My mind is blown. And that’s a phrase I haven’t even thought of in decades. It feels like a portion of my head has been exposed to the elements. The back of my skull pulsates.
“Oh, you dreamers.” Alfred laughs lightly at the expression I’m wearing. “That’s why we love you: Your vanity makes you such pushovers! But don’t worry, she must have genuinely cared for you, for her not to blow the whistle and do all sorts of serious damage, such as having the hospital padlocked and Dr. X stripped of his license. She must have grown very fond of you both and judged that what you were up to wasn’t going to hurt the state in any way. In fact, at the risk of blowing your mind a second time-”
“Uh?” I say.
“C’mon, it’s obviously blown from the look on your face, Daniel,” he says. “I hope you never try to make a living as a poker player.”
“Uh…”
“Anyway, hold on to your hat, because she may have even helped your quest for a kidney, greased the wheels behind the scenes, getting the paperwork approved by the higher-ups. She was watching over you, like a fairy-godmother.”
Or a fairy goddaughter…
Damn dim bulb is all I can think. I was in the dark all that time.
“But how’d you know…? I mean-”
“Oh, let’s just say a few of us took an interest in your project,” he says, smiling at me in that complicated way of his.
“An official interest?”
“I’m not prepared to say,” he says, affecting a look of modesty as he bites off the top of a sugar packet and picks the paper from his tongue. “In any event, it’s partly speculation on our part, with very little hard-and-fast proof. Maybe she’s just an innocent little waitress and we’re hyperventilating for nothing. If you think back on the cast of characters you’ve involved yourself with, however, I think you’ll agree that it has all the earmarks of being the classic scenario, on both sides.”
Cherry? I think. Ow my God, Cherry was on our team? Good hands indeed. And why was Queen Latifah so Johnny-on-the-spot? Did she have a dog in this fight, too?
I find myself clinging to the one thing I need to know for certain. “But the kidney’s good, right?”
Alfred laughs again, a tinkling like broken teacups. “You tell me. So long as Larry keeps taking his antirejection drugs, I’m told that everything should keep going well.”
“It’s not bugged or anything?”
“What, so the Chinese can keep tabs on his latest inventions?”
He laughs at me, not unkindly.
“And you’re sure it was a murderer, right, the donor?” I ask. “It wasn’t one of those religious guys the state’s outlawed?”
Here Alfred makes motions that say our little snack is coming to an end. “Let’s not even go there, shall we? Because in truth we’ve no way of knowing for sure. I doubt very much whether even Dr. X has a way of knowing for sure. I mean, China in its wisdom killed ten thousand prisoners the last year they reported, with very little lag time between verdict and execution, and the number is now officially a state secret, zealously guarded.”
He glances at my face.
“But listen, we don’t know anything for sure! We don’t even know about Jade for sure. The point is, you did what you had to do. Don’t second-guess yourself. Did you kill an innocent man? Possibly. Did you jump the queue, along with everyone else? Of course you did. Is it ruthless business? Without a doubt.”
I clear my throat. “I killed an innocent man?”
“Look, I can’t give you a free hall pass, Daniel: There are a lot of unknowns here. But you did what you came here to do: You saved your cousin’s life.”
“He’s not even my first cousin,” I say.
“So you’re not precisely your cousin’s keeper,” he says without missing a beat. “You’re something else, maybe less alliterative.”
I take a breath. It feels like the first one I’ve taken since entering the cafeteria. Alfred puts his hand on top of mine and pats it supportively.
“You know what, though? Can I give you one word of warning, from my limited experience seeing cases not unlike yours? Don’t expect to be applauded when you get home. A lot of people will be put out that you managed to pull this off. Certain family members may be angry that you lifted a finger to help when they didn’t. Certain segments of the medical community, don’t expect them to be overjoyed, either, at taking matters into your own hands. Others will say you played fast and loose, that you’re an American vampire, all those profundities that miss the point entirely. You know the expression ‘No good deed goes unpunished’? There’s an even more apt expression from this part of the world: ‘The captive buffalo resents the free buffalo.’ So don’t expect a ticker-tape parade.”
“I know,” I admit. “Even Larry kind of resents me.”
“We have a joke in Baltimore: ‘Why are you mad at me? What’d I do to help?’”
I try to smile, but it isn’t coming.
“As for those others who disagree with your methodology, they’re simply not playing on the same field as you,” he says. “They want a rational, step-by-step approach; you whisked yourself here and said, ‘Universe, use me.’ They want to play chess, and you’re already playing Go.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know about any of this,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m a little misoriented right now.”
“Here’s the bottom line,” he says, giving my hand a final pat and getting ready to stand. “All these carpings about whether we have the right to take an organ, even from a murderer, they’re just sentimental luxuries we can’t afford. I don’t necessarily want to get into this, because frankly it’s none of anyone’s business, but I lost a niece to a murderer back in the States, a long time ago, and I would have reached inside his rib cage and pulled out his heart with my bare hands if that would have brought her back to us.”
The speech has made him a little breathless. He gathers himself. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just mean to say that my ordeal has clarified a few things, taught me that if we have a chance to use good organs, even from bad people, it’s a sin not to. The rest of it, it’s not worth debating.
“All set?” he concludes, picking up his tray. “The second-to-last thing I want to say, and then I’ll let you go, is don’t feel compromised by this whole experience. Don’t feel dirtied. This is the real world…”
“And the last thing?” I manage to croak out.
“Don’t forget to bus the table.”
A dream comes back to me. I can fly. I’ve had it recurrently since childhood, less and less frequently as I’ve grown older, but I realize now I might have been having it several times in the last week. My arms are winglike. I possess just the right amount of power to rise to a state of being airborne, lumberingly at first, but then higher, aloft, dipping up and up to soar around the spaces I ordinarily look up to. In the dream this past week, I’ve been offering to carry Larry with me, and Mary, too, but they don’t want to go, so I’m flying by myself, suddenly zooming upward into the nighttime stars…
At first, leaving Alfred in the late-afternoon light, I don’t want the dream to end. I want to go directly to the airport and get on a plane and fly home without seeing Jade, all my dreams intact. But gradually I realize I have to see her. I can’t go home without seeing her one last time.
On the phone Jade tells me her father’s taken ill, just a “middle squeeze” and nothing serious. She’s very sorry, but she has to take a train to her faraway home after our dinner together, she can’t accompany me to the airport.
Fine. Just dinner will be fine.
So do I feel dirtied, in the cab on my way over to see her? Not so much dirtied as deepened. Not so much compromised as complexified. I’ve had layers added to my soul…or at least age spots added to my hands. I feel many things: overjoyed about coming home and seeing my wife and kids, apprehensive about coming home and facing my critics. All that, yes, but mostly how I feel this steaming autumn twilight afternoon on my way to see Jade is…con
flicted. With my new knowledge of her beneficent duplicity, I’m not sure how I feel about those oblong nostrils, those bubbles in her teeth. But I’ll never find out by sitting on my hands.
We’re to meet at the best duck restaurant in Beijing. I’m almost too tired to keep my eyes open in the cab-been up since dawn, with a long flight ahead of me before I get home. Part of my fatigue is from the bombshells Alfred just dropped on me, and part of it’s nervousness, as though this is a first date and a last date rolled into one-first because I’ll be seeing Jade with my eyes open as never before, last because we’ll never see each other again. Will we really, really not? I hate breakups more than anything in the world.
And then there she is, standing in front of the restaurant. A tiny figure. Why are life’s biggies always so much tinier than they ought to be? As a young man, one time I was doing sit-ups on a beach, and afterward I looked down at the impression my back had made in the sand, and it was minuscule. That was me? All my foolish drive and strifer, my precious fuck-upedness, and that was all I had to show for it-a pint-size dent in the earth? So does Jade turn out to be only Jade: a small, solitary figure on a dirty sidewalk, examining her thumbnail with great gravity, nearly engulfed by colorful people streaming past.
I see her before she sees me. Then, as my cab rolls to the curb, she ignites with pleasure. She hops to my door-one, two, three-and yanks it open.
Then she stops hopping. She seems to know at once, sensing it with a single glance. With animal subtlety she reads it in the set of my shoulders, the angle of my chin. She hears it in the catch of my voice as I thank the cabbie. It pains me to see her look so stunned.
“You are feeling just so-so?” she inquires, not meeting my eyes.
“Just so-so,” I reply.
She is careful not to ask me why. With unusual quietness we walk into the restaurant and take our seats. Jade is further stunned by the opulence of the place: six kinds of spoons, a glut of drinking glasses. “So many windows,” Jade says, meaning glasses, clicking her fingernail against each of three at her setting. With an attempt at lightness, she picks one up and holds it to her eye, peering through it. “You can see through me?” she asks.
“Why would I want to do that?” I ask.
But this is cruel. And cruel is the last thing I mean to be. She is made speechless by my words, suffering the Chinese equivalent of a deep blush-more a flush of immobility than a change of color. It’s almost scary to see that highly animated face immobile for nearly half a minute.
Her downcast eyes don’t meet mine even as she tries to make conversation. “How Larry is doing?”
“The kidney’s great. Can’t vouch for the rest of him.”
Is this guilt I’m witnessing on Jade’s face? But why? She did what she had to do and then some, maybe helping save Larry’s life in the bargain. We sit there, Jade and me, churning with separate unspoken guilts. Both of us did what we had to do, and would do so again. But it wasn’t without cost.
“And your father, how’s he doing?” I ask.
“This middle squeeze take place every autumn,” Jade says. “She has the burning heart, so I am sure she okay, but I go home to see.”
I look at her, my dear double agent, my co-conspirator on the opposite side of a deep divide.
“He,” I say, correcting her.
“He,” she says.
Neither of us smiles.
We order. As usual, the dishes come out in random order: bowls of rice first, then cups of crème brûlée for dessert. Eventually the duck comes. We watch it being sliced.
“You feel more delicious with chopsticks,” Jade says, plucking adroitly. I think she means that one eats more slowly this way, savoring the morsels.
We’re both eating slowly, not wanting the meal to end, wanting it to end as quickly as possible.
“I have ducks not so different from this one at my home,” I tell her. “In my pond.”
I’m used to her eyes being blank, the emotions coming from somewhere else and not the eyes themselves, yet now they are filling up, overflowing with liquid light. A tear falls into her crème brûlée. “I am never see that,” she says.
Suddenly she whirls up to go to the bathroom. It’s strange to see her walk in so unlively a fashion, hop-less. I write a note and stick it in her purse before she comes back. So how do you like that: For all my talk of the crude cloak-and-dagger tactics of the Chinese, I’m the one who performs the most blatant act of all. Going into a personal pocketbook! But of course my particular cause is just, which distinguishes it from 99 percent of the other causes in the world. Right…
“Don’t talk about the leaving,” she instructs upon her return. “We transfer to another topic.” But there are no other topics. And now a hip-hop band has begun performing in an alcove near the bar, so we can’t hear each other anyway, which only highlights the fact that we have nothing to say. The bass is so booming it sounds like a trapdoor’s open in my chest and my usual emotions have drained out. Making room for new emotions to seep in. I’m a jumble of contradictory feelings, but rising to the surface is something I didn’t expect: admiration. I can’t help it. Keystone Kops, like hell-the laugh’s on me: The Chinese did a better job of pairing Jade and me than candeyblossoms.com ever could. And Jade herself-bravo! I was already impressed by how well she spied for me, but that wasn’t the half of it. What a girl! The cult of Mao and the cult of Larry are pretty mutually exclusive, yet she managed to juggle both. I’m as sad and proud as a papa bear bone-bitten by his cub: Ow! Very good! This must be what a father feels walking his daughter down the aisle. She’s not mine any longer, and never really was. I’m thrilled, and a bit closer to death. What a maudlin combination! But yes, these compromises do reconcile us little by little to our graves.
As if mirroring my mood, the bass sounds like a death knell, syncopated. It’s energetic, but it’s death.
There are more tears, not springing from her seal eyes but leaking, falling silently onto the shellacky crust of her crème brûlée, mixing with the soft custard beneath. “I am sorrow for this sorrowness,” she says.
“Don’t apologize,” I say. I don’t want to make her cry harder. Yet maybe I do, because suddenly it’s vitally, perversely important for me to hear myself telling her about Tiananmen. That it wasn’t the way her government makes it out, they mowed down thousands…
“I know.” She is weeping. “I hear a little bird of this.”
Still I make her weep more. It’s like draining a wound as I speak. They machine-gunned innocents…they ran over teenagers with tanks…they disemboweled one another, they torched one another. It’s been a lot of years now, but that hasn’t dulled the horror of it in one degree…
Suddenly I’m claustrophobic, just when the appetizers arrive with the bill. We have to leave. We can’t stay here. Besides, her train leaves in less than an hour. I take her hand to escort her to a cab. Up front, the driver swims slowly through the traffic, as though sensitive to our restless, funereal mood. The cab feels like a hearse.
“This is not a joyride,” she says.
“No, more of a joy die,” I confirm.
She doesn’t look at me. “You want take that ride?” she asks.
“I can’t,” I say. “My family…”
I turn away. There’s another reason I can’t take that ride, I acknowledge to myself. I’m an American. I don’t want to be like that Foreign Service guy from the temple who felt he wasn’t from anyplace anymore. Also-and this seems almost as important, somehow-my hat needs cleaning. It’s collected two months worth of limbo dinge; any more and it might never come clean. So there we are.
But of course the main reason I can’t-I know it, she knows it-is if I did, I’d be stuck here for good. Situation not splendid, or splendid in its own way, even though it means we’ll never see each other again.
I lift the hand I’m still holding, plant kisses on it. Not a few. Many.
“You are doing this because you are cold?” she asks, not flinching.
“No,” I say. I put her hand away. Her tears continue, silently, a reluctant leakage. But now I’m perverse in a new way and want to make her laugh. “And what about you? You are crying for the duck we ate?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says, sniffling and smiling.
“Or for the ducks of my home?”
“All of them.” She laughs through her tears.
“Because I can eat the ones at home, too, if that will make you feel better.”
“No no no!” She laughs, beating fists into her lap and crying more now, making so many bubbles in her teeth that I can’t keep track of them all. Are these the same bubbles as the ones I fell for so long ago? They aren’t, of course-woe, woe!-she must be making new ones all the time. This thought fills me with unease, but also a kind of joy. She’s using herself up but also remaking herself all the time! Again I have the unlikely thought: She must never die! How can the flower of Chinese youth bite the dust, and by extension American youth, all of us everywhere? They must never suffer depressionism, or earthquick, or even death when death is due. I can’t ask such a thing, can I, Cool God? Or is that how it works: You dare to hope for whatever you can, the bolder the better?
“I know why I came here,” I say. “Looking at you, so young, I understand. Larry and I were young together. Now he’s facing death. But he’s the first person I care about in my family’s generation to be up against it like this. There was no way I was going to let death take him without a fight.”
“I understand this,” Jade says.
“Even a baby fight, even a token resistance. This was my protest, my shrimpy sit-down strike, saying you can’t snatch us that easily, every damn time, we’ve got to be able to postpone the inevitable just a tiny bit longer…”
“I am capable to understand all this.”
“I know you are. Whatever is the true, whatever is the false, I know you know.”
“I do,” she says.
“We’re still naïve, you and me. I’m the most naïve of all, to think I could come here without knowing anyone and score an illegal kidney. To think that Larry has the golden heart even though I’ve seen the awful tarnish on it. This kind of naïveté is irresponsible, reckless-the Disapproving Docs are right!-almost inexcusable. And yet I keep it, I prize it…”
Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China Page 31