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

Larry takes off his sunglasses and gives me a Mona Lisa expression that says, I have no expression whatsoever. “Dan, you’re my cousin, and besides that you’re more or less my friend, so I’m going to do you a favor and say, ‘No comment.’”

I re-strain the muscle in my neck. Now it’s officially a crick. “I thought the fatwa was over, Larry. Larry?”

“You’re absolutely right, it was over,” he says, taking a tissue that serves as napkin to pat the drops of sweat that constellate his brow. “Then it became under again.”

“But you said it was done!”

“If you recall, I didn’t say it was done. What I precisely said was it was behind us, and it is behind us. Specifically, it’s behind Burton, not to get too anatomical.”

“But, Larry, here we are in China on a whole new page. What did Burton ever do to you that was so unforgiveable you can’t let it go?”

The Mona Lisa smile means he means business. “Dan, believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say he stabbed me in the back, trying to swindle my mutha.”

“But if you don’t tell me, how can I judge it for myself?”

“Who’s asking you to? I know what I know. That’s good enough for me.”

He spears another watermelon cube and sucks it thoughtfully for a minute. A cab races by the window. More more more more, goes its horn.

“Okay, bottom-line reason, sparing you the details? He said I owed him money, I said I paid him back. To teach me a lesson, he demanded a mortgage on my mutha’s house, saying it’ll be a learning experience for me, a growth experience. Long story short: My mutha died the worst kind of death, thinking she had lost her house and that Judy and I were left homeless. We were with her day and night at the hospital at the end, and she thought the only reasonable explanation was that she had lost everything to Burton and we had no home to go to. Yes, she was delusional, and we tried to convince her otherwise, but she was set on it, and she died in agony. She died sick with worry, and for this I blame Burton. For this he deserves everything coming to him. That’s why it’s not over.”

“But Burton didn’t get the house,” I protest.

“Doesn’t change anything. He tried.”

“But you’ve got to keep things in balance,” I say. “Didn’t you tell me a couple of days ago that you wouldn’t have been able to arrange the cure for Judy’s epilepsy if it hadn’t been for Burton?”

“Absolutely. He was an angel.”

“Then why-”

“That was then. This is now.”

I can feel my face doing funny things. It’s as though my eyebrows are trying to convince him out of it by sheer force of contortion. My neck muscle is seizing up. “But the FBI interviewed you last time, when they advised him to go to a motel for two weeks. You’ll be the first person they suspect.”

Now the Mona Lisa smile deepens a bit, so the toothpick can reach some deeper recess. “Let’s just say I have made arrangements,” he says. “To be dispatched upon my death.”

“You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”

“No, that’s the beauty part, because as soon as I’m dead, presto, the plan goes into effect. They can’t come back at me. Pretty sweet, huh? So in a way I hope Burton does find out where I’m going to have my surgery and does manage to squash it, because it’ll be his ass.”

I’m squinting through the smoke from tables everywhere, blinking much more than I want to. “So I’m assuming this is still a wake-up call rather than a fatwa fatwa, as you said. And Burton will survive it, right?”

“Yes. Whether he’ll want to, that’s a different question. Put it this way: It’ll be a learning experience for him. Like he prescribed for me. A growth experience. He thinks he rules the world. He’ll find out that he’s not even an ant in the real world.”

I’ve never heard such contempt packed into a single word as what he does with “ant.” He extracts his toothpick and points it at me.

“And you know the part I love best, Dan? That he thinks he’s safe. Oh, I relish that. This is my masterwork. I want to be remembered for this.”

“But, Larry, you don’t think something more moderate might be in order? Like challenge Burton in a court of law?”

“I’m not interested in paperwork. This is poetic justice. He screwed me up the ass, I’m returning the favor. And in front of his wife. That’s the part Killer especially liked. When Killer heard about my mutha on her deathbed, he said he couldn’t wait to take care of it personally. He was very attached to his mutha, too, apparently. Well, I already alluded to that. She called him ‘Button-Nose.’”

Larry’s eyes are dancing. Even the thought of the deed makes his eyes sparkle with happy menace. I haven’t seen him this animated since he was ten, doing his favorite trick of speaking Clint Eastwood lines into the fan: “I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.”

I look around the crimson restaurant, aghast. My eyes search out a TV for distraction. On the screen above the waiters’ station, they’re running a show about pandas. What is it with this country and pandas? Everywhere you look, pandas chewing on celery stalks, pandas batting one another playfully in the balls, pandas in positions that in any other species would be called obscene. They even have an expression for someone with droopy eyes: “panda eyes.” Enough with the pandas already. I make one last effort at denying Larry’s news.

“You’re gaming me, right? You’re hoping I get back to Burton with this so he freaks out all over again, even though in reality there’s nothing to it.”

“Oh, I like that version,” Larry says. “That adds a nice little bit of surrealism that even I couldn’t have dreamed up.”

“But that’s the truth, right? You never really issued the first fatwa against him. You were just blowing smoke to shake him up. You’d never do something like that to your own cousin, or anyone else for that matter. You just said it so he’d get anxious, and that would be punishment enough right there.”

“Good. Keep your head in the sand. That’s the version we’ll go with.”

“Because you’ve got the golden heart, even for people who cross you. I mean, you’re someone I’ve known my whole life, you’re not…evil…are you?”

“No, I like the first scenario. We’ll leave it at that. Why spoil a nice Friday-night duck feast. Good Shabbos, by the way. We ought to make this Peking duck a Friday-night tradition.”

The denial is over. I’m at one of the next stages of grief-depression-and am surprised at how weak and supplicating my voice comes out. “I really thought the feud was dead.”

“Not dead. Dormant. But I do have some good news.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve refined it somewhat. I now want the act recorded on film so it can be posted on YouTube.”

“Larry, I’ve got to tell you this is making me physically ill.”

“Don’t worry. It’s less than a grand. Killer gave me a discount-”

“I don’t mean how much you’ve had to shell out, Larry! I mean the idea of you doing bodily injury to a relative. To anyone!”

When have I ever seen eyes so merry with deadliness? And then it comes to me. At his father’s funeral. There was a man no one recognized at graveside. He stood right beside the casket, waiting patiently for it to be lowered. And when it was set into the ground, he was the first person to pick up the shovel and perform the traditional rite of casting dirt upon the grave. Only he did it with too much gusto. It’s meant to be symbolic, a reluctant drizzle of soil, but this grunting stranger heaved five, ten, twenty-five shovelfuls: He didn’t stop till his shirt was soaked through. It was only after the ceremony that it occurred to me he must have been someone with whom Sam had had a blood feud. Decades earlier, perhaps, the man must have vowed, “I’ll toss dirt on your grave!”