“I’ve gone over it and over it and can’t figure out what gave it to me. Was it the Lemon Chalet Creme cookies I had for breakfast? One of them had like a black spot on it. Something in the batter?”
I see a glass of germ-sweating, bacteria-festering tap water next to his bed.
“Uh, Larry, I think I may have an idea why….”
His jumbo suitcase is bursting, but I set to work binding it back and forth and up and down. Presto, we’re good to go. But then: “Larry, what’s that crate over there?”
“That’s my porcelain tea set,” he explains. “I have innumerable godchildren at home, and I need to bring things to them. They’re a big responsibility.”
“Larry, that’s going to be a bitch to tote around.”
“The other ones aren’t as big,” he says.
“What ‘other ones’?”
He points to three other crates behind the sofa. He’s wrong—they’re bigger. “Sixty bucks for each tea set,” he says. “You know how hard that was to pass up?”
The elevator’s on the fritz, so I lug each crate down the stairs one after the other and line them up on the blazing sidewalk of the courtyard outside the reception office. When all four are lined up, the hotel manager, a slick-haired sharpie who apparently feels he knows how to deal with this customer, comes out clucking.
“Larry, Larry, Larry,” he says, “what are we going to do with you? You have to consolidate.”
The manager produces a large cardboard box, and I go to work packing the various tea sets into it when Jade intervenes. “Not too crispy to carry?” she asks. “Please give me cell phone to ask my mather’s advice.”
“Uh-oh, did you give me back my cell phone, Dan?” Larry asks, fanning his face with a fat wad of Chinese money, gangster style.
“I never had your cell phone,” I say.
“Uh-oh,” Larry says. “I know I had it earlier this morning, when I was talking to Mary.”
“You were talking to Mary this morning?” I ask.
“Yes, didn’t I tell you? I reached her at her uncle’s, and the first thing out of her mouth is she loves me and wants to visit me when I get installed in the hospital.”
Jade and I look at each other in the heat. “Larry, that’s great news!” I say.
Larry starts wheezing through his nose, a sort of nose hiccups, whether out of excitement or his condition, I’m not sure. But we’re still minus a cell phone. The vamp quints are happy to turn the courtyard upside down, looking behind flowerpots and inside drainpipes.
“Call the cell-phone number,” the hotel manager suggests, and soon there’s a faint ringing from inside the suitcase I bound with yellow tape.
“Does anyone have scissors?” I inquire. One of the quints produces a cigarette lighter, pale flame flickering in the sunshine. “No, I mean the kind that cut?”
Snip, snip, snip. I take out everything from Larry’s suitcase, all the clip-on neckties, the three-piece suits made in Albania, the corn-and-callus cushions, everything packed in with funereal precision. And this: hard copies of all my books as well as CDs of my aunt the harpsichordist soloing at Boston’s Jordan Hall. “I’m proud of my family,” he says defiantly when he spies my dumbfounded look. “The few who aren’t trying to screw me over.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to cart our products all over Asia,” I say. “They’re not even my paperback editions.”
He sends me a helpless look, which I translate as: These were the ones on sale. He doesn’t even have to say it. He couldn’t anyway, because the nose hiccups have gotten worse.
No sooner do we find the cell phone among his antifungals than Larry wonders where his MasterCard is. “Could it be in your bag?” he asks.
I don’t see how, but I open mine, too, just in case. Not there, of course, but Larry gets a gander at the title of one of the books I’m carrying—Middlesex—and pops a devilish gleam.
“Never off duty, are you?” he says to me admiringly.
“Did you check your back pockets?” I ask, patting him down. Frisking my cousin on his diminished, no-longer-round rear end is not something that a month ago I ever imagined I’d be doing.
Sure enough, there’s the MasterCard, bright and shiny.
“Tea sets too crispy,” Jade announces, clicking shut Larry’s cell phone. “My mather says I will arrange a shipping company to send them to Larry direct.”
We give Larry’s address in America to Jade and make her promise to forward the bill to us at the hospital. Larry insists that we hold on to one crate of teacups for safekeeping. “I can’t afford not to get at least one set out of this,” he says.
I use a few of the luxury hotel’s washcloths I seem to have taken with me to wrap his tea-set pieces, along with my wolf skull, then seal the suitcase up tight.
“Game on,” the hotel manager says, sending one of the vamp quints off on a bicycle to fetch a taxi, the black bobbin of her hairdo bouncing over the potholes.
“Good man,” I tell the manager. “I don’t know how we can repay all your kindness.”
“When Larry send me forty hot coeds to rent rooms for exchange program, that will be payment enough,” he says.
“Larry worked out a deal with you?”
“Why do you think I’m doing this?” he says with a chortle, rubbing his fingertips together. I can’t believe he actually says that, and out of the side of his mouth yet. Isn’t that the sort of thing you’re supposed to keep to yourself? Okay, so they’re not all helping us out of the goodness of their hearts. Jade and I exchange a smile anyway, part of our pact to retain naïveté.
The taxi’s here, but by the time I’ve loaded it with our belongings, Larry is entertaining the vamp quints again. “Does the name Red Auerbach mean anything to you?” he asks.
“Larry, you don’t have to pile it on so deep,” I tell him. “They already like you enough! Can’t you see how they’re twittering?”
“Beneath my somewhat brash exterior, I’m a very insecure person,” he says.
“If it doesn’t work out with Mary, I’m sure any one of these ladies would be happy to run off with you to your condo in Pembroke Pines. Don’t say it—I know you’re devoted to Mary. But hey, you want to seal the deal, watch this: Ladies, not that you know what this means, but Larry here is a charter member of Mensa, the brain club in America.”
“IQ of one thirty-one,” Larry protests with genuine modesty. “That means I’m the dumbest member, with the absolute lowest number they’ll accept. And now of course my disability cost me twenty-two points.”
“What is with you, cuz? I try to talk you up, and you cut my legs out from under me!”
“I don’t like to boast about my real accomplishments, only my pseudo ones.”
Shrugging the way an ancestor must have shrugged on the streets of Minsk three generations ago, he hobbles to the street, an old man in sunglasses, so pathetic that I take his elbow—chicken bones held together by a rubber band. Get used to it, I tell myself.
Jade accompanies us in the cab to a madhouse scene outside the train station. I remember being here twenty-five years ago, and the pushing and shoving has only increased with the millions of new people since then.
“Very exotic, looks like China,” Larry observes.
Jade’s in front pulling several suitcases on wheels, and I’m behind her doing the same, and Larry’s way behind, stepping gingerly around the crumbling tiles of the plaza, when the cabbie we just left comes running up with a handful of bills. “Larry drop these!” Jade says, counting two thousand RMB and buttoning them into Larry’s breast pocket. I’m glad she doesn’t refer to him as Professor. Not that Larry doesn’t more or less deserve the title, but every time someone says it, I feel like I’m one of the con-man duo on Huck Finn’s raft. I couldn’t bear for Jade to fall for it.
“The cabbie won’t even take a tip,” Larry notes. “I like these people.”
They must like us, too, because in a minute a new cabbie with a cute dimple approach
es and calls us “friend,” telling Jade that he lives in Shi and will take us there for a discount price.
“Another car ride on that road? Never,” Larry says, but Jade intervenes with some good sense. “You no have train ticket reserved,” she points out. “Maybe you don’t make train till much later? Also, maybe it so crowded you have to stand? Also, train station in Shi very far from hospital. You have to wait another taxi there. Maybe is better drive?”
“Up to you,” I tell Larry. “At least this cabbie looks more awake than yesterday’s.”
“Let’s do it,” Larry decides. The new cabbie with the cute dimple relieves Jade of her suitcases, and we follow him through the throng, getting sprayed by a street cleaner, me twisting my ankle but willing the pain away, looking in vain for a handicap ramp for our suitcases, another four blocks of broken tiles and sand before we come to the man’s undersize taxi.
“I think is safe,” Jade tells me when we’re loaded up and ready to go.
“‘Think’?” I say, chuckling at her wit. “What’s he gonna do, kidnap us?”
“Yes, I think not. I write down his number in case to call police.” She scribbles down his license on her small palm.
I look at her for what may be the last time, with no words to express my gratitude. “Jo yee, jo jang,” I say, trying to remember the friendship toast from twenty-five years ago. “Yo yee or yay yee, something like that—”
“Give it up.” Jade smirks with a shove to my shoulder.
This is farewell. I give her a chaste hug.
“Sorry I am sweaty,” she says.
“It’s the humanity,” I say, meaning “humidity.” I’m losing my English in the onslaught of so much Chinese.
“I hope you live,” she says, apparently without irony. My heart tugs as we drive away.
In the backseat, Larry and I are wet with perspiration, giving each other as much berth as possible. Both of us are a little out of breath, but Larry is already on to the next chapter of his life. “Better exhaust system than yesterday’s taxi,” he diagnoses. “I think the problem yesterday was there was a loose fitting where the muffler met the tailpipe. You know how many Packards I worked on when I was twelve? I was given a Coke for each muffler I changed.”
I can’t figure out which is worse—a morose Larry when he’s down or a garrulous Larry when he’s up. Also I’m a little heartsick at splitting from my adopted daughter. But at least this taxi ride seems to be better than yesterday’s, and we’re making better progress, too. Before an hour’s up, we’re in an unfamiliar landscape of cornfields and irrigation machinery. We’re not weaving nearly as much, either. “I paid him a little extra to not cut between trucks,” Larry explains.
Something about my hesitation makes him look at me.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing. It’s nice that you’re so generous with everyone. It’s just…”
“What?”
“I’d just start conserving money if I were you; we still don’t know how much the surgery’s going to cost. But hey, it’s your call. I’m not going to tell you how to spend your quarter mil.”
Something about his hesitation makes me look at him.
“You do still have a quarter mil, don’t you?” I ask.
“Life,” Larry says with a shrug.
“Yes, go on….”
“Life costs money,” he amplifies, “especially when you have a fiancée with champagne tastes, not that she isn’t worth every penny.”
I brace myself. “Larry, how much do you have left?”
“A little under sixty,” he says.
“Bullshit!” I explode. “The icicle/truck settlement was for two-fifty, after lawyers!”
“Shhh.”
“Shhh? What do you mean, shhh? Either you have it or you don’t.”
“I did have two-fifty, but it’s been going fast. Most of it already went to living expenses. The market is down. This trip is not cheap. Plus, the first thing I did with my winnings was pay off people I owed, which you have to admit attests to my decency as a human being, despite my image as a miscreant, which I cultivate, no question, it’s an ingrained habit. Bottom line, I’ve got maybe one-twenty left,” Larry concludes.
So that’s what shhh means. It means he has twice what he lets on. But it also means he has to husband his money carefully. This trip may not work, after all. If we don’t succeed in getting a new kidney, Larry will be too ill to make any more money.
“Okay,” I say, recalculating. “That doesn’t change the basic equation. It was still a good move for you to come to China, assuming the kidney comes in around eighty-five. Let’s do the numbers again. How much does a kidney transplant cost in the U.S.?”
“Two-fifty, vicinity. But insurance covers it at home.”
“But you have to wait ten years at home, which you aren’t willing to do. Plus, you mostly get a cadaver kidney at home, and here you get a live one. So it’s worth it to pay out of pocket here, right?”
“Look at that, a Russian gas station. Probably twenty percent water,” Larry says.
“Right?” I persist.
“That seems logical, yes,” Larry says.
“Plus, here they’re more experienced at the surgery, since they do so many more of them than at home.”
“Correct.”
“So it seems to me that you may be misoriented, but you got yourself to the right place. As long as you watch your pennies.”
Larry starts cracking his knuckles, a sign he’s feeling pressured. “I get it,” he says. “I have to preserve my nest egg. I’ll do my best.”
Progress. Hard won. I allow myself a moment of relief before attending to more pressing matters, like why we don’t recognize any landmarks whatsoever on our drive. Are we sure our cabbie understood our destination correctly? I tap the little plastic partition behind the cabbie’s head that insufficiently seals us off from him.
“Uh, hello, friend? We going Shi?”
“Friend, yes,” he assures us, nodding his dimpled cheeks up and down.
“Let’s just hope he’s not planning to cut our throats,” Larry suggests. “Jade didn’t sound all that sure on the kidnapping front.”
“We don’t understand this culture very well,” I remind him. “Let’s not second-guess what people mean every minute. Besides, they don’t kidnap people in China, as a general rule. That’s not their style.”
We go a few more miles in silence and pass a series of water tanks I’m sure we would have remembered from yesterday, if we’d seen them. I crack my knuckles—which I almost never do.
“What I don’t like,” Larry says after another minute, “is that this cabbie found us, we didn’t find him. Could be he saw my two luxury watches at the train station and figured I was worth trying to take down.”
He slides the bands of his watches around so they double as brass knuckles. “They’ll do in a pinch,” he says.
We stare at the faulty partition between the cabbie and us while I smell a hint of cardamom and rifle grease again.
“I saw the video of Danny Pearl’s last moments,” Larry says out of nowhere. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t see it.”
We sit in nervous silence for a few unfamiliar miles more, wheezing through our noses.
“Seriously, Dan, this could be worse than your being thrown in a Chinese jail cell.”
“It wasn’t really a cell, it was more like a little barracks room with bars, if you must know. But I really don’t want to think about it right—”
“Do you bear any scars on your body?”
“It wasn’t a Jack Bauer kind of deal,” I say, “it was—”
“More psychological torture,” Larry deduces. He scratches his butt discreetly for a while before taking another tack. “So what were you doing here anyway twenty-five years ago? Being like a freelance foreign correspondent?”
“That sounds more glamorous than it was,” I say. “Mostly I was getting away from my divorce.”
“Didn’t you teac
h the natives how to dance or something?”
He’s distracting me, I suddenly realize. He’s trying to help me like I was trying to help him yesterday, when he was the one feeling worse. He’s throwing me a lifeline, and you know what? I’ll take it.
“The year was 1984,” I begin, a little timidly. “The streets of Beijing were colorless and without music. No one seemed to have radios or record players. At least I never saw or heard any. The government was just starting to allow Western music in a few select venues. One of these venues was a banquet for some visiting American journalists. A film crew from the Ministry of Education followed us around recording our every move, presumably to broadcast nationwide for training purposes, teaching the masses how to catch up on certain officially sanctioned Western customs. The crew followed me behind the bar, where I demonstrated how to pour a Perfect Manhattan, which I freely confess was long on bourbon. They followed me to the dance floor, where, after a sufficient number of Perfect Manhattans, I was induced to demonstrate the Jerk. Long story short, as some people like to say, I may no longer be one of the worst dancers on the planet. Scary thought, but there may be a few million Chinese doin’ the Dan.”
“Ha ha, good one,” says Larry.
“Ha ha, thank you,” I say bashfully. Because Larry’s trick of distraction has actually worked. I feel better. I’m back to normal, acknowledging that there’s probably nothing awry with this cab ride. I just tend to get paranoid in this sort of situation. I’m the guy, after all, who carried the personal telephone number of notorious Lebanese kidnapper Abu Nidal in my wallet when I traveled through most of the eighties, courtesy of my Lebanese hairstylist, who promised that if I got kidnapped, that number would connect me with the chief honcho, who could spring me.
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 Page 13