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1 Before the After
The instructions are given in a perfunctory manner and carry the impression of efficiency: actions and their subjects, one after the other, that come with the managing of one’s final affairs. Manfred von Karma talks of the estate—the funds—the connections—the implications unto the presumed after, which approaches. There is a certain beauty, Miles thinks, to be found in the rhythm of his speaking, deliberate and precise: the language of an architect deciphering his fall. The familiar train of speech in fact distracts Miles enough, to his immense chagrin afterwards, to keep him from realizing for some time that the orders are not meant for him. It is only when Manfred enumerates the articles of the ample inheritance that he will be leaving Miles—who oddly finds himself unsurprised and indeed even vindicated by the other man’s generosity—that the latter knows himself to be what he always has been, for the past fifteen years: an eternal stranger. All shall instead be executed by some other solicitor, one of the many vague partners of respectable reputation that Manfred had gathered over the forty years of his making; or, more likely, by the man himself.
Manfred pauses, a break in his perfect diction. “You are silent,” he observes, “but I sense that it is neither surprise nor shock that keeps your tongue at bay. It should take no insignificant effort to face the man revealed to have killed one’s father, and in that regard, I suppose I must thank you for your appearance.”
One would call Manfred von Karma cruel, but Miles has come to understand through experience and perhaps a little projection that the other man’s cruelty is exacted and doled out as deemed necessary. There is a certain puritan discipline that dictates von Karma, a certain clarity of purpose under his extravagant standards of perfection. It is, Manfred had once said, a long time ago it now seems, a greater evil to let inconsequential matters cloud one’s rationale and so detain one from one’s intended course of action. In this respect, Miles accepts Manfred’s words as sincere.
“I found no reason to deny your summon, despite all that has transpired,” Miles responds. A glass wall separates them where they sit: protective measures, as is custom, but Manfred’s legal reputation had persisted enough to keep any other outside distractions to a minimum. As if in reciprocity Miles too had told no one of today’s meeting, lest he be persuaded from pursuing it. “And I had been under the impression that you had reasons of your own in arranging this visit. To speak of other things,” Miles adds, a little conspicuously, “than legal matters.”
Manfred grimaces. “I could have sent you the relevant documents, yes, and washed my hands of the whole affair, but perhaps I have grown sentimental with age. Perhaps it is mere habit; your attentiveness once used to be one of your more worthwhile traits.” He studies Miles, who tries not to falter under the scrutiny. The glass turns a trivial thing that does not conceal. “You do not seem as happy as I imagined you would be.”
Miles hesitates. “Should I be?” he wonders aloud, somewhat humiliated by the observation. He quickly sublimates the question to the abstract: one would be, he thinks; his life as it now stands reconstructed before others would suggest almost a thespian plot of tribulation, and retribution, and perhaps even reward. And yet he himself remains calm and undivided, a spectator. A specter.
“You have triumphed in your endeavors,” Manfred answers, one eyebrow raised. “In the courtroom; in life; in the formulative years of your upbringing, which the press seems intent on publicizing as a Dickensian tragedy that you have overcome with great fortitude. The entire matter is a comedic farce, but even I must admire their dedication in dubbing me ‘the real demon of the courtroom.’ Quite the ironic turn for the story of the ‘Demon Prosecutor.’”
He pauses, as if waiting. Miles, however, does not ask Manfred von Karma of his motive nor of his means; he is a clever man and the obvious does not merit unnecessary questions. “Why now?” Miles asks instead. “Why not sooner, when I was more vulnerable, or later, when the downfall of my career would have been more valuable?”
Manfred smiles wryly. It is the correct question. “That daft defense attorney of yours,” he says, “have you seen him after the trial?”
Yes. “No.”
“He strikes me a fool, but his kind of dogged resolve proves to be persuasive, even in a short amount of time. The kind,” Manfred muses, “that upsets the system at hand, even as they try so blindly to believe in it. I should have known sooner that you would be susceptible to bad influence, and in so pathetic a manner. It is strangely the only remorse I feel, upon reviewing the events as they have unfolded.”
It is not a direct answer, but it is answer enough, and one that Miles had suspected and even feared, for a time. “I had been willing to accept the blame,” Miles says quietly. “I had thought it retribution, or more appropriately, punishment. That I would be punished at last, through your accusation.”
To his surprise, Manfred chuckles. “I always did think you had a romantic streak in you,” he says, and his voice, Miles imagines, is almost fond. “Blame, retribution, punishment—what do they mean, now? Even now you flail against guilt, which is the most unnecessary burden that weighs upon the human mind. Do not let what did not happen cripple you, boy, lest you are left with a scar that does not fade, as your bullet mars my own body. You are a prosecutor and have trained under my tutelage; you know as well as I that no one can remain innocent, for such is the human condition. Do not confuse the means with the end. The system exists to be used. Use it. Use it so that you may live, now that it is decided that I am to die.
“Do not submerge yourself,” Manfred says, “in the belief of your own guilt.” It is to be his final command. It is why he has called for Miles today, this final act of kindness.
Manfred von Karma had killed his father; Manfred von Karma is now dying away; with time back in joint and the old records set straight, at what is to be their last meeting, Miles finds that fury escapes him, that sorrow too loses ground too quickly to take root. A line he had once read sometime somewhere returns to misplace itself: the Old Masters were never wrong. Two men stoic before a fate perhaps foreseen, that first meeting fifteen years ago—but him unable to sail calmly on. Him drowning instead into the lake, with its ghosts.
“There are some things,” Miles says slowly, deliberately, staring at the other man, “that evidence cannot prove. Sometimes it is the words of guilt that speak the truth and must be accounted as such.”
“Even when the party is found innocent, to all intents and purposes?”
“Even then. Especially then. Sometimes it matters not the perpetrator of the action. Sometimes one must wonder,” Miles says, “if the system is not enough.”
Manfred looks at Miles but does not speak. His expression is strangely pensive and lost to an irreparable past to which Miles is not entirely privy. He is, Miles sees now, an old man, weariness tugging at the proud angles of his face, his once sharper features. It should not be a particularly startling revelation, Miles thinks. It is simply what it is.
“I now see the futility of my devotion,” Manfred says after some time. His tone is tainted by neither fury nor regret. “There is not much of your father in you, after all.”
Manfred abruptly turns away, and the light catches his shoulder, the bad one. He would not have had time to extract the bullet from his body, Miles knows. And perhaps it had been his choice, in the end, not to operate; such is the final burial of evidence. The glass between them, once a ward and a window, shines through the stains like a symptom—translucence, for a moment, almost like penitence. What remains after is an opaque mirror that catches only the other man’s reflection.
There is the irrevocable sound of a chair being pushed and Miles stares blindly at the retreating shadow. There is nothing for him to do, nothing at all. Nothing, at last. Silently the image dissolves; the familiar face perishes—and for the first time since his father’s death, Miles Edgeworth finds himself truly alone with his loss.
It is long after he leaves the building, wandering through the strangely vibrant streets, the people passing with their sunbright faces, he himself unable to return anywhere, in vain refusing the tremors of his aimless body, that Miles realizes with shame that Manfred von Karma had not mentioned his daughter at any moment of the visit, and that he himself had not interrupted to ask; so glad had he been, even then, to be the sole recipient of his love.
2 The Future Past
“Have coffee,” Wright says, “with me.”
The offer is rather poorly timed, as with almost everything that has anything to do with the man; Miles, one hand holding a tolerable take-away cup of tea that is becoming increasingly less tolerable by the second, stops in his tracks for the irony.
“I mean, another one,” Wright amends sheepishly. “Or tea, or hot chocolate, or whatever it is you drink these days. I only thought it would be nice to, well, have coffee. Between friends.” It is a sheer wonder, the man’s disparity of eloquence within the tribunal and without it. Miles opens his mouth to refuse—Wright had caught him on his way to the prosecutor’s office, despite it not being his usual hours—but he finds that he is tired, and perhaps even in need of company, and perhaps the prospect of that particular company being that of the other man is not as disagreeable as he initially set out to believe.
“Well, then,” Miles says simply, still a little guarded, and Wright beams at him. Miles throws away his cup without a second glance.
Wright leads; Miles follows. They walk down the street together and it is spring. The unfamiliar city seems once more to return to Miles’s arms, taking on a new meaning that he has not the heart to deny, even to himself; standing beside Wright the physicality of their bodies seems to swell, accentuated by their surroundings that surreptitiously retreat from Miles’s attention. Miles listens and occasionally intercepts with input of his own as Wright awkwardly rambles about the weather (“pleasant enough”), inquires about Miles’s lodgings (“nothing permanent as of yet”), and describes in detail some letters dispatched by the girl who had seemed perpetually glued to Wright’s side.
“I see,” Miles says, because he does not know much about the girl or her relationship with Wright to comment in depth on the subject. He instead opts for general amiability. “You two must be close, after all that has happened.”
“Well, yeah,” Wright hums, eyes ahead and swerving in search of the café that he had assured would serve ‘great coffee, Edgeworth, even by your standards.’ “Crazy stuff, really, I’ll have to tell you everything in detail sometime. I miss having her around, these days.” He glances back at Edgeworth in an almost furtive manner. “I used to send you letters too, you know. When we were kids.”
“Is that so?”
“Okay, ‘tried to send you letters.’ It wasn’t easy for a nine-year-old kid to find exactly which part of Germany their best friend had moved to. I tried, though,” Wright grins. “I’m glad we met up in the end.”
In the end—an odd choice of words, Miles thinks, briefly. That juvenile title of best friend, as well. Miles’s contemplation is interrupted as Wright launches almost desperately into little anecdotes of their childhood. With a little bemusement, Miles recognizes his younger self not through recollection but through the reflection of Wright’s incessant descriptions and impositions: charming, in an ambiguous way, as little stories out of a picture book and not much more. He does not entirely understand why Wright seems to cherish these memories so, when Miles himself does not remember them.
They reach the café though it is found to be full, and they resort to take-out. Miles insists on paying; Wright grudgingly accepts but only on the condition that he treats Miles ‘next time.’ Miles can do little but accept the offer, and the door as Wright holds it open for him on the way out.
Only when they make sufficient distance from the premises and its patrons does Wright let out a breath that he evidently has been holding. “You shouldn’t believe what he told you.”
Miles is not astonished by Wright’s sudden outburst; nor is he confused as to whom Wright is referring. “I don’t,” he says lightly, avoiding Wright’s stare. Wright is the kind of man, Miles has garnered over the past few months, who adopt the troubles of others too willingly and too deeply. Troubles that should not be his own. “At the very least, I try not to. You already advised me as such on the day of the trial, Wright, and frankly it should be no concern of yours.”
“I know, I know,” Wright mumbles. “I just—worry about you, sometimes.”
“I am not as weak as you think me to be,” Miles says; he is aware that he sounds a little unkind. “You should know that, Wright.”
“I know,” Wright says, with more enunciation this time, and conviction, which Miles finds irresistible. “And you should too. You’ve gone through hell, Edgeworth, with what happened all those years ago and having to grow up with that sadistic bastard and then this case… But you’re an innocent man, Edgeworth. And a good person. You always have been. I know you.” Wright smiles, unequivocally. “God, I’m just so happy that you’re here, finally, you know?”
His eyes momentarily close as he laughs with a joy that alienates Miles, willingly embracing a sort of blindness; Miles sees then that they are the eyes of a somnambulist. They are the same eyes of a childhood that Miles has long forgotten but Wright treasures so deeply; when Wright would have called Miles, wait for me, Miles, you’re my best friend, when they would have been happy, as children are: happy, for a time, until they find themselves otherwise. Awake they open once more, the eyes of a man entrenched in a past that only he knows, possessed of ghosts that only he sees.
I don’t believe in your nightmare, Wright had said. It isn’t real. It isn’t real to me.
So, Edgeworth is saved. So, Edgeworth is good. It is incomprehensible, almost unforgivable that a man whose brilliance relies on incredible leaps of logic cannot fathom that the laws of causality may not apply, in some cases, and in a way, Miles almost envies the other man. My salvation is everything to him, as of this moment, Miles thinks, and so in truth I mean nothing to him, not in the way that truly matters.
It is for this reason that Miles does not say anything to Wright as they walk in silence back to the prosecutor’s office. He does not tell Wright that the other man’s absence from his childhood does not perturb him greatly as may be imagined. He does not tell Wright that the imprint of those fifteen years does not, regardless of how much he struggles, feel like a slave’s branding. Wright shall not know that in the place of his solipsistic hero stands, even now, a boy broken by phantom guilt thinking I did it I did it I think I killed him, I think it’s my fault. Wolves at the door but it had been another man instead. Come, Miles had heard, and Miles had followed, and Miles had been understood, to the extent that Miles could continue to live. Wright knows none of these things. He would not be able to comprehend that great enigma of reality, and thus Miles walks alone, unwilling to be deceived. Wright’s steps fall in easier strides before his own and the apparent harmony is almost unbearable.
Before Miles enters the building, Wright stops him with a hand on his arm. It is warm. “Keep in touch, okay?”
“Okay,” Miles agrees.
Wright’s fingers seem to subtly linger for a moment too long, his expression kind in proximity. Miles suddenly sees, with terrible clarity, that the man before him is beautiful.
Wright turns away, radiant—and the dusk in his passing smells of rust, a rupture. Once his father had told Miles, when he had been young, as they had been leaving the room, a tidbit of knowledge that Miles had then found no relevant hold in the dreams of his own future. Dusk is the hour of madness, his father had said; even the keenest rational mind cannot uphold against the sway of its fall, sure and certain; the onset of war, of love, of death—they become their most poignant when held against the setting light. There are simply some things that cannot be explained, Miles, some things that have no place in the realm of logic, his father had said; he had not looked at his son then, and his gaze had remained a mystery, and a hard thing to believe.
And now something too seems to mask his own vision, and it is something hidden, and beset by fatigue, and a little fear. How easy it would be, Miles thinks, his sight growing dim against the light, to subject himself to Wright and his savior’s logic; to let his heroic illusions run rampant and so quell them unto an ending. To let the man mend him in that pervasive image of his own belief—and so, almost irresponsibly, to love him. Easy it would be, and perhaps even necessary, because despite the long years Miles has learned nothing: he wishes, so very desperately, to live, and believe in something else, which may exist.
But the past and its future promises have long ceased to interest him and it is only the interminable present, broken that one day and bound closed in a loop, that pulsates within, simply and terribly. In that regard his father is wrong, Miles finds fifteen years later; now near wild dawn he sits at a desk in his temporary residence of a hotel suite. It is not the sense of an ending that pervades one with dread; it is rather its absence that one feels most acutely: the duration of one long night with boundaries blurred by miasmic fog.
The notion itself had crept upon him like madness, it is true, and is perhaps a little more reactionary than he would like to admit, but death without fervor is masked and silent and willing to games of chess rather than poetry. It is patient and he has thought it through. It is the only option. It is the only logical conclusion, and after all even poetic justice, Miles thinks with some amusement, that a nine-year-old boy in his seriousness may have thought quite romantic. He somewhat envies Manfred von Karma’s own demise; it had been clean, the result of his meticulous planning, and carried out by professionals. The hotel staff will have to do, for his own purposes; at the very least, he will have had more time than his father, with his five hours. Miles calls for tea to be served at a particular time, as is habit. Perhaps Wright’s daring is infectious; Miles will allow himself one final game of chance, in the form of a variable. He wonders if Wright will understand. He wonders if Wright will know him at last.
Miles seeks out a notepad among his other belongings and very gently rips out a sheet, taking great care that it does not tear. It will be the only available evidence of his soul, for some time. Should he be found, he will only ultimately be found as lost; the truth will thus fade into fiction.
Miles exhales—no longer is he afraid. With relief instead, and fortunately some vanity, which lends him a little courage, Miles looks forward, as if out to a promontory that only he can see, into unknown and mist-clad waters.
Despite his sedentary preferences, Miles is indubitably a man of action; given the chance, he will always fire the gun.
The page is a blank expanse devoid of all
but a single contingency.
Pen in hand loaded like a pistol, no longer beset with longing, Miles Edgeworth makes his choice.
0 Your Eternal Becoming
His dad would have said well good Miles you see now that it is important to believe, to believe in the witness in the system in truth in justice in humanity in dad, who is a defense attorney, and therefore a hero, and therefore the best thing there is to be. The last part Miles himself, not Dad, had said to his friends at school, the ones who listen to him and so are the important ones. Miles had said it because he knows it to be true, and he does not lie, and anyhow it is what his dad (Miles knows) would have said.
Yes (Miles knows this too) today his dad would have said yes Miles you see now you see what I’ve been fighting for, you see how innocent people can be saved, you see now with your own eyes; and Miles who would have seen the truth for what it was for what it could be would have relayed the whole thing to his friends the important ones and in doing so he would have become like his dad.
But his dad says none of those things that Miles knows that he would have said as they are waiting for the elevator. There is someone else, a man in uniform standing nearby, one who has witnessed the whole thing today in the stands; that is perhaps why his dad does not speak.
“Dad,” Miles whispers, reaching out for his dad through the silence because he does not understand. He cannot make sense of it. All those testimonies were forced, they were lies, his dad had said today, but it had changed nothing today; his father had lost. Miles tries very hard to understand how evil does not always come in great sweeping steps but can instead rob like a secret a person of their speech. How the great justice truth system dad can be wrong, at times; how he can lose.
“Miles,” his dad says, perhaps more sharply than he intends, “now is not the time.”
Gregory Edgeworth does not meet his son’s eyes as if in refusal. A betrayal. He does not smile and his face in profile is masked. He does not explain anything to Miles, who waits. Miles’s disappointment instead lingers palpable on his tongue mouth throat until he too finds that he has nothing to say. No words of comfort—no words of despair—for his dad now stands a stranger to him, that once almost fearful brilliance lying shattered and glistening at his feet. Who is he? What is he now? Miles stares, unforgiving, at the older man, somewhat slouching in his overcoat, which has become (Miles seems to notice only now) stained, and faded, like that of a man dying. The missing body, standing here in the silence bellowing, no longer that joy that shining running like wildfire through his veins. A body cold in defeat, in death. Miles cannot help but hate him, this man who does not seem like his dad, and it is a strange feeling, monstrous and intense.
So yes in a way his dad is right, now is not the time so he too will not speak. But there’ll be time later, Miles thinks, he will show him. He will show his dad, his father, he will make him see that no longer is he his father’s son but something someone indeed far greater, someone who can help his father not as a boy not as his son but as fellow attorney as fellow man in the sure and shining future, the future that is bound to come greater than either of them; and then his dad will have to know he will have to say yes son yes you are indeed my son I was weak I was wrong but oh my son you were meant for this, the truth and all things that blaze in its wake, this great thing Miles hardly knows how to describe, so great and beautiful it had once seemed just out of his reach, beckoning; and Miles will one day shed his small bones his youngblood skin so as to hold in his own hands this glorious thing and his dad his father who was weak once only once just once this one time will rise brightly from the ashes and wipe defeat off his brow and yes there will be time later yes, sure and shining, when Miles will know, and Miles will be, and all will be right again, and all will be good again and. And,
And Miles Edgeworth stares at his father’s back as they wait for the elevator, and he is nine years old still, and the elevator arrives, and they all step in: one after the other, each looking ahead.