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

Seems like quite an omission, but…must be a boy thing. “But then Mary turned out to be lacking in some of the essentials,” I skip ahead, to keep his rally going, such as it is. He’s looking so poorly that I’m grasping at straws.

“Sadly, yes,” he says. “Though I do want to correct the record on one point, if I may. Mary’s son is not mentally endangered. I misunderstood. He’s actually a very capable young man. He just graduated university, where he was captain of his basketball team, and just got his first engineering job. Mary is very proud of him. I don’t know how I got that wrong, and I apologize for it. Oh, I miss Mary ever so much.”

Gets me every time: this tough guy using Edith Wharton language. But he’s backsliding now, so to cheer him up or give him perspective, whichever comes first, I segue to the subject of…our relationship. “Larry, not counting our recent estrangement, why do you suppose we’ve basically always gotten along?”

“No big mystery, Dan. We’re straight with each other. Not overly straight, not straitjacket straight, but straight enough so it works. Plus, look at this, you’re giving me a fake Cartier from the marketplace. Thank you, Dan. You can never have too much of a good thing. And just to show you how much I appreciate it, I’m going to put the Cartier on my left wrist to go with the Rolex on my right. The Chinese will think it’s a new status thing.”

From here it’s a natural step for him to talk about our childhoods. How we did this together. How we did that together. His memories are much more vivid than mine: None of it sounds even vaguely familiar to me. Two or three hours go by, and the deeper into the countryside we drive, the less familiar his memories sound. The pump of Larry is primed, and he’s talking a blue streak; I couldn’t shut him up if I tried. How at my house he was always nervous around the dinner table because everyone used big words all the time. How our housemaid frightened him-he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to act around her. How one time my mother took him to the train station to go home and she saw he was craving an issue of Popular Science on the rack and she bought it for him, even though he begged her not to because it cost so much-seventy-five cents.

The sagas are flying. But then the world he’s talking about becomes distinctly alien. How his father, Sam, the lovable but illiterate garage mechanic, used to beat him with a belt. How a respected great-uncle manhandled him sexually. What? This isn’t even the same orbit of planets on which I was raised. I can’t accept that. Great-Uncle Auguste, the hero who fought in the French Resistance, abused him as a little boy? Larry isn’t really saying that, is he? Not in so many words, maybe, but he gives me to understand that we view the world from very different starting points. There in the backseat of this tiny rattrap cab, with no seat belts and an empty can of kidney beans for an ashtray, Larry tells tales that make me think I’ve never known my cousin at all, never known the universe we supposedly shared.

As if to mirror my dismay, the air outside’s gotten worse. Dense, chewy ribbons of smog have spread themselves over the sunflower fields like shrouds of mutant spiderweb filament. They’ve moved the smokestacks out of Beijing into outlying regions as part of the plan to sanitize the city’s image for the Olympics, and we’re now in the thick of it. Raw, unscrubbed black smoke tumbles into an already filthy sky, making the air so bad that cars put on their headlights in the afternoon light and you can hear the particulates hissing around like drizzle. Nor does it help that car exhaust is leaking into the cab through the floorboards. We’re awash in bad air, inside and out.

But a little reality check. I must have misheard him before. Auguste, who had that beautiful library of rare French books in leather jackets-a child molester? Could that possibly be true? Could the fact be that all the children in the family were protected from Auguste, but no one protected Larry? That he was expendable, his ass didn’t count for much?

“This could be Georgia now,” he says. “Look at that red soil.”

I tune out for a while, won’t allow myself to take in any more. I watch two grandmothers hobble along the median strip, holding hands. I watch a mattress lashed to a highway sign nodding in the wind. The pollution’s bothering my eyes, making me blink twice as much as usual. Eventually a question is directed to me.

“Dan, do you remember my bar mitzvah?”

“I only remember you saying in your bar mitzvah speech that you wanted to grow up to become a munitions dealer,” I say.

“That was more for shock value than anything else, though it did seem like a pretty sweet life,” Larry says. “But do you remember what happened afterward? After the ceremony when everyone moved into the banquet hall to have lunch, you stayed behind and started making speeches into the podium microphone that you assumed was dead. You didn’t know it was being broadcast live into the banquet hall-”

“Yeah, a vague memory.”

“Everybody thought it was actually pretty funny, except for one person-your futha was fuming around till he found you and kicked you out. Long story short, you were wandering around the parking lot with no lunch.”

“Wait a minute, didn’t you come out and find me after a while?”

“I brought you a plate of dessert, so you wouldn’t go hungry.”

“Do you remember what I said into the microphone?”

“No,” Larry answers, “but I do remember that the dessert was strawberry shortcake.”

This actually puts a lump in my throat. I know it’s a cliché, but the lump is real: It’s hard to swallow for a second. The image of a thirteen-year-old bringing his fifteen-year-old cousin a piece of strawberry short-cake in the parking lot. What a sweetheart.

“You were one of the only people I wanted there,” Larry tells me. “I desperately wanted to emulate you.”

I sway and jostle as the cab swerves back and forth.

“That’s why I say, whatever you think is best about my treatment, Dan, that’s what I’ll do. You make the decisions. I won’t impede you. I put myself in your hands.”

Before I can react, he interrupts me.

“No, wait, I just remembered what it was you were saying into the microphone,” Larry says, “but it’s gone again. Sorry.”

The car stops. “We are at hospital,” Jade says, hopping out.

It’s late afternoon, and we’re in the middle of a provincial capital of nine million that few Americans have heard of. Gray, gritty: “Could be Baltimore after a brush fire,” Larry says, coughing. “If I lived here, I would take up smoking as a defense.”

Indeed, the pollution is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The low-grade, high-sulfur coal that produces most Chinese electricity mixes with the humidity in the air to produce a kind of atmospheric sulfuric acid. My eyes sting. I get out and snap some pictures to try to capture the soupy mix. Two guards come over but withdraw when Jade assures them we’re guests of Dr. X. Like every other skyscraper in this fast-growing country, the hospital itself seems to arise out of the soil like a giant mushroom: First there’s dusty, hard-packed earth, then there’s a gleaming steel edifice. Across the parking lot struts a hearty young pocketbook-toting administrator who speaks blessedly good English.

“Glad you made it in one pieces,” Cherry says after introducing herself as the hospital translator/coordinator. “Sorry to say, Dr. X has already left for the evening; he had appointment with delegation from Zambia. But we are prepared to do preliminary procedure and attend all you questions, if you kindly follow me.”

Inside the hospital it’s quiet. Ghostly patients shuffle about in blue-and-white-striped PJs that look like what Yankee uniforms would look like if Yankees never got honest-to-goodness smudges by sliding into home plate but just hung out at second base for two years collecting dinge. Limbo dinge. Cherry leads us to a waiting room off the main lobby called the Family Crush Room, where a delegation of extremely polite medical residents awaits us. The men have pimples, the women sit with their legs open on the yellow plastic couches, a sight that both cheers and terrifies me; perhaps they’ve delayed their social skills because they’ve been so busy cramming in arcane medical knowledge?