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

“You don’t have to, cuz.”

“But I want to prove I’m not a schnorrer, taking more than I’m entitled to.”

“Larry, you know what this sounds like? This sounds like your mother yelling, ‘Yoo-hoo, Irving, I’m only taking a warm Coke.’ Larry: Take everything you need. You’re entitled.”

“Thank you, Dan. Oh, that calms me down. Oh, you have no idea. You’re like my consigliere. I still want to figure out what it was you said into the mike at my bar mitzvah, I’m getting compulsive now, I know it’s in my mind somewhere-”

“Shh, now,” says Jade, reaching back and taking his hand again. And like that he closes his eyes and falls asleep. Maybe it’s the visual overload, maybe it’s the sleep deprivation or the heat, but he’s been laboring through his moods at such a dizzying rate, from despair to pirate cheer, struggling to keep himself afloat, that he’s worn himself out. Like magic, the talking ceases.

Jade and I look in each other’s eyes. We’re each a little shy at having witnessed these words of his.

“Torrible,” she says quietly.

“Yes, it is,” I say. With blurry vision I look at the diminished hulk of Larry, not snoring, barely breathing. I look back in Jade’s eyes that emit no light, infinitely grateful she’s shared this ride with us.

“Do you have anything to snack on?” I ask her quietly. “Mooncakes?”

“I am very very sick of mooncakes in my entire life,” she replies. “Please I give you some jum?”

“Okay, but only if you promise never to pronounce it ‘jum.’”

Studiously to herself she practices her hard g while she unsnaps her purse and takes out a piece of Trident, extending it to me gingerly, like feeding a deer through the fence at a petting zoo. “Sugarless, good strawberry!” she says, but she says it quietly, with sadness.

We watch our charge dozing, almost like he’s our child, our brutal spawn, something we’re caring for together, a tender beast hiccupping in his sleep, adjusting his position every now and then to alleviate his back spasm.

“Were you able to understand most of what he was saying?” I ask her.

“Some of it. When he is talking, I am thinking of my futha,” she says-it’s peculiar how her Chinese accent sounds like Larry’s speech impediment; his is a handicap and hers is an intonation, but it all levels out-“he always say, ‘Do not pity! Be strong!’”

Her eyes bulge for a second, turn shiny. With a little darting gesture, she reaches back into her purse for a tissue and apologetically dabs her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “Miss my parents.”

I pat her hand, let it go.

“Were they affectionate with you when you were growing up? You know, stroke you and sing you songs? Affectionate?”

“You spell?”

“A-f-f-e-c-”

Slowly she spells it out in the air, and then quickly her face lights up, before dimming again. “No, is different in China. My futha no show affectionate, only this: ‘Stahdy! Stahdy hart!’”

She mimics her father’s harsh voice so well I can hear it-his worry for her, his dreams for her. For a minute I even think I glimpse Larry’s father, Sam, on her features, but it goes away as swiftly as it comes.

“He wants you to study hard and make something of yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Do your parents ever tell you they love you?”

“No!” She’s taken aback. “In China not considered polite.”

“What about your grandparents?”

“No!” She’s even more scandalized by this thought. If she didn’t trust me as a friend, I think this question would be giving her doubts about me. “But in their heart, very deep, no words for it.” She is dabbing again. “My futha-”

“Yes?”

“He says I am naïve.”

The word comes out perfectly pronounced. Naïve.

“Of course you’re naïve,” I say. “If naïve means tending to feel simply for people, and to simply forgive, I’m naïve too, in that sense. Just so long as you don’t let people take advantage of you, it’s a blessing to be naïve. It’s something you should try to always be.”

She nods, naïvely, dabbing her eyes. We nod back and forth, with great naïveté that we wish to hold on to. It is almost like a vow between this Chinese daughter and her adopted American father. Again I feel this impulse to protect her, to safeguard the passage of moods on her face like the phases of the moon in fast motion. Together we look over the brute slumped in the seat, a spot of moisture locked into the corner of his twitching eyeball.

“I am in torment about Larry tears,” she says.

“Me, too,” I say.

The one who strikes first will gain control of others.

Every time I see the vamp quints, the team of beautiful receptionists at Larry’s discount hotel, I hear the songs from those old Robert Palmer videos. “Simply Irresistible.” “Addicted to Love.” Next morning when Jade picks me up and together we go to collect him, Jade stays in the reception area to scrutinize the bill while I go up to Larry’s room with a roll of yellow tape to fix his suitcase that’s falling apart. Involuntarily, my nostrils sniff the air in his room-an unlikely odor of cardamom and rifle grease. “You having intestinal trouble, on top of everything else?” I ask.

“I’ve gone over it and over it and can’t figure out what gave it to me. Was it the Lemon Chalet Creme cookies I had for breakfast? One of them had like a black spot on it. Something in the batter?”

I see a glass of germ-sweating, bacteria-festering tap water next to his bed.

“Uh, Larry, I think I may have an idea why…”

His jumbo suitcase is bursting, but I set to work binding it back and forth and up and down. Presto, we’re good to go. But then: “Larry, what’s that crate over there?”

“That’s my porcelain tea set,” he explains. “I have innumerable godchildren at home, and I need to bring things to them. They’re a big responsibility.”

“Larry, that’s going to be a bitch to tote around.”

“The other ones aren’t as big,” he says.

“What ‘other ones’?”

He points to three other crates behind the sofa. He’s wrong-they’re bigger. “Sixty bucks for each tea set,” he says. “You know how hard that was to pass up?”

The elevator’s on the fritz, so I lug each crate down the stairs one after the other and line them up on the blazing sidewalk of the courtyard outside the reception office. When all four are lined up, the hotel manager, a slick-haired sharpie who apparently feels he knows how to deal with this customer, comes out clucking.

“Larry, Larry, Larry,” he says, “what are we going to do with you? You have to consolidate.”

The manager produces a large cardboard box, and I go to work packing the various tea sets into it when Jade intervenes. “Not too crispy to carry?” she asks. “Please give me cell phone to ask my mather’s advice.”

“Uh-oh, did you give me back my cell phone, Dan?” Larry asks, fanning his face with a fat wad of Chinese money, gangster style.

“I never had your cell phone,” I say.

“Uh-oh,” Larry says. “I know I had it earlier this morning, when I was talking to Mary.”

“You were talking to Mary this morning?” I ask.

“Yes, didn’t I tell you? I reached her at her uncle’s, and the first thing out of her mouth is she loves me and wants to visit me when I get installed in the hospital.”

Jade and I look at each other in the heat. “Larry, that’s great news!” I say.

Larry starts wheezing through his nose, a sort of nose hiccups, whether out of excitement or his condition, I’m not sure. But we’re still minus a cell phone. The vamp quints are happy to turn the courtyard upside down, looking behind flowerpots and inside drainpipes.