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

“Guys! The bar stays down!”

“I’m feeling encouraged now, Dan, I’m crawling out from beneath my blankets. Next Sunday? Next Sunday would be good.”

FIRST FIVE REASONS TO HANG UP THE SECOND YOUR LONG-LOST COUSIN ASKS YOU TO GO WITH HIM TO CHINA

Familially, you and he aren’t that close. You didn’t see each other all that much growing up, and, in fact, have been estranged for two decades.

Morally, what he’s suggesting is murky. C’mon, are we just another couple of arrogant First Worlders who think they can snatch an organ from the Third?

Medically, it’s even murkier. Take him away from his American doctors to find a foreign organ that may or may not be up to snuff?

Legally-let’s not even go there. Even Larry admits it’s illegal.

For all these reasons, and countless more that flood the brain, it’s clearly a fool’s errand.

So, case closed. It’s a few hours later, and the chairlift is shut down for the night. The kids are fast asleep in the darkened hotel room on either side of their sleeping mom in the king-size bed. With a light on in the adjoining bathroom and the door closed, I’m sitting in the empty bathtub Googling the words “transplant,” “kidney,” “cousin,” “death.” Just to satisfy myself that what Larry’s asking is preposterous.

Kidney: The organ that cleans blood, without which the body shuts down and dies.

Dialysis: The procedure to artificially clean blood when kidneys fail. The patient is hooked up to the dialysis machine at least three times a week for at least four hours per session, typically followed by twelve hours of addled sleep.

Transplant, waiting list: A dire situation. In America alone there’s a backlog of seventy-four thousand patients, forty-four hundred of whom died last year while waiting. Average wait is seven to ten years, longer if other medical problems make patient a less desirable recipient.

Transplant, options: Given the dismal prospects, more and more people around the world are crossing international borders to obtain the care they can’t get at home. So-called medical tourism is risky and controversial, but sometimes it’s the only viable option.

Transplant, donation: I’m off the hook, in case there was a question. Our DNA’s so distant it’s doubtful we’d have a match. Larry and I are probably as different in that division as we are in everything else.

Guilt: I don’t need to look that up. I know all about how Larry missed out on the privileges the rest of the family enjoyed. But is that any reason to consider raiding the home piggy bank, especially at a time when my books aren’t exactly feathering the nest? Of course not. No, no, the answer is no.

The tub’s getting crampy. I perform a couple more searches before shutting down the laptop. Oh, here’s a nice one now: kidneys, eaten. Apparently, back in 1968 at the height of the frenzy that was China ’s Cultural Revolution, several accounts report that the bestial Red Guards ate human kidneys as part of their revolutionary zeal. Simmered the corpses of their enemies in large vats, then fried their organs in oil.

Great place he’s asked me to revisit. Typical Larry.

I flick off the bathroom light and make my way across the hotel room by the glow of the moon coming through the curtain. For a minute I watch over the sacred sight that is my family in the moonlight. A vein ticks in each of their necks, blue and tender, right below the surface of the skin. A microscopic image comes to me from my Googling: the tips of two fifteen-gauge needles piercing a blood vessel for the dialysis procedure. Then, just as quickly, I’m into macroscopic mode, picturing the millions of haggard patients languishing on kidney lists around the globe.

Their veins ticking, too.

What was that memory Larry was alluding to? Bailing me out at his bar mitzvah? I have a faint recollection of the tubby thirteen-year-old mumbling his prayers into the microphone, softly impedimented, as though he had strawberries in his mouth. I remember feeling sorry for him. I remember feeling angry for him. But nothing beyond that. Something about a piece of cake…?

And then, more recently, something about Larry going to China alone, pathetically trying to find a kidney without me, dying over there all by himself? Or maybe that’s a memory that’s not supposed to happen?

I watch my wife and boys in the moonlight, pooling their body heat as they sleep. They’re healthy, thank God; Larry’s not. Luck of the draw. But why would I, flawed and fucked-up as I am, why would I desert my darlings to go half-cocked into business where I don’t belong?

Game plan: Why doesn’t my laptop have a link for that? Where’s the Web site to tell me what to do? But what if-being completely crazy here for a minute-what if I promise my family I’ll make it up to them, entrust the boys with feeding the ducks in our pond when they get home to Massachusetts, arrange to meet Larry in Beijing, and buy a round-trip ticket with the return date to be decided later? Then-still speaking theoretically-say we give it one week in China and another week or two in neighboring countries, just long enough to prove that it’s an impossible mission?

I yearn to stay and share in the body heat my family promises. A shiver of cold runs through me, to think how wrenching it would be to thrust myself into the vast beyond. I’d have to force myself to be extra chipper, and chipper is the last thing I feel.

Sleepily, I climb in among the bodies of my family, making four. Soon enough, in the cosmic scheme of things, each of us will end up going our separate ways to points unknown, but for this night we share a king-size bed. “Dad?” cries one of the boys, looking up startled. He takes my hand and curls it with him back to sleep.

I lie awake.

You cannot fight a fire with water from far away.

Commotion. On the next Sunday, I’m being driven from the Beijing airport through the sweltering smogshine that feels like a moist anvil on my head. I’ve managed to hustle an assignment from a magazine to report on the changes in Beijing since I was here twenty-five years ago-airfare and all expenses paid for one week. The hotel package comes complete for six days with this Red Flag limo, mercifully air-conditioned, and a fetching tour guide. Very fetching.

But what changes! Ole BJ has been buttered and Botoxed for the Olympics. Once a low-lying labyrinth of grainy neighborhoods, it now reminds me of Kryptonopolis in the early Superman comics, a futuristic metropolis with soaring trains and heatstroke-inducing architecture. All the feverish activity of twenty-five years earlier-men and women scampering across bamboo scaffolding like ants on a picnic plate-has resulted in a supersonic McCity of gleaming chrome and smoked glass and blue kryptonite-duplicator rays, for all I know. The effect is akin to going from the run-down department store that is your everyday life, with its faulty fluorescents and grimy escalators, into a strobe-lit video arcade. Snap, crackle, zap! Instead of those grandmothers you could still see a quarter century ago shuffling through the rag stalls with bound feet, movie starlets with French pedicures are mobbing the malls, impatiently stamping their designer sandals. The tour guides have changed, too-twenty-five years ago they were tight-lipped and severe, hiding their little hair buns in gray Mao caps. By contrast, the luxurious Yuh-vonne from Happy-Go-Luck Travel bounces flirtatiously, with nuclear pink highlights in her pageboy that’s like the mane of a punk thorough-bred.

“I like you shirt, blue and green!” Yuh-vonne says vivaciously, sitting in the leather-seated back with me while the driver bullies his way through the circuslike traffic. “Blue and green is good omen in China. Green thimble-ize humanity. Blue thimble-ize heaven, divine, all that. Red, what does red thimble-ize?”