Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

by Daniel Asa Rose

  “Where you off to?”

  “Conference in London. I’m almost at the airport now. I won’t be able to hear you in a few minutes, but I’ll keep my cell on vibrate.”

  “Antonia, you’re an angel….”

  “Just call me back within ten minutes so I can let my contact know. Then, when you procure a cab, have the cabbie call the surgeon’s secretary so he can get directions. Here’s the number….”

  “Thank you, thank you. When I woke Larry last night to tell him there was a ray of hope, he nearly wept with gratitude,” I say. Am I laying it on too thick? He might have wept—if I’d actually wakened him, and if he were that kind of person. The main thing I want Antonia to know is how much her efforts are appreciated.

  “I want to make very clear that I’m not guaranteeing anything, and I’m formally absolving myself of all responsibility for your actions. But good luck. And Daniel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful….”

  Hanging up, I look at Jade. Her seal eyes allow no light to escape. She’s heard everything, understood everything. She’s my instant ally as I dial Larry and get his okay, call Antonia back with our commitment. As we rush to the market exit, Jade asks me something only an ally could.

  “This lady you speak with, she is someone we can trust?”

  “I think so. I met her at a Jewish synagogue last night.”

  “You are Jew?”

  I flag a cab. “Yes.”

  She stops me and lifts my hat. “But where you horn?”

  “Only about half of us have horns these days,” I say, ushering her inside the cab. “It’s part of a PR push. So where shall I drop you?”

  Jade waves her hands no as we begin flying through the traffic. “Of course I halp you in this task,” she says.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Shi is hours away. I don’t even know what time we’ll be back tonight.”

  “Don’t ridiculous you,” she says adamantly. “This my country. You are guest. I only worry how you manage in Shi?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I say. “We’ll play it by ear.”

  “Your ear not get tired from playing it so much?”

  I lean to give her a kiss on the cheek. She recoils slightly until she understands it’s just the cheek. Now she’s happy again. I’m happy because I really can use her help. Her face looks American to me right now as we rush to Larry’s hotel. I see my face in the reflection of her sunglasses, and it looks Chinese. Everybody looks like everybody, I conclude sagely. It’s the wisdom that comes when things start clicking into place.

  As arranged, Larry and Mary are sitting by the sidewalk in front of their hotel. Larry taps Mary’s elbow to help him up, a gesture I remember his parents making to each other back in Lynn, oddly touching in its familiarity. Larry’s ragged, drained face brightens at the sight of Jade.

  “Where’d you find this one?” Larry asks. “They keep getting better and better.”

  “She was my breakfast waitress.”

  “Must have been some breakfast,” he says dryly.

  But now there’s a new development. Mary takes this moment to announce that she’s going home!

  “I thought the day after tomorrow,” Larry says in shock.

  “Train in two hours,” Mary says.

  Larry’s stunned. Why didn’t she tell him before now? But events are in motion, and there’s no time for explanations or elaborate farewells, no time even for Mary to wince when we embrace good-bye and the Little Tree Air Freshener squeezes into her bosom. Larry is shell-shocked as I guide him into the backseat of the cab and slide in after him. Jade takes the front. “Nice a meet you,” Mary calls, blowing us a kiss as we screech off down the block.

  “I thought the day after tomorrow” is all Larry can say.

  Is the romance over? Is that the end of the Larry-Mary show? Larry is too stunned to respond, and Jade and I can only raise eyebrows.

  Here we begin the most harrowing cab ride of our lives to date. Yes, we’re in a rush to meet Dr. X, the mystery surgeon, in the far-off city of Shi before nightfall, but the cabdriver doesn’t need that excuse to dart and weave between diesel trucks with only inches to spare. He likes multitasking—he munches on a hairy chicken claw with one hand while jerking the wheel with the other—so I hand him my cell phone with the surgeon’s secretary predialed for him. “Are! Are! Are!” he says, writing down directions on a Mickey Mouse pad he has taped to the front of his broken speedometer dial.

  Traffic leaving the city is frantic, but despite this our driver appears to nod off, while still managing to munch on the chicken claw. Before long he slams the brakes so hard I drill my forehead against the empty kidney-bean can soldered to the back of the front seat that serves as an ashtray. His hands, with yellowish nails that extend a half inch beyond his fingertips, are looped through the steering wheel, and he’s waving his index finger as though conducting an orchestra of fleas.

  “Does he know where he’s going?” I ask Jade.

  “Oh, yes, very skillful driver,” Jade says.

  Coulda fooled me. He ducks under an underpass so low that the antenna scrapes the cement ceiling, then emerges from the other side to shoot across four lanes of traffic without once checking his mirrors. For all this activity, he looks half asleep, slumped over the wheel, with a nasty habit of drooping his head every four or five seconds. It’s exactly how I’d look if I hadn’t slept in two days.

  “Can you tell him to slow down?” I ask Jade. This works for the short term, but in a minute he resumes dipping in and out of the breakdown lane, which also contains bicycle riders, shards of truck parts, and workers pushing shopping carts loaded with twenty-foot pipes. After an oncoming bus swerves to avoid hitting us, I notice that Larry doesn’t look well. He hasn’t said a word since Mary left, concentrating instead on studying receipts from his wallet. This is the self-defense clicking in again, how he’s maneuvered a difficult life, but I’m not sure denial is healthy just now.

  “I think you miss Mary,” I suggest.

  “I do!” he says, releasing air out of his face like punctured bubble wrap. “I’m the first to admit it. I haven’t been without her the whole time I’ve been here. She’s taken care of everything. Maybe it’s a moot point, but I have a lot of sympathy for her. Her life has not been easy, by a long shot. Why can’t we pool our resources and make a go of it together? Or is it too late? I don’t even know if she left for good or if I’ll ever see her again….”

  His eyes are closed, and he’s resting his head on the side window while excavating a boil on his chin. You’ve got to be feeling pretty low to keep your eyes closed while you do that.

  “Maybe I’m mistaken, but I see great devotion in her. To use a strange word. I mean, she’s not gorgeous, but I pick up a lot of sweetness in her. She sat by my side throughout my entire dialysis yesterday, rubbing my back. If I got taken, I’m going to be hurt beyond belief.”

  “What would it mean to be ‘taken,’ exactly?” I ask.

  He digs a moment more. “I’m not sure,” he says finally. “I don’t want to sound evasive, it’s just that I’m not sure.” The boil done, Larry starts making sounds as though he’s gargling, but with a dry throat.

  A flock of guinea hens scamper across the highway. Some of them make it. The feathers of the rest fill the air like a series of pillow bombs.

  “How’d her husband die, anyway?” I ask.

  “Car accident.”

  “Sorry I asked,” I say.

  “Believe me, so am I.”

  The driver waits with uncharacteristic patience for a truck to pass us before veering into the speeding lane. But oops, it’s a double truck that swipes us, tearing off our sideview mirror. There are no seat belts in back, only a hanging strap, which I access. Larry doesn’t bother. At one point I ask Jade why the driver is going east when before he was going north?

  “He not sure. He only know by sun,” she says.

  We’re in the countryside now, passing s
unflower fields. “This could be north Florida,” Larry notes from time to time, trying to find references to home to help him deal with his homesickness. “This could be North Carolina.”

  I’m grateful that this is a highway and not a crooked back street, but we’re tacking and snaking as though it were a crooked back street. It’s like driving slalom on the autobahn, with the occasional trash can or patio chair strewn here and there, kind of brilliant in its own way, though I’m not sure I know what I mean by that. Suddenly there’s a pause in the action.

  “Is it me, or did we just stop in the median and the driver got out?” Larry asks.

  “He has to go peewee,” Jade informs us.

  “Good to know I’m not demented,” Larry remarks. “Merely imperiled.”

  The driver comes back minus his chicken claw and resumes driving. I work to keep Larry talking. I hint that he might want to talk about why he never got married. One great thing about Larry, even when he’s feeling poorly, you never have to coax; he comes out and gives you all he’s got. Complete mini-sagas—beginning, middle, and end all wrapped up with a bow.

  “Ten-second story,” he says. “I’m fussy, simple as that. Never met the right girl. Well, strike that. There was one with…I don’t want to mention her name, but it didn’t work out with Chelsea—oops, guess I said it after all. That’s the misorientation speaking, whatever you want to call it. Who’d want me now anyway, in my state? What am I going to do, chase ’em with a cane? Those days are behind me.”

  Okay, it’s a little shorter than I was hoping, but it does seem to warm him up a bit. I hint that he might want to tell the story about why he initially decided to find a mail-order bride, even though he doesn’t like referring to her as that.

  “A lot of people in my coin-trading discussion group asked me the same question,” he says. “Here’s why. Because go to another temple mixer, meet another seventy-year-old overweight real-estate broker? No thanks. How I found Mary was on a Web site I already gave you the name of—it’s not coming to me at the moment—which they claim has forty-nine thousand women, which took me the better part of a week to check out. I checked out the men, too, just to see what I was up against. What a bunch of losers: potbellies, the works. There’s some guy with a big toofy grin saying he’s an astronaut from New Jersey. If he’s an astronaut, I’m a stud muffin. I myself was quite forthright: didn’t mention my illness but was otherwise quite honest.”

  Seems like quite an omission, but…must be a boy thing. “But then Mary turned out to be lacking in some of the essentials,” I skip ahead, to keep his rally going, such as it is. He’s looking so poorly that I’m grasping at straws.

  “Sadly, yes,” he says. “Though I do want to correct the record on one point, if I may. Mary’s son is not mentally endangered. I misunderstood. He’s actually a very capable young man. He just graduated university, where he was captain of his basketball team, and just got his first engineering job. Mary is very proud of him. I don’t know how I got that wrong, and I apologize for it. Oh, I miss Mary ever so much.”

  Gets me every time: this tough guy using Edith Wharton language. But he’s backsliding now, so to cheer him up or give him perspective, whichever comes first, I segue to the subject of…our relationship. “Larry, not counting our recent estrangement, why do you suppose we’ve basically always gotten along?”

  “No big mystery, Dan. We’re straight with each other. Not overly straight, not straitjacket straight, but straight enough so it works. Plus, look at this, you’re giving me a fake Cartier from the marketplace. Thank you, Dan. You can never have too much of a good thing. And just to show you how much I appreciate it, I’m going to put the Cartier on my left wrist to go with the Rolex on my right. The Chinese will think it’s a new status thing.”

  From here it’s a natural step for him to talk about our childhoods. How we did this together. How we did that together. His memories are much more vivid than mine: None of it sounds even vaguely familiar to me. Two or three hours go by, and the deeper into the countryside we drive, the less familiar his memories sound. The pump of Larry is primed, and he’s talking a blue streak; I couldn’t shut him up if I tried. How at my house he was always nervous around the dinner table because everyone used big words all the time. How our housemaid frightened him—he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to act around her. How one time my mother took him to the train station to go home and she saw he was craving an issue of Popular Science on the rack and she bought it for him, even though he begged her not to because it cost so much—seventy-five cents.

  The sagas are flying. But then the world he’s talking about becomes distinctly alien. How his father, Sam, the lovable but illiterate garage mechanic, used to beat him with a belt. How a respected great-uncle manhandled him sexually. What? This isn’t even the same orbit of planets on which I was raised. I can’t accept that. Great-Uncle Auguste, the hero who fought in the French Resistance, abused him as a little boy? Larry isn’t really saying that, is he? Not in so many words, maybe, but he gives me to understand that we view the world from very different starting points. There in the backseat of this tiny rattrap cab, with no seat belts and an empty can of kidney beans for an ashtray, Larry tells tales that make me think I’ve never known my cousin at all, never known the universe we supposedly shared.

  As if to mirror my dismay, the air outside’s gotten worse. Dense, chewy ribbons of smog have spread themselves over the sunflower fields like shrouds of mutant spiderweb filament. They’ve moved the smokestacks out of Beijing into outlying regions as part of the plan to sanitize the city’s image for the Olympics, and we’re now in the thick of it. Raw, unscrubbed black smoke tumbles into an already filthy sky, making the air so bad that cars put on their headlights in the afternoon light and you can hear the particulates hissing around like drizzle. Nor does it help that car exhaust is leaking into the cab through the floorboards. We’re awash in bad air, inside and out.

  But a little reality check. I must have misheard him before. Auguste, who had that beautiful library of rare French books in leather jackets—a child molester? Could that possibly be true? Could the fact be that all the children in the family were protected from Auguste, but no one protected Larry? That he was expendable, his ass didn’t count for much?

  “This could be Georgia now,” he says. “Look at that red soil.”

  I tune out for a while, won’t allow myself to take in any more. I watch two grandmothers hobble along the median strip, holding hands. I watch a mattress lashed to a highway sign nodding in the wind. The pollution’s bothering my eyes, making me blink twice as much as usual. Eventually a question is directed to me.

  “Dan, do you remember my bar mitzvah?”

  “I only remember you saying in your bar mitzvah speech that you wanted to grow up to become a munitions dealer,” I say.

  “That was more for shock value than anything else, though it did seem like a pretty sweet life,” Larry says. “But do you remember what happened afterward? After the ceremony when everyone moved into the banquet hall to have lunch, you stayed behind and started making speeches into the podium microphone that you assumed was dead. You didn’t know it was being broadcast live into the banquet hall—”

  “Yeah, a vague memory.”

  “Everybody thought it was actually pretty funny, except for one person—your futha was fuming around till he found you and kicked you out. Long story short, you were wandering around the parking lot with no lunch.”

  “Wait a minute, didn’t you come out and find me after a while?”

  “I brought you a plate of dessert, so you wouldn’t go hungry.”

  “Do you remember what I said into the microphone?”

  “No,” Larry answers, “but I do remember that the dessert was strawberry shortcake.”

  This actually puts a lump in my throat. I know it’s a cliché, but the lump is real: It’s hard to swallow for a second. The image of a thirteen-year-old bringing his fifteen-year-old cousin a piece of strawb
erry short-cake in the parking lot. What a sweetheart.

  “You were one of the only people I wanted there,” Larry tells me. “I desperately wanted to emulate you.”

  I sway and jostle as the cab swerves back and forth.

  “That’s why I say, whatever you think is best about my treatment, Dan, that’s what I’ll do. You make the decisions. I won’t impede you. I put myself in your hands.”

  Before I can react, he interrupts me.

  “No, wait, I just remembered what it was you were saying into the microphone,” Larry says, “but it’s gone again. Sorry.”

  The car stops. “We are at hospital,” Jade says, hopping out.

  It’s late afternoon, and we’re in the middle of a provincial capital of nine million that few Americans have heard of. Gray, gritty: “Could be Baltimore after a brush fire,” Larry says, coughing. “If I lived here, I would take up smoking as a defense.”

  Indeed, the pollution is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The low-grade, high-sulfur coal that produces most Chinese electricity mixes with the humidity in the air to produce a kind of atmospheric sulfuric acid. My eyes sting. I get out and snap some pictures to try to capture the soupy mix. Two guards come over but withdraw when Jade assures them we’re guests of Dr. X. Like every other skyscraper in this fast-growing country, the hospital itself seems to arise out of the soil like a giant mushroom: First there’s dusty, hard-packed earth, then there’s a gleaming steel edifice. Across the parking lot struts a hearty young pocketbook-toting administrator who speaks blessedly good English.

  “Glad you made it in one pieces,” Cherry says after introducing herself as the hospital translator/coordinator. “Sorry to say, Dr. X has already left for the evening; he had appointment with delegation from Zambia. But we are prepared to do preliminary procedure and attend all you questions, if you kindly follow me.”

  Inside the hospital it’s quiet. Ghostly patients shuffle about in blue-and-white-striped PJs that look like what Yankee uniforms would look like if Yankees never got honest-to-goodness smudges by sliding into home plate but just hung out at second base for two years collecting dinge. Limbo dinge. Cherry leads us to a waiting room off the main lobby called the Family Crush Room, where a delegation of extremely polite medical residents awaits us. The men have pimples, the women sit with their legs open on the yellow plastic couches, a sight that both cheers and terrifies me; perhaps they’ve delayed their social skills because they’ve been so busy cramming in arcane medical knowledge?