Very few paid him any mind. Most didn’t see him at all. And no one spoke to him. 2,000 cubicles planted like artificial rows of vinyl vegetables over 3 floors.  This was a company doing technology-driven projects. Delivering solutions. Lots of solutions.  And project plans. 

Hemingway’s computer keyboard and monitor lay plastic dead on the cubicle counter. He had picked up each. Shaken them. Turned them upside down. Flicked the foreign plastic with his fingers. Pressed something that lit the screen up with a screaming message of SHOW ME YOUR PASSWORD!

But he had no password. No passport. No papers. So he turned and laid his hands down on his battered typewriter. A lover’s touch.

No one from the acres of cubicles around him said a word about the clickity-clack chorus of his Corona. This was a technical floor. These were programmers. They assumed that the typewriter strokes were a new app being tested. Or they didn’t hear. They were technical people.

Then Hemingway began to do what he always did. He began to tell a story. One that mattered.

From the overhead sounds piped into the Cube Farm with the worker’s daily allotment of air, he heard something that might have once been music. The lyric:

I want to laugh while the laughing is easy. I want to cry if it makes it worthwhile.

He began to write of easy laughter. That was something he could always hear. But as he listened, as he listened with that gut spearing bullshit filter he carried at the very depths of his soul, he heard no easy laughter here. Even outside on the city streets waiting for snow, there was no easy laughter here.

So he dug deeper and searched for crying. Crying like no one ever saw him do. Crying like when he left Hadley and went with Pauline. Crying for reasons he could touch with his hands.

But there was no crying in the cubicles.

So Hemingway turned finally to what surrounded him.  To the cubicles.  He started looking cubicle to cubicle for the story that would write itself.

In the first cubicle on the left, he found the programmer poet. The answers in the code tumbling out lyrically and then crammed back into a language of tiny little hash marks. Gibberish! Where was the poetry?

In the next cube, Hemingway saw the architect Project Manager. Her vision of a gleaming white temple just waiting to burst out and be built.  Just as soon as the Powerpoint slides were done.

He saw the painter pressed between the lines of the Excel spreadsheet.

The potter plotting a flow chart that would never touch clay.

And in the last cube, the quiet dancer taking a customer service call. A smiling heart and willingness to work, simply searching for something to do that mattered.

Hemingway slapped his forehead. “No one is doing what they do well here,”  “That’s the story!” Hemingway thundered. That is the story. It’s simple. As it always is.

He stopped writing. And he said it a third time. “No one is doing what they do well!”

But of course, just like the poets in the cubicles, with their souls pushed into the grateful silence of having jobs, paying rents and mortgages, no one heard Hemingway speak.

As silence inside on the Cubicle Farm settled in, outside it began to snow.

The rhythm of the city picked up the pace.  And Hemingway did not know why.

So he listened. What he heard was the unbroken rhythm of daily life. Somewhere a woman is reminding a man to pick up the dry-cleaning and he’s asking her if she fed the dog and where she put the keys to the car.

In the distance he hears a question. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

The disjointed broken rhythm of no one doing what they do well.

Soothed by the songs of ordinary life.

An American tune.

Hemingway lifted his hands from the typewriter keys.

And went home to Oak Park.