Tropic of Orange

Bobby, Rafaela’s estranged husband, is a hardworking janitor in Los Angeles. At the cleaning supplies depot, a man tried to carjack Bobby. Without missing a beat, Bobby physically put down his assailant, leaving him a bloody mess. Though his last name appears to be Vietnamese, Bobby is ethnically Chinese and was raised in Singapore. After the death of his mother, Bobby’s father encouraged him to immigrate to America. Every day, Bobby and his brother would go to the Vietnamese refugee camp in Singapore to attempt to mix in with the refugees. Eventually, they succeeded in making it to America along with Vietnamese refugees.

Working in Los Angeles, Bobby learned Spanish and met Rafaela. Bobby worked hard and grew a successful janitorial business, earning enough money to send some back to his father in Singapore and to put his younger brother through college. Bobby wants his son to know the good life. Bobby works hard, frenetically accomplishing all he can. However, he now finds it hard to function without his wife and son around. He wants to get them back but does not know how to begin. He remembers that Rafaela wanted him to stop smoking, so he decides that will be the first step.

Gabriel and Emi, a second-generation Japanese American woman who works for a news channel, meet for lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant in West Los Angeles. The two have been in an on-and-off relationship since they met in college. Emily likes to poke fun at Gabriel, and while they wait for their food, she goads him about his taste in classic movies, saying that she prefers television. Gabriel seems mildly amused. Emi dated Gabriel initially because “he was Latino, part of that hot colorful race, only to find out that, except for maybe his interest in tango (and even that was academic), he wasn’t what you call the stereotype” (20).

Emi orders a Bloody Mary, and she and Gabe discuss her plans involving the coordination of the day’s weather report and a commercial, and Gabriel’s plans to check up on his property in Mexico. Emi gets a call from the studio that her prerecorded video for the afternoon has been lost, so she must return, cutting their afternoon short. Once outside, she knocks on the window to get Gabriel’s attention; it is pouring rain.

Buzzworm is a community activist known throughout his neighborhood—which has a significant unhoused population—for his reliability. Buzzworm is a “Big black seven-foot dude, Vietnam vet, an Afro shirt with palm trees painted all over it, dreads, pager and Walkman belted to his waist” (26). He is well known for his extensive collection of watches, most of which have a story attached to them. After going through rehab twice, Buzzworm picked up the habit of constantly listening to the radio; he listens to everything from NPR to Blues programs to Korean stations. Now, instead of spending his money on drugs or other habits, he spends it on batteries.

Buzzworm also has a great fondness for trees, especially the palm trees of his part of town. He frequently tries to get his neighbors to appreciate the palm trees lining their streets, educating them on the trees’ ages and species. Buzzworm grew up “near about the corner of Jefferson and Normandie” (30), in a part of town with very few trees, and thus never noticed them until later in life. After discovering the proliferation of palm trees in Los Angeles as a kid, Buzzworm developed the habit of drawing them. To Buzzworm, palm trees are not just geographical markers of his neighborhood but its metaphorical guardians.

Manzanar Murakami spends his days on a bridge over the Harbor Freeway near downtown Los Angeles, conducting symphonies in his head. Though he is unhoused, he is perfectly at home in Los Angeles. He conducts his symphonies every day, even in the pouring rain. He has become a fixture of the downtown scenery. He marks time by the flow of traffic beneath his feet. Today, there is a longer window of good traffic because schools are out for the summer, and they are not contributing to the usual congestion.

To the Japanese community in Little Tokyo, Manzanar Murakami is an embarrassment. They have tried to relocate him several times to no avail. Only the bridge over the freeway, with the view of the downtown skyline in the background, provides a suitable stage for the symphonies that Manzanar Murakami conducts. some have suggested relocating him to a mountaintop, but they know it would be futile: Manzanar Murakami would find his way back to downtown Los Angeles. The freeway system is “a great root system, an organic living entity. It was nothing more than a great rising concrete dinosaur and nothing less than the greatest orchestra on earth” (35).

At four o’clock in the afternoon, after the rain has subsided, Emi calls Gabriel to tell him to take a break. Gabriel puts her on hold, finishing his conversation with Terry, a new editor at the newspaper Gabriel writes for. Gabriel likes to test new editors by inserting the phrase “pewter skies” into an article to see how they change it. Terry passed the test.

Gabriel is one of the few Chicano reporters working for the editorial section of this newspaper. He became interested in journalism “because of Ruben Salazar, The Mexican American Reporter who was killed at the Silver Dollar during the so called ‘East LA uprising’ in the early seventies” (36). Though he does not count himself as purely idealistic, Gabriel sees his work at the newspaper as contributing to Salazar’s legacy.

Emi is frustrated about the rain: The weatherman on her news team predicted a sunny afternoon, and the sudden downpour clashed with the sponsor’s sunblock advertisement. Gabriel and Emi tease each other. Gabriel asks her to rent Angel Beach from the video store. She refuses, wanting to watch the scheduled disaster movie being broadcast that night. However, Gabriel knows she will do it; he thinks, “The complaining and the bitching were the surface of a very big heart, the most generous I had ever known” (37). Gabriel secretly likes the teasing side of Emi’s personality.

Gabriel steps into an unoccupied office to call Buzzworm, who paged him earlier. Buzzworm was investigating a camp populated by transgender women near the LA River when the downpour started. One of the women in the camp nearly drowned, but Buzzworm performed CPR and saved her. Buzzworm is indignant when Gabriel asks him for another story. However, he says he has a story of real human interest.

Buzzworm describes Manzanar Murakami to Gabriel; he thinks that Manzanar Murakami’s eccentric behavior will make for a good story—a way for Gabriel to help humanize the unhoused residents of Los Angeles. Gabriel relies on Buzzworm for story leads, and the two of them have a semi-serious deal that if Gabriel wins the Pulitzer Prize, he will give half of the prize money to Buzzworm.

Gabriel thinks of Rafaela and of his place in Mexico. The project is taking so many years that Gabriel almost does not care anymore. He knows that the people he has taken there over the years do not share his passion, and that if he were to move there permanently, none of his friends, even Emi, would follow. Gabriel realizes that he could never abandon his life as a journalist. He thinks that Rafaela could never return to her old life of janitorial work; he can only think of her in his house in Mexico.

When he leaves his office building, Gabriel is surprised at how bright the city is at this hour of the evening. He sees Manzanar Murakami conducting his symphonies on the bridge and realizes that Buzzworm was right about him.

Arcangel is an enigmatic, South American performance artist who has entertained everyone from Che Guevara to Gabriel García Márquez. He speaks in a dialect of Spanish all his own, one that blends Spanish with a seemingly limitless and unplaceable variety of Indigenous influences. Arcangel’s most defining feature is his wings, “wings that didn’t seem fake, weren’t strapped on or glued to his back, but growing there” (44).

In Montevideo, Arcangel prophesizes the doom of western civilization based on 10 cycles of the 52-year Mayan calendar, placing the end of the world in either 2012, 2014, 2018, or 2022, depending on what is considered the triggering event between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Old-World colonialists beginning with Columbus. He links the destruction to the dates of the discoveries of locations in the new world and proclaims that doom is inevitable everywhere in the new world.

On Monday, Arcangel woke up in Mazatlán. His path is taking him inexorably North.