A fall into a ditch makes you wiser.
CRAAAAACCCK! A peal of thunder. Thank heaven, a storm’s on its way-only a tempest could break this infernal heat wave. I’m sweating in my skyscraper gym with leaded windows closed, relishing the solitude as I ride my manual typewriter of a bike while Abu sluggishly practices his half gainers. Bring on the rain!
But the afternoon remains oppressively bright. I resume the thought sequence I was in the middle of before the thunder hit: wondering if Burton ’s guilty. Did he do anything to deserve Larry’s fatwa? And would he really try to stop this operation if he could, in the misguided belief that it would end his troubles with Larry? I’m not in a position to judge, but I do know that Burton ’s always been honorable in his dealings with me. He’s been nothing but upstanding, loyal, and generous. Also, Burton has devoted his life to healing thousands of brain ailments and is beloved by his community at Harvard and an army of patients. But then again, I’ve always known Larry to be honorable, too, in his fashion. He made a point of always paying back my loans promptly and in full. Except that one time he didn’t. I wouldn’t say he stiffed me; I’d say he didn’t pay me back promptly and in full. It’s possible he figured he paid me back in other ways. For the condo he convinced me to buy as an investment, I had trouble evicting a certain tenant who didn’t pay rent for almost a year. Larry took it upon himself to call the tenant a name to her truck-driver son, for which Larry received and returned several body blows. Perhaps in his mind this was worth the grand he owed me? We never discussed it in so many words, but when I asked for my grand back, that’s when he ratted me out to the FBI. Maybe there was a similar misunderstanding with Burton? Or maybe Larry resents Burton because he helped so much with Judy’s epilepsy; Larry’s constitutionally incapable of not biting the hand that feeds him? Who’s to say? As in most family feuds, there are few truths we could take to the bank. A homegrown Inscrutable.
Bzzzz, bzzzzz! It sounds like a bumblebee caught between window-panes, but it’s my cell phone vibrating angrily on mute. I let my wheels coast to a stop, lazily pick up the phone, and get an earful of screaming.
“DAN, LARRY HORT!”
I reel back from Mary’s voice as from a blast of ammonia.
“LARRY BLOOD!” she screams again, telling me that Larry has escaped the hospital again, only to take another spill.
CRRAAAAAACK!-another thunder blast. The atmosphere feels electrically charged, and when I crank open the leaded window, I see that the afternoon has blackened, at the mercy of a crackling downpour. Down below, the toy-train village of Shi looks defenseless, honking furiously to itself in a state of paralysis, its cogs gummed up by the rain. My cousin’s lying in a street out there somewhere, and in a minute Abu and I have gained the front sidewalk, observing the bottleneck.
“A cab will be quickest, see you later,” I yell to Abu, jumping into the backseat of a gaily decorated vehicle. But it’s a police car: Two frightened-looking officers gape at me from the front seat. “Sorry!” I say, jumping out again.
“Take this,” Abu says, holding out the key to his Vespa. “It will be quicker for only one.”
In a minute I’m racing through wet side streets, away from the bottleneck. It’s all clamoring chaos: Sirens wail, strobe lights flash from the tops of ambulances as their drivers shout for right-of-way. Larry couldn’t have gotten more than a fewblocks from the hospital, I figure; maybe he was heading for a familiar landmark. The duck restaurant! I’m like the worst or best of the Chinese drivers I’ve been marveling at all these weeks, weaving the wrong way down a one-way sidewalk. Half a block from the duck restaurant, around the corner from the hospital, I locate Larry lying in his hospital gown in the middle of the street, flailing like a beetle on its back. Everywhere I turn, Mary’s in my way, blithering idiotically. I place her aside and approach. Not knowing friend from foe, Larry stabs me with his KFC spork. I kneel in a puddle to subdue him, slosh the rain out of his eyes, peer directly into his face till he recognizes me.
“Huwwo, Dan, thank you for coming,” he says, like he’s hosting a craps game in the back of a strip club and is pleased I’m able to make it. “You look buff. Been working out?”
“Larry, what the hell’s going on?”
“I’ve been up since four trying to figure out exactly that. I’m quite baffled. What a night,” he says. “My back is in spasm…”
I use the momentary calm to coax him up. Mistake: It sends him into another frenzy, waving with his plastic weapon, clawing at my legs with his Businessman’s Running Shoes. A piece of paper’s in motion-the nun’s letter from back home. “Help! Someone!” he calls as traffic honks and weaves around us. “VIP in need!”
“Settle down!” I shout, using my weight now to keep him in place. A couple of soldiers approach with faces so blank they’re scary. “No, no, we’ve got it,” I call to them, blocking their approach. They hesitate, unsure whether to take offense or back off. Soon they’re gone.
“Larry,” I say sternly, “it’s dangerous to make a scene like this-”
CRAAAAAACK! The storm’s right on top of us now. The duck restaurant chooses this moment to begin broadcasting Peking Opera from its sidewalk speakers.
“I’m leaving,” he says through gritted teeth. “I can make my own way to the airport.”
With an adrenaline boost, he manages to wiggle out of my grasp, stands bare-assed with tubes coming out of him, the back of his hospital gown soiled.
“Larry, didn’t you put yourself in my hands when we got to this city?”
“Sue me,” he says. “If it’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s-”
He interrupts himself to spit out a tooth. Now there’s even less of him to save;nevertheless, his body seems to be cooperating. His blood’s scabbing up, the color of root beer; his legs are allowing me to assist him down the sidewalk in a daze.
“Larry, promise me you’ll never pull a stunt like this again. Do you know how many germs you could catch outside the hospital in your state?”
“You know how many germs I could catch inside?”
I’m trying to keep him on his feet, hobbling him toward the hospital. His blood, his Brylcreem, it’s all over me.
“Larry, why do you keep fighting me every step of the way?”
“All due respect, you’ve exceeded your authority, it’s my call, case closed. What do you care anyway? I’m not trying to cheat you out of a dime.”
All the ancient paranoias bubbling forth from a bloody mouth, the Old World recriminations…
“…your girlfriend Jade…your boyfriend that raghead…gooks and dinks…”
I shake him, not lightly. “Larry, it’s time to show a little gratitude to everyone who’s put themselves on the line for you.”
“I disagree.”
“It’s not a matter of disagreeing, Larry.”
“I disagree, that’s all,” he says. “I’m doing what you said in the microphone.”
I stop.
“What mike? When? At your bar mitzvah? I thought you didn’t remember what I said.”
“You said fuck everyone there, they were just a bunch of hypocrites and goody-goodies, and you didn’t want anything to do with them. That’s what I’m saying, too. Fuck ’em all.”
I blink at him, aghast. “You think this is junior high, Larry? You’re rebelling against the teachers? This is China with world-class surgeons!” I yell. “We’ve come halfway around the world and jumped in front of God knows how many people to get you a kidney, and you’re fucking up the whole thing!”
“No offense, Dan, but you don’t know what it’s like being me, putting up with what I’ve had to put up with.”
“Larry, better people than you and me are dying all around the world right now because they don’t have the money or the energy to find a kidney, and you dare say fuck ’em all? You know what you are, Larry-you’re an ingrate!”
“Fuck everyone, Dan. I’m just repeating your words.”
“Larry!” I cry, disgusted. “I was fifteen years old, for God’s sake! I grew up! The rest of the world is not the enemy! Yes, life dealt you a bad hand! Get over it! You’re being given a second chance here!”
“Easy for you to say, Dan. You had all the privileges.”
“You’re right!” I say. “I did have all the privileges. That’s part of the reason I came here with you, to even the score a bit. But you know what? It was a mis take.”
We’re at the hospital, and I push away the doorman who wants to give me a hand. Mary’s trailing us weeping hysterically, flailing her arms and shaking more raindrops.
“Keep fighting everyone,” I say to Larry. “Keep your precious feud with Bur ton. I don’t care anymore. Mary, get a wheelchair for him or don’t, I’m done with this fool’s errand. It’s a lost cause and has been from the beginning.”
I leave Mary and Larry in the lobby and split.
Whoa, serious daydream. I must be in major need of escape…
What actually happens is nothing so dramatic. Nor does it need to be dramatic to set me off by this point. All it would take by now is for Larry to look at me sideways and I’d be ready to bail. Larry falls on the street again, that’s all: I get a call in my gym from Mary and agree to meet her at the hospital while he gets cleaned up. But it’s the last straw for me. Abu drives me back in the oppressive brightness-the storm seems to have avoided us-and in a few minutes I’m in the Family Crush Room off the lobby, on the phone with the airlines to schedule my flight home. I’m disgusted with myself as much as with Larry, for my obscene sense of entitlement-that I can just arrive here with nothing and expect a whole country full of people to stop what they’re doing and fetch me a kidney. What a spoiled American. Talk about a sense of privilege. Give me a kidney, world! And to think a kidney would fix him in the first place. Larry’s a mess. The truth is, there’s very little left of him to save. Not enough for me to bother. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing.
I’m on hold when Mary finds me. My first impulse is to hit her.
“And you!” I say. “Great help you’ve been. Why didn’t you stop him from leaving the hospital?”
“Dan, I cannot do! He big boy, do what he want.”
I’m ranting. “Mary, he’s not worth it! Why would you even want him for a husband?”
And then, it’s the last thing I expect, but Mary is angry, too-every bit as much as I am.
“What you!” she yells, rounding on me. “You do this for nice China adventure. You tell friends you big hero, you save cousin’s life, but you telephony.”
“Oh, I telephony now,” I snicker. I’m bullying her with my language, trying to intimidate her into shutting up. “What’re you trying to say-that I’m a phony? Yeah, that hurts, coming from the person who steals medical gauze from the hospital-”
“It poor where I come from, you no understand-”
“Who lies about working in some godforsaken school-”
“I do working in school-mechanical draw! Good job, no computer skill but T square, hold head up high-”
“Yeah, then why didn’t you tell us the truth?”
“Because you will laugh like always laughing at Larry, big joke, ha ha, even sick, even mix up. But you send spy on me, call supervisor and get me in trouble-”
“Oh, like you didn’t deserve it, poor you who makes secret telephone calls to another man. Yes, hello,” I say to the airline, off hold at last. “I’d like to make a reservation, Beijing to New York, if you have a seat for tomorrow-”
Mary lurches forward suddenly and smacks the cell phone out of my hands. It hits the floor hard and shatters against the tiles.
“That my son I telephone call!” she screams. “He lose job, very frighten, you not know because you safe American. But it hard to live for people! Not everyone fly around world, say give me this, give me that! That my son I telephone call!”
When did she learn to speak this well? Despite myself, I’m impressed with her vocabulary. She really has picked up a lot of language the past few weeks, studying her manuals.
But she’s not finished with me, coming up so close that I’m almost physically threatened for a second. “Why you no give kidney?”
“What?”
“Why you no give kidney to Larry?”
Suddenly I feel ridiculous, holding my hand out like I was still gripping the phone. I kneel to pick up the casing, stand unsteadily. “It’s doubtful our DNA-”
“See you phony? You not even take test to try.”
She’s right. I’ve never really considered offering my own.
“You take big trip, go everywhere outside, but never go inside, never go here.”
She pokes me in my lower abdomen. I’m shocked by the contact. It’s a sensitive spot.
“Ouch, my kidney-”
“That not even right place!” she scoffs. “You not even know! Kidney in back, that where they take it, put new one in front, right here.”
She prods me again, same spot. “You worse than Larry,” she says. “Larry is what he is, but at least he not pretend he big hero…”
I’m withering under the truth of her attack but try to fight back. “What about you?” I say, trying to match her volume. “Why don’t you give him yours?”
Mary steps back, shows her teeth in a smile or a grimace, I can’t tell. “Larry no want me to, say too risky,” she says. “But you his cousin, Dan, in family of doctors, no excuse…”
I’m speechless. I can mount no defense as she softens her tone.
“Why you think we all have two?” she asks me. “One is extra, for giving.”
It strikes me as startlingly true, the obviousness of it. I don’t know what to say.
“How can you leave your Larry, Dan? He say you good man, you kind man.”
“He does not.”
“He say you kindest man in world.”
“Bullshit.”
She clutches me by both shoulders, resolutely. “He says you his big brother, that you only family left…”
I charge into Larry’s room, where the nurses are cleaning his surface wounds. “What do you mean I’m kind?” I demand.
“To me you are.”
“Fuck that. If I’m so kind, why’d you never ask for a kidney from me?”
“I would never presume.”
“And Mary?”
“I would have declined if she offered. She has no health insurance where she comes from, deficient medical care, she can’t put herself at risk. Matter of fact, I should forbid it in writing, in case she gets any crazy ideas.”
He looks around for a pen, but the Kleenex box with all his worldly goods is nowhere to be found. That’s okay, he’s made his wishes known. Cherry is here to witness his decision, should it ever come up again.
“But you’ll notice that I’m a fair negotiator,” he says. “I’m not making this veto without giving you something in return. So tell you what, I’ll yield on the question of surrender.”
“What do you mean, surrender?”
“White flag, peace pipe, laying down of arms. No more fighting you-I swear on my mutha’s grave.”
The decision made, he gives himself up to exhaustion, a kind of self-liberation. The act of capitulation is so enormous to him that it amounts to a kind of deliverance; he can’t keep himself from making sounds of relief as I discuss the situation with Cherry. The whole time she and I are talking, Larry drops his own comments in: “I’ll let you people decide.” “Whatever you say.” “I defer to you.” “I won’t stop you.” “I’ll let you talk in peace.”
With a wink to me, Cherry leaves the suite. Mary is off nursing her pride somewhere. At last Larry and I are alone. His surrender proclamation’s so monumental to him that he still feels he needs to explain himself.
“All my life I just wanted to assert my independence.”
“I know you did, cuz.”
He looks a thousand years old, like a thousand-year-old panda, so weary of the world and its nonsense. No, he looks worse than that: What he looks like is just another patient, biding his time in a dirty Yankee uniform.
“That’s why I kept leaving the hospital,” he says. “It was me demonstrating that I could make my own way.”
“I understand, Larry. You don’t have to explain.”
“When I’m having a fear reaction, that may be the only thing I can do. I don’t know what else there is to do. But I agree it would be ironic if we were to come all this way for a kidney, only to be struck dead by a Chinese bus.”
“It would be more than ironic, Larry, it would be dumb as hell.”
“Look at the abrasions on my arms,” he says, clucking at himself as if at the foolishness of a minor who’s seen the error of his ways. “We’ll have to get me healed up.”
“We will, Larry, we’ll get you good as new. It’s just…we have it within our grasp now, and you don’t want to pay.”
“I’ll try to pay.”
“You mean that?”
“I hope so, Dan. I hope it doesn’t come in too high, but I’ll do my best to pay.”
“You won’t go back on this, Larry? Because I can’t babysit you 24/7. I’ve got my own babies at home that I’ve put on hold for you.”
“It’s done, Dan.” He breathes peacefully.
I believe him. Because, like everything else about Larry, it’s contagious: I find myself in surrender mode, too. In the semi-dark of the hospital room, with the sheets draped up and surrounded by pistachio shells, I sit by his bedside in silence. On the TV variety show flickering in the background, a Chinese Jackie Gleason is trying to talk on a red-hot telephone. There’s lots of canned laughter at low volume, but we’ve learned to tune it out.
“Thank you, Dan. I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, but thank you a hundred times.”
“Friends and family, you don’t need to say, Larry. It’s understood.”
“I’m sorry, Dan.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re doing the best you can.”
“No. I mean…for everything. Getting sick and being such a bother. I never meant for this to happen. I always thought I was going to make a million dollars and be in a position to take care of everyone else in the family, not have someone in the family take care of me.”
“You just rest, Larry. You’ve lined up a great surgeon, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”
He lies there, the vein in his neck pulsing so delicately as the Chinese Gleason keeps almost scalding his mouth on the red-hot phone. Now there really is a thunderstorm outside, not a false alarm but the real thing. It’s drenching our windows, and I’m glad we’re safe inside our cave.
“You know one thing I don’t get, Dan?”
“What’s that?”
“Why you agreed to come here in the first place, after what I tried to do to you with the FBI.”
“Water under the bridge, Larry. C’mon, it’s a no-brainer. Your cousin’s sick and you have the power to do something about it? Then what’s the question? You do it.”
He shakes his head, beyond him. “I guess you’re better in the forgiveness department than I am.”
“You kidding? I hold grudges worse than anyone. I’m just being…unpiglike. I’ve got a good life-how could I not help? And stop looking at me that way.”
“What way?”
“With stars in your eyes. Save it for Chinese mothers who find it in them to forgive Red Guards for stabbing their babies. For people who really do donate their kidneys to save their cousins. What I’m do ing should be standard operating procedure. It’s like you saying that being an organ donor should be our default. Same deal with helping each other-helping should be our default. If I hadn’t lifted a finger, then you could ask me why.”
He takes this in quietly, as the rainstorm drums against our window. “Funniest thing,” he says. “When I was outside before, freaked by all the signs as usual, I realized that I’m as lost in China as my futha was lost in America. Now I know what he must have felt like, not being able to read the language.”
The Chinese Gleason dumps the phone in a bucket of ice water and smiles with relief.
“I’m telling you, if I come to terms with my futha, that will be an added bonus of this trip, even if I don’t get a kidney. Imagine: a reconciliation, after he’s been dead twenty years.”
“Better late than never,” I say.
Outside, the lightning flashes, the thunder booms. On TV a new act: A policeman in a girdle and wig cries as he tries to explain something to a judge. Soon all the girdle-and-wig-wearing policemen in the courtroom are crying. The flood level rises to their knees.
“Know what I think, Dan?” Larry says.
“What’s that?”
He looks at me with panda eyes. “I think you’re sort of a black sheep yourself. Not in the traditional sense, maybe, but-”
“Baaa,” I say, silencing him. “And you know what I think?” I say.
“What?
“I think I came here because I love you.”
“I understand.”
“I never said that to you before, and I don’t even think I knew it before this moment, but that’s why I’m here.”
“I appreciate that. Thank you.”
That’s all. Only time we ever broach the subject. Mary’s right: I cannot leave my Larry. I don’t know how long it’ll take or what it’ll cost, but we’ll see it through together. Side by side in the semi-dark, with the flood of tears in the courtroom rising to hip level, we wait.