Heat 28:
Comedy
Unemployment
A fitness instructor

What Comes Down

Greece is in crisis, and the garrulous inventor Daedo has a plan for an innovation that will revolutionize his country and the world. His wife and daughter have little faith in him, and his daughter gets into hot water with a scheme of her own.

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It was the Rice Krispies that did it. If I had not been watching them so intently that morning, perhaps I would still be selling old light bulbs to this day. Serendipity they call it. Maybe I was hoping for distraction when I focused on the sad little pellets lying in Freddy's breakfast bowl waiting patiently for milk. Maybe I was aiming to block out the noise of my father practicing his speech again, and to avoid the painful sight of my mother Magna transmitting her stale smile of encouragement in one direction while her hand crept in the other direction to correct my little brother's table manners. I tried to catch her eye with a smirk. That speech! Almost ten years ago, and it still rings in my ears. There is my father Daedo, pacing back and forth between the microwave and the cutting board, head jutting forward on the strained stalk of his neck, one hand on his chest, the other raised to his imaginary audience:

           "The Greeks they give the world the Olympic Games! The Greeks they give the world Plato, Socrates, and Aristoteles! The Greeks they give the world democracy! And today, it is the Greeks they give the world Dynoped!"

           With that last word, Daedo thumped on the breakfast table, sending the Rice Krispies in little Freddy's bowl leaping into the air and cascading down again. If only Magna had added milk a few seconds earlier, they would have had some heft and viscosity, and stayed put. Now, light as confetti, they sowed patterns across the table, leaving the bowl almost empty and Freddy in tears.

           Halted mid-harangue by his son's wailing, Daedo leaned down with earnest attention and picked up all the Rice Krispies from the table, depositing them, one by one, in the bowl. He ruffled Freddy's hair, and not until he had managed to elicit a smile did he continue:

           "Ahum! The Greeks we now have been weighed down very long, we have been grind into the ground. But my friends, it is a rule, we know very well this rule, that what comes down must go back up again! Yes, yes, it is the Germans – the Germans –" and at this point he always looked pointedly at my mother, even though she had not set foot in Germany since their marriage, fourteen years before – four years after I was born, in fact –

           "– who gave us the word Verelendung, yes? Yes! It say very clear that when the poor are pushed down, down, down, eventually they spring up! Like the corn it is sown in the soil, they come back up! With Dynoped, we shall now solve all the problems in the world, not just in Greece, my friends, but everywhere!"

           Daedo carried on with his explanation of Dynoped, the innovation that would solve "all the problems in the world." The idea was as simple as it was revolutionary: the unemployed, and in Greece this was by now over a quarter of the workforce, would be issued with electricity-generating shoes and would march about on them for several hours each day. The shoes would have insoles containing sensor based piezoelectric transducers, connecting to a power pack fitted outside the shoe. The result? The unemployed would receive a modest payment for the energy they produced and delivered to the local plant, their spirits would be buoyed, their exercise would keep them fit and employable – ready for the economic recovery – and the country's energy needs would be slashed.

           "Yes, my friends," Daedo was heading for his triumphant closure: "With one small, or let us say one medium-sized investment, we tackle unemployment, health, and the environment at one, in one – swoop! And the world will know what it is to be Greek!"

           I had long since stopped listening. One phrase from my father's familiar speech had lodged itself in my mind:

           " – what comes down must go back up again!" The words started to play and re-play in a loop, forming something just beyond my grasp.

My parents had met in the physics lab at high school in Berlin, where Daedo's family had moved from Athens when Granddad got a job as an engineer in the 1990s. They each told me the story separately, but it was the same story. Together they watched the tongues of fire fly in the Van de Graaf generator, and even Daedo's wall-to-wall chatter was stilled. They stood there, hands almost touching, and their passion leaped back and forth.

           They had married young. I used to ask Magna about those early days as we washed the dishes, and she reminisced, a little wistfully. She told me that she first fell in love with Daedo's springy hair and then lowered her eyes to his face. She thought him  charming although a little wacky, with his grandiose plans.

           "Dream first, then create the dream! We must all be alchemists!" Daedo had said, stroking her back. She allowed his rushes of speech to wash over her like obscure poems with melodious vowels.  She recalled when she was first attracted to him, the busy mouth, the lively eyes, the sudden leaps up from the dinner table, circling around and around while making a point. So much energy in one body: a small, compact frame, only the shock of hair poking skyward, arms flailing, shoulders rising and falling with the flow of his rhetoric, and when forced to sit, the toes tapping, knees wiggling. Ah, the life of Daedo!

           After lectures, Daedo and Magna would go to the gym, and while Magna did her obligatory stint on the cross-trainer, Daedo hoisted weights and sweated on an exercise bike, raising the resistance almost past endurance. Magna looked around at the gym's strange new machines, and asked Daedo to explain the Free Flexor, the Hawaii Chair, and the Euro Plate.

           "Gimmicks!" he said. He explained them all, and she committed the details to memory. Then he told her why each one of them was useless. This was disheartening.

           "Never rely on another person," she would say to me from time to time. This was only one of several maxims that I imbibed from my mother and wove into a personal creed.

           Magna used maxims as signposts to get from one bit of life to the next, and some of them she instilled in me from an early age.

           "Always believe in yourself!" was one; and

           "How you say something is as important as what you say" was another.

           Magna had a practical bent, and loved to fix things. When the electrical heater broke down in a cold spell, she cleaned the filter and blower assembly, adjusted the blower belt, and hey presto! After graduation, she had joined a team of women electricians and when the crisis came, the company weathered the storm amazingly well. Everyone wanted their broken appliances to be fixed instead of replaced, and business was booming. When she was called out in the evening, she sometimes allowed me to accompany her, and I learnt the tricks of the trade.

           While Magna fixed fridge freezers and radiators, Daedo worked for years as a consultant electrical engineer. Then came the economic crisis, and one day he came home with so few words we knew something terrible had happened.

           "What happened?" asked Magna.

           "What did you do?" I asked.

           "I love Daddy!" said Freddy.

Daedo told us that his firm had gone under, and after fifteen years he was jobless. Dazed, he pushed his plate left and right across the table, and then he leaped up and went to the gym.

           Many hours later he came home. His energy and his knowledge of physical fitness were legendary, and when he told his gym buddies of his misfortune, he offered himself as a personal fitness coach. Two of his buddies immediately hired him, assuring him of the beginnings of an income. Within six months he had qualified as a fitness instructor and taken over a number of body pump and indoor bootcamp sessions. Meanwhile, the constant sight of flabby bellies and sagging spirits had inspired him. He started working in earnest on his exciting plans for the future, to set the unemployed to work.

            With one of his clients, a quiet, intense banker called Yannis, whose bald patch shone with effort, Daedo would talk about his Dynoped project. I watched them hunched over drawings spread across the kitchen table and frowned with misgivings. Not that I thought the project might succeed. But if it might make a modest profit, why risk giving it away to someone else?

           The gym hired Daedo as a daytime fitness instructor, and in the evenings he worked on the Dynoped. Sometimes he went to the taverna for hours with Yannis, and we hardly saw him. The house became very quiet.

           When I turned nineteen I celebrated with a street party. Someone popped a bottle of champagne and the cork flew in a graceful parabola, landing in a plate of taramosalata.

           "Oops!" said my neighbor. "What goes up must come down!" – and the idea that had been germinating in my mind for a year was born.

           The problem was not how to get the Rice Krispies into the air, but how to keep them there! The next day I announced that I was leaving college to work on my design for a low-cost urban hovermobile – Levitikos. I set about raising money to fund R&D, and sent out a frenzy of leaflets and announcements in the social media for crowd funding. I promised everyone good returns, and kept my promises, by paying last year's investors from this year's. For three years I was flying high, although Levitikos – not so high yet. Then everything went a bit wobbly. Investments dried up and I found myself unable to pay anyone. A lot of people were suddenly eager to see me flayed alive.

           "You have been operating an illegal pyramid scheme," said the fraud squad. Magna and Daedo watched in shame as I was indicted and sent for trial. A few months later, I was sentenced to ten years in jail. Seven with good behavior.

In the women's jail, I soon won a privileged position. Financial cuts were crippling the institution, and I had learnt a lot from my mother. I was kept busy fixing fridges and heaters, the air conditioning in the prison guards' room, the ovens and once I had ten minutes to fix the failing electrical lock system.

           I strode back and forth, across the two meters of my cell. A guard opened a flap and posted me a plate of rice with a fish finger. I needed to get my thoughts straight. It was almost visiting time, and I had to give my parents an answer. Last week, my mother said that when I finally got out of jail, I could come and work for my father. Was that really what I wanted? Frankly, I felt nostalgia for the time I spent selling old light bulbs in the school vacation. Working for myself. Not taking orders from anyone.

           I heard a buzz at the window, and just for a second I imagined a Levitikos suspended in the air, a cheerful young couple waving at me from their cushioned bucket seats. In my dreams. Levitikos was not going to happen. I moved to the window and looked out, reminding myself of the real world. I could just see the highway, with its dynopeds and dynopatins streaming along in a colorful ribbon, reds and blues and emerald green, alongside the car lanes.

           The dynopatins had been Yannis's invention. A more sophisticated generator harvested energy from roller skates. I tried to remember why I hadn't trusted him.

           "You told me always to rely on myself, not on anyone else" I said to my mother on the phone.

           "Did I? I was wrong about that," my mother said softly.

           "And you told me that how someone says something is as important as what he says!"

           My father had always spoken in such comical phrases, in such a flood of bluster. When we laughed at him he just looked puzzled, or a little hurt, and rushed onto the next thing. He didn't care if he sounded ridiculous. He had a vision.

           "Well. Anyway. You can choose, either to work for your father or to take a job in Uncle Yannis's branch of the business" said my mother.

           "Uncle Yannis?"

           "Oh yes, we all call him that now, because of Freddy . . . Freddy has formed a, mmm, Freddy and Yannis's daughter are quite an item now, they may be getting married soon. They got together at last year's DynoUniverse conference and now they're pretty much inseparable. And now that Freddy has patented his dog poop avoidance system, they'll be able to get their own house soon."

           I gulped, trying to catch up with the world that was speeding past me. Since the merger, Dynoped-Dynopatin had become one of the biggest corporations in the world, and had had made good its pledge to plow profits back into the national treasury, Greece was wealthy, and wealth was power. All my old creditors had long been repaid. Turkey had been half bought off, half cowed out of Cyprus, and the new Greek Empire was virtually running Europe.

           I knew all this from reading the papers, but was eager to see it for myself. When my release date approached, the prison guards held a party, and I handed out business cards. A few days later, I strode out through the gates into the new Greek-led Europe. My mother took me on a celebration trip to Paris. Who would have thought that the tastes of a continent could be transformed in less than a decade? Tiny cups of Greek coffee (never again to be known as Turkish coffee) were served all along the Champs-Élysées. Little stalls around town with blue and white flags sold souvlaki. The students were all drinking retsina, and French people and tourists alike raised their pre-dinner glasses of ouzo to the cry of "Ya mas!" I read that in Britain, chicken tikka masala had been ousted as the nation's favorite meal by moussaka and kleftiko. The European Union had proclaimed 25 March a public holiday, celebrating independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks had conquered the world, and I was going home to enjoy it!

           My father's corporation planned to launch a new invention, as yet unnamed: a bicycle generating twice as much power as a dynoped. Perhaps I could be involved in the new product? I suggested to my mother, a little timidly.

           "Perhaps,"  said Magna, who had been put in charge of the launch. She gazed at me.

           "You came down very far. Down and down. I think that it is time for you to rise up again, joining the rest of our family, and our nation."