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

I can’t figure out which is worse-a morose Larry when he’s down or a garrulous Larry when he’s up. Also I’m a little heartsick at splitting from my adopted daughter. But at least this taxi ride seems to be better than yesterday’s, and we’re making better progress, too. Before an hour’s up, we’re in an unfamiliar landscape of cornfields and irrigation machinery. We’re not weaving nearly as much, either. “I paid him a little extra to not cut between trucks,” Larry explains.

Something about my hesitation makes him look at me.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing. It’s nice that you’re so generous with everyone. It’s just…”

“What?”

“I’d just start conserving money if I were you; we still don’t know how much the surgery’s going to cost. But hey, it’s your call. I’m not going to tell you how to spend your quarter mil.”

Something about his hesitation makes me look at him.

“You do still have a quarter mil, don’t you?” I ask.

“Life,” Larry says with a shrug.

“Yes, go on…”

“Life costs money,” he amplifies, “especially when you have a fiancée with champagne tastes, not that she isn’t worth every penny.”

I brace myself. “Larry, how much do you have left?”

“A little under sixty,” he says.

“Bullshit!” I explode. “The icicle/truck settlement was for two-fifty, after lawyers!”

“Shhh.”

“Shhh? What do you mean, shhh? Either you have it or you don’t.”

“I did have two-fifty, but it’s been going fast. Most of it already went to living expenses. The market is down. This trip is not cheap. Plus, the first thing I did with my winnings was pay off people I owed, which you have to admit attests to my decency as a human being, despite my image as a miscreant, which I cultivate, no question, it’s an ingrained habit. Bottom line, I’ve got maybe one-twenty left,” Larry concludes.

So that’s what shhh means. It means he has twice what he lets on. But it also means he has to husband his money carefully. This trip may not work, after all. If we don’t succeed in getting a new kidney, Larry will be too ill to make any more money.

“Okay,” I say, recalculating. “That doesn’t change the basic equation. It was still a good move for you to come to China, assuming the kidney comes in around eighty-five. Let’s do the numbers again. How much does a kidney transplant cost in the U.S.?”

“Two-fifty, vicinity. But insurance covers it at home.”

“But you have to wait ten years at home, which you aren’t willing to do. Plus, you mostly get a cadaver kidney at home, and here you get a live one. So it’s worth it to pay out of pocket here, right?”

“Look at that, a Russian gas station. Probably twenty percent water,” Larry says.

“Right?” I persist.

“That seems logical, yes,” Larry says.

“Plus, here they’re more experienced at the surgery, since they do so many more of them than at home.”

“Correct.”

“So it seems to me that you may be misoriented, but you got yourself to the right place. As long as you watch your pennies.”

Larry starts cracking his knuckles, a sign he’s feeling pressured. “I get it,” he says. “I have to preserve my nest egg. I’ll do my best.”

Progress. Hard won. I allow myself a moment of relief before attending to more pressing matters, like why we don’t recognize any landmarks whatsoever on our drive. Are we sure our cabbie understood our destination correctly? I tap the little plastic partition behind the cabbie’s head that insufficiently seals us off from him.

“Uh, hello, friend? We going Shi?”

“Friend, yes,” he assures us, nodding his dimpled cheeks up and down.

“Let’s just hope he’s not planning to cut our throats,” Larry suggests. “Jade didn’t sound all that sure on the kidnapping front.”

“We don’t understand this culture very well,” I remind him. “Let’s not second-guess what people mean every minute. Besides, they don’t kidnap people in China, as a general rule. That’s not their style.”

We go a few more miles in silence and pass a series of water tanks I’m sure we would have remembered from yesterday, if we’d seen them. I crack my knuckles-which I almost never do.

“What I don’t like,” Larry says after another minute, “is that this cabbie found us, we didn’t find him. Could be he saw my two luxury watches at the train station and figured I was worth trying to take down.”

He slides the bands of his watches around so they double as brass knuckles. “They’ll do in a pinch,” he says.

We stare at the faulty partition between the cabbie and us while I smell a hint of cardamom and rifle grease again.

“I saw the video of Danny Pearl’s last moments,” Larry says out of nowhere. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t see it.”

We sit in nervous silence for a few unfamiliar miles more, wheezing through our noses.

“Seriously, Dan, this could be worse than your being thrown in a Chinese jail cell.”

“It wasn’t really a cell, it was more like a little barracks room with bars, if you must know. But I really don’t want to think about it right-”

“Do you bear any scars on your body?”

“It wasn’t a Jack Bauer kind of deal,” I say, “it was-”

“More psychological torture,” Larry deduces. He scratches his butt discreetly for a while before taking another tack. “So what were you doing here anyway twenty-five years ago? Being like a freelance foreign correspondent?”

“That sounds more glamorous than it was,” I say. “Mostly I was getting away from my divorce.”

“Didn’t you teach the natives how to dance or something?”

He’s distracting me, I suddenly realize. He’s trying to help me like I was trying to help him yesterday, when he was the one feeling worse. He’s throwing me a lifeline, and you know what? I’ll take it.

“The year was 1984,” I begin, a little timidly. “The streets of Beijing were colorless and without music. No one seemed to have radios or record players. At least I never saw or heard any. The government was just starting to allow Western music in a few select venues. One of these venues was a banquet for some visiting American journalists. A film crew from the Ministry of Education followed us around recording our every move, presumably to broadcast nationwide for training purposes, teaching the masses how to catch up on certain officially sanctioned Western customs. The crew followed me behind the bar, where I demonstrated how to pour a Perfect Manhattan, which I freely confess was long on bourbon. They followed me to the dance floor, where, after a sufficient number of Perfect Manhattans, I was induced to demonstrate the Jerk. Long story short, as some people like to say, I may no longer be one of the worst dancers on the planet. Scary thought, but there may be a few million Chinese doin’ the Dan.”

“Ha ha, good one,” says Larry.

“Ha ha, thank you,” I say bashfully. Because Larry’s trick of distraction has actually worked. I feel better. I’m back to normal, acknowledging that there’s probably nothing awry with this cab ride. I just tend to get paranoid in this sort of situation. I’m the guy, after all, who carried the personal telephone number of notorious Lebanese kidnapper Abu Nidal in my wallet when I traveled through most of the eighties, courtesy of my Lebanese hairstylist, who promised that if I got kidnapped, that number would connect me with the chief honcho, who could spring me.

Without warning, our cabbie peels out onto a dirt road and starts signaling to another cab that pulls in right behind us.

“What just happened?” I say in alarm. “Did we just land ourselves in trouble?”