monopolies | supplement - Small Moments for Fake Memories

He wakes up cold and realizes there is shrapnel in his side.

It hurts, but not as much as the an open sore just below his ribs that runs deep into his abdomen. Even below his heavy wool, he can smell the charred flesh and smoke from burning organs. It hasn't been this bad in months. A year. Not since he arrived in––

Disoriented, he reaches for Luke to make sure he's alright. His hand falls on open air and mud and in a flash of terror he wonders if his friends were ever real at all. Too many strange things happen in his life that it could've actually happened. Memories bleed together until doubt of their authenticity seeps into every available crack. It feels like trying to recall memories of the time before his brothers; everything exists in a fog, clear enough to recall details but obscured enough to wonder if it truly happened or if it's a memory fabricated from dreams and stories. Anything is possible and America hates it.

Whatever the case, he knows without any uncertainty that this is real. He is outside Atlanta, alone with the taste of ash in his mouth. He crawls to a dead tree, musket gripped in his lap and supplies abandoned a few yards away. The rest of the day is spent huddled against its trunk sobbing and scratching the sleeves of his uniform until the remainder of his fingernails break off. The dark fabric is already stained with old blood and dirt. A sense of deja vu dredges up a memory, or the ghost of a dream that has lodged in his brain, of a taller forest where he'd almost killed a friend in a fit of terror because he thought he was back in his war. A sick, infinite loop stuck in his head. It's the clarity of the memory, not the content, that makes him cry even harder.

The rest of the day passes like that until he's too dehydrated for tears. By the time the sun sets he feels empty. He wants to sleep for days, but distant voices remind him that there is no escape. No one cares what's going on in his mind. Everyone is sick and done, full of sorrow and hate. No pity will be spared for a country that they feel has abandoned them, or rejected them or betrayed them, who they either hate or think hate them. There are no more steady friendships. Only his people to help and countries to put on a brave face for.

He vomits a meal of salted meat and rotten vegetables beside the tree, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, smears the fresh blood over his jaw, and moves on.

After the war, America cleans the dusty, broken bits of his homes. They're islands of his personal self in a sea of personification. Spaces for Alfred in America. Things are straightened and polished until they're back in their proper places. Tangible memories in the form of pictures, flowers, and little toy soldiers are placed on mantles and planted in gardens and shoved into storage closets that he can't bring himself to clean out. At his old Virginia home, Moby's pool is cleared of debris and the beluga is showered with attention from his absent owner. Halfway through preparing dinner for his first quiet evening since the end of the war, an idea suddenly occurs to him. America rummages through his shed until he finds an old chest. The next day he paints an ornate closet door suspended in a clear blue sky. He isn't a great artist, but it does the trick. As an afterthought he paints a little gray whale in the corner. By evening the chest is lined with loose papers. Moments are scrawled messily in no particular order. A weekend in the life of a teenage superhero, sex in the dream of an impossible desert night, a hand replaced with a mechanical saw so he can fight the undead. Small things––descriptions of faces and personalities and feelings and a few spare names––line the margins. It is an incomplete, muddled sketch of people and places that might only exist in his head, but it's his, and he likes it.

Life is too busy to spend much time reminiscing. This has always been the case. The best option, he's found, is to take the happy parts of the past with him. On a trip to London, he finds a medical handbook on discount, sold by an Algerian midwife who couldn't hide her irritation when he tried to flirt with her. He purchased it and shoved it between pages about a female doctor. Toy dinosaurs are thrown into the chest, as are a handheld crossbow, a pair of dark tinted glasses, a discolored picture of himself that makes his hair look dark and eyes red. Innumerable oddities start to fill it.

When asked, he sometimes tells people the truth. Those who are countries or familiar with the countries sometimes believe him, but few actually care because their life is too absurd as it is to pay mind to alternate dimensions. He falls in love with an outlaw who is always entertained by the stories. America isn't sure if he believes him, but he's happy to share with someone. The boy is gunned down in his girlfriend's home some months later. He stops sharing, but he continues to collect.

By 1891 the chest isn't full. Maybe three quarters of the way filled. On quiet nights he might decide to sift through the contents. Ten years after the fact, he'd started to feel immensely saddened by these things and shoved the chest in the storage closet. A few years later he'd moved it back to its proper place under his bed. Over the years the people and moments written on the pages had fallen into obscurity in a way his real memories hadn't. They still exist somewhere, he knows, because rereading the words and running his fingers over the knick-knacks feels like he's catching up with a childhood friend, refreshing things long buried and filling in the gaps. He even finds a few weird details littered among the moments he can't really name or place––foods that he's never had, machines that don't exist, an iPhone that he shouldn't even know what that is because he broke the laws of time and space to get a smart phone before he'd even gone to that place. He ended up smashing it against a tree because fucking Siri kept being a smart ass when he asked where the nearest battle was raging.

But then life moves on, and he remembers who his is, and he is not one to dwell on the past. America likes to look toward the future while living in the moment. In the moments he remembers, he hopes that all those people are happy wherever they are.