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

“I schlep again soon. Bullet train so fast I come and go many quickies!” She looks around bewildered. “So where is evidence for this meal?”

I hold up the bill. She tries to snatch it but misses.

“My treat,” I say.

“Nice thought, but don’t even think it,” Larry says, snagging it from my fingers like one of those frogs with a lightning-fast tongue. It’s the first thing he’s said in an hour.

At the station I’m still not sad. I’ll see Jade again soon. Larry will somehow come around to springing for the surgery, whatever the cost. Everything seems doable, even the notion of transplanting a living organ from one human body into another. What’s the big deal? You slice it out of one person and you stitch it into another person. “Danny Boy” seems the right thing to hum as Larry and I walk Jade to her track.

“Thank you again,” I tell her.

“Don’t always say ‘sank you,’” she says with impatience. “Normally in my country, if you are friends or you are family, you do not say.”

“Oh, it’s understood, like ‘I love you,’” I say.

“Yes, too stupid to say.”

I stand corrected. Not to say reprimanded. But nothing can wreck my mood. I push her shoulder slightly. “I nudge you,” I say.

“Exactly!” she says, looking pleased as she pushes my shoulder slightly back. Emboldened suddenly, she reaches her fingertips to my chin. “I do?” she asks, touching my goatee experimentally. It’s the first time she’s dared to touch my face, but she must feel safe, because we’re well chaperoned by our Spanish duenna. “So like wire,” she says and shivers slightly. “I think this night I will have sweet dreams,” she says.

I do not answer this. It’s in my wedding vows.

From an invisible distance, trains chug, firecrackers ignite.

Down the lonely platform, we see a fuzzy figure all by herself, swaggering under many pieces of luggage. The poor thing must have missed her train or be lost or something. But now the figure is waving, making noises, all but yodeling to us. Let’s listen:

“Larry-Mary! Mary-Larry!”

I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming? Swaying under her baggage, sweating like a rhino in Larry’s mother’s fur coat, it’s Mary, returned from her open pit of a city near the Korean border, back to her beloved. “I bring you mashed!” she says, waving a bag of KFC.

“Huwwo, Mary,” Larry says evenly as he accepts a hug without emotion. “I thought not till next week. Any case, thank you for coming.”

We wave Jade off on her train. We bring Mary back with us in a cab.

One woman out, one woman in.

“Danny Boy” dies in my throat. I was wrong. There was something that could wreck my mood.

Quarreling is like cutting water with a sword.

So now we are three again. A new three. Group dynamics have changed. The Gang of Two rules the suite.

The only way a truce can work is for Larry and me to give each other as wide a berth as possible. Immediately we set up some house rules. The door between our two rooms is to remain closed. He seals his and Mary’s room so it can stay tropically heated; I allow mine to cool at night by keeping my windows open. When we need to initiate communication, we’ll use the phone. Or at the very least knock. Larry accepts the conditions, but not happily.

“You make me sound like a manipulator even to myself, Dan, as though I planned this arrangement. Did I ask for Mary and you and me to end up in the same cell block? Go home if you want. Leave me to my own devices. I don’t care. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

The preceding was for rhetorical purposes only; we both understand the situation. Luckily, there are still reserves of goodwill that we can draw upon, and the door clicks cordially between us. All that can be heard is the sound of the lullaby piped in overhead through the soft-speakers. Three blind mice, three blind mice…

No, actually that’s not the only sound that can be heard. The passage of hours, then days, brings further intimacies, as I discover to my chagrin that I can’t avoid overhearing the housekeeping between them.

“I’ll brush my hair myself, Mary… Because I like brushing my hair, that’s why…”

See how they run, see how they run…

Mealtimes are always interesting. The din from Chez Larry-Mary usually begins with the popping open of a Coke can, punctuated by celestial screeches from Mary when she gets ambushed each time by a burst of fizz in her face. Then even happier sounds as she drops two or three artificial sweeteners into her brew and savors the result. “Goooooooooood…” Then domestic tranquillity, for a while, as they settle into their meal and work out mutual misunderstandings in their own way.

Mary: “What is?”

Larry: “McFish of some sort, except the KFC variety. Can you hand me my Blistex…no, not my reading glasses…thank you…”

Silence. Contrapuntal chewing.

“Mary, can you open another Coke for me?…I would happily do it myself, Mary, if I were strong enough… Thank you, Mary… On the subject of fish, can you ask the nurse what kind of fish this medicine comes from? I can see from the illustration on the box it’s supposed to swim in water, but-”

“Fish.”

“I know that, but what sort of fish?”

Mary goes into a hubbub with the nurse, while the refrigerator squawks, coughs, and recovers-to come up with this answer:

“Fish-fish.”

When I go to the bathroom, I tiptoe through their tropical room and glimpse them like any normal couple: he hunched in hospital robe and Businessman’s Running Shoes, going through his closet, she sprawled in fur coat and hairnet, devotedly cracking pistachio nuts for him. Overheard in passing, a disquisition on his wardrobe, snatched midstreak:

Bought this jacket at a Hadassah thrift store sale in Hallandale, Florida. Fifty cents. It’s thirty dollars in the catalog. Keeps the rain off, more or less. Now this clip-on bow tie I found at a Cub Scout bake sale in-

Sometimes they bicker, but usually they both show an impressive amount of patience for each other, watching the Chinese weather channel for hours in harmonious silence. After which conversation resumes in respectful tones.

“Storm predicted.”

“Ummm, storm!”

“You like your food?”

“Hot.”

“I know it’s hot, Mary. Hot wings means hot. I like it, too.”

And so forth. I don’t know how he’s pulled it off. Right here in the middle of the East Asian landmass, a configuration of lofty mountain ranges and vast areas of inhospitable terrain, Larry’s managed to recreate the dinner-table conversations between Sam and Rivie in Lynn, Massachusetts, circa 1962.

Meanwhile we seem to be getting the runaround from Cherry. Two weeks come and go like nothing, and still there’s no sign of a kidney. I decide against hounding Dr. X but think there should be some sort of progress report. “You sure the dead horse is coming to the live horse?” I ask Cherry.

“I am sure. Maybe off by just one-two weeks, because first week of October is national holiday, or some screwup possible, quite minor.”

“And it’s not going to leak out to the authorities?”

“Chill, Daniel. Do not ransack yourself.”

Agreed: I should not ransack myself. It’s high time to get the silence and space I need. Fortunately, to this end, the elevator goes both up and down.

“Hello, Saudi Arabia,” I say to my friends in long robes, whom I haven’t seen in weeks.

“Hello, America,” they say to me. “Bush still suck, eh?”

“Big time.”

“Beeg time, beeg time.” They parse my words.

As usual, the women of the second floor are invisible-the Pakistani wives in blue shawls, the Egyptian mothers in head scarves and beads, the Yemenite sisters with wide belts and swaying hips. It’s the men who speak loudly, gesture broadly, pop their pecs before serving the birdie. But you get the feeling it’s the women behind the scenes who are conducting life, quietly making it all happen.