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The first things Vincent remembers is the heat that makes him shiver and the bitterness that settled down on the border between metaphor and reality. Scorching night air, rough pavement, and a body stuck somewhere in the middle. This must be how life begins: with the inability to scream, with a head full of viscous emptiness, with a feverish lack of thoughts, with uncertainty. No one has ever felt and will never feel as helpless as Vincent Edgeworth. No one will ever understand his genuine misunderstanding, no one will hear his poignant story told by the silence between two particularly difficult breaths. His first memory flows into something akin to a fairy tale; we attract what we fear the most. The moral at the end of the book. Vincent is scared that they won't come for him. An epigraph. He is terrified of being alone.
Unfortunately, he will not get a chance to see how the scratches scattered all over his skin and will not find out which of the bones in his body were treacherously broken. Forever unnamed hands will recklessly pick up his body, not yet outlined with chalk, mercilessly pressing where it should hurt the most, but it all will remain a subtext. The missing words in places where maroon stains have soaked the paper will eventually be filled by imagination. Somewhere the sentences are interrupted in the middle, somewhere whole paragraphs are missing.
The number of anonymous hands in lab-clean gloves changes faster than memories are able to form. There are a lot of them, they are all the same, like a flock of scavengers; the only difference is the time it takes for them to gather around a piece of meat to investigate, inspect, examine it. Vincent is stripped of his only weapon. It seems that for the first time in his life, he truly feels like prey. He drifts through the murky waters of unconsciousness between pitifully small islands of comprehension, goes with the flow. Every time he is conscious again, there is pain. This pain is inevitably forgotten, and then it starts again every time. Or so he thinks. He forgets to register it. No matter how hard Vincent tries, his eyelids are too heavy to move, and the fog inside his skull is too thick to resist.
Those hands go deeper than Vincent’s introspection ever could. It was foolish to assume that his self-reflection would scrape his insides more thoroughly than a doctor's scalpel. Vincent would have turned inside out if he hadn't been sprawled on some bunk under a hundred spotlights. As long as the pain is forgotten, it can be mitigated. Paraphrased, replaced with something more understandable. As long as the lamps that hurt even through the closed eyelids hang over the head, he can see the sun through them.
The last thing Vincent remembers is a dorm room with two beds, full of soft light, and a brief but much-needed break. The cotton of the sheets and the warmth that can be reached with a stretch of one’s hand. Hands. Gentle fingers. Silky, timid skin-to-skin touches. Their absence. The need for them. Their momentarily overwhelming, alluring aura. A prologue between two chapters. He feels accepted. Overture.
“Can I?”
It doesn't happen immediately, but too quickly to realize. Pain can still be forgotten; the feeling of something unpleasantly cold persistently penetrating the skin cannot. Then he is left alone for a while, and the fragments of so many pictures slowly form one realization: when the body begins to feel heavier than the whole world, Vincent notices that the places where his skin touched are now strangely empty. A limp, shackled, open body. Immovable, pathetic. He still can't open his eyes. Is this how people should feel on the operating table? Should people on the operating table feel anything?
The abrupt clarity passes. Vincent sinks deeper as the static noise, caused by the endless working hours of the fluorescent lamps, brings back memories of a fireplace and a sofa that fits two people, of the weight of a book in his hands, of the leather binding, and of the rustling pages. The reliable, never-changing plot that permeates every chapter of his life. Someone’s familiar presence echoes with recollection. Some people don't have to be seen to be there. A pleasantly cool hand falls on the shoulder. As light as metal. As human as steel. The room smells of wood. Somewhere, a cat meows.
“Are you okay? Well... If one can even be okay after that nightmarish pile of papers and several days of court hearings…”
The nightmare is just beginning, if the arguing voices around him are to be believed. Vincent concentrates as best he can and hears something about "weeks" and "months" of recovery. Then an ominous silence fills the room. The door opens. Some orders are given by a man whose voice is stern and strong. Vincent hates to admit that this voice is familiar. Perhaps business is business. Perhaps Vincent is more valuable than he ever imagined. It would be great to know what exactly this value was, especially now, when the line of reasoning is broken again and the train of thoughts crashes, turns to dust. There must be something that Vincent was not told about. And this must be logical: he is smart enough to figure it out on his own. He just needs to concentrate.
Just a second ago, Vincent was sure he was trapped in that bright room, but now he finds himself in the dead of darkness. Can he open his eyes? All around, or at least as far away as Vincent is able to assess, there is nothing but rotten, bone-chilling air and a frozen, damp floor. Is there anyone else here? Are his eyes open? Consciousness fails once again.
“Take a little break now, would you?”
The picture of the fireplace, the sofa, and the closest person he has is slightly expanded to include a window; it is ajar, and the rain is silently drumming on the glass. Vincent is hungry. He would love to invite Victor to dinner in some fine-dining restaurant where every guest has a unique set of precious jewelry, all recipes were created by world-famous chefs, the wine list has well over fifty items, and each bottle costs a small fortune. If one is not careful, a couple of drops could roll down your lips, down your chin, and then be forever lost. But that wouldn't matter. Especially if Vincent wasn't alone. Especially because Vincent Edgeworth would have no regrets.
Something as disgusting as syrup drips down his chin. Vincent opens his eyes. The darkness is kind enough to let him see. Hands that look like a pile of scrap metal. A pile of scrap metal that looks like an outline of a mutilated hand. A bloody piece of flesh. Teeth marks. The awful taste of meat in his mouth. The substance that flows further down the neck. He feels nausea building up. It looks disgusting. It looks...
Vincent closes his eyes. He thinks about the clinking of glasses and the golden glitter of chandeliers. He thinks about his reflection looking back at him from the blade of a knife, and fixes his tie. What a stupid habit. He thinks of a veal roast. He thinks of mutton. He thinks of sacrifice.
What will they put on his grave when he dies?
Sometimes the usual darkness parts and gives way to a thin ray of light. People walk into the chamber. Some simply throw a piece of meat on the floor. Some write something down. One day, among the faceless observers, Vincent recognizes one. A young man who joined the Myers Corporation last year now warily leans against the wall as a masked figure with a flashlight hunches over Vincent. How easy is it to move from the legal department to cybernization?.. Unaccustomed to something other than filthy, dirty colours, Vincent squints, ready to protest, but is unable to make a sound. Vincent backs into a corner. The scientist curses and tries to grab his arm. "Wait, it's not used to the light yet!" the young man shouts and puts his hand forward. "Don't make it harder."
Did they just call Vincent an "it"? The flashlight is gone. Never mind. Vincent is grateful.
The hours when the cold creeps into the very guts and curls up somewhere in the stomach that aches with hunger, Vincent considers to be nights. There is no clear way to keep track of time without the stars, except for the seldom-caringly-invasive visits of people in lab coats. But they are hardly reliable; sometimes the observers return before Vincent allows himself to fall asleep, and sometimes they are gone for days. Perhaps biological rhythms are confused. Perhaps they never existed. Losing to nature without a fight is not something Vincent Edgeworth would do. Losing to Vincent Edgeworth is not something nature would care about. He sleeps restlessly on the blood-stained floor and finds comfort in knees pressed to the chest, in the embrace of his own hand. Sometimes his body refuses to cooperate, and he is unable to curl up in a ball. Sometimes the deepest sleep that Vincent's brain is capable of is a light nap.
The shoulder under his ear becomes a familiar pillow, moderately dense and not too high, so that the neck wouldn’t hurt in the morning. His arm wraps around his head, his fingers entangled with the black strands of hair. It’s repulsive. How long should it be now? His hairstyle is surely a mess, and his once soft locks have long been tangled. Nature has won once again, and, even despite the howling emptiness of his stomach, fatigue takes its toll. In this dark, cold room, exhaustion seems to overpower Vincent with such ease that he hasn’t seen before. He closes his eyes. Finding your own path, creating your own destiny should be an important task. And it is, just somewhere else. Somewhere, where the sun shines and people talk to and not of him; somewhere, where instead of his stiff fingers, it’s Victor who’s playing with his hair. Somewhere, where there is a fireplace, a smell of juniper, good perfume, and a slight scent of sagebrush.
Did Victor feel helpless, too? He hadn't been locked up for weeks, but was his darkness any less frightening than the cold twilight of the concrete chamber that became the Myers Corporation’s confession? Seeing his face distorted by pain in the hospital felt deeply wrong. Not seeing his eyes felt a hundred times worse. Vincent carefully wrapped his arms around Victor's unnaturally cold palm, hoping that it could absorb at least some of his warmth, and listened to his breathing. Another person’s recovery cemented itself as one of the most exhausting time periods in Vincent’s life, and it was not something he was used to. He remembers the moment when Victor's prosthetics first moved. His index finger twitched, then fell back into place, as if scared. Then Victor rose from his bed and looked at Vincent. Then Vincent could barely breathe. Then something he hadn’t felt in years made him sob like a naïve kid and press his face against the scarlet metal hand.
Victor talked a lot about his past. About how he fell off the bike and how his mother hugged him afterward. These concepts sounded so fabulous and so unrelated to the cause that they reminded him of children's books, in which there are more pictures than words and the font is bigger than the standard twelve points; Vincent read only a few of those before moving on to more serious literature. How many broken bikes and familial hugs has he missed? Did Victor feel warm enough on that hospital bed? Still, it was better than this torture chamber and constant hunger. Subjecting him to something like this would have been inhumane, and the mark on his psyche would most likely have been much more obvious than the one his operations left.
But it just wasn’t fair! Nurses and doctors were around Victor all day, colleagues visited their boss to check in on him, people sent wishes for a smooth recovery... And if that wasn’t enough, Vincent was there for him! He even took a few days off to spend them near the snow-white bed, holding Victor's hand. He even convinced the hospital to transfer Victor to a separate room. He even brought him some stupid game console, which was hidden at the very bottom of one of Victor’s drawers, so that he could practice using his prosthetics. Wasn't that enough? Does Vincent deserve this loneliness? Why can’t Victor be with him?
But some people don't have to be there to be seen. Reddish spots that do not stand out from the color palette of this torture chamber become a blurry silhouette, and it is so tempting to trust it. Vincent can almost feel someone stroking his hair and back, and the touch is soothingly guilty. He hugs his knees tighter. Instead of a dank room, he finds himself in a warm bed. It’s still raining outside.
“Stay with me a little longer, please.”
Vincent wakes up and finds his fingers clutched around a lock of his own hair.
Time is a terribly strange phenomenon. It never has meaning or clear speed but always finds ways to make itself known. Time always works against man, and never listens to his pleas. When every second counts, time rushes by at an unprecedented speed and grins mockingly, winks over its shoulder. When it is better to let go, to skip a particularly unpleasant moment, to turn the page and start a new chapter, time trails behind, barely moving its legs. There are not enough theories and studies in the world to fully explain the concept of time, but it doesn't matter because it’s always in motion. It does not stand still, and with each step it takes, everything in the universe turns into a distant memory. At some point, this realization no longer seems like the worst nightmare of all but becomes something comfortably sad: no matter what you do, time will pass. This means that there’ll be a moment when all of this comes to an end.
Vincent sleeps as much as he can. With one’s eyes closed, it is easier to rewrite history, and the dark spots on the pages of memoirs turn out to look more careless, more akin to an accident. In dreams, there is a marble mansion surrounded by the woods instead of a concrete floor; there is a delicious home-made dinner instead of raw flesh stuck between his teeth; there are errands to run, responsibilities to fulfill, and debates to be held instead of meaningless waiting. If only he could hear the clock strike midnight. Or noon. If only he could hear anything other than his own hoarse sighs, the clicking of someone’s boots, and the conversations of his observers devoid of meaning. Freedom seems like a myth, a rumor, an overly realistic dream, but Vincent would be lying if he said he didn't desire it. Dreams of the unattainable have been a definitive trait of Vincent Edgeworth since childhood—his constant, his pride. He successfully bit off more than he could chew, burnt the candle at both ends, and it felt too right to not be magical. It would be nice to start dreaming again. What would he find on his grave if he got out of here?
Vincent’s hand finds the only thing he has left: his beginning, his ending, his birth and death; Vincent clutches the tie that hangs from his neck and concentrates on it.
Red metal fingers cover Vincent’s palms. They are neither cold nor even warm, they are weightless, unnatural. But they are here. They make Vincent grasp the black fabric tighter, remember, recall, feel every stitch. The tie is soaked in blood, charred at the edges, it is muddy-scarlet and, probably, will remain so forever because you don’t recover after something like this. Could it be that this familiarity would disappear one day, too?
“Yeah, the workload is horrible, but maybe you could still make it home today?”
The concept of home turns out to be even more complex than the concept of time, and the return to the mansion entails the return to a never-ending analysis of the past, present, and future. When Vincent looks in the mirror for the first time, he realizes that the reflection that looks back at him is far more grotesque than anything he could imagine. Instead of a haggard face, distorted beyond recognition, he sees... himself. Was it the cruel joke Myers played on him? Vincent has a general understanding of what happened to him, but it would take more time for the excerpts to form a proper narrative. So, for now, he continues to stare at the millimeters of artificial skin that hide even more artificial insides. People used to say that Vincent lacked sincerity, but perhaps he was able to accept this statement only now, after his personality, which was crafted carefully and meticulously, started to feel more genuine than his body.
He notices the changes gradually, and every day the sickness, caused by the observations, grows more and more unbearable. His wrinkles, evidence of hard work, of forced voluntary labor, of eyebrows furrowed, of passed, wasted time, disappeared from his face. Vincent had never been proud of them, but their absence brought about a deep feeling of loss and mourning; it had the same reasons as the disappointed sighs he would let out before. Then he notices that all the marks time left on him were gone: his moles, small scars from paper cuts, dark circles under his eyes, his grizzled temples—his body became a blank sheet of paper that had just been inserted into a typewriter. Not a single wrinkle, not a single spot, not a single hint of the past. The absence of history. Pages rough from eraser would seem more natural.
Vincent would have turned himself inside out if he wasn’t held back by Victor's embrace. It’s still warm, perhaps a little tighter, but almost identical to how Vincent remembered it, and so it reeks of cold, of loneliness of Myers' rotting basement. It smells of dreadful humidity, and the desire to curl up in a ball, hide in a corner, and imagine the fireplace, the cozy sofa, and the rain outside the window creeps up in the back of Vincent’s mind. But the crackling of logs is real, as well as the cats meowing and the clock ticking. Vincent is sick of himself and his home, of two things that served as synonyms for safety. It's dangerous to think about it. Vincent fears that he will soon feel sick from the red metal and the care it provides.
Somewhere in a dorm room with two beds, full of light, Vincent recites a sequence of some very important theses for the umpteenth time but is unable to finish the thought. The one and only person in his life glances at him, not daring to even blink. Anaphora. A smile must have appeared on his face because his roommate’s eyes light up with sparks brighter than sun, and even brighter than the terrible, blinding, paralyzing, buzzing lamps. Vincent would see his reflection in them if he were to overcome himself. The whole summary of his life could be hidden in those gray eyes, but fate is a construct invented by the weak to justify their own thoughtless actions. The sunset flashes in the red hair of the most faithful of friends, and the young man falls on the bed, arms outstretched on either side of him, and sighs peacefully. Vincent thinks of extending his hand for the first time. A rhetorical question. He takes a deep look inside himself and finds nothing but childish joy there.
Perhaps sometimes the curtains are just blue, and the wind brushes against the skin of his neck. Vincent's fingers grasp for the piece of fabric, but its place is strangely empty. Epilogue. The tie, stained with the original sin of trust, must have been lost somewhere along the way. Conclusion. Vincent opens his eyes. Eulogy.