Tropic of Orange

Listening to car talk radio, Buzzworm makes his way to Manzanar Murakami with the contents of the package that Rafaela sent to Gabriel. Inside the small cooler is a Tupperware container, containing a zip lock bag filled with fluid and “a tiny purple slimy thing padded tenderly by what was now tepid refrigeration” (185). Manzanar Murakami immediately identifies it as a baby heart. Still carrying the cooler, Buzzworm meets some city officials in the unhoused encampment. He does not know what to do with the heart. Afterward, he goes to downtown Los Angeles, drawn to the crowd surrounding Angel’s flight.

Buzzworm sees Arcangel performing, juggling corn and the last orange in the city. Sol Grabs the fruit and runs. Buzzworm, worried that the crowd is going to trample the two-year-old, grabs him and runs from the crowd. No matter how fast he runs, however, he cannot put any distance between himself and the pursuing crowd. He shoves the orange under Sol’s shirt and hands him back to Arcangel. Arcangel tells the crowd that Buzzworm still has the orange, pointing to the small cooler Buzzworm is still holding. They chase after him, and Buzzworm throws the cooler into the crowd. Another man catches it and runs off with the crowd in pursuit.

The driver of the black Jaguar attacks Rafaela. In the struggle, they transform. Rafaela’s becomes a serpent and Hernando becomes a wild cat with black fur and sharp claws.

Rafaela wakes up sometime later, spitting out a wad of black fur. She is bleeding badly; her whole body seems bruised and torn, and she is naked by the side of the road. The villain is nowhere to be seen. Opening her hand, she says she is clutching the turquoise inlaid a pocketknife that Arcangel gave her, along with a severed human ear in the other hand. The night is abruptly replaced by day.

Gabriel is driving down the highway to Mazatlán thinking about the relationship between Emi and Manzanar Murakami. He suddenly sees Rafaela crumpled weather side of the road. Horrified, he pulls over and helps her up. She is somewhat delirious but refuses to get into the car. Gabriel thinks that they are in the middle of nowhere, but she points out his own house not far away. Gabriel is confused; he should have had several more hours to go before he made it home.

They make it inside. Gabriel asks where Sol is, and she hands him the tattered pieces of the poem Arcangel wrote on the flyer for the wrestling match. She tells Gabriel that Sol will be there. Gabriel feels great tenderness for Rafaela. He wonders about the romantic feelings he harbored for her. He feels accused. He thinks of how he thought he was helping her out by letting her stay, but now he wonders if he was only patronizing her. He thinks, “I thought she might fall in love with me, but she was only fixing up my house, and I was a part of a net of favors and subtle harassments that unconsciously set her up. And she had taken this beating for me” (192). Gabriel asks who did this to her, and Rafaela says that she ate him. She tells Gabriel that the man cannot hurt them anymore. She asked about the package, fearfully questioning if it was a child’s heart. She implores him to tell Bobby about the wrestling match at noon tomorrow.

Gabriel looks out the window and sees Doña Maria approaching. Doña Maria takes over caring for Rafaela. Gabriel goes to her house to use her telephone, and while he is there, he turns on her new satellite TV. A strange channel shows a small X moving through a map of Downtown Los Angeles. He asks Lupe what this is; all she knows is the Doña Maria’s son and other men installed the satellite dish. He told her he will call her from Los Angeles tomorrow so she can tell him where the X is so he can search for it. Gabriel scans the desk with the telephone for any clues; he finds a travel itinerary with the name C. Juárez at the top but does not know if it is just a coincidence. He returns to the house, but Rafaela is sleeping. He gets back in his car and seize his property become a speck in his rearview mirror.

Bobby and his cousin discuss American culture as they drive up Interstate 5. Bobby points out the sites that he recognizes. The girl has a jar of dirt from her home village with her. Bobby does not mention anything about her brother. They get to Los Angeles from the border in record time, but once within the city, traffic comes to a dead stop. It takes forever to get home; the geography of the streets has inexplicably changed.

Bobby gets a call from Gabriel. Gabriel reluctantly tells Bobby that Rafaela is hurt bad, and that he feels like it is his fault. He tells her that Sol got separated from her, but he will be at the Ultimate Wrestling Championship tomorrow. He tells Bobby to contact him at his office; he needs to catch his flight back to Los Angeles. Bobby gets the fax over the wrestling match flyer; however, it is the side with the poem written on it. This enrages Bobby. He thinks, “What’s this? A pinche poem? You sending me a poem? What the hell! He’s supposed to find Sol in a poem?” (198).

Xiayue acclimates herself to Television right away. Bobby watches her changing channels, trying to sync. The language is on every channel are messed up, but everything makes sense. Bobby wonders, “Does Connie Chung even speak Mandarin? Does that Trek character Chekhov speak Russian? Or George Takei, does he speak Japanese?” (199). Even though Pacific Rim Auditorium is not far from his house, Bobby decides that he will start walking now due to the changing geography. He walks through all the surrounding areas of Los Angeles, before making it into the city proper.

Buzzworm finds Emi sunbathing in a bikini on top of the NewsNow van. Emi jokes about having a New Age tan and explains it is a result of various liberal Los Angeles stereotypes. Buzzworm shakes his head and says, “Well, I’ll be. And I thought having skin color was just so as to define what’s white” (201). He asked her why she has not gone to see Manzanar Murakami yet; she deflects his question.

Undeterred, Buzzworm gives her an hour to mentally prepare herself to meet her grandfather again. Descending from the van, Buzzworm hears a familiar rumble: gunfire. He commands the other members of the news team to get down. He rushes back to the top of the van to grab Emi. She gasps, “I actually saw them out there aiming for the dish. It’s such a dick the air, you…wouldn’t…think…they’d…miss…” (202).

One of Murakami’s grids overlaying the city is that of workers going to and from places of business on the freeways. Now, for a brief time, the unhoused occupied the same cars that the workers once used to get to their places of business. He begins to become aware of a new grid, finding “himself at the heart of an expanding symphony of which he was not the only conductor. On a distant overpass, he could make out the odd mirror of his own figure, waving a baton” (203). A vast, orchestral network of unhoused conductors have added their symphonies to Manzanar Murakami’s.

The freeway valley expands, “becoming the entire city and bigger than a tiny island or a puny country the size of San Bernardino” (204). At the same time, Arcangel and his parade approach, dragging with them the entire middle of the hemisphere. Gunfire rips through the celebratory feelings of the moment. The sound of it echoes in Manzanar Murakami’s mind over and over, each time bringing with it more pain. He does not understand.

The assembled and waiting military and LAPD forces use the drive-by shooting as an opportunity to open fire on the encampment of unhoused people. The Valley erupts into chaos, as “[t]he motley community of homeless and helpless and well intentioned ran in terror, surrendered, vomited, cradled the dying,” and “Manzanar recorded every scream and cry and shudder with dumb incomprehension” (205). At the same time, the forces from the South, “not foreign to the ravages of war—never stopped, clamored forward, joined the war with both wooden and real weapons, capital, and plunder” (205).