The longer the night lasts, the more our dreams will be.
It’s 10:00 P.M., and Mary and I are singing Peking Opera in Larry’s hospital room. She’s performing the male roles, and I’m doing the females in falsetto, with much ritualized stomping of feet and syncopated banging of bedpans. Still wiped out from this morning’s dialysis, Larry lies before us on the bed with his eyes closed, showing all the appreciation of a corpse. I do believe, however, that down at frog-decibel level, he may be chuckling in time with the music. It wouldn’t be too much to shoot for a grin, would it-one of Larry’s old-time razzle-dazzlers? “Ha ha, good one,” that’s what I’m aiming to hear, like a grand-slam home run, despite a few missing teeth in the bleachers.
And then at 10:01 P.M., the call comes. It’s Cherry on the phone.
“Now is the time,” she says. “Approval has been granted.”
Whoa, team. I hush Mary in the background and collect myself. “Have all the papers gone through, the signatures from all the parties?”
“All yes, but no time for small talk,” Cherry says. “Tell Larry surgery in two hour, preparation begins right away.”
It’s day forty-two in Shi, our forty-ninth day in China, and we can barely believe it. We’re so pumped-we’re like hostages suddenly being told they’re about to be set free-we go into double time, hurriedly getting things in order as a swarm of white-clad people enter our space and scurry about efficiently. We’ve been poised to go for so many weeks that we’re almost exploding out of the gate. Mary sweeps the latest pistachio shells out of the way so that when the time comes, Larry can be wheeled out smoothly. Larry fumbles with his shoelaces, but he’s so flustered he’s tying them into knots. I take over removing his Businessman’s Running Shoes, freeing him to keep up a running monologue as the Judy-look-alike resident shaves his lower abdomen and crotch.
“I’m not optimistic about this operation,” he says. “I know the stats are on my side, but my hunches are usually good, and I don’t think I’ll make it. There’s going to be a complication, and I won’t pull through. And I’m surprisingly okay with it. My choice to come to China was a sound one. I’m just so tired, tired isn’t the word for it. I can’t fight for my life anymore. Whatever happens, happens. I want to be cremated, just so you know-my ashes buried with my mutha, my futha, and Judy. And to remind you, even if I come out of it and by some miracle it’s a success, I reserve the right to kill myself.”
I’m paying as much attention to these pronouncements as I usually do, preoccupied by glancing sidelong at his crotch. First time I’ve ever seen it. Is that what it boils down to, the nest of his manhood? This tender package, this shy sac, beneath all the hurly-burly of his life? It seems so private and quaint, after all the histrionics of his existence. Eventually I tune back in and find the words he needs to hear.
“Well, I have a great feeling about this,” I reassure him. “Everything’s fallen into place for us. This is just the endgame of a very fortunate series of events.”
But no sooner are the words out of my mouth than I’m seized with a huge charley horse in my thigh. I rarely get charley horses, but this one clutches me for nearly a minute, making me squeeze the bedside for support.
“Dan bad?” Mary asks.
I concentrate on breathing oxygen down to the spasm. Serves me right for sounding overoptimistic. “Give me a sec,” I say at last. Just as an e-mail comes in. It’s the Disapproving Docs demanding an update, “or we cannot vouch for the consequences.”
The phone rings. It’s Cherry again. “Oh, and Daniel, we now have a price for you,” she says.
“Go ahead,” I say, breathing through my spasm.
“Dr. X give you half-price special, like what he give Chinese citizen. Thirty-two thousand American dollar.”
“I see,” I say, not letting the figure sink in right away, not tipping my hand about how pleased its initial sound makes me.
“You can get this now?” Cherry asks.
“Right now, in the middle of the night?” I ask.
“Yes, please, before operation. Is midmorning U.S.A., banks open.”
“Yes, but it may take a while to go through.”
“You tell them to wire and show us document, is okay.”
My spasm subsides as I prepare to tell Larry the news. He’s lying on his bed with his bare feet pointed at me. In most countries this is an insult, but I don’t mind. “Ready for the number, Larry? Thirty-two.”
He seems obscurely gladdened by this, taking the figure in stride. “That includes everything?” he asks tonelessly. “CAT scans, recovery time, post-op care?”
“Thirty-two for everything, Larry. And that’s for a team of four surgeons and an anesthesiologist. I was gearing up to convince you to spring for sixty or eighty.”
“Which I may or may not have done.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“And that’s their asking price,” Larry says. “I bet I can talk them down to twenty-five-”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I caution him. “Thirty-two’s an unbelievable price, considering it costs eight times that much at home for a cadaver kidney-”
“I know, it’s excellent-”
“I can’t believe it!” I crow, finally letting the figure sink in. “Thirty-two! Larry, we’re gonna save your life!”
“Yes,” he says, thoughtfully picking at a hangnail on his big toe. “It may well be…”
But not ten seconds elapse before he’s on to a new subject, slowly excavating his Kleenex storage box. “Next order of business, here’s my passport for safekeeping,” he says, withdrawing the small navy blue booklet and handing it over. He starts plucking cards and papers from his wallet, then lays it belly-up so its contents are exposed.
“Just take the whole wallet, take whatever you need, keep records or not, it doesn’t matter. Reimburse yourself for any hospital payments you’ve paid, buy yourself some good things. I know I’m setting you loose with free money in a city with massage parlors on every corner, but you deserve it, give her a kiss for me.”
“Larry, I’m happily-”
“Did I say you weren’t?”
“But all joking aside, you’re okay with handing over your stuff? Not losing self-respect?”
“That’s a girlie thing,” Larry says dismissively. “But you’ll need my all-purpose password for my various accounts. Ready? 1909VDB-S.”
“Wait a minute, I know that code,” I say. “It’s from the first Lincoln-head penny, designed in 1909 by Victor David Brenner-”
“That’s right, and the S was from the San Francisco mint, the rarest of them all.”
“So wait,” I say as a vague recollection comes to me. “Did you have a penny collection when you were a kid, too?”
“Dan, you been undergoing dialysis, too? Your memory’s not so great. We bofe had them,” he says. “I wanted to have one like my big cousin had. You honestly don’t remember?”
“I remember mine. I never had the 1909 VDB-S, of course. That was the holy grail, but I had a 1943 zinc penny I was pretty proud of-”
“Who do you think traded it to you?” Larry says. “I only got the new Lincoln memorial in exchange, but I didn’t mind.”
“Larry, did I…cheat you?” I ask. “A Lincoln memorial in exchange for a ’43 zinc?”
“In mint condition, but I wanted you to have it,” Larry says.
Suddenly I have access to a whole chronology of memories about Larry as a kid that I didn’t have until this moment. A sweet little Larry being generous to a fault. A sweet little Larry being a good sport about being taken advantage of. A little-less-sweet Larry never wearing gloves in winter, to toughen himself up. A lot-less-sweet Larry being an ace shot with a peashooter. A tough-talking Larry standing up to bullies. A problem-student Larry bringing cherry bombs to school-and defying his teachers to send him home for it. There may also have been something about a scuffle with a guidance counselor, but I can’t stand to think of it, because it’s dawning on me that I may have had something to do with this timeline. Could I have contributed, even in a minor way, to his unsweetening?
And always, Larry loving Girl Scout cookies-which is at least one memory I can do something about, right here and now.
“Here, want one? I say, holding out a Caramel de Lite. “For courage?”
“Too sugary,” he says, taking a flaky dry Chinese pastry instead.
I don’t know what to say, so I get busy with my hospital duties.
10:14 P.M. I scramble to make calls to Larry’s bankers and lawyers, fax a letter giving his broker the hospital’s routing number.
10:17 P.M. Get verbal confirmation that thirty-two thousand American dollars are winging their way to China.
10:21 P.M. At Larry’s request I reach his lawyer at her vacation ranch in Wyoming, ask her to fax Larry’s living will.
10:22 P.M. Do we know where our donor is? Is he having his final dinner?
10:23 P.M. We receive a fax with written confirmation that money is in transit. Show this to Cherry.
10:29 P.M. Larry says, “Why do I feel I’m about to flunk my final pilot’s test?”
10:31 P.M. Larry says, “I’m not deluding myself about what a long shot this is.”
10:26 P.M. Do we know where our donor is? Is he is being walked from his final holding cell?
10:35 P.M. “Everything clicking like clockwork,” Cherry reports. “Organ on its way.”
“The donor, too, or just the kidney?” I ask.
Cherry and the Judy look-alike exchange a giggle. “Just the kidney, really,” Cherry says.
10:37 P.M. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. It’s the waifs from candeyblossoms.com. I’m pretty sure I canceled the account, but I guess they’ve found new ways to get around it.
10:37 P.M. Just as I’m closing my laptop so there’ll be no more interference, I receive another e-mail from the Disapproving Docs, saying that unless I assure them that Cousin Burton’s life is not in danger, they retain the option of reporting us to the FBI.
10:38 P.M. The computer is successfully shut down.
10:39 P.M. My cell phone rings. It’s Jeremy with a new bagel he wants me to listen to, but I don’t have time right now and have to cut it short. What’s he doing home on a school day anyway? Is he faking sick again?
10:40 P.M. A visibly nervous Larry asks Cherry if she can sit on his bed with him.
“This may come as a shock,” he tells her, “but my self-assurance fails me in certain situations, and this may be one of them.”
“Yes, of course,” Cherry says, seating herself and taking his hand.
10:40 P.M. I think about how much gentler “yes, of course” is than the French “mais oui,” which always carries a hint of exasperation in it. I think about how I’ve seen no exasperation among the Chinese these entire two months. I think that twenty-five years ago the Chinese appeared brutal to me, with policemen pulling citizens by their hair, but that this time the Chinese have the face of Cherry, the face of Jade.
10:41 P.M. I recover a repressed memory that I did in fact take a semester of French in college. Yuh-vonne’s fact file was correct! It was on the pass-fail system, as I recall, and I didn’t exactly distinguish myself…
10:42 P.M. Still holding Larry’s hand, Cherry takes a phone call and then says, “Sorry to report we need more cash money for antirejection medicine. Ten thousand RMB.”
“But Larry’s account is maxed out till tomorrow,” I tell her.
“Must find a way,” she says.
10:43 P.M. I race out of the hospital with my own MasterCard, which I hope still has enough credit on it to fulfill the hospital’s request. As I’m racing back with a giant wad of cash in my pocket, I glimpse oily roasted peanuts through the window of a nearby market. And I haven’t had a bite to eat since this morning.
10:48 P.M. Large paper bag of peanuts in tow, I race back into the hospital, just as a dusty ambulance is pulling up the entranceway.
10:48 P.M. Meet the surgeons coming up the elevator from their basement dorm room. They’re in their early thirties, wearing blue jeans, just waking up from an evening nap in preparation for the midnight surgery. They won’t let me take their picture, and they let me know that Dr. X is meditating before procedure and cannot be disturbed.
10:49 P.M. I’m greeted by Mary outside our room, waving her hands and cheering, “Yay-yay Larry!”
10:50 P.M. “I’m a creative type,” Larry is saying to the Judy look-alike, who is swabbing his tummy with alcohol and painting arrows. Or maybe what he’s saying is “I’m afraid of heights.” With all the extra bodies in here, the acoustics aren’t great right now.
10:51 P.M. While Larry drinks something that will empty his bowels, Cherry walks me down to the cashier on the fifth floor to deposit the latest money into Larry’s account. At this hour the place is even more deserted than usual, but Cherry keeps ringing the bell until the cashier shows up and runs my ten thousand RMB through her handy counterfeit-checking machine. A line more or less forms behind me. Someone tries to cut in front of me, but I block him from doing so. Cashier says something that makes the crowd laugh.
“What’d she say?” I ask Cherry.
“She make little joke,” Cherry informs me. Instant Inscrutable. I could live here thirty years and never plumb the depths of that one.
10:53 P.M. In the elevator going back up, I ask Cherry: “What’d you mean before when you said, ‘Just the kidney, really’?”
“I mean donor is brain-dead, freshly executed, but still alive on life support. Body with kidney coming in ambulance.”
I stop eating peanuts mid-munch. “I just saw an ambulance pull in when I went out for money,” I say. “Could that have been him?”
“Doubtful,” she says thoughtfully. “He come in regional ambulance, probably dusty.”
“This one was dusty.”
“Okay, that is him.”
10:53 P.M. Now we know where our donor is. The dead horse has indeed come to the live horse-but only because the Chinese government has put the dead horse to death.
10:54 P.M. On way back to Larry’s room, I stop in Abu’s hallway to give everyone the news. As usual, the competition’s deadly quiet, but it stops for the minute it takes them to partake of some of my peanuts, a silent moment we share on Larry’s behalf, no less reverential for being full of munching mouths.
10:56 P.M. On my return I see that Larry is wearing a black and gold yarmulke.
“Don’t worry, it’s only a loaner,” he tells me. “I need all the luck I can get.”
10:56 P.M. Downstairs, the donor’s body is being wheeled through the lobby, elevated to the top floor, where it’s placed in an operating room next to the one where Larry will be.
“Two rooms side by side,” Cherry informs me amiably. “One to remove, one to receive.”
10:59 P.M. Larry’s transferred from his bed to the gurney in preparation for the trip to the elevator while Cherry escorts Mary and me as closest kin, sort of, to the tenth-floor “Conversation Room,” where the anesthesiologist produces a form to sign. Cherry reels off the list of possible “sad effects”: heart attack, throat damage, on and on. I sign as Mary rubs her crucifix anxiously.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I tell the anesthesiologist who declines my peanuts.
11:06 P.M. When I get back to Larry’s room, he’s entertaining the Judy look-alike with a brand-new mini-saga:
“Does the name Rockefeller mean anything to you? Bunch of robber barons from the 1890s. But Jay Rockefeller is senator from West Virginia, one of the smartest men in Congress. Way back, doing graduate work at Harvard, he ended up renting the downstairs of my Aunt Esther’s house, fairly homey two-family structure on Sacramento Street. One day Jay’s car doesn’t work. Esther calls my futha for help, Sam knows where to get a good used battery, needs five bucks to pay the guy, but Jay has already taken a cab to go about his day. Sam pays for the battery, installs it, car runs fine, Jay’s ever so grateful. But he’s never around when Sam is. And Sam doesn’t want the five bucks back anyway. For the rest of his life, Sam gets to tell people that a Rockefeller owes him five bucks.”
“Hey, Larry,” I say, standing in the doorway. “That’s a good memory of your dad!”
“So it is,” he says, marveling. “How do you like that-better late than never.”
And with a wink good-bye to the Judy look-alike, he’s wheeled out of our cave.
11:18 P.M. We’re waiting at the elevator bank, where Larry resumes being negatively vigilant, as though making up for the momentary lapse. “None of which diminishes the fact that I continue to feel I’m going to expire of kiddie failure right on the operating table.”
“Everything’s A-OK,” I say.
Larry looks at me with preternatural patience. “No, Dan, nuffing is,” he says, “but that’s A-OK.”
“C’mon, trouper,” I say. “Can you rally?”
“I’m a pro, Dan. What am I supposed to do: stop living just because I’m dying?” He picks up his cell phone.
“Who’re you calling?”
“My broker, Dan. Buying puts on China Life Insurance. It’s called hedging my bets. (What don’t you get? If I die on the operating table, it doesn’t bode well for the way the Chinese perform kidney transplants in general, and presumably the insurance company that banks on people living a long time will underperform over time. Stock goes down, put goes up, ergo the estate of the deceased makes money. Am I missing something?)”
I look at him, admiring, while his broker’s office puts him on hold.
“You punch butt, Feldman,” I say.
“I know. Not bad for a chronic depressionist. If it weren’t for my gallows humor, I’d have been a goner long ago.”
Nor does he quiet down in the elevator. Still on hold when the elevator doors open, he continues blabbing to the surgeons inside, who’re now dressed in white. Their surgical masks make them look like the duck slicers at the restaurant where Larry and I had our Shabbos dinner a lifetime ago. I only hope they’re as skillful.
“Goody luck, goody luck!” Mary cries as Larry’s wheeled in. We can’t go upstairs to surgery with him, but he wouldn’t permit a lingering good-bye anyway. He’s too busy giving the surgeons his personal theory on the stock market.
“People say, ‘How can you speculate? You don’t have enough money to speculate.’ I say, ‘I don’t have enough money to speculate. That’s why I speculate.’”
Larry and I make eye contact for half a second as the elevator doors close. “Yes, I’d like to place an order for one thousand-”
The doors seal shut.
Mary and I slap high five, then come together in a hug.
Outside, under the dusty stars, or maybe they’re cinders, Cherry stands with Mary and me. She purses her lips and nods at me as though the fate of the world is in balance. “Now in a way is out of our hands,” she says.
“Cherry,” I say, laying my palm on her shoulder, “if I haven’t already told you this, then let me say it for the first time. You’re a doll.”
“Is nussing,” she says.
“Is summsing,” I say.
The operation is slated to take three hours, up to six if there are complications. Mary and Cherry decide to go out and find a cake to buy. I decide to go back up to our cave. Larry’s tropical half looks as if a war front has moved through, and I prop open the door to my half so a cool front can move through as well. The temperature between our two spaces is evening out, all the molecules flowing back and forth freely. I decide to do a little housecleaning, start putting things back in the wallet he plucked apart. It’s like viewing the interior of his life: gift cards from Sharper Image and other defunct stores, laminated photos of all his godchildren-little towheaded rowdies flaunting their baby teeth, as well as sullen teenagers who probably dig their wack-job godfather despite themselves. I reach for a fake Caramel de Lite for comfort. Here are photos of Mary that Larry took when she was modeling her L. L. Bean coat his first night in Beijing. She looks amazingly good in them-sending him a sultry look over her shoulder-almost glamorous. Is this the way Larry sees her, like a movie star, almost?
I take another Caramel de Lite-not bad, caramel sprinkled with toasted coconut-and sit on his bed to sort through wads of loose, sandy documents. Here’s the nun’s VIP letter he’s been toting around, the all-purpose talisman putty-soft with misuse, not quite grammatical, and with a couple of phrases he was probably too embarrassed to read aloud to me: “…diamond in the rough…please treat with respect…” But it’s an obvious forgery, or worse than a forgery. Down below, where time and rain have gotten to it, the smudgy signature reads “Larry Feldman.” Was it muddleheadedness that made him sign his own name, or a strange kind of integrity? For all his sketchy ways, does it go against his nature to lie? I check this tenuous insight against a photo of Larry on his recently reissued passport. Is this possibly the face of a man who’s fundamentally honest with himself and others if and when he can be? But how old and sick he looks! How puffed out and entirely devoid of hope! I’m startled by what I haven’t admitted to myself before now: He looks like a man at death’s door.
I stuff my face with Caramel de Lites.
Around the room, remnants of Larry wink at me morbidly. There on the bureau is the all-purpose spork he’s carried with him these many weeks. Will Larry be okay in surgery without it? He’s so fragile, couldn’t he use every good luck charm he can get? And there parked so neatly in the open closet are his Businessman’s Running Shoes; it pains me to see that he abdicated them at last. Will he be okay without his rubber-stiff self-reliance? Why are we toying with the autonomy he so painstakingly assembled in his life? I wonder why I quoted his Jesus line back to him: “Everything’s A-OK.” But is it really?
Ouch, I get an echo of the charley horse, stand from the bed to try to release it. It fades somewhat, and I limp to his suitcases stacked in the corner. There on top is my wolf skull that’s gotten mixed in with his things. I unwrap the washcloth, and it’s intact, thank goodness-those luxury washcloths really did the job. The scent of chamomile wafts back to me from what seems like years before. But have the washcloths protected his tea set, individually wrapped in the crate beneath? I unwrap a teacup-jagged shards. I unwrap a saucer-in pieces, as are all the items, one after the other, not a single item unsmashed. Why is this always Larry’s luck? Why do I come out unscratched and Larry takes the fall? Jade was right, as usual: They were too crispy to travel. Now the question is, was Larry?
Without warning, the charley horse slides to my gut.
I upend the crate so all the rubble of shattered china pours into the waste barrel, chips and flakes and then the trailings of dust. How can this be anything but a bad omen? Another spasm passes through me-a kind of couvade, suffering for Larry’s suffering, or maybe an anxiety attack. I close my eyes and am dizzy for a minute, ransacked by images of kidney beans behind my eyelids. Kidney bean pie. Kidney bean salad. WARNING! RED KIDNEY BEAN POISONING! Raw kidney beans contain as many as seventy thousand units of toxin, and as few as four beans can bring on symptoms of extreme vomiting, which may be life-threatening.
Larry, Larry, my sweet little cousin, fighting for his life…
Visions of chewing pig kidneys. On the podium at Larry’s bar mitzvah, spitting kidney beans at the congregation. The words “kidnap cabbie” speed by so fast they condense into the word “kidney.” The bad-bad criminal gorging himself on Larry’s baby back ribs. An old Peter Lorre movie where an invalid concert pianist who’s been in an accident has a murderer’s hands attached to his stumps. A black pimp in a surgical mask waving a saber at the balls of Leonard Bernstein lying dead in a chef’s hat. Larry and I falling out of a chairlift as lullabies run together in a loop: London bridge is falling down, and down will come baby, Jill came tumbling after…
The spasm knocks me to my knees.
O Fearless Father of East and West alike, Emperor of the healing arts, do not let Larry be crispy, I pray. Forgive him his trespasses as You forgive me for cheating him out of a 1943 zinc penny. I haven’t been too cavalier about this, have I? You’d let me know if these prayers aren’t proper, wouldn’t You? Have I used up my quota? Unless maybe-hear me out-if I haven’t exhausted my lifetime allotment, taking into account my pissy teenage years…I get rollover prayers? Sound like a deal?
My gut feels fine. Must have been the oily peanuts. I trash the rest and set out for a change of scenery.
A few minutes later, the midnight air outside feels ridiculously fresh, like a farmer’s field after haying. The stars are as sharp as any of the china shards I just discarded. I begin walking with no destination in mind. Spit globules glisten in the tar from the streetlights overhead. Neon squiggles like a puppy I’ve grown bored with. Two men are singing “Soul Train” at an outdoor karaoke bar, but they’re so shy they sit with their backs to the handful of listeners. Despite their shyness, the mikes amplify their warbling voices into the humid night air. Are the mikes loud enough to carry their song to the windows of the hospital not far away? Could it serenade the surgeons beginning to hack at his guts? Because the surgery must have started by now. May the song bring them joy and precision as they cut.
I walk farther. A shopkeeper ducks into his store as I approach, the better to observe me through his slatted window. I help a grateful couple push their broken-down car several blocks through city traffic to a gas station; it’s good to have something to do. Farther on, under a highway bridge, a cello quartet is rehearsing on a sidewalk. The instruments bellow as cars sizzle past overhead. It should be a recording studio, Bach complete with street sounds. Lovely.
Even farther, the tissue wrappings from someone’s afternoon fireworks have shredded to red confetti, damp already and turning to clay underfoot. So some festivities go on, even after the holiday season’s passed. Good to know. And another thing: A girl falls off her bicycle, startled by the sight of me. I extend my hand to help her up, then lift her bike for her. She is featherlight, but her bike is as heavy as lead. I’ve spent all this time in China and had no idea how heavy the bikes were. This also seems an important detail to know.
Navigating by the specter of the Giant Mushroom, I find a new route to the Old Faithful fountains. A school chorus is practicing in the open air. Up so late, the singers smile and whisper to one another while the choral director scolds them fondly. It’s a mystery to me how a nation this huge manages to foster such a feeling of family: calling one another aunt and uncle, treating one another like sibs. Maybe it’s because there’s a shortage of real-life relatives. Scrutable! China’s enacted the One-Child Policy not only to halve its population but also to foster national unity. Everyone’s an only child, so the nation is their family. What a stroke of genius. I miss my children.
And then I arrive at the waltzing terrace. There they are, the former Red Guards, waltzing in trim little circles around the colored fountains, round and round. But tonight they’re not frightening, these former cannibals and rapists and butchers; they’re just unfortunates, doing the best they can to salvage what’s left of their lives. Wasn’t that always what they were, unfortunate pawns of generals and tyrants? Given the right circumstances, couldn’t we American student protesters of that era have been manipulated into becoming monsters ourselves? Seeing them tonight, I imagine they’re dancing not in celebration of their misdeeds but in shame for how they were duped into ruining so many lives. They’re waltzing round and round to atone for their sins, the way dirty water can cleanse itself by recirculating. Maybe that’s what these fountains are about, too: redemption through recirculation. Whether they realize it or not, it’s some sort of purification dance, oxygenating themselves free of their polluted past. Isn’t there an old Chinese saying that if you rinse your hands in running water for an hour every day, after nine years you may be pardoned for your past? So maybe if you waltz every night for ninety-nine years, you finally waltz away your crimes. Quick, there’s somebody I need to share this with…
“Hon?”
“Dan?”
“It’s happening. He just went under the knife-”
“Are you sure it’s safe to say this over the cell?”
“He’s in surgery. It’s too late for anyone to stop it. It’s happening…”
I’m close enough to the small fountains that little droplets of spray are coming onto me, dampening my hat. I hold the phone out toward the scene: the waltzers down below and, in the background up above, the hulking shape of the hospital, its top floor ablaze where Larry is. “Can you hear this, honey?” I call to my wife. “I know it’s noon where you are, but it’s midnight here, and the Red Guards are swirling to this music. And can you hear this traffic, all the cabbies honking? And the bicycle brakes screeching? And the street vendors calling? This is what goes on here around the clock! All this blessed cacophony-”
I put the phone back to my ear. “Doesn’t the noise bother you?” she’s asking.
“Nah-threw out my earplugs weeks ago.”
A pause. “Dan, what’s going on? Are you okay?” she asks.
“It’s just…I’d forgotten how lucky I am,” I say, “to get to go halfway around the world and be privy to this. I might have stayed home and missed this. Thank you for allowing me to be reckless.”
“Dan,” she asks, “you haven’t gone back to carrying your flask around, have you?”
“I’m standing here watching these people I thought were monsters, but they’re not,” I say. “They’re victims, too!-of their lives. Because you can’t hurt others without ultimately hurting yourself. And now they need a lifetime to heal themselves, any way they can.”
A cannon goes off somewhere far away, accompanied by cheers. “And, hon?”
“Yes, Dan?”
“Larry’s not going to die of kiddie failure. We won’t let him. ’Cause he’s a victim, too, just like Mary is, and these poor souls here, who’re really pretty good waltzers, by the way. We ought to take some lessons, you and me…”
Shelley takes a moment. “I like how you sound,” she decides. “You sound kind.”
“Yeah, well, blame your older son for that. Is the little one still faking sick, by the way?”
“No, he finally went to school today. His conscience got the better of him.”
“Conscience, eh? Let’s nip that in the bud.”
She chuckles. “Call me in the morning and let me know how Larry’s doing.”
“Will do.”
Hanging up, I see the waltzers gesture to me. I withdraw by habit, hesitate, then come forward and join my generation-mates. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream…” Old Faithful’s on a timer to keep her faithful, and off she goes, adding to the general hoopla. We waltz under the water drops, and it’s bountiful, being sad and festive together with my generation under the hulk of the hospital where Larry lies unconscious. Then, faintly at first, but with more and more clarity, I make out a more insistent honking than any of the stray honking that’s pealing through the night. It’s adamant, rhythmical, eloquent. “Jong may yo yee-”
“Ma?!” I cry, jumping out of the way to avoid getting splattered by my exuberant friend, the Queen Latifah cabbie, waving wildly to me out her window as she weaves around the dancers like she’s one herself, splashing through the puddles, round and round the fountains pumping her horn, and you don’t need a translator to know exactly what it’s saying, in any language at all:
“Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples!”