Tropic of Orange

On Tuesday morning, Manzanar Murakami conducts his symphony above the traffic as usual, when a big rig carrying propane crashes into a red Porsche, killing the spots car’s passengers. This fatal accident causes an enormous traffic jam on the Harbor Freeway.

Before he became unhoused, Manzanar Murakami was a surgeon. One day after a surgery, he abruptly left the hospital “to become a statistic under missing persons” (52). Manzanar Murakami has the uncanny ability to discern the multitude of overlaid maps that make up Los Angeles and to reinterpret them as the layered musical sections of a symphony. To any observer, “it would seem that he was at once orchestra and audience,” though “unknown to anyone, a man walking across the overpass at that very hour innocently hummed the recurrent melody of the adagio” (53).

Emi, following the NewsNow van, is stuck in traffic caused by the collision between the big rig and the Porsche. She frequently follows the news van to the scenes of breaking news. Gabriel’s car, an old, beat-up Jaguar, is stalled out in the same traffic jam. He was on the way to follow up on a lead from