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

As arranged, Larry and Mary are sitting by the sidewalk in front of their hotel. Larry taps Mary’s elbow to help him up, a gesture I remember his parents making to each other back in Lynn, oddly touching in its familiarity. Larry’s ragged, drained face brightens at the sight of Jade.

“Where’d you find this one?” Larry asks. “They keep getting better and better.”

“She was my breakfast waitress.”

“Must have been some breakfast,” he says dryly.

But now there’s a new development. Mary takes this moment to announce that she’s going home!

“I thought the day after tomorrow,” Larry says in shock.

“Train in two hours,” Mary says.

Larry’s stunned. Why didn’t she tell him before now? But events are in motion, and there’s no time for explanations or elaborate farewells, no time even for Mary to wince when we embrace good-bye and the Little Tree Air Freshener squeezes into her bosom. Larry is shell-shocked as I guide him into the backseat of the cab and slide in after him. Jade takes the front. “Nice a meet you,” Mary calls, blowing us a kiss as we screech off down the block.

“I thought the day after tomorrow” is all Larry can say.

Is the romance over? Is that the end of the Larry-Mary show? Larry is too stunned to respond, and Jade and I can only raise eyebrows.

Here we begin the most harrowing cab ride of our lives to date. Yes, we’re in a rush to meet Dr. X, the mystery surgeon, in the far-off city of Shi before nightfall, but the cabdriver doesn’t need that excuse to dart and weave between diesel trucks with only inches to spare. He likes multitasking-he munches on a hairy chicken claw with one hand while jerking the wheel with the other-so I hand him my cell phone with the surgeon’s secretary predialed for him. “Are! Are! Are!” he says, writing down directions on a Mickey Mouse pad he has taped to the front of his broken speedometer dial.

Traffic leaving the city is frantic, but despite this our driver appears to nod off, while still managing to munch on the chicken claw. Before long he slams the brakes so hard I drill my forehead against the empty kidney-bean can soldered to the back of the front seat that serves as an ashtray. His hands, with yellowish nails that extend a half inch beyond his fingertips, are looped through the steering wheel, and he’s waving his index finger as though conducting an orchestra of fleas.

“Does he know where he’s going?” I ask Jade.

“Oh, yes, very skillful driver,” Jade says.

Coulda fooled me. He ducks under an underpass so low that the antenna scrapes the cement ceiling, then emerges from the other side to shoot across four lanes of traffic without once checking his mirrors. For all this activity, he looks half asleep, slumped over the wheel, with a nasty habit of drooping his head every four or five seconds. It’s exactly how I’d look if I hadn’t slept in two days.

“Can you tell him to slow down?” I ask Jade. This works for the short term, but in a minute he resumes dipping in and out of the breakdown lane, which also contains bicycle riders, shards of truck parts, and workers pushing shopping carts loaded with twenty-foot pipes. After an oncoming bus swerves to avoid hitting us, I notice that Larry doesn’t look well. He hasn’t said a word since Mary left, concentrating instead on studying receipts from his wallet. This is the self-defense clicking in again, how he’s maneuvered a difficult life, but I’m not sure denial is healthy just now.

“I think you miss Mary,” I suggest.

“I do!” he says, releasing air out of his face like punctured bubble wrap. “I’m the first to admit it. I haven’t been without her the whole time I’ve been here. She’s taken care of everything. Maybe it’s a moot point, but I have a lot of sympathy for her. Her life has not been easy, by a long shot. Why can’t we pool our resources and make a go of it together? Or is it too late? I don’t even know if she left for good or if I’ll ever see her again…”

His eyes are closed, and he’s resting his head on the side window while excavating a boil on his chin. You’ve got to be feeling pretty low to keep your eyes closed while you do that.

“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I see great devotion in her. To use a strange word. I mean, she’s not gorgeous, but I pick up a lot of sweetness in her. She sat by my side throughout my entire dialysis yesterday, rubbing my back. If I got taken, I’m going to be hurt beyond belief.”

“What would it mean to be ‘taken,’ exactly?” I ask.

He digs a moment more. “I’m not sure,” he says finally. “I don’t want to sound evasive, it’s just that I’m not sure.” The boil done, Larry starts making sounds as though he’s gargling, but with a dry throat.

A flock of guinea hens scamper across the highway. Some of them make it. The feathers of the rest fill the air like a series of pillow bombs.

“How’d her husband die, anyway?” I ask.

“Car accident.”

“Sorry I asked,” I say.

“Believe me, so am I.”

The driver waits with uncharacteristic patience for a truck to pass us before veering into the speeding lane. But oops, it’s a double truck that swipes us, tearing off our sideview mirror. There are no seat belts in back, only a hanging strap, which I access. Larry doesn’t bother. At one point I ask Jade why the driver is going east when before he was going north?

“He not sure. He only know by sun,” she says.

We’re in the countryside now, passing sunflower fields. “This could be north Florida,” Larry notes from time to time, trying to find references to home to help him deal with his homesickness. “This could be North Carolina.”

I’m grateful that this is a highway and not a crooked back street, but we’re tacking and snaking as though it were a crooked back street. It’s like driving slalom on the autobahn, with the occasional trash can or patio chair strewn here and there, kind of brilliant in its own way, though I’m not sure I know what I mean by that. Suddenly there’s a pause in the action.

“Is it me, or did we just stop in the median and the driver got out?” Larry asks.

“He has to go peewee,” Jade informs us.

“Good to know I’m not demented,” Larry remarks. “Merely imperiled.”

The driver comes back minus his chicken claw and resumes driving. I work to keep Larry talking. I hint that he might want to talk about why he never got married. One great thing about Larry, even when he’s feeling poorly, you never have to coax; he comes out and gives you all he’s got. Complete mini-sagas-beginning, middle, and end all wrapped up with a bow.

“Ten-second story,” he says. “I’m fussy, simple as that. Never met the right girl. Well, strike that. There was one with…I don’t want to mention her name, but it didn’t work out with Chelsea-oops, guess I said it after all. That’s the misorientation speaking, whatever you want to call it. Who’d want me now anyway, in my state? What am I going to do, chase ’em with a cane? Those days are behind me.”

Okay, it’s a little shorter than I was hoping, but it does seem to warm him up a bit. I hint that he might want to tell the story about why he initially decided to find a mail-order bride, even though he doesn’t like referring to her as that.

“A lot of people in my coin-trading discussion group asked me the same question,” he says. “Here’s why. Because go to another temple mixer, meet another seventy-year-old overweight real-estate broker? No thanks. How I found Mary was on a Web site I already gave you the name of-it’s not coming to me at the moment-which they claim has forty-nine thousand women, which took me the better part of a week to check out. I checked out the men, too, just to see what I was up against. What a bunch of losers: potbellies, the works. There’s some guy with a big toofy grin saying he’s an astronaut from New Jersey. If he’s an astronaut, I’m a stud muffin. I myself was quite forthright: didn’t mention my illness but was otherwise quite honest.”