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

“Am I answer all your question?” she asks pleasantly. “Need more to pump my info?”

“Well, the other main thing I need to know is, is it legal?” I demand.

“Hard to say that, because Chinese people don’t really know laws. But if doctors can get, is okay.”

I look over at Larry, who appears to be demonstrating how he couldn’t eat lotus roots even if he wanted to, “given what condition my teef are in.” Reading my cousin’s lips is not an ability I ever planned on developing.

“So what I’m sort of gathering,” I say to Cherry, “is that it’s official policy not to do transplants for Westerners-”

“But only true so-so.”

I incorporate her interruption. “Which only true so-so. Maybe it’s what’s known as a Beautiful Law, so-called because they look good on paper but there’s no enforcement?”

“Could be,” Cherry says. “No one on the outside really knows, that’s the thing, all secret. You part of secret now, too.”

“So it’s sort of an open secret, but no one knows the details. Made trickier by the fact that the central government makes the laws, but it’s up to the locals to carry them out.”

“So not very transparent situation,” Cherry confirms. “Also liquid all the time.”

“Okay. So even though it’s officially illegal to traffic organs to Westerners, if a well-placed surgeon has a way of procuring an organ for a Westerner, he’s not questioned.”

“Yes, of curse,” she says kindly.

“And Larry and I won’t land ourselves in jail?”

“Jail? No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Of curse not,” she clarifies patiently. “Rest easy. You are in good hands.”

Well, all right then, that’s what I wanted to hear. I’m partial to those five words. We are in good hands. It’s such a human expression, so reassuring on a primitive, tactile level, that I surrender. We don’t know the cost, we don’t know the time frame, but in the end it comes down to hands, and something about Cherry’s makes me trust them. Competent, strong, maybe even wise hands. It’s a leap of faith, but here we go, crossing the Rubicon, making the emotional commitment to put our fate in the hands of this capable young lady. Larry is in my hands, and I am in Cherry’s hands, and Cherry is in Dr. X’s hands, like a series of nesting dolls with Mama Mao at the end.

Our business concluded, I duck into the bathroom to rinse my contacts, and while I’m doing so, the right one shreds in my fingers. The pollution’s eaten it away. My teeth taste granular; when I blow my nose, it feels like the Great Wall. Also, I make out a smudge mark in the middle of my forehead like it’s the beginning of Lent, only I got this from banging into the cab’s ashtray. Scrubbing it off, I wonder how many hours I’ve been wearing this mark of penitence, and no one thought to tell me?

I emerge from the bathroom to a blurry scene. With only one contact lens, I can’t immediately locate our party near the windows. Then I spot Jade, a figure of clarity in a fuzzy, fast-moving space. Seeing me emerge safely from the bathroom and begin to pick my way across the noisy room, she raises her hand in a victory salute to me. I can’t quite make it out, but is she, are her…?

Yes. Those thin fingers are crossed.

Once on a tiger’s back, it is hard to alight.

So we’re moving our little opera to the city of Shi. We’re canceling the Philippines and committing ourselves to Cherry and Company. One little glitch: Before we can install Larry in this hospital, we have to return Jade to BJ, check out of our hotels there, then scoot on back. Should be a snap-in our minds we’ve already moved.

Round-trip, however, is going to require two separate journeys.

Our faithful cabbie’s waiting outside the hospital when our party returns from KFC. He’s used the hour to play games on his cell phone rather than catch up on sleep. Making our farewells, Jade, Larry, and I exit the city the same way we entered, via a series of medieval ramps and pulleys, but things look different this time. When we arrived in sunlight, Shi appeared bleak and grimy, a grim town of harsh angles. But with darkness it’s transformed itself into a neon wonderland: sprays and spoutings of illuminated fluorescents. Sidewalk trees, storefronts, and a bonanza of billboards are adazzle with flashing bulbs. I can’t say for sure, because my one remaining contact lens is smeary, but there even seems to be a nighttime amusement area not far from the hospital, where a series of colored fountains provides a blinking liquid backdrop to a promenade on which couples seem to be…figure-skating? Whirling each other round and round?

I’m a sucker for neon, especially when it’s in a language I can’t decipher, and am cheered by its fluid warmth. But a few blocks on, Larry thinks he reads messages in the garish squiggles.

“Did you notice all the massage parlors in this town, Dan?”

“Where?”

“There! There! We just passed another one! You’re going to have a good time in this town.”

It’s like a Rorschach test, I think. He’s managing to read into these foreign graphics every kind of fantasy vision. And just like Larry to use such a grandmotherly word as “parlor.” Well, I suppose there’s something to it. If I squint, I can see some of those letters looking vaguely like a woman’s legs. Or hips. Wiggling hips, because the neon’s moving. Wait a minute-those are breasts being advertised there! The target of neon squirts and spumes. Larry’s right: There are massage parlors all over the joint! With real-life hostesses in ankle-length gowns beckoning real-life customers, all washed in vivid, reflected color.

“Let’s just call it Massage Central,” Larry suggests. “The real city name is too hard to pronounce anyway.”

Larry is still coming off the high of mealtime. The attention of so many female medical residents at dinner has apparently made him feel munificent toward womankind. He directs his attention to Jade in the front seat. “What do you do, dear? Dan tells me you’re a grad student. What are you studying?”

“Foreign relations.”

“From what I can see, I’d say you’re already very successful at foreign relations,” he tells her. “As Dan may have already told you, I am a professor. Here I’m just a poor schmuck of a patient, but at home, if I ever manage to get back there, they call me sir.”

“What you professor of?”

“Customarily I teach negotiation, which I can tell Dan thinks is just a fancy term for haggling. I also teach mediation from time to time and as such am called upon to mediate complex legal cases. High-status people from the top echelons of society come to me for advice.”

“Is that true?” I ask.

“Moderately,” he says. “Have you ever been to America, dear?”

“I have never been on a plane,” she offers.

The more we drive, the more Larry’s good mood drains off. Soon munificence gives up the ghost. He has cycled through many moods in the hours since Mary left, trying to find equilibrium, and now he has to add fatigue to the mix, as well as nervousness about moving into the darker reaches of China. He’s finally allowing it to hit him that Mary’s gone.

“I don’t feel very well,” he says, commencing a series of wet hiccups. “Usually I would go to bed after exerting myself as I have today. I don’t take a car ride like this ordinarily.”

“No one takes a car ride like this ordinarily,” I say.

It’s rush hour now, so the breakdown lane also contains shards of cinder block, wrecked dishwashers, and the occasional vehicle driving the wrong way. We seem to have mistakenly gotten onto a secondary truck route, a dusty road with a red light every half mile or so, squashingly full of thirty-six-wheelers, none of which keeps our driver from nodding off for four and five seconds at a stretch. In order to find the correct highway, for a time we’re the ones driving the wrong way in the breakdown lane. Eventually we find the right road, but this presents us with a new issue.