Peregrination 2036

Abstract

Peregrination 2036 Mika Kennedy (bio) 2036 miles, as the crow flies. 2021 Bury the bird. It is the most and least fragile thing—all bones and air, delicate. But you could never touch a bird like that. This is a corpse. Pulled from the grille of your sister’s car, where it was impossibly contorted, its bean-like insides having evacuated its body and spilled outward, twisting around car plastic at seventy miles per hour. Bury it among red ants, under sage and sand, in the shadow of Stoke’s Castle. The corpse is two hundred miles from its home. From where it had last flown. You know Kansas, Colorado, Utah almost by heart. You know the road from Atwood to Denver to Goblin Valley to Topaz. The day before, you’d made your fourth trip to Topaz, though you’ve never headed all the way west, so this part of Nevada is new to you. It’s where the train would have run in 1942, passaging through the desert with its Japanese American soon-to-be-prisoners (so-called “evacuees,” so-called “pioneers”). Standing under the American flag at Topaz, you told your sister, If our family had lived in Fremont during World War II, this is where they would have ended up. Why? she says back, already tired of Utah. She hasn’t spent the last however many years earning her PhD in stories about the past— stories that take place here, stories that can withstand the desert. Your sister reads the plaque. Then she says, I hate it here, and you drive away. Headed west on US-50, America’s Loneliest, you create an exquisite corpse. It has the wings of a bird and the entrails of a serpent. [End Page 181] Unlike your sister, you’ve spent almost a decade in a PhD. “In” is the appropriate preposition, because there’s not much that is adjacent about a dissertation. You’ve tried to tie yourself to place this whole time, studying literature and its relationship to both the mythic and material, which is a literary way of saying it started with Manzanar, when you were at college in California. Then Amache (Colorado). Poston and Gila River (Arizona). Topaz (Utah). Jerome and Rohwer (Arkansas). But your dissertation isn’t really sited there, even if its subject matter is. Outside of a few weeks out of the last eight years, the entire time you’ve written about the West you’ve been in Michigan, which is in the Eastern time zone, the Detroit airport reminds anyone who will listen. You are a scholar of place and maybe that place is the West, but it has to be Michigan, too. You live there. Before Stoke’s Castle, before Topaz, you meet up with a cousin in St. Louis, a recent and temporary transplant (law school). She gives you a big STL welcome—barbecue and a tour of her neighborhood and its weirdly affordable mansions, though her apartment isn’t one of them. Still, you can buy a lot with a little in Missouri. In your cousin’s eyes, everything in the Midwest is quaint, maybe even backwater. She can’t quite believe she lives there, and so doesn’t quite live there. Not yet. Nevertheless, she’s unafraid to speak on behalf of the region, with the confidence of an explorer telling the Californians back home what’s what: One hundred and fifty years ago, all those settlers were right to keep going. And for Asians like us, it was smart to stop at the coast. To venture no further. (Before the year is over, she will say she can imagine staying. She has community here. She has found—) You, though. You’ll go to bat for the Midwest. Your work is on the walls of the Detroit Historical Museum right now, and it’s not about the West, because it’s not your dissertation. Instead, it is the work of living here in Michigan—a kind of inheritance when you choose to step into a place, a newcomer. Your part of the story takes the shape of foamcore and Photoshop, all edges and pixels and museum space. Exiled...