Roy couldn't remember.
The damn drugs had taken his energy, his dignity, and now his photographic memory. Or was it the disease burrowing deeper, embedding itself ever more so into his DNA? What came first, Roy thought, the chicken or the demand for eggs? It didn't matter; what mattered was his damn memory and he wanted it back.
He felt light-headed suddenly as if he had fallen into a trance. This was happening too frequently for Roy these days. He closed his eyes, groaning in acceptance for whatever hallucination was going to show up this time. Roy opened his eyes to a mirrored room. Steam blurred the edges of each mirror but the air around him was cold and he gripped the sleeves of his hospital gown. When Roy looked into the mirror in front of him, he gasped and sent himself into a coughing fit. As his lungs quieted slowly, Roy tried again to make sense of what he saw: the same hooded eyes, the perpetual scowl, the scar down the center of his nose, all on the body of a five-year-old. In the blink of an eye, he realized it was his five-year-old body.
Roy turned to the right and found himself graduating Columbia Law School. He whipped to the left and there he was, sitting next to Joe McCarthy at the Hearings; outside the courthouse with Tom after each of his three acquittals; on his yacht the day before it "sank"; shaking hands with Rupert Murdoch, Roger Stone, Donald Trump. His heart dropped when he saw himself by the pool with Peter, standing in the White House with Peter to his right and the Reagans to his left; he marveled at the irony of the scene. He almost smiled at the family photo: Dora, Al, and Roy outside their new home in Manhattan. Finally, the damn Christmas Carol merry-go-round ended and Roy was left facing the heap of cancer-spotted skin he knew he appeared as now. He released the breath he had been holding.
The many lives of Roy M. Cohn, pasted on top of one another like a bad sheet cake. Cut him open and he bled a life few enjoyed to hear about. Was that it? Roy thought, all of them. Was that all there ever was for me? All these memories he had thought would build themselves up into a grand history had instead only built a life. Overwhelmed and deflated, Roy closed his eyes and began to fall asleep. His past lives dissipated and he wondered softly who even was Roy Cohn anyway?
