Life is additive not subtractive, if you ask the worker in Cubicle 1. It’s subtractive, not additive, if you ask the worker in Cubicle 2. The worker in Cubicle 3 is a gifted artist. The worker in Cubicle 4 is gifted at nothing. The worker in Cubicle 5 has replacement parts in both legs and jokes about being a robot. The worker in Cubicle 6 hates those jokes. What’s so funny about being a robot? The worker in Cubicle 7 has pica, and thinks that no one notices, though everyone does. The worker in Cubicle 8 once believed that life was structured in a way that permitted an endless circuit of generosity, but then he spent nearly an entire summer laboring on a project for the guys from C Division, cracked the design issue that made the whole thing possible, and when the company announced the new product launch he wasn’t mentioned at all, and that broke something in him, even though he knew that he shouldn’t have let it get to him, and he went from being a garrulous Pollyanna, a little too skinny, sure, to a lowering wraith that the president of B Division said was “the embodiment of capital-D Darkness, but not in any powerful or interesting way,” and even though she was serious about that, she laughed, a buoyant trill that her husband, who worked for A Division now but used to run D Division, had always loved. The worker in Cubicle 9 is sleeping in a rowboat out at sea, lips cracked by the salt and the sun, entirely unaware that a nearby gull has marked him for and will soon pluck out his eyes. He is dreaming the rest of them.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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