“Larry, I’m not a China hand. I’ve been here four times total, and the last time I was thrown in jail, for God’s sake.”
“Mary’s got to hear this story,” Larry says. “You were clowning around in some forsaken outpost in Tibet, right, drunk on barley beer? Offered to sell some Chinese soldiers a basketball signed by the Dalai Lama, something like that?”
“Larry, do you mind if we don’t revisit that adventure? It still gives me hives.”
“Did they waterboard you? Mary’s gonna love this.”
“I think we’ve established that she doesn’t have great command of English, Larry.”
“At least tell her about the sadistic soldiers blowing smokes rings in your face.”
“Larry, no one in this country wants to hear stories from the past. It’s all Great Leaps Forward, haven’t you noticed? Besides, she can get the whole traumatic tale off my Web site if she’s curious.”
“Well, all I can say is, it’s beyond me how you’d be willing to come here again. I’m amazed you’re not freaked by the Chinese after that, Dan.”
“Who says I’m not freaked?” I say. “I thought I was lost to the world, and vowed that if I got out, I’d never step foot in this country again.”
Larry takes in this confession with the seriousness it calls for. “I guess bottom line is you want to make sure to avoid a jail cell this time around,” he says.
“You could say that, yes.”
“Okay, so help me find my trousers. You ready to go?”
“Go where?”
“The airport, I keep telling you. I forgot most of my luggage at the terminal. In the excitement of meeting Mary and so forth, it slipped my mind. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve told you. See, that’s my mental impairment again.”
“Larry,” I say.
“Yes, Dan.”
“What mental impairment?”
Larry looks me in the eyes for perhaps the first time since I entered his room.
“I’m pretty sure I told you about my mental impairment, Dan.”
“I’m pretty sure you didn’t,” I say, looking back in his.
“Well then, there it is again, case in point: my impairment. As you may have noticed, I tend to babble a bit. Misplace things, get confused, what have you. Our task is to determine whether this is the natural result of the dialysis, which scrambles my blood chemistry, or if it has to do with the disability suit.”
“Larry,” I say.
“Yes, Dan.”
“What disability suit?”
“Okay, I’m not going to quibble,” Larry says. “Maybe I already told you about it and maybe I didn’t, but long story short, what do you think’s funding my trip?”
“So wait, I may have heard something about it on the grapevine: Is this the disability suit for getting hit in the head by a falling icicle?”
“No, it is most definitely not,” Larry says, offended. “The icicle suit was the one I filed on behalf of my mutha, the settlement of which was nuffing compared to my own disability suit, for being rear-ended by a truck.” His anger settles down a bit. “I can see where it might be tricky to keep them straight, however,” he adds generously. “For the duration, if you wish to refer to either as the icicle suit, I have no quarrel. Any case it was a quarter-million-dollar settlement, after lawyers’ fees. Sweetest words I ever heard come out of a jury foreman’s mouth: ‘We find the plaintiff cognitively impaired.’ But the downside: Cost me twenty-two IQ points, and Dan, as you know, my claim to fame has always been that I’m the dumbest member of Mensa—I had the lowest IQ you can have and still be a member. But now I can’t even seem to locate my toofbrush.” He raises his voice. “Mary, do you know what I did with my toiletry bag?”
On her knees in the bathroom, Mary holds up the bath mat, nodding hopefully.
“Never mind, dear, go back to work if that’s what you want, or better yet come in here and rub my neck….”
Mary gears up to run toward us while I gird myself for a bear hug.
“Mary, you are in for a treat when I take you home to America,” he says. “You may think you’ve seen good basketball in this country with the Dalai Lama’s team, but just wait till you see the Miami Heat. You’re gonna meet my friend Shaquille O’Neal. I’ve had lunch with him half a dozen times, on account of my cousin on the other side of the family is his accountant. We’ll get center court seats for all of us together, Dan in the middle ’cause how many people could I ask to delve into his life savings like this, not a peep of complaint—”
Mary is at full gallop. I brace myself just in time for an onslaught of bosom.
“Cuzn Dan!” she cries.
CHAPTER 4
Making Love Out of Nothing at All
You cannot push a cow’s head down unless it is drinking water by its own will.
First order of business is getting Larry back on his dialysis routine. No time to waste: Without a working kidney, it’s imperative that he be hooked up to a blood-cleaning machine at once to keep him alive till we can locate a replacement kidney. Bright and early next morning, Mary leads Larry off to hook up with her uncle, who’s made an appointment for him at a dialysis clinic. This frees me to begin the process of procuring a kidney, but before I can start, I have to do some remedial work—locating not only the luggage but also the passport Larry’s managed to misplace, both a drain of precious time when we’ve allotted ourselves only a week in-country. Yuh-vonne pitches in, taking me to the airport where we find the luggage, manning the phone with her little rhinestone headset from my hotel suite to find the right offices to replace his passport so that he can legally be here.
Noontime finds Yuh-vonne and me sitting on a hard wooden bench with the rest of China, in a gleaming but ill-lit hallway at a police station where we hope to get the forms to get the forms to pay the five-hundred-dollar U.S. penalty and replace his passport. How can the insides of China be so gleaming when the outsides are so dusty? Maybe it has something to do with those brooms everyone is always wielding that look like something snapped off a tree. It’s a mystery that makes my eyes droop, and soon I’m dozing in and out of sleep while Yuh-vonne passes the time by translating aloud from the binder she claims is my fact file.
“‘Beautiful lady smooth bottom of he shirt’…”
It’s an interesting translation.
“‘She take fingertips and stroke he belt’…”
“Wait a minute, it says this in my fact file?”
“No fact file!” she informs me. “Chinese chicken-choking book!”
So I see. Chinese porn is hidden inside the binder. Should I take umbrage that she’s defiling my dossier? Yuh-vonne smiles with her little bitten lips and continues reading.
“‘With great skill her fingertips undo the latch on belt, the key on belt’—what you call the handle that attach?” She looks at me brazenly.
“Buckle?” I say.
“Yes, buckle! ‘And then she does zippery part’—what called the zippery…?”
“The fly?”
“No fly!” She looks vaguely offended.
I peer down at the page, all those lovely squiggles. “Yes, fly, I’m sorry, that’s what we call it….”
Satisfied, Yuh-vonne coyly covers her smile with her hand and continues. “‘He gorge is’—how you say, like a desert?”
“Dry? His throat is dry?”
“‘Then she put mouth on he…deek….’”
Suddenly my cell phone rings. Was I daydreaming just now? I scramble to fetch it and hear a semifamiliar voice.
“Ah, Dan, Professor is frighten.”
“What do you mean, Mary? Is he all right? Can you put Professor on the phone?”
“Put. Professor?”
“Yes, can you put him on the phone?”
After a few minutes of negotiation, Larry takes the line. “Larry, are you okay?”
“Not really, Dan. I’m upset, I’m confused, I can’t even read the street signs.”
“That’s because
they’re in Chinese, Larry. We’ll get this all straightened out when we get you a new organ. Where are you? I’ll come meet you.”
“I have no clue, Dan.”
“Okay, can Mary say it to me phonetically?”
Mary gets back on the phone. “Hello, Mary. What is the name of the hospital where you are?”
“Hos-ip-it-al….”
“Yes, the hospital, or clinic, or wherever you are. Its name. What is its name?”
“Okay! Close Beijing.”
“Not in Beijing”?
“No Beijing—close!”
“What’s the name of the town? The name of—”
“Sank you, sank you very much,” she says, hanging up.
“Yuh-vonne, I have to go see my cousin,” I tell her.
With the aid of a rhinestone hand mirror, she’s applying coral-colored lipstick to clash with the highlights in her hair. “He is eunuch?”
“No. What makes you ask that?”
“On phone—you say he need new organ.”
“Not that kind. A kidney organ. Can you help me find him?”
“I do. Everything!” she reminds me with a happy smile.
“That’s really sweet,” I say. “Can you ask our driver if he’s willing to go?”
“No ask driver.”
“Why not?”
She leans to whisper in my ear. “Maybe he garment spy,” she says.
All right, once again: the issue of “government spies.” Let’s get into this topic a little deeper. Twenty-five years ago, almost everyone in China was a government spy. In fact, it was risible how almost everyone was a government spy. They were paranoid, and with good reason: When Mao formed his first government in 1949, it was later discovered to be half filled with Soviet spies. And the Soviets were his allies! In Chinese society, spying for the motherland was traditionally considered a sacred duty. Keeping tabs on friend and foe alike was in the air they breathed, and had been for eons. But for a culture that codified its espionage in the sixth century B.C., the cloak-and-dagger stuff was so primitive as to be borderline funny. One evening twenty-five years ago, I came back from a banquet early to use my bathroom and actually caught a sweating hotel clerk with his hands in my luggage, feverishly planting a bugging device. Later he tried to gain my good graces by giving me a bottle of sticky-sweet Shandong wine. I was so taken with his grade school antics that it worked: He did gain my good graces, even though from then on, my luggage clicked like a Geiger counter whenever I got near a railway station. I was embarrassed for them, the way one is embarrassed for a slow classmate who so obviously copies from your spelling test that you move your elbow to let him see better.
But then, of course, that slow classmate had the power to lock you up and throw away the key.
Ah, the precious antics of police states…comedy on the cusp of terror. Staring into the abyss for three hours, last time I was here, was so nauseating that the only proper response was laughter.
Yuh-vonne leans in again. “Also for secretive purposes, we refer to kidney as other name. Say ‘Princess,’” she suggests.
“You really think it’s necessary?”
“I think.”
Calling Mary back, Yuh-vonne gets directions to the dialysis clinic outside the city limits. We dismiss our limo driver and hop a bus to the burbs, which are distinctly un-Kryptonopolis-like. There are oxcarts and rice paddies and the smell of gunpowder from fireworks going off at random. We take a bumpy taxi ride several hazy blocks to a clinic that looks like a low-level government building, with decals for soda pop on the windows and a junior-size billboard in the courtyard advertising foot powder.
When we finally locate Larry, he’s inside a circle of people—slumped forward in the backseat of a minicab parked inside a second inner courtyard, looking like a guy who’s made up his mind to do something everyone else disagrees with. He may be frightened, as Mary diagnosed, but it comes out as stubbornness. He refuses to have his dialysis treatment. Why not? He objects on principle to being ordered around. Even if it’s for his own good? He doesn’t care. He hates this hospital, he hates this country, and he hates Mary.
“You hate Mary?”
“Probably only temporarily. I’ve been up since seven o’clock with certain things I said I wanted to do, and Mary, whose real name turns out to be Ma-ah or something like that, she stalled and stalled—first we had to go here, then we had to go there, and then we had to go to a restaurant where I paid for lunch for everyone.”
“Who’s ‘everyone’?”
“These people. The doctor, the translator, and so forth.”
“That’s who these people are?”
“Yes. I’m too tired to explain. Also the taxi driver and the old man.”
“Who’s the old man?”
“Dan, you know what? I don’t want to make introductions right now. I just want to go back to my hotel.”
I turn to nod hello to everyone. They grin at me helplessly, with worry in their eyes. The woman doctor looks concerned and kind. The old man has his chin in his hands and is assessing everything as he steps thoughtfully about, never looking at anything in particular. I take a seat in the taxi, which is rich with a loamy scent, and turn back to Larry, who manages to lift his gaze to me with a pirate glint and say, “On the other hand, I like your girlfriend.”
“She’s my guide, Larry.”
This would be the time for Larry to come up with some sort of crude joke about her guiding me to a rooftop, shtupping my money’s worth, something like that. What constantly surprises me in these instances, however, is that Larry’s not that type of person. Despite his rough appearance, he’s made of finer stuff. “I always envied your taste in women,” is all he says.
I look over at Yuh-vonne and wonder again whether the T-shirt she’s wearing, with the slogan I AM IN MY PRIME, is the most appropriate choice to wear while visiting police stations this morning. “She’s pretty bright,” I say.
“She’s like the Chinese equivalent of a California girl,” he says, warming to the subject. “Not a Valley girl—she seems too articulate—but a starlet, very enthusiastic, someone who—”
“Larry,” I interrupt, “if you don’t have dialysis, you could die.”
“So I die. I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of treading water.”
“Larry, you haven’t treaded water in China. It’s different here.”
“Dan, all due respect, but water is water, and I can’t back down now after saying I wouldn’t. It would signal weakness.”
A memory comes to me—Larry as the little boy refusing to blow out his birthday candles. He’d sit there with his chunky arms crossed under his pointy birthday cap, insisting that if he blew them out, it would mean that the party was over. And now as an adult, the mix of 100 percent obstinacy and perhaps 60 percent disability is a potent one. Nor is physically forcing him an option: Not only would he be as unmovable as a tree stump, he’d probably punch me in the kidneys. Then we’d have two of us needing new organs.
And so Larry the diva of dialysis sits in the back of his Chinese cablet, choosing instead to relate his first memory.
“Maybe not actually my first,” he says, “but top two or three anyway. My mutha says we have to go see the doctor. I don’t want to go see the doctor. Okay, we’re not going to see the doctor, my mutha says, we’re going to see Aunt Esther. Goody, I like Aunt Esther. But after we go see Aunt Esther, guess where we go next? The doctor’s. It was a stupid lie, but it opened my eyes.”
“Maybe that’s when you started taking a different path from your twin,” I say. “Judy continued to believe in your mother’s system, but you took a more skeptical approach.”
“It taught me that if something didn’t make sense to me, I’d say no. So when you tell me things, no offense, Dan, no matter how much sense they might make to you, I’m going to go with my gut. Hasn’t lied to me yet.”
“But right now your gut is injured, Larry!”
“Sorry,” he says with a shrug.
“My kidney tells me, ‘No dialysis today.’”
“About that word,” I say. “Yuh-vonne thinks it would be better if we don’t say ‘kidney.’ The walls have ears, apparently. She suggests the word ‘Princess.’”
“Fine. I need a new Princess. But the old Princess doesn’t want dialysis.” He coughs into his hand, a surprisingly delicate maneuver. “I am just not in the mood to be exsanguinated.”
“Don’t be dark, Larry. You’re not being exsanguinated, you’re having your blood cleansed.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the word, though,” he says with a hint of pride.
In addition to his personal entourage, we’re providing entertainment for a crowd of maybe ten people in the courtyard: three teenage girls, a barefoot man smoking in a wheelchair, a beggar urinating on the clinic steps, and half a dozen faces at various open windows in the whitewashed clinic, all staring at us impassively.
“But you could die without dialysis!” I remind him.
“Actually, I’ve skipped them before and was surprisingly okay. I figure if I can cut out one every other week, I can save myself a couple hundred bucks a month.”
This calculus reminds me of the husband in childbirth class who asked if he could get money back for forgoing the episiotomy. I refrain from telling him so. “And Mary?”
“She can keep the gifts. I’m not asking for them back.”
“Have you given her more gifts?”
“Just a used laptop, about a year ago. I couldn’t believe how easy it was with PayPal. I wired her three hundred and fifty dollars, she picked up a Dell, I think she said.”
“Don’t you think that was overly generous of you, before you’d even met?”
“Dan, she had to go out in forty-below weather to e-mail me! Do I want her to freeze, just to talk to me? That’s why I brought her my mother’s mink coat.”
“I thought you brought her the warmest coat that L. L. Bean sells?”
“That was for Labor Day. The mink is for Memorial Day. Or vice versa. Trying to keep those holidays straight is a sucker’s game.”
“You carried your mother’s mink coat over from Florida?”
“I had it compressed. They do a very good job of compressing things like that. It doesn’t cut down on the weight, but it takes up surprisingly little space.”
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 5
