Tropic of Orange

Gabriel faxes Bobby the flyer for the wrestling championship. Then he calls the travel agency from the itinerary and turns up a name: Corazón Juárez, matching the C. Juárez he has been pursuing. However, it is another dead end. He tries contacting Emi and Buzzworm but gets no response. He tries to trace the shipment of oranges that wound up in Los Angeles, but only finds a confusing series of exchanges between South and Central American countries. He Contacts Doña Maria about Rafaela, but she is still sleeping. He asks Lupe about the X on TV; to Gabriel’s dismay, the X appears to have multiplied, and he does not know what this means.

Gabriel has gotten used to carrying on his relationship with Emi over the internet. They have even maintained a sexual relationship over text only.

Gabriel sets up newsgroups on the Internet according to the storylines he is following and the budgets that correspond to each one, including “alt.soc.med.transplants.farming.infants” and “alt.soc.drugs.oranges” because “oranges continued to be scarce, worth their weight in gold, and floated invisibly though some parallel world” (212). He collects information from these message boards, follow a seemingly endless number of leads.