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

“Call the cell-phone number,” the hotel manager suggests, and soon there’s a faint ringing from inside the suitcase I bound with yellow tape.

“Does anyone have scissors?” I inquire. One of the quints produces a cigarette lighter, pale flame flickering in the sunshine. “No, I mean the kind that cut?”

Snip, snip, snip. I take out everything from Larry’s suitcase, all the clip-on neckties, the three-piece suits made in Albania, the corn-and-callus cushions, everything packed in with funereal precision. And this: hard copies of all my books as well as CDs of my aunt the harpsichordist soloing at Boston ’s Jordan Hall. “I’m proud of my family,” he says defiantly when he spies my dumbfounded look. “The few who aren’t trying to screw me over.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to cart our products all over Asia,” I say. “They’re not even my paperback editions.”

He sends me a helpless look, which I translate as: These were the ones on sale. He doesn’t even have to say it. He couldn’t anyway, because the nose hiccups have gotten worse.

No sooner do we find the cell phone among his antifungals than Larry wonders where his MasterCard is. “Could it be in your bag?” he asks.

I don’t see how, but I open mine, too, just in case. Not there, of course, but Larry gets a gander at the title of one of the books I’m carrying-Middlesex-and pops a devilish gleam.

“Never off duty, are you?” he says to me admiringly.

“Did you check your back pockets?” I ask, patting him down. Frisking my cousin on his diminished, no-longer-round rear end is not something that a month ago I ever imagined I’d be doing.

Sure enough, there’s the MasterCard, bright and shiny.

“Tea sets too crispy,” Jade announces, clicking shut Larry’s cell phone. “My mather says I will arrange a shipping company to send them to Larry direct.”

We give Larry’s address in America to Jade and make her promise to forward the bill to us at the hospital. Larry insists that we hold on to one crate of teacups for safekeeping. “I can’t afford not to get at least one set out of this,” he says.

I use a few of the luxury hotel’s washcloths I seem to have taken with me to wrap his tea-set pieces, along with my wolf skull, then seal the suitcase up tight.

“Game on,” the hotel manager says, sending one of the vamp quints off on a bicycle to fetch a taxi, the black bobbin of her hairdo bouncing over the potholes.

“Good man,” I tell the manager. “I don’t know how we can repay all your kindness.”

“When Larry send me forty hot coeds to rent rooms for exchange program, that will be payment enough,” he says.

“Larry worked out a deal with you?”

“Why do you think I’m doing this?” he says with a chortle, rubbing his fingertips together. I can’t believe he actually says that, and out of the side of his mouth yet. Isn’t that the sort of thing you’re supposed to keep to yourself? Okay, so they’re not all helping us out of the goodness of their hearts. Jade and I exchange a smile anyway, part of our pact to retain naïveté.

The taxi’s here, but by the time I’ve loaded it with our belongings, Larry is entertaining the vamp quints again. “Does the name Red Auerbach mean anything to you?” he asks.

“Larry, you don’t have to pile it on so deep,” I tell him. “They already like you enough! Can’t you see how they’re twittering?”

“Beneath my somewhat brash exterior, I’m a very insecure person,” he says.

“If it doesn’t work out with Mary, I’m sure any one of these ladies would be happy to run off with you to your condo in Pembroke Pines. Don’t say it-I know you’re devoted to Mary. But hey, you want to seal the deal, watch this: Ladies, not that you know what this means, but Larry here is a charter member of Mensa, the brain club in America.”

“IQ of one thirty-one,” Larry protests with genuine modesty. “That means I’m the dumbest member, with the absolute lowest number they’ll accept. And now of course my disability cost me twenty-two points.”

“What is with you, cuz? I try to talk you up, and you cut my legs out from under me!”

“I don’t like to boast about my real accomplishments, only my pseudo ones.”

Shrugging the way an ancestor must have shrugged on the streets of Minsk three generations ago, he hobbles to the street, an old man in sunglasses, so pathetic that I take his elbow-chicken bones held together by a rubber band. Get used to it, I tell myself.

Jade accompanies us in the cab to a madhouse scene outside the train station. I remember being here twenty-five years ago, and the pushing and shoving has only increased with the millions of new people since then.

“Very exotic, looks like China,” Larry observes.

Jade’s in front pulling several suitcases on wheels, and I’m behind her doing the same, and Larry’s way behind, stepping gingerly around the crumbling tiles of the plaza, when the cabbie we just left comes running up with a handful of bills. “Larry drop these!” Jade says, counting two thousand RMB and buttoning them into Larry’s breast pocket. I’m glad she doesn’t refer to him as Professor. Not that Larry doesn’t more or less deserve the title, but every time someone says it, I feel like I’m one of the con-man duo on Huck Finn’s raft. I couldn’t bear for Jade to fall for it.

“The cabbie won’t even take a tip,” Larry notes. “I like these people.”

They must like us, too, because in a minute a new cabbie with a cute dimple approaches and calls us “friend,” telling Jade that he lives in Shi and will take us there for a discount price.

“Another car ride on that road? Never,” Larry says, but Jade intervenes with some good sense. “You no have train ticket reserved,” she points out. “Maybe you don’t make train till much later? Also, maybe it so crowded you have to stand? Also, train station in Shi very far from hospital. You have to wait another taxi there. Maybe is better drive?”

“Up to you,” I tell Larry. “At least this cabbie looks more awake than yesterday’s.”

“Let’s do it,” Larry decides. The new cabbie with the cute dimple relieves Jade of her suitcases, and we follow him through the throng, getting sprayed by a street cleaner, me twisting my ankle but willing the pain away, looking in vain for a handicap ramp for our suitcases, another four blocks of broken tiles and sand before we come to the man’s undersize taxi.

“I think is safe,” Jade tells me when we’re loaded up and ready to go.

“‘Think’?” I say, chuckling at her wit. “What’s he gonna do, kidnap us?”

“Yes, I think not. I write down his number in case to call police.” She scribbles down his license on her small palm.

I look at her for what may be the last time, with no words to express my gratitude. “Jo yee, jo jang,” I say, trying to remember the friendship toast from twenty-five years ago. “Yo yee or yay yee, something like that-”

“Give it up.” Jade smirks with a shove to my shoulder.

This is farewell. I give her a chaste hug.

“Sorry I am sweaty,” she says.

“It’s the humanity,” I say, meaning “humidity.” I’m losing my English in the onslaught of so much Chinese.

“I hope you live,” she says, apparently without irony. My heart tugs as we drive away.

In the backseat, Larry and I are wet with perspiration, giving each other as much berth as possible. Both of us are a little out of breath, but Larry is already on to the next chapter of his life. “Better exhaust system than yesterday’s taxi,” he diagnoses. “I think the problem yesterday was there was a loose fitting where the muffler met the tailpipe. You know how many Packards I worked on when I was twelve? I was given a Coke for each muffler I changed.”