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

The speech has made him a little breathless. He gathers himself. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just mean to say that my ordeal has clarified a few things, taught me that if we have a chance to use good organs, even from bad people, it’s a sin not to. The rest of it, it’s not worth debating.

“All set?” he concludes, picking up his tray. “The second-to-last thing I want to say, and then I’ll let you go, is don’t feel compromised by this whole experience. Don’t feel dirtied. This is the real world…”

“And the last thing?” I manage to croak out.

“Don’t forget to bus the table.”

A dream comes back to me. I can fly. I’ve had it recurrently since childhood, less and less frequently as I’ve grown older, but I realize now I might have been having it several times in the last week. My arms are winglike. I possess just the right amount of power to rise to a state of being airborne, lumberingly at first, but then higher, aloft, dipping up and up to soar around the spaces I ordinarily look up to. In the dream this past week, I’ve been offering to carry Larry with me, and Mary, too, but they don’t want to go, so I’m flying by myself, suddenly zooming upward into the nighttime stars…

At first, leaving Alfred in the late-afternoon light, I don’t want the dream to end. I want to go directly to the airport and get on a plane and fly home without seeing Jade, all my dreams intact. But gradually I realize I have to see her. I can’t go home without seeing her one last time.

On the phone Jade tells me her father’s taken ill, just a “middle squeeze” and nothing serious. She’s very sorry, but she has to take a train to her faraway home after our dinner together, she can’t accompany me to the airport.

Fine. Just dinner will be fine.

So do I feel dirtied, in the cab on my way over to see her? Not so much dirtied as deepened. Not so much compromised as complexified. I’ve had layers added to my soul…or at least age spots added to my hands. I feel many things: overjoyed about coming home and seeing my wife and kids, apprehensive about coming home and facing my critics. All that, yes, but mostly how I feel this steaming autumn twilight afternoon on my way to see Jade is…conflicted. With my new knowledge of her beneficent duplicity, I’m not sure how I feel about those oblong nostrils, those bubbles in her teeth. But I’ll never find out by sitting on my hands.

We’re to meet at the best duck restaurant in Beijing. I’m almost too tired to keep my eyes open in the cab-been up since dawn, with a long flight ahead of me before I get home. Part of my fatigue is from the bombshells Alfred just dropped on me, and part of it’s nervousness, as though this is a first date and a last date rolled into one-first because I’ll be seeing Jade with my eyes open as never before, last because we’ll never see each other again. Will we really, really not? I hate breakups more than anything in the world.

And then there she is, standing in front of the restaurant. A tiny figure. Why are life’s biggies always so much tinier than they ought to be? As a young man, one time I was doing sit-ups on a beach, and afterward I looked down at the impression my back had made in the sand, and it was minuscule. That was me? All my foolish drive and strifer, my precious fuck-upedness, and that was all I had to show for it-a pint-size dent in the earth? So does Jade turn out to be only Jade: a small, solitary figure on a dirty sidewalk, examining her thumbnail with great gravity, nearly engulfed by colorful people streaming past.

I see her before she sees me. Then, as my cab rolls to the curb, she ignites with pleasure. She hops to my door-one, two, three-and yanks it open.

Then she stops hopping. She seems to know at once, sensing it with a single glance. With animal subtlety she reads it in the set of my shoulders, the angle of my chin. She hears it in the catch of my voice as I thank the cabbie. It pains me to see her look so stunned.

“You are feeling just so-so?” she inquires, not meeting my eyes.

“Just so-so,” I reply.

She is careful not to ask me why. With unusual quietness we walk into the restaurant and take our seats. Jade is further stunned by the opulence of the place: six kinds of spoons, a glut of drinking glasses. “So many windows,” Jade says, meaning glasses, clicking her fingernail against each of three at her setting. With an attempt at lightness, she picks one up and holds it to her eye, peering through it. “You can see through me?” she asks.

“Why would I want to do that?” I ask.

But this is cruel. And cruel is the last thing I mean to be. She is made speechless by my words, suffering the Chinese equivalent of a deep blush-more a flush of immobility than a change of color. It’s almost scary to see that highly animated face immobile for nearly half a minute.

Her downcast eyes don’t meet mine even as she tries to make conversation. “How Larry is doing?”

“The kidney’s great. Can’t vouch for the rest of him.”

Is this guilt I’m witnessing on Jade’s face? But why? She did what she had to do and then some, maybe helping save Larry’s life in the bargain. We sit there, Jade and me, churning with separate unspoken guilts. Both of us did what we had to do, and would do so again. But it wasn’t without cost.

“And your father, how’s he doing?” I ask.

“This middle squeeze take place every autumn,” Jade says. “She has the burning heart, so I am sure she okay, but I go home to see.”

I look at her, my dear double agent, my co-conspirator on the opposite side of a deep divide.

“He,” I say, correcting her.

“He,” she says.

Neither of us smiles.

We order. As usual, the dishes come out in random order: bowls of rice first, then cups of crème brûlée for dessert. Eventually the duck comes. We watch it being sliced.

“You feel more delicious with chopsticks,” Jade says, plucking adroitly. I think she means that one eats more slowly this way, savoring the morsels.

We’re both eating slowly, not wanting the meal to end, wanting it to end as quickly as possible.

“I have ducks not so different from this one at my home,” I tell her. “In my pond.”

I’m used to her eyes being blank, the emotions coming from somewhere else and not the eyes themselves, yet now they are filling up, overflowing with liquid light. A tear falls into her crème brûlée. “I am never see that,” she says.

Suddenly she whirls up to go to the bathroom. It’s strange to see her walk in so unlively a fashion, hop-less. I write a note and stick it in her purse before she comes back. So how do you like that: For all my talk of the crude cloak-and-dagger tactics of the Chinese, I’m the one who performs the most blatant act of all. Going into a personal pocketbook! But of course my particular cause is just, which distinguishes it from 99 percent of the other causes in the world. Right…

“Don’t talk about the leaving,” she instructs upon her return. “We transfer to another topic.” But there are no other topics. And now a hip-hop band has begun performing in an alcove near the bar, so we can’t hear each other anyway, which only highlights the fact that we have nothing to say. The bass is so booming it sounds like a trapdoor’s open in my chest and my usual emotions have drained out. Making room for new emotions to seep in. I’m a jumble of contradictory feelings, but rising to the surface is something I didn’t expect: admiration. I can’t help it. Keystone Kops, like hell-the laugh’s on me: The Chinese did a better job of pairing Jade and me than candeyblossoms.com ever could. And Jade herself-bravo! I was already impressed by how well she spied for me, but that wasn’t the half of it. What a girl! The cult of Mao and the cult of Larry are pretty mutually exclusive, yet she managed to juggle both. I’m as sad and proud as a papa bear bone-bitten by his cub: Ow! Very good! This must be what a father feels walking his daughter down the aisle. She’s not mine any longer, and never really was. I’m thrilled, and a bit closer to death. What a maudlin combination! But yes, these compromises do reconcile us little by little to our graves.