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

“Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples!”

You can only go halfway into the darkest forest; then you are coming out the other side.

Larry is dead. I bolt awake after three hours’ sleep, wearing box-turtle shades, and am convinced of it. Larry didn’t survive. He was too feeble to withstand the anesthesia. His heart gave out. Because of the tonsils that were mangled when he was a kid, he started hiccupping and choked on the breathing tube. He gagged on his own vomit. Even in the depths of his anesthesia, he fought the surgeons tooth and nail, mindless brutal flailing that threw them off their game. Larry is dead.

Then the phone rings.

“Operation a winner,” Cherry says.

I rip off the shades I must have put on in the middle of the night. “Cherry, don’t be messing with me-really? A complete success?”

“Complete.”

“No ‘sad effects’?”

“None.”

“I can’t believe it. He’s not rejecting it? No complications at all?”

“At all,” she says. “We keep an eye on him the next week, but maybe kidney last another thirty year of life. The rest of Larry may fall down, but that kidney take a licking and keep on ticking.”

I locate Mary, who’s been in the Crush Room worriedly studying English all night. She tried to sleep but couldn’t. “Larry, Larry, sleep…Larry, Larry, sleep,” she explains. I give her the news. We’re jumping up and down. “Long live Larry!” we shout to each other.

A few hours later, Cherry, Mary, and I don surgical masks and shuffle into the ICU with plastic Baggies over our shoes. Larry’s unconscious. Looking down on his slumbering face, I view him as a mother would-as his dear, gentle Rivie must have seen her baby boy. And here’s a ridiculous thing: He does look handsome, he is handsomer than he looks. Minged up, to be sure, older than when he got here, but also younger and less scrappy somehow. Part of the reason is that he has a kidney that’s working; it’s given him a glow of health. But there’s something else, and I don’t know what it is. Why do human beings do that to one another? Just when you think you’ve got everyone squared away in his or her little pigeonhole-this one’s pug-nosed, that one’s square-assed-they jump out and turn beautiful on you. Why’d it take me so long to see it?

Slowly he stirs, opens his eyes, gestures me over. He can barely croak out the words. “How’s China Life Insurance?”

Forty-eight hours later, Larry is sitting up in bed, partaking of a celebration cake Mary has brought, complete with sparkly candles and a side of Chinese eggplant. His face is less puffy than before, with a flush of baby pink in the cheeks. The kidney is doing what it’s supposed to do-cleaning his blood. So simple, so primitive, and so life-changing.

“My feet are back to size nine after being twelve for two years,” he says.

“Also his brain back to itself,” Cherry confirms. “Very good kidney, very good match. But must taking it slow,” she reminds him.

“It’s like breaking in a new transmission, I get it,” he says. “You have to let it get used to the rest of the vehicle.”

“Perfect,” Cherry says.

“Do I feel perfect? No,” Larry says, chomping down what look like tiny pork balls from the top of the cake, using chopsticks. “I woke up this morning and still wondered what I should get Judy for a souvenir. But I’m ahead of the game. I’m free of the dialysis machine, which is a minor miracle in itself. I’ve got my life back.”

“So we think next week you go home,” Cherry says.

“Yippie yi yo,” he says. “You mean after almost two months of captivity, I’ll be able to resume a normal existence?”

“Was it normal before?” Cherry counters.

“I take your point,” Larry says. “Bottom line, I may die of general decrepitude, or I may decide to off myself, but odds are good I’m not going to die of kiddie failure. Say, any way I can get the recipe for this eggplant? It’s ever so much better than at home.”

It’s a joyful scene, with Cherry looking on fondly and Mary looking lovely, all decked out with pink sweater and blue plastic necklace she bought herself in celebration, nothing too expensive on Larry’s dime, resting her head on Larry’s shoulder and saying, “I very like Larry. I tell my son, every day he nice to me. Every day.” There’s even a birthday party tune from the softspeakers: How old are you now, how old are you now…?

But something odd’s going on with me. As warmed as I am by all that’s happening, too much is at stake here for me to surrender to fuzzy feelings. Instead of getting all throat-lumpy at the proceedings, I find myself clearing my throat. I have work to do-now.

“So by the way, Larry,” I say almost airily, “if you do elect to ‘off’ yourself after all this?”

“Yes?”

“You’ll be doing what Judy did after you cured her of epilepsy and her newfound health was too much for her to handle. It’ll be a similar thing.”

“Not identical.”

“But similar enough for me to kill you a second time, Larry-so don’t even think about it,” I say. “Don’t drink the warm Coke, Larry. For once in your damn existence, reach for a cold one, keep it, enjoy it, don’t fucking blow it.”

He looks startled, not sure if I’m joking or if there’s an actual edge of anger to my voice.

“I’ll try,” he says.

“Don’t try,” I say. “Whatever you do, don’t you dare do that. Trying gets you in more fucking trouble than I’ve ever seen in my life. Just fuck-all do it, plain and simple, do it.”

Mary and Cherry may not know these are swearwords, but my tone makes them drop their eyes and fidget self-consciously.

“Dan, I’ve never heard you swear so much in a single sentence-”

“Shut up, Larry,” I say. “I’m trying to wax self-righteous here for a minute, if I may.”

Larry sweeps his arm out before him. “The floor is yours.”

As if on cue, Cherry pushes a knob on the side of the TV. At once the softspeakers fall silent. For the first time, we have no background music. Why wasn’t I able to locate that knob two months ago? What a relief.

“Listen up,” I say, abruptly pushing Mary’s chair, with Mary in it, so it faces the center of the room. “It’s time to speak hard balls to both of you.”

“As you wish, Dan,” Larry says, giving me a vacant look.

Cherry excuses herself, correctly, and leaves the room. In the fresh silence, I fix Mary with a look that tells her I mean business. Carbonation may not have come to her village near North Korea, but straight talk apparently has. She takes hold of Larry’s hand and looks at me as though I’m going to pronounce them man and wife.

“Mary,” I begin. “Larry is a good man.”

She is nodding.

“A good man and a true man.” I’ve never spoken so slowly in my life, never enunciated so carefully. It’s like I’m willing my words into that brain of hers, whether it’s an honest brain or a dishonest brain, whether it’s a product of forty-below temperatures where she was forced to steal or whatever. I want my words in there.

“And he needs you to be true as well.”

“True? B-a-”

“No. True. T-”

“Oh, true! T-r-”

“Yes.”

“T-r-u-e.”

“Yes, Larry will be true to you, if you become true to him.”

Mary’s face changes. Her eyes become…what I can only call…true. “I become true to him,” she says. “I be really, really true.”

I look down at my hands. I see age spots. Where’d they come from? I’ve gotten three age spots since I came here two months ago. This is how we age, I understand. This is how we age.