The Reincarnated Copy Boy

One Mistake in the Strings of Fate is all it took to change everything. Benjamin Harlow had a gift. Not a particularly impressive one, not one that won him prizes or earned him respect at dinner parties, but a gift nonetheless. Ben could copy anything. A paragraph of dense legal text, a page of handwritten scrawl, an architectural diagram crammed with measurements and annotations. Just give it to Ben and he would reproduce it with an accuracy that bordered on the unsettling. Every loop, every comma, every accidental ink smear rendered faithfully in his careful, unremarkable hands. The trouble was, in a world that celebrated originality, being a very good copy of something was rarely considered a compliment. He had learned this early. At school, sitting in the back row of every classroom from Year Three onwards, Ben had discovered that paying attention to lessons was something that happened to other people. Numbers swam when he looked at them. Dates and names tangled in his head like Christmas lights. But if he could see the work on a desk beside him like really see it, even for a second, he could reproduce it perfectly on his own page without missing a single detail. Teachers had caught him more than once, of course. They called it cheating. Ben thought of it more as resourceful outsourcing, but he had learned to keep that opinion to himself. He had slipped through secondary school the same way he slipped through most things in life, quietly, efficiently, and without anyone expecting very much of him. No detention had managed to stick for long. No teacher had truly believed he was worth the fight. He passed his exams, not brilliantly, not badly, just well enough that nobody asked too many questions and he stepped out into the world of work at nineteen years old with a CV that was technically accurate and practically useless. His first job interview had been for a data entry position at a firm called Hadleigh & Croft. He had sat across from a narrow shouldered man named Phillips who wore the expression of someone perpetually being mildly inconvenienced by the universe. "So You have no qualifications in administration," Phillips had said, peering over his round glasses. "No, sorry I don’t, " Ben had agreed. "No particular technical skills either?" "Not as such, no." "But you can type?" "I can copy," Ben had said carefully. "Whatever you put in front of me, I can get it onto a page. Exactly The same as the original." Phillips had stared at him for a long moment. Then he had said, in the tone of a man making the least exciting decision of his career, "well your in luck We actually do need someone for the copy room." That had been three years ago. Ben was now twenty two, and the most professionally accomplished thing he did on any given day was stand at a photocopier and press a green button. The office of Hadleigh & Croft occupied the fourth floor of a grey building on a grey street in a city that seemed to have been designed specifically to reflect the grey inner lives of everyone who worked there. Ben arrived each morning at eight forty five and left each evening at five thirty, and in between those two points he pushed trolleys, fed paper trays, collated documents, and received instructions from people who could not be bothered to say please or thank you. There were seven people in the office who Ben could honestly say treated him like a human being. Three of them were the cleaning staff. One was the security guard in the lobby, a large quiet man named Derek who always nodded at Ben as if acknowledging a fellow traveller in some unspoken struggle. The other three were potted plants, who at least had the decency to ask nothing of him. Everyone else fell into one of two categories, people who ignored him, and people who didn't bother to. Sandra from accounts was firmly in the second camp. She was a woman of formidable administrative power and she had a voice like a staple g*n, she had decided within Ben's first week that he was personally responsible for every paper jam, every missing file, and every instance of the toner running low. "Harlow," she would say, appearing at the copy room door like an extreme weather event. "The Brennan contracts. Where are they?" "On your desk, Sandra. I put them there over an hour ago." "They're not there." "They're in the green folder, under the," "I said they're not there, Harlow. Do I need to explain to you what 'not there' means?" He had learned not to argue with this woman. Not because Sandra was right, she almost never was but because the energy required to push back simply wasn't worth it. He would find the contracts, which would be on her desk, under the green folder, exactly where he said they were, and she would accept them without acknowledgement and disappear without any sort of apology And Ben would return to his small grey room with its humming machines and its smell of warm toner and paper and he would settle back into the quiet. His immediate supervisor was a man named Graham Peel. Graham was thirty four, he had worked at Hadleigh & Croft for around eleven years, and wore his seniority over Ben like a king wearing a crown made entirely of other people's suffering. He was not a cruel man in any active sense. He was simply the kind of person who had never once stopped to wonder whether the people below him on the professional ladder might be experiencing something resembling an inner life. "Ben," he would say, leaning into the copy room without fully entering it, as if proximity might be contagious. "The Whitmore report. I need forty copies of it, collated, stapled, and on the board room table by nine o’clock. It's currently half eight so get on it now." "It's forty two pages, Graham. Forty copies means" "I know what it means." "That's sixteen hundred and eighty pages. The machine always jams at about" "I need them by nine, Ben. No excuses" And Graham would leave, and Ben would sigh the sigh of a man who has accepted his portion in life without quite making peace with it, and he would get to work. His family were not, by any objective standard, terrible people. But they were the kind of family that had a very clear idea of what success looked like and had concluded, fairly early on, that Ben was not going to be providing any success. His father worked in logistics and spoke about promotions with the reverence other men reserved for football scores. His mother had wanted him to study law, and while she had never explicitly said she was disappointed in him, she had a way of asking "and how's the copy boy job going?" with a particular downward inflection that communicated everything words were too polite to say. His sister, Carly, had a degree, and a mortgage, and a boyfriend who worked in finance and said things like "I’m going forward, I’m moving forward, I’m looking forward.” An awful lot. At family dinners she would tell stories about her office, the team building retreats, the away days, the promotions and everyone would laugh and ask questions, and Ben would eat his roast potatoes and be quietly invisible. "Are you Still at the same place?" his dad would ask, every single time Ben came for Sunday lunch. "Still at the same place, yeah." "Right. Right." A pause. The sound of cutlery. "And is there any, you know, room for advancement?" There was not. There was only the copy room, and the trolley, and the green button, and nightmare that is Sandra. It was a Tuesday in October when the universe decided, rather abruptly, to change its mind about Benjamin Harlow. The day had been ordinary by any measure. He had arrived on time, been shouted at twice before ten o'clock, fixed a paper jam that Graham had announced was Ben's fault despite occurring in the machine on the third floor which Ben had never operated, and he had eaten his lunch alone in the stairwell because the canteen was like running an office quiz that everyone had been invited to except for him. Not intentionally, probably. Just the particular social gravity of a group that has long since stopped noticing one empty chair. He left at five thirty, tugging his jacket against the October chill, and made his way down through the lobby where Derek nodded at him with the solemn solidarity of a man who understood. The walk home normally took twenty five minutes on a good day, thirty if the lights were against him. He usually spent it listening to music, but tonight his headphones were in his bag somewhere underneath three unread letters from the council, and he couldn't be bothered to dig for them. So instead he walked in silence, which gave his thoughts rather too much room to stretch out. He thought about the day. He thought about Sandra and the Brennan contracts and the way Graham had signed off at four without mentioning the overtime Ben had quietly done to get the Whitmore report finished in time. He thought about his father's voice, still at the same place? and his mother's inflection, and Carly's finance boyfriend and his forward facing language. He thought about the copy room. The particular quality of light in there, fluorescent and slightly yellow. The smell of warm toner that had worked its way into the fibres of every jacket he owned. The way the machine hummed at a frequency that after three years he no longer consciously heard, the way you stop hearing the ticking of a clock you've lived with long enough. He thought, not for the first time and with no particular drama, that this was probably it. Forever. That the trajectory of his life had revealed itself and this was the shape of it. the grey building, the green button, the Sunday lunches with their careful silences. Not suffering, exactly. Not a life of great pain. Just a life of small, persistent ordinariness, stretching forward into a future that required very little of him and offered very little in return. He was so absorbed in this thought or rather, in the grey, texture less feeling that accompanied it, that he stepped off the kerb at the junction of Mercer Street without quite registering that the pedestrian light was still red. He did register the lorry. Eventually. A white H,G,V, appearing from the left with startling conviction, headlights blazing in the early evening dark, horn blaring a single enormous note that seemed to fill the entire world from edge to edge. Ben had time to think, with a clarity that felt almost offensive given the circumstances, “oh crap.” And then there was nothing.