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

“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.”

“I can’t believe you gave her your mother’s mink coat when you’re not even sure you want to stay with this woman.”

“She liked it very much. She was posing for me, I took pictures. It looked almost as good on her as on a stripper of my acquaintance. Nice way to say ‘hooker,’ incidentally.”

It occurs to me that I could learn a thing or two from Larry’s open-handedness. But now’s not the time to explore this question. Now’s the time for a decision.

“Larry, you’re not thinking straight.”

“Welcome to my world,” he says, pointing to his head as though it’s a third party to these proceedings. “My question is, am I misoriented permanently from the icicle, or just temporarily from the dialysis? I can only hope it’s the former.”

“You mean you can only hope it’s the latter,” I say.

“That’s what I said,” he says.

I don’t bother correcting him that it was his mother the icicle hit. “Let’s get him back to his hotel,” I tell the crowd. “We can make sure he gets his dialysis tomorrow, hopefully.”

The crowd murmurs troubled assent. The kindly woman doctor retreats into the clinic. The translator piles in the front seat of the mini-cab with the driver, and Mary piles in with Larry in back. The tiny car heaves and bounces off. The old man sticks around, still with his chin in his hands and pacing slowly to and fro, looking at nothing but assessing everything.

The smog respires with a life of its own, back and forth, like cloud banks of vaporized Frappuccino, quite tasty.

“So that’s my cousin,” I tell Yuh-vonne, inviting her to sit next to me on a cinder-block bench. “What’s your honest opinion of everybody?”

The black pupils of her eyes dart from side to side, twitching as in REM sleep. She’s hard at work, figuring how much tact to filter in with how much candor.

“Your brother Laurie’s accent I can’t understand,” she says carefully.

“He has traces of a speech impediment left over from having his tonsils taken out too late,” I say defensively. “Or maybe they mangled the surgery. Anyway, his tongue sometimes has a habit of staying in the back of his froat.”

“He sound a little Chinese,” she says.

“Hmmm. And what do you make of his mail-order bride, though Larry doesn’t like us to refer to her that way?”

Again with the REM movement. “Ah, she is not good educated.”

“No?”

“Because her voice doesn’t look beautiful.”

“So there’s no way she could be a college professor, as she claimed?”

“Definitely not! High school maybe. In the distant countryside. Her education basement is very low.”

“I’ll level with you, Yuh-vonne. See, I’m not sure I can trust Mary. Maybe she just wants an American husband to get out of the country, take his money, and then ditch him. I need to figure out if she’s good for him.”

“Ah, maybe just concubine to play with Laurie,” she says, “only to play and not be serious, so to catch better opportunity for herself.”

“We call that a gold digger, where I come from.”

Yuh-vonne thinks a minute, nibbling little dents into her lips. “But maybe Laurie have golden heart,” she says at last. “Maybe they have golden heart together. A relationship between human beings is the hardest thing there is.”

Which gives me something to think about while the old man paces nearby, his chin in his hands.

“It is hard to find person you can trust,” she says at last. “Mary is brave lady. She came to Beijing only to make friends with Laurie. This take a lot of courage. But as for emotional item, I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe Mary not love Laurie so much.”

“Okay, that’s what I’m wondering.”

“All she worry about is if he dangerous.”

“Larry? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless maybe you were a cousin who got on his bad side.”

“That all she worry about, not how is Laurie doing, only is he dangerous. Also why he never marry before.”

“He’s come close a couple times, but it never worked out.”

“Not because he gayboy?”

“Nah-he likes the ladies, and the ladies like him.”

Yuh-vonne nods. “Mary is not stupid, and she is clever. She knows what she wants. Also, all these people around Laurie, they are her peeps, I think. Three to one. Four to one. Who know how many, their purpose only to chase the money.”

“You think they’re all in collusion?”

“And the taxi driver, too, in my opinion.” Yuh-vonne stands and extends a hand to pull me up. “So now we go back to our hotel?”

Despite myself, I love how she calls it “our” hotel. But suddenly the old man takes a step closer and addresses some sentences in Chinese to Yuh-vonne, who nods and says “Are! Are! Are!” like a toy poodle with its vocal cords cut.

“What was that about?” I ask when it’s over.

“Ow my God, this man is the uncle,” she tells me.