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

“I doubt it. I picked it up on the street in Ecuador for eight bucks.”

“ Ecuador? For a panama?”

“Little-known fact: Most panamas come from Ecuador,” I say as the intelligent heads nod in receipt of a new fact. How my people love new facts! Information! Data! While they’re taking this in, I scramble to collect myself.

“So you’re standing,” the rabbi observes neutrally. “Does this mean you have a general announcement to make?”

Cool God, here goes nothing, I think, turning to shrug an apology to Izzy in case this backfires. I clear my throat. “Shabbat shalom, everyone,” I say. “I’m Daniel from Massachusetts. I apologize in advance if this isn’t the proper place to say this or if I’m abusing your hospitality, but I’ll just be direct: I’m in Beijing on a mission of mercy. My cousin Larry, whom I referenced before, is dying of end-stage renal disease and I’ve come to Beijing with him to look for a kidney. I realize it’s a controversial subject, and the last thing I want is to offend anyone, but we can’t afford to dillydally. We’ve had no luck all week and are about to give up on China and leave for Manila in two days, so time is of the essence. If anyone has even a faint lead on how to find a healthy kidney, it would be a mitzvah if you would share it with me after the service.”

No one reacts as I sit back down in silence. A deep blush starts in my chest and speeds upward to my scalp. How gauche I am, barging right in and doubtless breaking all kinds of protocol. I’ve probably embarrassed my host, Izzy, half to death. I don’t dare turn around to see the discomfort I’ve caused. Cool God, ouch-sorry me so pushy!

The ceremony breaks up shortly afterward, and I’m left alone with my blush burning the tips of my ears. People hurriedly depart to the right and left of me. I turn around slowly to face Izzy, but he’s split for a buffet table at the back of the room. Maybe I ought to just liquefy myself and dribble down a drain somewhere…

The pretty journalist from New York approaches me.

“Sorry if I overstepped,” I say.

“Hey, ‘chutzpah’ is a Jewish word,” she assures me.

“Yeah, but didn’t I just alienate everyone in the room?”

“They’re still processing,” she says…and sure enough, little by little, members start drifting over.

“So how’s your brother doing?” one of them asks.

“He’s my cousin, and he’s dying,” I say.

“I have an uncle who’s a pulmonary surgeon,” someone else volunteers, “who came here a few years ago to perform a lung transplant.”

“Close but no cigar,” I say, getting my confidence back. “I hear lungs but no kidney. Do I hear a kidney,” I ask, like an auctioneer, the tips of my ears still burning. “Kidney going once, kidney going twice…”

Just then a leopard scarf slides by behind me, close enough to brush my shirt. “Talk to me when you get a chance,” the Australian accent says.

Ten minutes later Antonia is giving me her business card and telling me she’ll try to call me tomorrow. Of course the transplantation of organs to Westerners is illegal and her company would never put itself in a position to help me directly, she says, but perhaps she can make a few discreet calls on my cousin’s behalf.

“It is illegal, for sure? That’s one of the points we’ve been unclear about.”

“Because the law is more fluid in China than you’re used to at home, it’s not as black and white,” she says, “and it’s frequently tailored to meet local conditions. But yes, it is indeed illegal, since they passed a Restriction a while back. Apparently the feeling was that the West was making such a fuss about China’s transplant business-questioning whether organs came from political dissidents or religious radicals-that China said, ‘All right, then, you can’t have any.’ And that was that. But here people don’t have the same general attitude against it that there is in the West. It’s not frowned upon ethically the way it is in much of your United States.”

“Well, I’m suspending all ethical considerations because he’s my cousin.”

Antonia comprehends this implicitly. “Those considerations are fine until it’s your flesh and blood, isn’t that right?” she says. “So Izzy tells me you’re a writer. What sort?”

“I write about my life and the things I see happening around me. You could call me an investigative memoirist, I guess.”

“I’ll be frank: I’m asking because that concerns me. You’re not going to give away any secrets, are you? You could get a lot of people in trouble…”

“No, ma’am, I won’t,” I say.

She looks me over. “Give me my card back.”

Is she rescinding her offer because she doesn’t trust me? But no, she only wants to add her cell number.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “But no promises.”

We hug and part.

Suddenly finding myself superfluous in the room, I try to locate Izzy to say good-bye, but he seems to be successfully avoiding me. Just as I’m at the exit ready to slip unnoticed down the stairs, the dean with the bow tie appears-Alfred somebody-tucking his business card into my breast pocket and telling me to keep in touch.

“I like what your cousin’s nurses said,” he says. “Did they really wish him well?”

I nod. “There aren’t any bad guys in this drama,” I say. “People may go about things differently, but everyone wants what’s for the best.”

He snorts appreciatively, passing me something under his arm like contraband: the black yarmulke with gold Chinese letters. “A little keepsake from one of the guys,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, as though we’re performing an undercover act. “He says to say you earned it.”

An hour later I find Larry in the lobby of his hotel, regaling the Robert Palmer quints, who are spellbound by the unstoppable flood of Larry talk in a tongue they don’t speak. “On the other hand, you may be too young to have heard the name Shaquille O’Neal, all those greats,” he’s saying. “What are you, seventeen years old? Seventeen is good in China, I can see you’re responsible citizens. Where I come from, seventeen is the worst. Let me give you an example. I had a friend whose daughter was seventeen. Name of Angela, I called her Angina. My friend asked Angina, theoretically, if she had a classmate in a wheelchair, would she be willing to be friends with her. Angina thought for a minute. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘because I’m so popular it wouldn’t hurt me a bit.’”

“Sorry to interrupt, ladies,” I say, pulling Larry aside. They seem disappointed as I escort their star performer to the other side of the room and give him the good news about Antonia and her connections. Larry’s visibly unimpressed-after a lifetime of disappointments, he’s learned to keep his emotions monochromatic-but does allow how excited he is that Mary has hand-washed his socks for him again while I was gone.

“By the way,” he says, “just FYI: I don’t do sunscreen, like you mentioned before you left. I consider it sissyish. Please don’t embarrass me like that in front of Mary again. I’m a big boy.”

I look him over. “That may be what you are most of the time,” I say, “but what you are the rest of the time, Commissioner, is a pain in the ass.”

Larry considers this. “That’s probably an accurate assessment,” he says.

One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

Next morning, fuck market. I figure I can cheer up Larry if I grab him a Cartier knockoff for five bucks that would cost someone five grand on South Beach. Outside the hotel Jade comes hopping up to me waving both hands. I almost don’t recognize her in jeans and blouse instead of her olive drab uniform. “Excuse me, Eighty-four, but this moment the staff comes out,” she explains as she pulls me down the street away from the hotel entrance.