolbox, and neither of us is watching where we are going, and my shoulder catches his elbow and the toolbox goes everywhere. Wrenches scatter across the gravel like they have somewhere urgent to be. I crouch down immediately, mortified, scooping up whatever I can reach, and the man crouches too and we nearly crack heads over a socket wrench.

"Sorry, sorry, that's entirely my fault," he says, and he has a laugh in his voice that makes the apology sound almost cheerful, and I can see now he is maybe thirty-two, broad in the shoulders, with a short beard and forearms that suggest he lifts heavy things for a living. "I'm Magnus, by the way. I do fog horns for the port of Kyllini, and apparently I also give tours here now, which is a long story involving a favor I could not refuse."

"Gillian," I say, holding out a crescent wrench like it is a business card, which makes him laugh again. "I'm here for the open house. I'm with the bank, sort of. I mostly just stand places."

"Well, I mostly just point places, so we should get along fine," he says, and we gather up the rest of the tools together and I try not to notice how his fingers brush mine twice on purpose, or maybe not on purpose, and I fail at not noticing either way.

Inside, the main room is already half arranged, rows of folding chairs facing a large steel-and-ceramic tube mounted on a cradle of scaffolding, with little round peepholes drilled along its length at eye level. Tom is there in his good blazer, adjusting a placard, and when he spots me his whole face relaxes the way a man's face does when the one responsible thing he invited actually shows up.

"Gillian, thank god, come here, look at this before the crowd messes it up," he says, waving me over to the tube. "This is our tritium breeding blanket mock-up, or a section of it anyway, the real one is in three hundred pieces across four countries. The peepholes are for the visitors, see, they lean in and look down the channel and they can see the lithium ceramic pebbles, and it makes them feel like they're inside the reactor, which is the whole trick of public engagement. You stand here and hand out the brochures and look like you understand what you're handing out."

"I don't understand what I'm handing out," I admit, and he pats my shoulder and says nobody does, that is the beauty of it, and I take my place by the brochure table feeling marginally better.

Magnus sets up his tour station near the far wall, which consists of a clipboard, a hand-lettered sign reading TOURS WITH MAGNUS, ASK ME, and the green toolbox, and he catches me watching him arrange the sign and winks, and I turn back to my brochures with what I hope is a professional expression. He is funny in a dry, unhurried way while he works, telling me about a fog horn in Kyllini that has been sounding the wrong note for six years and how the fishermen have gotten sentimental about it and now refuse to let him fix it properly. I laugh more than I mean to. He is easy to be near, is what I am noticing, and I have not been easy near anyone in a while, if you want the truth, not since a tourist from Athens I flirted with on a dating app two years ago and who left town politely before anything came of it.

The trouble starts at half past six, when the doors open and the first guests drift in, and a small round woman with silver hair and a canvas tote bag comes straight through them like a boat through chop. She is sixty-seven years old and everyone in Dimitsana knows her, Gertrude, retired schoolteacher, president of the folk dance society, and she is not here for fusion.

"Tom," she says, planting herself in front of him, "the spider skimmer. You borrowed it in June for your filtration demonstration and the dance is Saturday and we hang lanterns from it and I would like it back tonight."

"Yes, yes, of course, it's in the side office, through there," Tom says, gesturing vaguely at a door behind the mock-up, "although I confess we may have, that is to say the handle had a small incident with a heating element in July, it's still perfectly functional as a skimmer."

"A burned handle is not perfectly functional, Tom, it is a burned handle," Gertrude says, but she is already being pulled away by guests wanting to look through the peepholes, and she waves her tote bag at me across the room and calls out, "You, the bank girl, Gillian, you fetch it, I'll wait," and so of course I go, because you do not argue with Gertrude, nobody has ever successfully argued with Gertrude.

The side office is closet-sized and crammed, blueprints rolled and stacked on every surface, boxes of cables, a dead potted plant, and there on the second shelf sits the wire-mesh spider skimmer, its long handle scorched black halfway up, looking exactly like the kind of thing a folk dance society would hang lanterns from. I reach up on my toes to get it, and I have just closed my fingers around the handle when I hear the door behind me