Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“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.”