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

And always, Larry loving Girl Scout cookies-which is at least one memory I can do something about, right here and now.

“Here, want one? I say, holding out a Caramel de Lite. “For courage?”

“Too sugary,” he says, taking a flaky dry Chinese pastry instead.

I don’t know what to say, so I get busy with my hospital duties.

10:14 P.M. I scramble to make calls to Larry’s bankers and lawyers, fax a letter giving his broker the hospital’s routing number.

10:17 P.M. Get verbal confirmation that thirty-two thousand American dollars are winging their way to China.

10:21 P.M. At Larry’s request I reach his lawyer at her vacation ranch in Wyoming, ask her to fax Larry’s living will.

10:22 P.M. Do we know where our donor is? Is he having his final dinner?

10:23 P.M. We receive a fax with written confirmation that money is in transit. Show this to Cherry.

10:29 P.M. Larry says, “Why do I feel I’m about to flunk my final pilot’s test?”

10:31 P.M. Larry says, “I’m not deluding myself about what a long shot this is.”

10:26 P.M. Do we know where our donor is? Is he is being walked from his final holding cell?

10:35 P.M. “Everything clicking like clockwork,” Cherry reports. “Organ on its way.”

“The donor, too, or just the kidney?” I ask.

Cherry and the Judy look-alike exchange a giggle. “Just the kidney, really,” Cherry says.

10:37 P.M. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. It’s the waifs from candeyblossoms.com. I’m pretty sure I canceled the account, but I guess they’ve found new ways to get around it.

10:37 P.M. Just as I’m closing my laptop so there’ll be no more interference, I receive another e-mail from the Disapproving Docs, saying that unless I assure them that Cousin Burton’s life is not in danger, they retain the option of reporting us to the FBI.

10:38 P.M. The computer is successfully shut down.

10:39 P.M. My cell phone rings. It’s Jeremy with a new bagel he wants me to listen to, but I don’t have time right now and have to cut it short. What’s he doing home on a school day anyway? Is he faking sick again?

10:40 P.M. A visibly nervous Larry asks Cherry if she can sit on his bed with him.

“This may come as a shock,” he tells her, “but my self-assurance fails me in certain situations, and this may be one of them.”

“Yes, of course,” Cherry says, seating herself and taking his hand.

10:40 P.M. I think about how much gentler “yes, of course” is than the French “mais oui,” which always carries a hint of exasperation in it. I think about how I’ve seen no exasperation among the Chinese these entire two months. I think that twenty-five years ago the Chinese appeared brutal to me, with policemen pulling citizens by their hair, but that this time the Chinese have the face of Cherry, the face of Jade.

10:41 P.M. I recover a repressed memory that I did in fact take a semester of French in college. Yuh-vonne’s fact file was correct! It was on the pass-fail system, as I recall, and I didn’t exactly distinguish myself…

10:42 P.M. Still holding Larry’s hand, Cherry takes a phone call and then says, “Sorry to report we need more cash money for antirejection medicine. Ten thousand RMB.”

“But Larry’s account is maxed out till tomorrow,” I tell her.

“Must find a way,” she says.

10:43 P.M. I race out of the hospital with my own MasterCard, which I hope still has enough credit on it to fulfill the hospital’s request. As I’m racing back with a giant wad of cash in my pocket, I glimpse oily roasted peanuts through the window of a nearby market. And I haven’t had a bite to eat since this morning.

10:48 P.M. Large paper bag of peanuts in tow, I race back into the hospital, just as a dusty ambulance is pulling up the entranceway.

10:48 P.M. Meet the surgeons coming up the elevator from their basement dorm room. They’re in their early thirties, wearing blue jeans, just waking up from an evening nap in preparation for the midnight surgery. They won’t let me take their picture, and they let me know that Dr. X is meditating before procedure and cannot be disturbed.

10:49 P.M. I’m greeted by Mary outside our room, waving her hands and cheering, “Yay-yay Larry!”

10:50 P.M. “I’m a creative type,” Larry is saying to the Judy look-alike, who is swabbing his tummy with alcohol and painting arrows. Or maybe what he’s saying is “I’m afraid of heights.” With all the extra bodies in here, the acoustics aren’t great right now.

10:51 P.M. While Larry drinks something that will empty his bowels, Cherry walks me down to the cashier on the fifth floor to deposit the latest money into Larry’s account. At this hour the place is even more deserted than usual, but Cherry keeps ringing the bell until the cashier shows up and runs my ten thousand RMB through her handy counterfeit-checking machine. A line more or less forms behind me. Someone tries to cut in front of me, but I block him from doing so. Cashier says something that makes the crowd laugh.

“What’d she say?” I ask Cherry.

“She make little joke,” Cherry informs me. Instant Inscrutable. I could live here thirty years and never plumb the depths of that one.

10:53 P.M. In the elevator going back up, I ask Cherry: “What’d you mean before when you said, ‘Just the kidney, really’?”

“I mean donor is brain-dead, freshly executed, but still alive on life support. Body with kidney coming in ambulance.”

I stop eating peanuts mid-munch. “I just saw an ambulance pull in when I went out for money,” I say. “Could that have been him?”

“Doubtful,” she says thoughtfully. “He come in regional ambulance, probably dusty.”

“This one was dusty.”

“Okay, that is him.”

10:53 P.M. Now we know where our donor is. The dead horse has indeed come to the live horse-but only because the Chinese government has put the dead horse to death.

10:54 P.M. On way back to Larry’s room, I stop in Abu’s hallway to give everyone the news. As usual, the competition’s deadly quiet, but it stops for the minute it takes them to partake of some of my peanuts, a silent moment we share on Larry’s behalf, no less reverential for being full of munching mouths.

10:56 P.M. On my return I see that Larry is wearing a black and gold yarmulke.

“Don’t worry, it’s only a loaner,” he tells me. “I need all the luck I can get.”

10:56 P.M. Downstairs, the donor’s body is being wheeled through the lobby, elevated to the top floor, where it’s placed in an operating room next to the one where Larry will be.

“Two rooms side by side,” Cherry informs me amiably. “One to remove, one to receive.”

10:59 P.M. Larry’s transferred from his bed to the gurney in preparation for the trip to the elevator while Cherry escorts Mary and me as closest kin, sort of, to the tenth-floor “Conversation Room,” where the anesthesiologist produces a form to sign. Cherry reels off the list of possible “sad effects”: heart attack, throat damage, on and on. I sign as Mary rubs her crucifix anxiously.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I tell the anesthesiologist who declines my peanuts.

11:06 P.M. When I get back to Larry’s room, he’s entertaining the Judy look-alike with a brand-new mini-saga:

“Does the name Rockefeller mean anything to you? Bunch of robber barons from the 1890s. But Jay Rockefeller is senator from West Virginia, one of the smartest men in Congress. Way back, doing graduate work at Harvard, he ended up renting the downstairs of my Aunt Esther’s house, fairly homey two-family structure on Sacramento Street. One day Jay’s car doesn’t work. Esther calls my futha for help, Sam knows where to get a good used battery, needs five bucks to pay the guy, but Jay has already taken a cab to go about his day. Sam pays for the battery, installs it, car runs fine, Jay’s ever so grateful. But he’s never around when Sam is. And Sam doesn’t want the five bucks back anyway. For the rest of his life, Sam gets to tell people that a Rockefeller owes him five bucks.”