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

  I look at him, admiring, while his broker’s office puts him on hold.

  “You punch butt, Feldman,” I say.

  “I know. Not bad for a chronic depressionist. If it weren’t for my gallows humor, I’d have been a goner long ago.”

  Nor does he quiet down in the elevator. Still on hold when the elevator doors open, he continues blabbing to the surgeons inside, who’re now dressed in white. Their surgical masks make them look like the duck slicers at the restaurant where Larry and I had our Shabbos dinner a lifetime ago. I only hope they’re as skillful.

  “Goody luck, goody luck!” Mary cries as Larry’s wheeled in. We can’t go upstairs to surgery with him, but he wouldn’t permit a lingering good-bye anyway. He’s too busy giving the surgeons his personal theory on the stock market.

  “People say, ‘How can you speculate? You don’t have enough money to speculate.’ I say, ‘I don’t have enough money to speculate. That’s why I speculate.’”

  Larry and I make eye contact for half a second as the elevator doors close. “Yes, I’d like to place an order for one thousand—”

  The doors seal shut.

  Mary and I slap high five, then come together in a hug.

  Outside, under the dusty stars, or maybe they’re cinders, Cherry stands with Mary and me. She purses her lips and nods at me as though the fate of the world is in balance. “Now in a way is out of our hands,” she says.

  “Cherry,” I say, laying my palm on her shoulder, “if I haven’t already told you this, then let me say it for the first time. You’re a doll.”

  “Is nussing,” she says.

  “Is summsing,” I say.

  The operation is slated to take three hours, up to six if there are complications. Mary and Cherry decide to go out and find a cake to buy. I decide to go back up to our cave. Larry’s tropical half looks as if a war front has moved through, and I prop open the door to my half so a cool front can move through as well. The temperature between our two spaces is evening out, all the molecules flowing back and forth freely. I decide to do a little housecleaning, start putting things back in the wallet he plucked apart. It’s like viewing the interior of his life: gift cards from Sharper Image and other defunct stores, laminated photos of all his godchildren—little towheaded rowdies flaunting their baby teeth, as well as sullen teenagers who probably dig their wack-job godfather despite themselves. I reach for a fake Caramel de Lite for comfort. Here are photos of Mary that Larry took when she was modeling her L. L. Bean coat his first night in Beijing. She looks amazingly good in them—sending him a sultry look over her shoulder—almost glamorous. Is this the way Larry sees her, like a movie star, almost?

  I take another Caramel de Lite—not bad, caramel sprinkled with toasted coconut—and sit on his bed to sort through wads of loose, sandy documents. Here’s the nun’s VIP letter he’s been toting around, the all-purpose talisman putty-soft with misuse, not quite grammatical, and with a couple of phrases he was probably too embarrassed to read aloud to me: “…diamond in the rough…please treat with respect….” But it’s an obvious forgery, or worse than a forgery. Down below, where time and rain have gotten to it, the smudgy signature reads “Larry Feldman.” Was it muddleheadedness that made him sign his own name, or a strange kind of integrity? For all his sketchy ways, does it go against his nature to lie? I check this tenuous insight against a photo of Larry on his recently reissued passport. Is this possibly the face of a man who’s fundamentally honest with himself and others if and when he can be? But how old and sick he looks! How puffed out and entirely devoid of hope! I’m startled by what I haven’t admitted to myself before now: He looks like a man at death’s door.

  I stuff my face with Caramel de Lites.

  Around the room, remnants of Larry wink at me morbidly. There on the bureau is the all-purpose spork he’s carried with him these many weeks. Will Larry be okay in surgery without it? He’s so fragile, couldn’t he use every good luck charm he can get? And there parked so neatly in the open closet are his Businessman’s Running Shoes; it pains me to see that he abdicated them at last. Will he be okay without his rubber-stiff self-reliance? Why are we toying with the autonomy he so painstakingly assembled in his life? I wonder why I quoted his Jesus line back to him: “Everything’s A-OK.” But is it really?

  Ouch, I get an echo of the charley horse, stand from the bed to try to release it. It fades somewhat, and I limp to his suitcases stacked in the corner. There on top is my wolf skull that’s gotten mixed in with his things. I unwrap the washcloth, and it’s intact, thank goodness—those luxury washcloths really did the job. The scent of chamomile wafts back to me from what seems like years before. But have the washcloths protected his tea set, individually wrapped in the crate beneath? I unwrap a teacup—jagged shards. I unwrap a saucer—in pieces, as are all the items, one after the other, not a single item unsmashed. Why is this always Larry’s luck? Why do I come out unscratched and Larry takes the fall? Jade was right, as usual: They were too crispy to travel. Now the question is, was Larry?

  Without warning, the charley horse slides to my gut.

  I upend the crate so all the rubble of shattered china pours into the waste barrel, chips and flakes and then the trailings of dust. How can this be anything but a bad omen? Another spasm passes through me—a kind of couvade, suffering for Larry’s suffering, or maybe an anxiety attack. I close my eyes and am dizzy for a minute, ransacked by images of kidney beans behind my eyelids. Kidney bean pie. Kidney bean salad. WARNING! RED KIDNEY BEAN POISONING! Raw kidney beans contain as many as seventy thousand units of toxin, and as few as four beans can bring on symptoms of extreme vomiting, which may be life-threatening.

  Larry, Larry, my sweet little cousin, fighting for his life…

  Visions of chewing pig kidneys. On the podium at Larry’s bar mitzvah, spitting kidney beans at the congregation. The words “kidnap cabbie” speed by so fast they condense into the word “kidney.” The bad-bad criminal gorging himself on Larry’s baby back ribs. An old Peter Lorre movie where an invalid concert pianist who’s been in an accident has a murderer’s hands attached to his stumps. A black pimp in a surgical mask waving a saber at the balls of Leonard Bernstein lying dead in a chef’s hat. Larry and I falling out of a chairlift as lullabies run together in a loop: London bridge is falling down, and down will come baby, Jill came tumbling after. …

  The spasm knocks me to my knees.

  O Fearless Father of East and West alike, Emperor of the healing arts, do not let Larry be crispy, I pray. Forgive him his trespasses as You forgive me for cheating him out of a 1943 zinc penny. I haven’t been too cavalier about this, have I? You’d let me know if these prayers aren’t proper, wouldn’t You? Have I used up my quota? Unless maybe—hear me out—if I haven’t exhausted my lifetime allotment, taking into account my pissy teenage years…I get rollover prayers? Sound like a deal?

  My gut feels fine. Must have been the oily peanuts. I trash the rest and set out for a change of scenery.

  A few minutes later, the midnight air outside feels ridiculously fresh, like a farmer’s field after haying. The stars are as sharp as any of the china shards I just discarded. I begin walking with no destination in mind. Spit globules glisten in the tar from the streetlights overhead. Neon squiggles like a puppy I’ve grown bored with. Two men are singing “Soul Train” at an outdoor karaoke bar, but they’re so shy they sit with their backs to the handful of listeners. Despite their shyness, the mikes amplify their warbling voices into the humid night air. Are the mikes loud enough to carry their song to the windows of the hospital not far away? Could it serenade the surgeons beginning to hack at his guts? Because the surgery must have started by now. May the song bring them joy and precision as they cut.

  I walk farther. A shopkeeper ducks into his store as I approach, the better to observe me through his slatted window. I help a grateful couple push their broken-down car several blocks through city traffic to a gas station; it’s good to have something to do. Farth
er on, under a highway bridge, a cello quartet is rehearsing on a sidewalk. The instruments bellow as cars sizzle past overhead. It should be a recording studio, Bach complete with street sounds. Lovely.

  Even farther, the tissue wrappings from someone’s afternoon fireworks have shredded to red confetti, damp already and turning to clay underfoot. So some festivities go on, even after the holiday season’s passed. Good to know. And another thing: A girl falls off her bicycle, startled by the sight of me. I extend my hand to help her up, then lift her bike for her. She is featherlight, but her bike is as heavy as lead. I’ve spent all this time in China and had no idea how heavy the bikes were. This also seems an important detail to know.

  Navigating by the specter of the Giant Mushroom, I find a new route to the Old Faithful fountains. A school chorus is practicing in the open air. Up so late, the singers smile and whisper to one another while the choral director scolds them fondly. It’s a mystery to me how a nation this huge manages to foster such a feeling of family: calling one another aunt and uncle, treating one another like sibs. Maybe it’s because there’s a shortage of real-life relatives. Scrutable! China’s enacted the One-Child Policy not only to halve its population but also to foster national unity. Everyone’s an only child, so the nation is their family. What a stroke of genius. I miss my children.

  And then I arrive at the waltzing terrace. There they are, the former Red Guards, waltzing in trim little circles around the colored fountains, round and round. But tonight they’re not frightening, these former cannibals and rapists and butchers; they’re just unfortunates, doing the best they can to salvage what’s left of their lives. Wasn’t that always what they were, unfortunate pawns of generals and tyrants? Given the right circumstances, couldn’t we American student protesters of that era have been manipulated into becoming monsters ourselves? Seeing them tonight, I imagine they’re dancing not in celebration of their misdeeds but in shame for how they were duped into ruining so many lives. They’re waltzing round and round to atone for their sins, the way dirty water can cleanse itself by recirculating. Maybe that’s what these fountains are about, too: redemption through recirculation. Whether they realize it or not, it’s some sort of purification dance, oxygenating themselves free of their polluted past. Isn’t there an old Chinese saying that if you rinse your hands in running water for an hour every day, after nine years you may be pardoned for your past? So maybe if you waltz every night for ninety-nine years, you finally waltz away your crimes. Quick, there’s somebody I need to share this with….

  “Hon?”

  “Dan?”

  “It’s happening. He just went under the knife—”

  “Are you sure it’s safe to say this over the cell?”

  “He’s in surgery. It’s too late for anyone to stop it. It’s happening….”

  I’m close enough to the small fountains that little droplets of spray are coming onto me, dampening my hat. I hold the phone out toward the scene: the waltzers down below and, in the background up above, the hulking shape of the hospital, its top floor ablaze where Larry is. “Can you hear this, honey?” I call to my wife. “I know it’s noon where you are, but it’s midnight here, and the Red Guards are swirling to this music. And can you hear this traffic, all the cabbies honking? And the bicycle brakes screeching? And the street vendors calling? This is what goes on here around the clock! All this blessed cacophony—”

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Doesn’t the noise bother you?” she’s asking.

  “Nah—threw out my earplugs weeks ago.”

  A pause. “Dan, what’s going on? Are you okay?” she asks.

  “It’s just…I’d forgotten how lucky I am,” I say, “to get to go halfway around the world and be privy to this. I might have stayed home and missed this. Thank you for allowing me to be reckless.”

  “Dan,” she asks, “you haven’t gone back to carrying your flask around, have you?”

  “I’m standing here watching these people I thought were monsters, but they’re not,” I say. “They’re victims, too!—of their lives. Because you can’t hurt others without ultimately hurting yourself. And now they need a lifetime to heal themselves, any way they can.”

  A cannon goes off somewhere far away, accompanied by cheers. “And, hon?”

  “Yes, Dan?”

  “Larry’s not going to die of kiddie failure. We won’t let him. ’Cause he’s a victim, too, just like Mary is, and these poor souls here, who’re really pretty good waltzers, by the way. We ought to take some lessons, you and me….”

  Shelley takes a moment. “I like how you sound,” she decides. “You sound kind.”

  “Yeah, well, blame your older son for that. Is the little one still faking sick, by the way?”

  “No, he finally went to school today. His conscience got the better of him.”

  “Conscience, eh? Let’s nip that in the bud.”

  She chuckles. “Call me in the morning and let me know how Larry’s doing.”

  “Will do.”

  Hanging up, I see the waltzers gesture to me. I withdraw by habit, hesitate, then come forward and join my generation-mates. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream…” Old Faithful’s on a timer to keep her faithful, and off she goes, adding to the general hoopla. We waltz under the water drops, and it’s bountiful, being sad and festive together with my generation under the hulk of the hospital where Larry lies unconscious. Then, faintly at first, but with more and more clarity, I make out a more insistent honking than any of the stray honking that’s pealing through the night. It’s adamant, rhythmical, eloquent. “Jong may yo yee—”

  “Ma?!” I cry, jumping out of the way to avoid getting splattered by my exuberant friend, the Queen Latifah cabbie, waving wildly to me out her window as she weaves around the dancers like she’s one herself, splashing through the puddles, round and round the fountains pumping her horn, and you don’t need a translator to know exactly what it’s saying, in any language at all:

  “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples!”

  CHAPTER 19

  Long Live Larry

  You can only go halfway into the darkest forest; then you are coming out the other side.

  Larry is dead. I bolt awake after three hours’ sleep, wearing box-turtle shades, and am convinced of it. Larry didn’t survive. He was too feeble to withstand the anesthesia. His heart gave out. Because of the tonsils that were mangled when he was a kid, he started hiccupping and choked on the breathing tube. He gagged on his own vomit. Even in the depths of his anesthesia, he fought the surgeons tooth and nail, mindless brutal flailing that threw them off their game. Larry is dead.

  Then the phone rings.

  “Operation a winner,” Cherry says.

  I rip off the shades I must have put on in the middle of the night. “Cherry, don’t be messing with me—really? A complete success?”

  “Complete.”

  “No ‘sad effects’?”

  “None.”

  “I can’t believe it. He’s not rejecting it? No complications at all?”

  “At all,” she says. “We keep an eye on him the next week, but maybe kidney last another thirty year of life. The rest of Larry may fall down, but that kidney take a licking and keep on ticking.”

  I locate Mary, who’s been in the Crush Room worriedly studying English all night. She tried to sleep but couldn’t. “Larry, Larry, sleep…Larry, Larry, sleep,” she explains. I give her the news. We’re jumping up and down. “Long live Larry!” we shout to each other.

  A few hours later, Cherry, Mary, and I don surgical masks and shuffle into the ICU with plastic Baggies over our shoes. Larry’s unconscious. Looking down on his slumbering face, I view him as a mother would—as his dear, gentle Rivie must have seen her baby boy. And here’s a ridiculous thing: He does look handsome, he is handsomer than he looks. Minged up, to be sure, older than when he got here, but also younger and less scrappy somehow. Part of the reason is that he has a kidney that’s working; i
t’s given him a glow of health. But there’s something else, and I don’t know what it is. Why do human beings do that to one another? Just when you think you’ve got everyone squared away in his or her little pigeonhole—this one’s pug-nosed, that one’s square-assed—they jump out and turn beautiful on you. Why’d it take me so long to see it?

  Slowly he stirs, opens his eyes, gestures me over. He can barely croak out the words. “How’s China Life Insurance?”

  Forty-eight hours later, Larry is sitting up in bed, partaking of a celebration cake Mary has brought, complete with sparkly candles and a side of Chinese eggplant. His face is less puffy than before, with a flush of baby pink in the cheeks. The kidney is doing what it’s supposed to do—cleaning his blood. So simple, so primitive, and so life-changing.

  “My feet are back to size nine after being twelve for two years,” he says.

  “Also his brain back to itself,” Cherry confirms. “Very good kidney, very good match. But must taking it slow,” she reminds him.

  “It’s like breaking in a new transmission, I get it,” he says. “You have to let it get used to the rest of the vehicle.”

  “Perfect,” Cherry says.

  “Do I feel perfect? No,” Larry says, chomping down what look like tiny pork balls from the top of the cake, using chopsticks. “I woke up this morning and still wondered what I should get Judy for a souvenir. But I’m ahead of the game. I’m free of the dialysis machine, which is a minor miracle in itself. I’ve got my life back.”

  “So we think next week you go home,” Cherry says.

  “Yippie yi yo,” he says. “You mean after almost two months of captivity, I’ll be able to resume a normal existence?”

  “Was it normal before?” Cherry counters.