Tropic of Orange

Buzzworm listens to Mexican radio stations to “be ready with the dialogue” (89). Buzzworm realizes that to keep peace between the Black and Brown communities of Los Angeles, “somebody had to be there to get the sides to see eye to eye” (89). Buzzworm uses his radio stations and musical suggestions as a means of educating people in his area, especially the youth. For example, he uses jazz as a bridge between hip hop and the history of Black people in America.

The young man who spoke to him about the curving bullets on Tuesday is dead. According to reports, he died of an overdose of cocaine and “unidentified chemicals.” Buzzworm accompanies the young man’s mother to the morgue. When they see the corpse, it is evident that he was beaten severely, probably to death. Buzzworm is skeptical of the official cause of death.

The mother collects the boy’s few possessions, including the calculator watch that Buzzworm gave him on Tuesday. Buzzworm gives her a business card for an organization for mothers called Reclaim Our Children. He then visits with the young man’s friends, his tagging gang. Buzzworm suspects that the boy was beaten for wanting out, but the other young men deny this. He asks them about the cocaine, but they seem genuinely confused. One of the boys in the group is listening to a Walkman, and Buzzworm asks, “Gimme a hit off those headphones of yours” (92). To his surprise, the boy is listening to classical music. Buzzworm leaves, confused “first about the dead boy who saw bullets curve and now about another homey who listened classical” (92).

Buzzworm thinks of Margarita, who loves listening to Aretha Franklin. He decides to visit her stall in hopes of buying some homemade pupusas for lunch. On the way, he thinks of how he will tease her, and the conversations they will have. However, when he gets there, her stall is not there: He gets a page that she is dead. According to her sons, she was at the kitchen sink “peeling oranges, eating, washing dishes, chopping vegetables […] Then all of a sudden: boom. Slips to the ground. Looks like she’s sleeping” (93). They rushed her to the emergency room, where she died before being seen by a doctor. The official prognosis is that she died of an overdose, even though she was never known to take any substances.

Buzzworm does not buy it. He goes back to her corner, where she always set up shop, and tries in vain to find Aretha Franklin on the airwaves. Instead, he settles on Mexican stations, searching for cumbia music. Even though she was Salvadoran, “It was the best he could do for poor Margarita” (93).

Gabriel meets with Buzzworm early at a bus bench at Pershing Square for the promised interview with Manzanar Murakami. He lets Buzzworm do the talking, merely sitting by them and trying to look inconspicuous. However, Manzanar Murakami realizes that Gabriel is some sort of reporter and asks if he is recording this. Buzzworm tells him that Gabriel has an audiographic memory. Buzzworm’s method of interviewing is indirect and circuitous; Gabriel is frustrated at first but caught by surprise when Buzzworm’s questions meet their goal.

Manzanar Murakami does not consider himself crazy, though Gabriel does not entirely rule it out. Manzanar Murakami “had created his name out of his birthplace, Manzanar Concentration Camp in the Owens Valley” (96). He claims that he was the first sansei (third-generation Japanese person) born in a concentration camp. Because of the clarity of his mind and speech, Gabriel doubts that Manzanar Murakami is insane. He thinks “his attitude was monkish, like a character in a Kurosawa film who shaves his head and forsakes all worldliness” (96), but he also notes his sense of humor. His final impression of Manzanar Murakami is that “there was something I had to learn from this man, something I needed him to impart to me, not as the subject of an interview or an investigation, but something he could teach me” (97).

Gabriel later makes the connection that both Emi and Manzanar Murakami are Asian: He wonders if Emi has heard of him before, or if her mother, who is deeply invested in the Japanese American community knows anything. Emi teases him for assuming that she knows one man out of Los Angeles’s entire Asian American population. Emi asks if Gabriel heard an explosion yesterday: A tanker truck carrying gasoline jackknifed in the traffic caused by the propane truck explosion, and it met the same fate. This left “[a]n entire mile of cars trapped between two dead semis, not to mention two craters, fires, and the debris from the blasts” (98).

Gabriel asks Buzzworm about an encampment for unhoused people in the undergrowth near the overpass. Buzzworm reports that it went up in smoke. The unhoused people who lived there are taking over the cars whose drivers abandoned them due to the danger. Buzzworm tells Gabriel that he agrees that the second case that Gabriel is working on is not about illegal medication. His source wants to meet with Gabriel, but there will be a political price for doing so. They insist on meeting in Mexico City, and Buzzworm thinks they want to make Gabriel an offer.

Rafaela and Sol walk through the cornfield toward Doña Maria’s house. They walked past the wall of Gabriel’s property, which, earlier she and Rodriguez discovered is indeed bent, like she noticed yesterday running home in the rain. In her mind, she rehearses having a conversation with Bobby. She wants to tell him that she needed to go home to Mexico to see what it was like again, and that she wishes he could see how tan and happy Sol is. She wants to try to convince him that they should all go visit his family in Singapore. She thinks it will help.

Rafaela is wary to see a black Jaguar parked in front of Doña Maria’s house. She almost considers going back home, but Sol runs up the steps, and Doña Maria sees them. Rafaela hears a man yelling on the phone in another room; Maria tells her it is her son Hernando, and it is good that they can finally meet. She hears Hernando yelling something about shipments of oranges; he wants to know every detail of the shipments’ voyage from Brazil.

Rafaela, Maria, and Sol go outside to look at Maria’s corn fields. Maria tells them that her servant, Lupe, will take the corn to market when it is ripe. This makes Rafaela think of the exploitation she faced as a cleaning lady in the United States.  

Maria realizes they forgot the basket for gathering corn in the kitchen; Rafaela volunteers to go get it and so she can put Sol’s bottle in the refrigerator. From the kitchen, she hears Hernando speaking with someone—not on the phone, but in person. She eavesdrops. Hernando and the mystery person are discussing harvesting the organs of a child: a heart, a kidney, and a stomach. They expect delivery by Friday.

One of the voices approaches the kitchen, so Rafaela darts back outside. When she hears footsteps leaving the kitchen, she darts back in and looks in the refrigerator. Inside is a tiny cooler, barely big enough to be useful. Instinctively, she grabs it and stuffs it into her bag. She realizes how rash this was when, back outside, she meets Hernando’s gaze through the glass of the kitchen window. She compares Sol to one of the men’s descriptions of a child; she thinks, “Sol. Sol was not starving. He was not just any two-year-old” (103). In a state of motherly panic, she runs back toward her son.

Manzanar Murakami conducts a piece he calls The Hour of the Trucks, which refers to a time of day when big rigs dominate the freeway. the symphony utilizes the trucks’ monstrous sounds. below him, the mile of cars between the two wrecked big rigs has been abandoned by the owners of the cars. As the fire creeps up the side of the freeway into Manzanar Murakami’s encampment, he knows he will lose everything, but he cannot stop conducting.

A surprising number of unhoused people emerge from the encampment and begin to take over the abandoned vehicles on the freeway. Large vehicles, such as vans, SUVs, and classic cars are given priority, while “Porsches, Corvettes, Jaguars, and Miatas were suddenly relegated to the status of sitting or powder rooms or even telephone booths” (105). Trucks hauling food are raided, their contents distributed among the new residents of the freeway.

The city of Los Angeles watches the spectacle unfold on television with a mixture of anger and amusement. Manzanar keeps conducting, though “For the first time, he considered abandoning his effort as he had once abandoned his surgical practice, and yet an uncanny sense of the elasticity of the moment, of time and space, forced his hands and arms to continue” (107). He knows that the direction of the event is stretching towards the South.

Gabriel and Emi dine at Hiro’s Sushi. Gabriel is not an adventurous eater; he sticks with cucumber rolls and California rolls while Emi orders more traditional sushi. On television in the background, the night’s disaster movie is Canyon Fires. However, the movie resembles the real-life disaster happening on the freeway, shown in “a corner box with continuous coverage of the freeway fire from the NewsNow copter” (108). Emi’s home television shows up to four channels at once, something that drives Gabriel crazy.

The couple begin to people-watch—another of Emi’s habits that Gabriel disapproves of. They make up backstories for the other diners; Emi mockingly calls them a “multicultural mosaic” (110). Her speech begins to offend a white woman sitting next to her, who apologizes to Hiro, the sushi chef, for Emi’s behavior. Gabriel is worried that Emi will make a scene. The white woman is wearing chopsticks in her hair. Emi asks for a pair of forks, holds them up to her, and asks, “Would you consider using these in your hair? Or would you consider that […] unsanitary?” (112).

Arcangel sits at the Cantina of Misery & Hunger. A waitress brings him nopales—the ones he bought from the woman he dreamed about, which he brought to the cantina to be cooked. The waiter claims to remember Arcangel from some distant time in the past, when Arcangel was in his village. He offers Arcangel a Budweiser on the House due to their chance meeting. Arcangel is surprised that the cantina only serves American beer, even though they are in Mexico. The cantina is unusually crowded. The waiter explains that this is because of an upcoming cockfight.

Arcangel joins the crowd for the cockfight. He watches the proceedings, wondering “when his time would come, when he would be forced to spar with knives at his heels, to meet the final destiny of those with wings” (114). After the cockfight, Arcangel transforms himself into “a motley personage: part superhero, part professional wrestler, part Subcomandante Marcos” (114). The crowd recognizes him as the man going north, El Gran Mojado, whose enemy is SUPERNAFTA.

The crowd speculates on what El Gran Mojado is doing here. Some think he is going North to fight SUPERNAFTA. Some are angry that he is going north to save the people up there, rather than those in the South. Arcangel reminds them that California was once Mexican territory until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. He says that SUPERNAFTA is doomed to failure, because it only cares about commerce, not about people. He has the crowd point his way north. The fight between El Gran Mojado and SUPERNAFTA “was being billed as the Greatest Fight of the Century” and “the crowd, lusting for battle and blood, moved North with its Latin birds and American beers” (116).