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

© 2010

When Larry and I were in China, a number of people put themselves and their livelihoods on the line to help us. Throughout the writing of this book, it has been crucial to protect these people by preserving their anonymity. For this reason, I have changed names, locations, and key features of several individuals and institutions, and have compressed a few time lines connected to their activities, so that they may continue their lives without being identified.

A word about the dialect: Although it has traditionally been considered condescending to write in dialect, the climate seems to be changing-and for good reason. In his recent book about India, The Elephanta Suite, Paul Theroux uses such locutions as “wicious” for “vicious,” “moddom” for “madam,” and “wee-icle” for “vehicle” in an effort to transmit more shades of emotional truth than a sanitized transcript can. Nor is the practice limited to native English writers. By writing, “My bawss was sacked, so we got laid all together” in his recent novel A Free Life, the Chinese-American author Ha Jin suggests how cross-cultural communication is a creative process for both native and visitor, with results that are sometimes as revealing as Freudian slips. Track ing both how foreigners use the English language and how an American visitor scrambles to make sense of foreign sounds is here meant to transmit the spirit of modern travel-equal parts charming and alarming.

Larry’s dialect, meanwhile, is another matter entirely.

The cautious seldom err.

“Huwwo?”

“Hello, who’s this?”

“Huwwo, Dan?”

“Yes. Who’s this, please?”

“This is Larry, Dan.”

“Who?”

“Larry. Your cousin.”

“Whoa, my long-lost cousin Larry?”

“Yes, Dan, that’s a fair description. I deserve that. I take full responsibility for being out of touch.”

“My black-sheep cousin Larry?”

“That’s also apt, as long as you’re simply stating a fact and don’t mean it in a negative way. Where did I reach you?”

“Actually, I’m on a chairlift in the Colorado Rockies, Larry, a couple of miles above sea level.”

“In the middle of summer? I’m somewhat dubious. Not that I’m calling you a liar, necessarily, but people have been known to alter their whereabouts to avoid speaking to people they aren’t necessarily eager to speak to.”

“I’m with my mountain bike, Larry-about fifty feet in the air, overlooking miles of ski trails that double as bike trails in the summer.”

“There, you see? I’m not dubious anymore. A perfectly cogent explanation. Some family members who will go unnamed-except that it’s Cousin Burton-consider me an unreasonable man, but I just object to being lied to, or considered an idiot simply because I dropped out of high school instead of taking the standard family route of going to Harvard or Brown, which you never did.”

“Never did what?”

“Considered me an idiot, at least to my face, which is one of the reasons I always looked up to you, Dan, even though you did go to Brown. Are you alone?”

“I’m here on vacation with my wife and two sons.”

“I heard you got remarried. I’ve been meaning to call you. Congratulations.”

“Well, that’s fourteen years ago now, Larry, but thanks. Where are you?”

“I’m under my blankets in my Florida condo. I haven’t come out for two days.”

“What’re you doing there?”

“I’m [-SQUAWK-]ing, Dan.”

“You’re what? We’re passing over some sort of radio tower or something. What’d you say you were doing?”

“[-SQUAWK-]ing.”

“What?”

“Dying, Dan. I need a favor.”

[Click.] The line goes dead.

The phone rings again twenty seconds later. I scramble to adjust my bike so I can keep one hand free, and there it is again, the lugubrious voice, like that of a funeral director with a slight speech impediment. “Huwwo.”

“Larry, sorry about that. Hold on a second, I’ve got to take these earplugs out. Okay, I can hear you better.”

“What’s with the earplugs? Is it cold?”

“No, nothing. My kids are nine and twelve, is all. It gets kinda noisy. Guys,” I say, securing a couple of fast-moving collars within my fist so they stop ramming their handlebars into each other, “if you don’t stop fooling around, someone’s going to fall right under the-”

“Huwwo?”

“Larry, I’m still here. So what do you mean, dying? Literally or metaphorically?”

“Literally, Dan. Kiddie disease.”

“Kiddie-”

“Kidney, kidney. Consequently, I’m depressed beyond all measure. More than depressed: I’m depressionistic. But first I have to ask: Are you still mad at me?”

“Mad? You mean for ratting me out to the FBI that time, telling them I’d inflated my income on a condo mortgage application, which you specifically advised me to do because you needed the commission?”

“I was upset, Dan. I’m not proud of it.”

“And why were you upset? Because I had the gall to ask for the thousand dollars back that I’d loaned you to spot your latest invention.”

“You’re right, Dan, I regret it.”

“Which as I recall was for wooden neckties.”

“Which you could sponge the gravy stains off of. I still maintain that would have been huge if I’d had the proper financing.”

The chairlift stalls above a grove of majestic pine trees, allowing the boys a momentary calm to see how far they can dangle one of the front wheels off the side. I nearly lose the phone grabbing a tire.

“No, I’m not mad at you anymore, especially since the FBI laughed it off. Besides, who the hell cares about that, if you’re literally dying?”

“Oh, it’s literal all right. Diabetes claimed first one, then bofe my kidneys. For two years I’ve been on a dialysis machine four hours every other day, watching my life ebb away before my eyes. Solution number one is off the table, because I’m not about to ask anyone in the family for their kidney, given how much they dislike my guts, which I assure you is mutual. But solution number two is surprisingly doable: I’ve been researching the Internet from under the blankets, and it turns out China does more kidney transplants than any other nation. And I won’t have to wait on a list seven to ten more years for a cadaver kidney, as my overcautious American doctors are telling me to-we could get a live one fairly quickly, if we make the right connections.”

“Larry, hold on-what do you mean ‘we’?”

“You’re an old China hand, Dan. You used to do that travel column in Esquire-”

“Larry, I haven’t been to China in twenty-five years! I don’t have any more contacts there than you do.”

“At least you know your way around. I’ve hardly ever been out of the States, except for luxury cruises to the Caribbean, which I could maybe fix you up on sometime, because college girls do things on a cruise ship they’d never dream of doing on shore, believe me, you could pass yourself off as a professor-”

[Click.] The line goes dead.

“Huwwo.”

The chairlift is still stalled in the middle of the Rockies, giving me a chance to take in the scenery: azure peaks crosshatched by bicycle spokes. My wife’s provisionally pacified the boys with an emergency Milky Way.

“Larry, I can’t promise we won’t get cut off again. The wind’s kicking up, and we’re swaying like a-”