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

He interrupts himself. “Mary, that’s more than enough piles, thank you. Could you call the nurses’ station and ask them to send us a fan? I want to make Dan as comfortable as I can. A fan, a fan?” He makes whirring motions with both arms until Mary grasps what he means and tentatively picks up the phone.

“Another thing,” Larry says to me. “For the first time, she appealed to me directly for money, sixty-six dollars U.S. That rounds out to five hundred RMB.”

“Did she ask for sixty-six dollars or five hundred RMB?” I ask.

“Sixty-six dollars. Sounds smaller that way,” Larry says. “Clever girl.”

Meanwhile clever girl is talking to the nurses’ station. “Call…fan. Call…fan,” she’s saying into the receiver. With her other hand, she undoes the top of her fur coat to let a little air in.

“What’s with the crucifix, by the way?” I ask Larry, seeing it glinting there in the opening. “It’s more chic than an air freshener, I’ll give you that, but did she become Catholic all of a sudden?”

“As far as I can make out, it’s more a good-luck token than a fashion statement,” Larry explains unhelpfully. Mary gives up on the phone and sets herself to new, non-pistachio-related business.

“So how’d you respond to her appeal?” I ask him.

“I gave her half. I gave her sixty-six dollars,” Larry says with satisfaction. “Two can play this game.”

“Larry,” I say, “that’s whole. Sixty-six is whole.”

Larry thinks about this. I expect him to say, “Oh, sorry, my head.” Which would worry me enough. But instead he says something that worries me more. He says, “Look how she’s going after my blackheads now. Bofe shoulders. Try getting an American girl to do that.”

“Larry,” I say, gripping him on his soft arm, “I need you to know this. My jury’s really out on this person. Starting with the fact that she’s not who she said she was.”

“Few of us are.”

“But think about it. Maybe all we need to know about her is that she claimed she was five foot two?”

“Or maybe that she keeps taking a ten-hour train ride to save me airfare?”

“Or maybe that she said she was fluent in English?”

“But she bought me bananas the other day,” Larry counters. “Not that I could stomach them, but still it was a nice gesture, I felt.”

“Hmmm,” I say, holding up my hands as if weighing two sides of a difficult equation. “Bananas, fraud; fraud, bananas.”

“Her language is improving,” Larry says.

“I’ll take your word for it,” I say.

“She’s sacrificed a lot for me, being here so many days.”

“And been well compensated for it.”

“She’s willing to look after me all my life.”

“Which you hopefully won’t need, since getting you back on your feet was the idea for coming here. Larry, her name’s not even Mary, maybe that’s the long and short of it.”

Mary doesn’t even look up at the sound of the familiar syllables. I feel like we’re conducting a test for a deaf person in an old movie.

“Do you think maybe she’s retarded?” Larry asks me then. “Maybe that’s where I got the erroneous idea that her son was retarded, because I’m pretty sure the word ‘retarded’ was in there somewhere in our early negotiations.”

I reflect on the acrylic sweater that Mary recently bought me with Larry’s credit card, of questionable use in this stifling heat. “It’s an attractive supposition, but I don’t think-”

“Fan!” Mary announces with sudden impatience. “I get now me!”

The second she’s out the door, Larry begins pointing to the corner behind the dresser. “The stash is over there,” he says with no emotion.

“Stash? Oh, come on, Larry, we’re not in enough danger without you deal-”

“Not that kind of stash,” he says. “Mary’s stash. Look.”

I’ve seen animal stashes before, where squirrels stockpile parts of nuts along with stray twigs and bottle caps, and that’s what this shopping bag of hospital throwaways resembles. Gauze pads. Rubber bands. Shower-curtain rings.

“I don’t know what to think,” Larry says with some embarrassment, as if the quality control is far below his standards. “It’s like we’re on the same page about so many things, but then I see her hoarding these things away.”

“Could she possibly be hoarding them for you?”

“Except I’m not in the habit of using Tampax,” he points out. “Plus, there’s the issue of the phone bill…” Larry hands me a receipt that totals four hundred dollars for the past two weeks.

“Just from the phone in our suite?” I say, pocketing the bill in disbelief.

Suddenly Larry seems to sag, jellying down in defeat. “I’ve had it with this country,” he says. “I’m so sick of the pillows, they’re like beanbags full of I don’t know what, kidney beans maybe, that crackle under my ear.”

“Really? I kinda like ’em.”

“I have no doubt you do. I don’t. You have the security of the upper middle caste, so temporary squalor may not bother you, but it does bother me. I just want to go home. Everyone sounds like Desi Arnaz. When I want something, they say uh-huh, uh-huh, and nuffing happens. I try to tell myself it’s not so different here, but then I see something like hospital administrators in a conference room Dancercising with Chinese fans, and it throws me. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, Dan, it’s just that I come from America, the toilet-paper capital of the world, and here I have to mime to wipe my ass-”

“I brought us some new rolls this morning,” I remind him.

“Gee, just when I was getting used to using the paper money,” he says. “But seriously, the M &M’s don’t taste the same, nuffing’s the same, everything tastes like China. And you know why everyone squats in this country, Dan, instead of sitting? I finally figured out why. It’s because every single spot has been peed on. Think about it: For thousands of years, millions of people have finally managed to hit every inch. And have you noticed how everyone keeps saying, ‘nigga nigga nigga-’”

“That’s just a filler-type word, Larry. It’s the equivalent of our ‘mmhmm.’”

“I’m not judging, Dan. I’m just saying it offends me. I’m doing my best not to say ‘Chink,’ and this is how they repay me, by getting to say that?”

“Okay,” I say, “but to be fair, none of this is Mary’s fault.”

“It’s all part of my horrible China experience,” Larry says. “Plus which, I can’t get a word out of Mary about her family. I don’t know if they’re a bunch of opium addicts or what. And her health is iffy. Apparently she’s had swelling of the ankles for two years, but she won’t let me get anyone in the hospital to look at them. So what it all boils down to, I can’t trust my database of emotions anymore. You’re supposed to be my sous-chef or whatever the term is-what do you think?”

A pause while I get to watch Larry clean the inside of his ears with a piece of hardworking tissue paper before depositing it in the orangey remains of his McFish chowder. Motorcycles pass by on the street nine stories below, sounding like a parade of broken lawn mowers.

What I think is, Mary’s come back with a fan. Against all odds, she’s not carrying a vacuum cleaner trailing a river of lint, or a stovepipe ripped out of some peasant’s hut, or a diseased dachshund she’s planning to cook. She’s bringing in a real live fan, and she’s plugging it into a real live socket. That goes in the credit column. But what I also think is that there’s this thing Mary does with her mouth that’s not pretty, like she’s getting ready to spit pig’s knuckles out on a tablecloth. I also think that every time we’ve shared a taxi, she makes Larry slide across the backseat, instead of letting him sit where it’s easiest for him and going around herself to the opposite door. I also think that from the beginning she’s always gotten us lost in this, her country; that she smells like she’s been sneaking into Larry’s Aqua Velva aftershave; that she talks on the phone to people in low tones, and when, to be conversational, I ask what she’s talking about she says, “Talking bout.”