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

“Hey, Larry,” I say, standing in the doorway. “That’s a good memory of your dad!”

“So it is,” he says, marveling. “How do you like that-better late than never.”

And with a wink good-bye to the Judy look-alike, he’s wheeled out of our cave.

11:18 P.M. We’re waiting at the elevator bank, where Larry resumes being negatively vigilant, as though making up for the momentary lapse. “None of which diminishes the fact that I continue to feel I’m going to expire of kiddie failure right on the operating table.”

“Everything’s A-OK,” I say.

Larry looks at me with preternatural patience. “No, Dan, nuffing is,” he says, “but that’s A-OK.”

“C’mon, trouper,” I say. “Can you rally?”

“I’m a pro, Dan. What am I supposed to do: stop living just because I’m dying?” He picks up his cell phone.

“Who’re you calling?”

“My broker, Dan. Buying puts on China Life Insurance. It’s called hedging my bets. (What don’t you get? If I die on the operating table, it doesn’t bode well for the way the Chinese perform kidney transplants in general, and presumably the insurance company that banks on people living a long time will underperform over time. Stock goes down, put goes up, ergo the estate of the deceased makes money. Am I missing something?)”

I look at him, admiring, while his broker’s office puts him on hold.

“You punch butt, Feldman,” I say.

“I know. Not bad for a chronic depressionist. If it weren’t for my gallows humor, I’d have been a goner long ago.”

Nor does he quiet down in the elevator. Still on hold when the elevator doors open, he continues blabbing to the surgeons inside, who’re now dressed in white. Their surgical masks make them look like the duck slicers at the restaurant where Larry and I had our Shabbos dinner a lifetime ago. I only hope they’re as skillful.

“Goody luck, goody luck!” Mary cries as Larry’s wheeled in. We can’t go upstairs to surgery with him, but he wouldn’t permit a lingering good-bye anyway. He’s too busy giving the surgeons his personal theory on the stock market.

“People say, ‘How can you speculate? You don’t have enough money to speculate.’ I say, ‘I don’t have enough money to speculate. That’s why I speculate.’”

Larry and I make eye contact for half a second as the elevator doors close. “Yes, I’d like to place an order for one thousand-”

The doors seal shut.

Mary and I slap high five, then come together in a hug.

Outside, under the dusty stars, or maybe they’re cinders, Cherry stands with Mary and me. She purses her lips and nods at me as though the fate of the world is in balance. “Now in a way is out of our hands,” she says.

“Cherry,” I say, laying my palm on her shoulder, “if I haven’t already told you this, then let me say it for the first time. You’re a doll.”

“Is nussing,” she says.

“Is summsing,” I say.

The operation is slated to take three hours, up to six if there are complications. Mary and Cherry decide to go out and find a cake to buy. I decide to go back up to our cave. Larry’s tropical half looks as if a war front has moved through, and I prop open the door to my half so a cool front can move through as well. The temperature between our two spaces is evening out, all the molecules flowing back and forth freely. I decide to do a little housecleaning, start putting things back in the wallet he plucked apart. It’s like viewing the interior of his life: gift cards from Sharper Image and other defunct stores, laminated photos of all his godchildren-little towheaded rowdies flaunting their baby teeth, as well as sullen teenagers who probably dig their wack-job godfather despite themselves. I reach for a fake Caramel de Lite for comfort. Here are photos of Mary that Larry took when she was modeling her L. L. Bean coat his first night in Beijing. She looks amazingly good in them-sending him a sultry look over her shoulder-almost glamorous. Is this the way Larry sees her, like a movie star, almost?

I take another Caramel de Lite-not bad, caramel sprinkled with toasted coconut-and sit on his bed to sort through wads of loose, sandy documents. Here’s the nun’s VIP letter he’s been toting around, the all-purpose talisman putty-soft with misuse, not quite grammatical, and with a couple of phrases he was probably too embarrassed to read aloud to me: “…diamond in the rough…please treat with respect…” But it’s an obvious forgery, or worse than a forgery. Down below, where time and rain have gotten to it, the smudgy signature reads “Larry Feldman.” Was it muddleheadedness that made him sign his own name, or a strange kind of integrity? For all his sketchy ways, does it go against his nature to lie? I check this tenuous insight against a photo of Larry on his recently reissued passport. Is this possibly the face of a man who’s fundamentally honest with himself and others if and when he can be? But how old and sick he looks! How puffed out and entirely devoid of hope! I’m startled by what I haven’t admitted to myself before now: He looks like a man at death’s door.

I stuff my face with Caramel de Lites.

Around the room, remnants of Larry wink at me morbidly. There on the bureau is the all-purpose spork he’s carried with him these many weeks. Will Larry be okay in surgery without it? He’s so fragile, couldn’t he use every good luck charm he can get? And there parked so neatly in the open closet are his Businessman’s Running Shoes; it pains me to see that he abdicated them at last. Will he be okay without his rubber-stiff self-reliance? Why are we toying with the autonomy he so painstakingly assembled in his life? I wonder why I quoted his Jesus line back to him: “Everything’s A-OK.” But is it really?

Ouch, I get an echo of the charley horse, stand from the bed to try to release it. It fades somewhat, and I limp to his suitcases stacked in the corner. There on top is my wolf skull that’s gotten mixed in with his things. I unwrap the washcloth, and it’s intact, thank goodness-those luxury washcloths really did the job. The scent of chamomile wafts back to me from what seems like years before. But have the washcloths protected his tea set, individually wrapped in the crate beneath? I unwrap a teacup-jagged shards. I unwrap a saucer-in pieces, as are all the items, one after the other, not a single item unsmashed. Why is this always Larry’s luck? Why do I come out unscratched and Larry takes the fall? Jade was right, as usual: They were too crispy to travel. Now the question is, was Larry?

Without warning, the charley horse slides to my gut.

I upend the crate so all the rubble of shattered china pours into the waste barrel, chips and flakes and then the trailings of dust. How can this be anything but a bad omen? Another spasm passes through me-a kind of couvade, suffering for Larry’s suffering, or maybe an anxiety attack. I close my eyes and am dizzy for a minute, ransacked by images of kidney beans behind my eyelids. Kidney bean pie. Kidney bean salad. WARNING! RED KIDNEY BEAN POISONING! Raw kidney beans contain as many as seventy thousand units of toxin, and as few as four beans can bring on symptoms of extreme vomiting, which may be life-threatening.

Larry, Larry, my sweet little cousin, fighting for his life…

Visions of chewing pig kidneys. On the podium at Larry’s bar mitzvah, spitting kidney beans at the congregation. The words “kidnap cabbie” speed by so fast they condense into the word “kidney.” The bad-bad criminal gorging himself on Larry’s baby back ribs. An old Peter Lorre movie where an invalid concert pianist who’s been in an accident has a murderer’s hands attached to his stumps. A black pimp in a surgical mask waving a saber at the balls of Leonard Bernstein lying dead in a chef’s hat. Larry and I falling out of a chairlift as lullabies run together in a loop: London bridge is falling down, and down will come baby, Jill came tumbling after…