Do not remove a fly from your friend’s head with a hatchet.
One thing you can say about kidnap cabbies: They tend to be punctual. The stroke of nine next morning finds two individuals tentatively approaching each other in the lobby of the Super 2: an American wearing a meek expression signifying, “Are you the one who almost took away my freedom to see my little boys for the rest of their childhood?” and a Chinese wearing a meek expression signifying, “Are you the one who was mewling in the backseat for no apparent reason?”
I remember the cute dimples. “Friend,” he keeps saying. Okay, he doesn’t have to rub it in. I get it: His friends in the other cab were supposed to drive us to Shi while he went back to BJ to pick up more passengers. I’m a fool-but at least a fool with his throat uncut. We shake hands exuberantly. I also shake hands with the smiling, dimply woman at his side, who seems to be his wife. What, did they get a family rate on dimples? I can tell by the interesting sounds he makes through puckered lips (“Oleo merger, catch a kitchen can”) that he’s pleased by the chrome flashlights I give him. He can tell by my no doubt equally intriguing sounds that I’m pleased not to be sitting on the floor of a closet with my hands tied behind my back with plastic twine. We go outside, and his wife snaps a picture of us in front of his little cab. She tells me how much she likes the picture (“Knee-bash, knee-bash! Sammy’s dagger so delayed!”) before handing it to me: The strain shows like gnarled rope on my face. Is it significant that his eyes are closed? I find myself wanting to speak the toast that is on the tip of my tongue. Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples! But it won’t come: “Wong we…” We shake hands again all around, and then before toodling off, he remembers to give me one more item he found in the backseat: the distinguished mahogany fountain pen I lifted from my luxury hotel in Beijing.
Oops…
What sort of mood will Larry be in this morning? Truculent? Tearful? Or merely mistrustful? I brace myself for the worst, only to enter his room and discover that he’s radiant! Why wouldn’t he be? He’s watching TV while up to his elbows in a bucket of hot wings.
“Catered by KFC!” he trills. “Apparently they deliver for orders over five bucks. Want some?” he asks, offering me a plastic take-out cup that’s more gravy than mashed potatoes. “It’s a little herbier than at home, and the Coke tastes a little cough-syrupy, but at least I’m eating,” he says.
“You’re not dying to give the local dishes a try?” I tease.
“Dan, back in Beijing I asked Mary to translate the room-service menu, and you know what one of the dishes was called? ‘Dog Won’t Eat It.’ Okay? Even the Chinese call it that. Case closed.”
A questionable lullaby warbles from the softspeakers: You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag. The A/C is off, and the temperature is to his liking: semi-sweltering. The room’s loamy with the scent of Larry.
“Uh-oh, here we go again,” he says, pushing himself to a more upright sitting position as a gaggle of eight nurses comes giggling in and surrounds Larry in his bed, posing for pictures. “They’re taking turns by floor,” Larry says, his arms around them. “This is the sixth floor, by my count. They’ve been doing it all morning. Apparently I’m some kind of celebrity in here. It’s a fantasy beyond belief.”
One for the family album: Larry in his hospital gown and shades, sitting atop the blankets like an underworld kingpin, hugging the prettiest nurses west of Shanghai. When at last they leave, the reenergized patient turns onto his side and begins pontificating again, a real blue-streak special. Unfortunately, I haven’t mentally cranked up for the onslaught this morning and don’t tune in, but a stray story line filters through, each worth a Movie of the Week: something about a pusher named Midget who used to be chased all over the globe by a ruthless bounty hunter, but now Midget’s son is in trouble with the law and Midget’s hired his old enemy to find his son so together they can help him; something about fixing up ex-Senator Barry Goldwater with a runway model from Milan, and too bad Goldwater kicked the bucket, because he owed Larry big time; at the end of which he says, “Good morning, Dan. As you can see, good food always makes me feel better. I’m feeling so good I even like this new gown with tiny blue sailboats. Makes me feel like a little boy.”
“Good morning,” I reply, even though now I mostly want to go back to the Super 2 and sleep.
Cherry enters the room for a brief check-in. “Patient good today,” she says. “Better than so-so.”
I smile sympathetically, because I can only imagine what she’s been through with him while I was gone, but I have to keep bugging her: “In terms of our anonymity,” I ask, “is it okay that Larry’s becoming such a mascot in here?”
“Is okay,” she assures me.
“But what about leaks to the authorities? If so many people in the hospital are in on the secret, isn’t there a bigger chance someone will tip off the local police?”
“Is not like that.”
“What is it like? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“In China we have an old sentence, ‘Take the dead horse to the live horse.’ This is what we try to do with Larry.”
“I have no idea what that even-”
“You the one need a clam pill, not Larry,” she admonishes with a smile. “Everything clicking like clockwork. Larry a fighter!” she says. “He will punch butt all over town.”
Momentarily alone with Larry, I settle sleepily into the plastic couch in front of the overloud Al Jazeera. “So they make a convert of you yet?” I say, watching an avuncular news anchor narrating a documentary on the American invasion of Iraq to the film sound track of Apocalypse Now.
“Actually, despite my being a capitalist fundamentalist, I have to admit they’re more balanced than some stations I could name,” he says. “If I didn’t know they were commie, I’d think it was Walter Cronkite talking.”
He’s having his pre-dialysis blood pressure read again by the ungainly resident from the other night who looks like she was picked on in high school. Larry’s flirting with her, making the requisite joke about how if there’s a spike in the reading, it’s her fault. She can’t understand a word but giggles anyway.
“I swear I’m getting the VIP treatment,” he tells me. “Back in the States, it’s always ‘Buy me, buy me.’ Here it’s ‘Let us help you.’ Whole different mind-set. I tried to give the janitor a tip, and he wouldn’t hear of it. Watch this, bet this resident won’t take a tip either…”
I redirect. “What accounts for your VIP treatment, do you suppose?” I ask.
“Could have something to do with meeting Dr. X last night.”
“You met Dr. X?” I say, jumping to my feet. “I thought he was gone till the end of the week!?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? He came in at ten P.M., after you left. Dressed very sharp. I’d say basically American style with an Asian twist. Power tie. Power cuff links. He said I have a lot of influential friends in China. That’s apparently what’s motivating him. Not money so much as doing right by our impressive contacts.”
“Antonia!” I breathe. She actually called in a favor for someone she met only once? I’m humbled.
“She must have some kind of muscle, because he said he got a great number of calls and e-mails from people in very high places. And already this morning I was bustled through a battery of tests, no waiting, just wheeled right through.”
“Larry, this is great news!”
His burp sounds like a question mark. “You think so? I do, too,” he says, mopping up the last of some egg yolk with a porous tablet of KFC sausage. “He said he wanted to make me aware of how complicated the situation is, what a ton of red tape he has to jump through to get an exception to the new laws. The gist is, he’s still able to get a few kidneys, not like a year ago when he personally did a hundred and fifty kidneys, but a few. Long story short: Said he doesn’t want to boast, but he’s the right person to pull this off, if anyone can.”
“Larry, this is fantastic.”
The resident removes an IV and instructs him to raise the arm.
“See what a good clotter I am?” he boasts, as no red appears. “Always been an excellent clotter.”
“So was all this conversation with Dr. X through an interpreter, or does he speak-”
“Speaks impeccable.”
“Larry, this is better than I dared hope.”
“I think so, too. He said in America you have to wait for a kidney that’s been sitting in a jar two weeks. Here I get one fresh out of the donor, pop it in with five minutes’ notice. So I’m sitting right here, docile as a lamb.”
“Right,” I say.
As the resident prepares to leave, Larry tells her, “All right, sweetheart, stay out of trouble,” and gives her a buffalo nickel, which she seems to prize. I suddenly realize who she reminds me of-just as suddenly shove the image of Larry’s dead twin, Judy, out of my mind.
“Any mention of the surgery’s price?” I ask.
“That we didn’t discuss,” Larry says. “Nor when it might happen. I didn’t want to push the envelope. I figure this first meeting let’s keep everything friendly, I can always put the hammer to him later.”
“Let’s let it be, then. Don’t breathe another word about it.”
“As you wish, Mr. Bond. I defer to your judgment.”
“And don’t mention that you’ve never actually met Antonia.”
“Roger that. But to expand upon your original question, his English is sometimes good and sometimes not. He’s spent significant time in Great Britain. He has a daughter who’s in college in Miami, but when I asked him which college, he didn’t seem to understand.”
“But Miami ’s gold, right? You’ll be able to repay him with Miami.”
“Of course. That’s where I have the most connections. I’ll take her to the Rusty Pelican-my accountant knows the owner-I’ll give her the name of my lawyer who’s on the traffic commission in case she has any parking tickets. I mean, of all the places for his pride and joy to be, she’s in my city. He seemed to understand I can take care of her. It’s all about relationships…”
“Larry, I think we made the right decision not going to the Philippines.”
“I know, plus they just blew up a shopping mall there this morning. I saw it on Al Jazeera.”
“Not only that, they’re illegalizing kidney transplants for foreigners, just like here, but punishable by twenty years in jail and a forty-eight-thousand-dollar fine.”
“I love how you don’t plan things, Dan.”
“You, too, Larry.”
WHY I’M MORE AND MORE FOND OF CHINA
After we go our separate ways-Larry to dialysis and me to some city errands-I wade through various crowds, leaving behind people deconstructing my passage. Even if it’s a gang of teenage punks trying to act disaffected, all is hubbub behind me as they diligently process my greeting: “Hello, how you.”
If it’s a gang of college girls, they’re polite, but afterward they cover their mouths and giggle, thinking they’re out of earshot just because our backs are turned.
When I pass a little park, I see a young tree propping up an older tree, and I understand that it was planted specifically to do that, and:
That reminds me of Larry’s story about his father, Sam, working for his older brother, Irving, and how it was traditional in old Russian-Jewish families for the younger brother to serve and prop up the elder, and:
This makes me feel that the world is connected in all sorts of ways I can’t even fathom.
Every now and then, I can hear the sound of old China, a tinkling of old-fashioned bicycle bells, reminding me that on my last visit I brought bells back for the children next door, and for a couple of years I had the sound of China in my neighborhood at home, and:
This makes me doubly homesick, in a lovely way, for a China that no longer exists and for the neighborhood children who are now grown up.
I feel I can’t get lost. No matter how far I wander, I always have the landmark of the eleven-story hospital, with its two arms outstretched and a water tank like a nurse’s cap on top. And when that’s obscured by smog, I can’t get lost anyway. What a rush, to feel unlosable!
Fireworks are likely to occur anytime, because someone’s always celebrating something. Could be a wedding or just a job promotion, but they ignite out of nowhere with a sound like two tons of pebbles cascading out the back of a dump truck.
When all is said and done, people here seem happy. At least that’s the conclusion I come to after hearing so many of them, including policemen, humming quiet tunes to themselves on the street. Can we say the same about Queens?
When I return, it’s dusk. Back in the hospital, I confront the usual emptiness in the lobby, punctuated by far-off badminton sounds. But the Giant Mushroom has aged forty years in the hours I was gone. New blotches and stains. Those hairline cracks in the crown moldings weren’t there before, were they? That gummy decay around the doorframes? And Larry looks Minged up-smudged and tattered, caved in on himself. I’m horrified to watch him in his sleep, like an emperor from the 1500s in a state of active decomposition. No wonder he’s doing everything in his power to get off dialysis-in the hours since I’ve seen him, they’ve taken out all his blood, scrubbed it clean, and put it back. The procedure leaves him ruined.
Tiptoeing in his half-darkened room, I silently lay out my care package: Sponges. Napkins. Dishwashing soap. Silverware. But the silverware clinks.
“Sam?” Larry mumbles.
“It’s me, Larry. Go back to sleep,” I say, unbagging hand soap, straws, shampoo.
“Who?”
“Me, Dan, your cousin.”
“Oh, hi, Dan. I’m sorry. I didn’t. Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital, in China.”
“I’m sorry. China?”
“Yes, don’t you remember?” I say, opening the bathroom cabinet and laying in toothpaste. “We came to China, and we found a hospital to get you a new kidney.”
He takes this in.
“What time is it?”
“Eight.”
“A.M. or P.M.?”
“P.M.”
“Oh. For a minute there, I thought I had to call Judy and tell her where I was. I’m very.”
“You’re in a safe place, Larry.”
“I’m a little. Can you tell me something? Judy. Is she alive or dead?”
“I’m sorry, Larry. Judy died a couple of years ago.”
“Okay, that’s what I. I just.”
“I know, it’s very misorienting. You’ve had dialysis this afternoon.”
“And my mutha? No, wait. She’s gone, too?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“It’s the dialysis. When I wake up, sometimes I don’t remember, and then I have to mourn for them all over again.”
“That must be horrible.”
“The one person I never wonder about is my futha, because he was dead to me so long ago. Oh, I’m doozy.”
“Don’t try to sit up, Larry,” I say, straightening his pillow so he can lie back down.
“Dialysis always leaves me weak, but this one was a whopper. I think the dialysis here must be more aggressive than at home.”
“That’s entirely possible, Larry.”
“I was dreaming about my futha. As you know, I had a very faulty bonding with Sam. He resented everything I could do that he couldn’t. When we were in South Miami once, he laughed because I couldn’t read the signs all in Spanish. ‘Now you know what I go through,’ he said.”
“But you had a dream about him?”
He doesn’t answer for a minute, lies there sweating in the half dark.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain, comes the tune from the invisible softspeakers.
“We were fishing, I think. Because one thing we bofe loved to do was fish.”
He coughs sadly for a minute, without sentimentality.
“No, he was dropping me off at school. Second grade. In second grade I just wanted to go home. I just cried and cried to go home. I was worse than Judy.”
He breathes, head sunken on his chest.
“Did you know I had to repeat fourth grade?” he asks. “This for a kid with an IQ of one thirty-one.”
“Because you were too busy rebelling from your teachers?”
“I know where you’re coming from with that question, but no. It was because I was so shy. I was so short on self-confidence that when the teachers called on me, I’d always say I didn’t know, just because I wanted them to get to the next person as quickly as they could.”
“I didn’t know that, Larry. You were always filled with such bravado.”
“At sixteen I dropped out of school, but I didn’t get a job at Irving ’s garage, like everyone told me to. I made it my business to enroll myself in a private school that I researched myself. Within a day I knew I had made the right choice.”
“How’d you pay for it?”
“With my winnings from KFC.”
I want to say, “No wonder you’re so devoted to them,” but I restrain myself. Instead I say, “Larry, that was nothing less than heroic. You altered your circumstances. What’s that old expression? You picked yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“I did.”
“You could have withdrawn from the world. But you found something in yourself to hoist yourself up. It’s like how you cured Judy’s epilepsy. These are heroic actions, Larry. Why do you never give yourself credit for them?”
“That’s a good question. I’m confused about that.”
“Why do you think?”
“I’m too busy giving myself kudos for the things I oughtn’t, and not for the things I ought?”
So help me, I love the quaint language coming out of this miscreant’s mouth. The truth is, and he doesn’t want this to get around, but he isn’t a miscreant at all. He’s a gentleman, checkered like all gentlemen, with a gentleman’s checkered heart.
“I’m hard on myself,” he says. “I don’t want to be selfish.”
“It’s not being selfish to give yourself credit, Larry. There ought to be a better word. It’s being self-generous.”
I can feel him struggling with this concept in the tropical dark.
“So when are you going to claim your right to take the coldest Coke in the cooler?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I got my pilot’s license just to see if I could do it, and even then I still had my self-doubts. I do this, I do that-”
“May I make a suggestion?”
“As you wish.”
“Yoo-hoo, you’re doing another heroic thing, by finding your way to this hospital room. Maybe that ought to do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the American medical establishment in its wisdom counseled you to be a good little Do Bee for ten years and make no fuss-”
“That’s the U.S. policy for how to help its citizens-”
“And instead, you took charge of your destiny and joined the army of half a million Americans last year who got off their asses and are doing something! Whether you succeed in saving your own life or not, that ought to convince you of your self-worth.”
Down came the rain and washed the spider out…
“Think about it, will you, Larry?”
“I do, Dan. I always think about what you say.”
From nine floors below, a fleet of police cars sounds like an armada of rowboats with outboard motors. The fridge makes a ghastly noise as it shudders to a stop. Larry flinches.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I saw the apparition?” he asks out of nowhere.
“What operation?”
“Not operation: apparition. Remind me to tell you that saga sometime.”
“We’ve got time now.”
He points to his ear and shakes his head no.
“No one’s gonna overhear. Or understand.”
Still he shakes his head no. “I lived through the Nixon years. I make a policy of not trusting.”
I close the door. And lock it. Now he’s ready.
“Dan, you know me well enough to know I’m not exactly touchy-feely. But when I was ten one summer day, I was helping my neighbor Frankie DelSesto on his newspaper route. Nice kid, grew up to tour with Aerosmith, in charge of selling their souvenirs. Any case, we were just turning back from the beach when I saw a ten-foot-tall Jesus Christ on a rooftop. He had an intricately carved staff, a full beard, and a long deep brown luxurious robe. Instantly I knew it was Jesus. I have no idea how I knew it was Jesus and not Moses, given my heritage, but there wasn’t even a question. It was Jesus. He knew my name though he didn’t speak; it was thought transference. What I got was a wonderful feeling of absolute peace-nonverbal absolute peace. ‘What’s the message?’ I wanted to know. ‘Everything’s A-OK,’ he said, without words. It wasn’t a question of him trying to convert me or anything, he just wanted to reassure me. There was an awareness of me and what I needed. I loved it at first, but the next day, when I tried to make sense of it, I didn’t like it one bit. I was a reality-based kid. It was too scary. I never spoke about it for years. Finally I asked a psychology major, did that make me insane? He said, ‘No, you are not insane.’ I thought that was a pretty strong statement.”
“Jesus said, ‘Everything’s going to be A-OK’?” I ask.
“No. ‘Everything’s A-OK.’ Like it’s A-OK right now and always will be. Eternally.”
“For the record,” I say, “I don’t think you’re insane either. So where do you want to go with this?”
“It’s just to say,” Larry says, struggling, “sometimes I have feelings. Premonitions, call it what you will. And I have a very bad feeling about this surgery.”
“Larry, you need to rest. Post-dialysis is no time to make sweeping statements.”
“No, Dan, I’m in my right mind. I know it’s bad luck or whatever to speak ill of it, but I think something bad is going to happen. I am not going to be all right. Even if a kidney comes through and they put it in, the surgeon’s going to botch something and I’m not going to make it.”
“Larry-”
“I’m just informing you, Dan. Please take it seriously. Contrary to what Jesus, or whoever he was, was telling me when I was ten, I do not have the feeling that everything is A-OK. Never has been and certainly isn’t now.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel like my brain has been scrambled by dialysis, too. But it’s vital to keep up an optimistic façade in front of him. Two nurses walk past in the hallway, conversing. “Quizzical gums he has!
Major social craze!”
“Ow, the light hurts my eyes,” he tells me. Even with everything turned off in the room, too much light seeps in through the gauze curtains from the floodlights outside for his sensitive, post-dialysis eyes. I help him put on his box-turtle shades, glad to be distracted from thoughts of his demise. But still the floodlights bother him. I remove the sheets from the spare twin bed and rig two squishy chairs by balancing one on top of the other and-another thing I never thought I’d be doing for my cousin-climb up to tie a series of knots in the sheets around the curtain rod. Being on my tiptoes on such an unstable surface against a thin picture window nine floors above the ground serves to keep me from dwelling on his premonition.
“Better?” I ask, panting, when I come back down.
“Thank you, Dan.”
“Does that closet light bother you as well?” I ask, because one of the Freakishly Thin Business Socks lovingly laundered by Mary is keeping the closet door ajar a crack.
“I use it so I don’t get nervous in the dark.”
“But isn’t it too bright? The light slants right into your eyes. I can turn on the bulb in the other room instead, if you like, and let the light peep under the door.”
“I don’t want to trouble you.”
I show him how little trouble it is.
“That’s good,” he says.
“You should be snug as a bug in a rug,” I say, tucking him in.
“Why are you doing this, Dan?”
“It’s going to be too bright otherwise.”
“No, I mean…all this.”
I look over this relic of a man, trying to grasp that he’s the same person as the chunky little boy who used to run up the down escalators. How much of that boy is left to save? The nurses pass by again, on their way back to their station. “Sheer drizzle spice, steak on top!”
“Y’know, I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ll tell you something,” I say. “Every now and then, I get your mother’s face in the back of my mind, saying, ‘Thank you, Danny. Thank you for taking care of my little boy.’”
“That’s nice,” Larry says.
“But as for the other reasons, can I get back to you? Honestly, I’m still working on it.”
WHY I’M MORE AND MORE FREAKED BY CHINA
Now that I’ve left Larry’s room, I can admit that his premonition rattled me. He’s right about so many things. Will he be right about the surgery, too?
The lights are out in the stairwell, and as I blindly feel my way down eight pitch-black flights of stairs, I wonder if Larry’s not the only one with brain damage.
When I reach the street, the city’s inflamed in a firestorm of neon. Swirling dragons. Flaming serpents. It looks as if a demon magician has touched it with an evil wand.
The darkness here’s more diabolical than the darkness at home. As I walk alone down a spooky alleyway, bike riders fly out of the murk like bats on wheels, squealing “Go back to quack-a-doe!”
The air, when all is said and done, is no laughing matter. It’s totalitarian pollution, a one-party blanket of smog so supersaturated that it can’t absorb the smoke from the sidewalk barbecues, much less the blue plumes from firecrackers that erupt out of nowhere, veiling all.
I’m lost. Even though the arms of the hospital are more or less visible through the haze, tonight they spread like the wings of a malevolent owl, leading me nowhere I want to follow.
I’m wet, or about to be. In a spot not far from the hospital, a promenade functions as a nighttime amusement area for adults, between fake volcanic rocks and a patio for old-timers to do their tai chi. But as I’m venturing closer, a fountain of colored water erupts from the rocks, drenching me head to toe.
Wet and lost as I am, I understand that these old-timers were my first enemies. Delicately doing tai chi between the fountains, these are the infamous Red Chinese of my childhood, the ones we were told were sadistically brainwashing American POWs in secret North Korean camps. And here I’ve put myself at their mercy, surrounded by them on all sides…
The next group is even worse. After so many days of not seeing people my age, I run into a whole brigade of them on a terrace by the promenade, and it hits me that they’re the original Red Guards who committed some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. While we student activists were making hay at home with a pretend revolution, our counterparts in China were making real hay, forcing millions out of the cities to reap grain in the countryside, butchering intellectuals and raping ballerinas and turning themselves into the human equivalent of swirling dragons and flaming serpents.
And what’re they doing on this sweltering September night? Waltzing. After all the carnage they wrought, they’re waltzing to old songs from the 1930s playing on an ancient gramophone. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” “The Touch of Your Hand.” “Falling in Love with Love.” Lit up in the smoglight, their eyes red in the glow of firecrackers, they turn gracefully clockwise, changing steps to turn counterclockwise. How can they be dancing, after all they’ve done, like Nazis doing a jig on the graves of their victims? But they’re sad-looking, and their waltz is sad. Wreathed in smoke, they sense that I’m of their generation. They beckon to me: “Join us!”
Never have I felt more a stranger. I withdraw into the shadows.