One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.
Next morning, fuck market. I figure I can cheer up Larry if I grab him a Cartier knockoff for five bucks that would cost someone five grand on South Beach. Outside the hotel Jade comes hopping up to me waving both hands. I almost don’t recognize her in jeans and blouse instead of her olive drab uniform. “Excuse me, Eighty-four, but this moment the staff comes out,” she explains as she pulls me down the street away from the hotel entrance.
“Oh, that’s right, Twenty-four, you’re moonlighting on the sly?”
“Double agent, license to kill,” she snickers. “Martini shaken, not stirred.”
I love that she can make fun of all the spying silliness. Situation splendid.
“Heat so hot you shirt is wet already,” she notes. “You are very schvitz.”
“It’s hot, all right. Where’d you pick up the slang?”
“I jabber on Internet so make this day worthwhile for you.”
The market, when we get there, respires the electrifying odor of garlic and incense. We are jostled by local vendors with beaten-up toenails and Westerners whose toenails look as if they’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Merchants and customers alike use finger symbols to signify numbers, a kind of bartering sign language I don’t remember from last time I was here. It’s pleasant to be under the wing of my young protector. “Be wary of pickypocks,” Jade warns, and she shows me how to discern between antiques that are genuinely old and those manufactured two weeks ago. She scratches the surface of an ancient-seeming jewelry box where particles of sand have been glued to make it seem as weathered as something from the Ming dynasty, and sure enough there’s a shiny staple underneath. I’m impressed: The art of instant Minging manifests an ingenuity that’s almost worth the price. But Jade is embarrassed about her countrymen’s duplicity.
“Don’t worry, we have fibbing in our country, too,” I assure her. “We even have our own finger gesture to symbolize it.” I demonstrate crossed fingers. “It means the person is faking.”
Jade is confused-she thought crossed fingers meant hoping for good luck. I’ve never thought of it before, but I tell her that the gesture actually means both-faking and hoping. What an odd combination. Jade crosses her thin fingers. “Good luck, I trick you,” she says, grasping the double concept right away.
I don’t actually mind losing money at this sort of bazaar, because there’s some justice in having Westerners spread the wealth like this-paying a few extra dollars for an imitation Cartier helps make up for the ways we’ve always exploited the Chinese, sort of individualized reparations. But Jade seems determined to get me my money’s worth. At a stall with yellowing, chipped animal bones, I eye an eagle skull with a black beak. Jade confirms that the dried cartilage is real. But what’s this other beauty?
“Walf. Small walf,” Jade says. “Not find this on Canal Street!”
She decides I’ll never fully grasp the Chinese soul until I own a small Chinese wolf skull, and to negotiate with the vendor she uses a range of lovely sounds my brain scrambles helplessly to make sense of. “Boozy boozy Negev Desert!” she scolds with finger upraised. “Who has chiggers?
She! She! She!” she laughs, putting her hand on his forearm as they chortle together, all part of a prescribed game. She cajoles most artfully, tugging on his sleeve, swinging her hips coquettishly, calling him uncle- and periodically accusing him of trying to pass counterfeit bills. “But not too crispy to travel?” she asks me after winning the sale for two dollars. It’s just coming to me that she means “brittle” when my cell phone rings.
“What’d you lose now?” I ask, but it’s not Larry-it’s the Australian accent of Antonia, telling me she reached someone, something, somewhere…?
“Listen, Antonia, there’s a crowd around me, can you hold on while I go someplace that’s quieter?”
But there is no quiet place in the market. Jade leads me to the back of a booth away from the main foot traffic, yet even here my English attracts a small crowd, including three schoolboys with their arms affectionately around one another’s necks. While I cover my ears from the ambient noise, Antonia tells me she’s learned that kidney transplants have indeed been drastically reduced because of the Restriction, but that if I can promise confidentiality, there’s a surgeon out in the city of Shi a few hours west of Beijing who may still have access to some.
“How can he skirt the law? Will it be a healthy organ?”
“My understanding is that this Dr. X is so highly placed, if he wants an organ-which will be immaculately screened-he knows how to make the authorities look the other way. But time is of the essence. If you can get there by this evening, he’ll be able to meet you. Don’t fool around with trains; just take a taxi and go. The fare will cost maybe eight or nine hundred RMBs-less than two hundred dollars.”
“Is it safe?”
“Safe?”
“I mean, if they catch us, will they lock us up to make an example?”
“I know what ‘safe’ means, I’m just framing my answer,” Antonia replies. There’s the wail of a siren from her end as a police car hurtles by. “I can’t say anything for sure,” she informs me after it passes. “Nothing is guaranteed. But I’ll tell you that if I were desperate to save a family member, this is the place I would go.”
That does it for me. I agree to run it by Larry and, if he’s good to go, to get started immediately.
“When you can commit a hundred percent to getting out there today, call me back and I’ll confirm with my contact,” Antonia says. “I have an hour and a half before my flight.”
“Where you off to?”
“Conference in London. I’m almost at the airport now. I won’t be able to hear you in a few minutes, but I’ll keep my cell on vibrate.”
“Antonia, you’re an angel…”
“Just call me back within ten minutes so I can let my contact know. Then, when you procure a cab, have the cabbie call the surgeon’s secretary so he can get directions. Here’s the number…”
“Thank you, thank you. When I woke Larry last night to tell him there was a ray of hope, he nearly wept with gratitude,” I say. Am I laying it on too thick? He might have wept-if I’d actually wakened him, and if he were that kind of person. The main thing I want Antonia to know is how much her efforts are appreciated.
“I want to make very clear that I’m not guaranteeing anything, and I’m formally absolving myself of all responsibility for your actions. But good luck. And Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful…”
Hanging up, I look at Jade. Her seal eyes allow no light to escape. She’s heard everything, understood everything. She’s my instant ally as I dial Larry and get his okay, call Antonia back with our commitment. As we rush to the market exit, Jade asks me something only an ally could.
“This lady you speak with, she is someone we can trust?”
“I think so. I met her at a Jewish synagogue last night.”
“You are Jew?”
I flag a cab. “Yes.”
She stops me and lifts my hat. “But where you horn?”
“Only about half of us have horns these days,” I say, ushering her inside the cab. “It’s part of a PR push. So where shall I drop you?”
Jade waves her hands no as we begin flying through the traffic. “Of course I halp you in this task,” she says.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Shi is hours away. I don’t even know what time we’ll be back tonight.”
“Don’t ridiculous you,” she says adamantly. “This my country. You are guest. I only worry how you manage in Shi?”
“Don’t know yet,” I say. “We’ll play it by ear.”
“Your ear not get tired from playing it so much?”
I lean to give her a kiss on the cheek. She recoils slightly until she understands it’s just the cheek. Now she’s happy again. I’m happy because I really can use her help. Her face looks American to me right now as we rush to Larry’s hotel. I see my face in the reflection of her sunglasses, and it looks Chinese. Everybody looks like everybody, I conclude sagely. It’s the wisdom that comes when things start clicking into place.
As arranged, Larry and Mary are sitting by the sidewalk in front of their hotel. Larry taps Mary’s elbow to help him up, a gesture I remember his parents making to each other back in Lynn, oddly touching in its familiarity. Larry’s ragged, drained face brightens at the sight of Jade.
“Where’d you find this one?” Larry asks. “They keep getting better and better.”
“She was my breakfast waitress.”
“Must have been some breakfast,” he says dryly.
But now there’s a new development. Mary takes this moment to announce that she’s going home!
“I thought the day after tomorrow,” Larry says in shock.
“Train in two hours,” Mary says.
Larry’s stunned. Why didn’t she tell him before now? But events are in motion, and there’s no time for explanations or elaborate farewells, no time even for Mary to wince when we embrace good-bye and the Little Tree Air Freshener squeezes into her bosom. Larry is shell-shocked as I guide him into the backseat of the cab and slide in after him. Jade takes the front. “Nice a meet you,” Mary calls, blowing us a kiss as we screech off down the block.
“I thought the day after tomorrow” is all Larry can say.
Is the romance over? Is that the end of the Larry-Mary show? Larry is too stunned to respond, and Jade and I can only raise eyebrows.
Here we begin the most harrowing cab ride of our lives to date. Yes, we’re in a rush to meet Dr. X, the mystery surgeon, in the far-off city of Shi before nightfall, but the cabdriver doesn’t need that excuse to dart and weave between diesel trucks with only inches to spare. He likes multitasking-he munches on a hairy chicken claw with one hand while jerking the wheel with the other-so I hand him my cell phone with the surgeon’s secretary predialed for him. “Are! Are! Are!” he says, writing down directions on a Mickey Mouse pad he has taped to the front of his broken speedometer dial.
Traffic leaving the city is frantic, but despite this our driver appears to nod off, while still managing to munch on the chicken claw. Before long he slams the brakes so hard I drill my forehead against the empty kidney-bean can soldered to the back of the front seat that serves as an ashtray. His hands, with yellowish nails that extend a half inch beyond his fingertips, are looped through the steering wheel, and he’s waving his index finger as though conducting an orchestra of fleas.
“Does he know where he’s going?” I ask Jade.
“Oh, yes, very skillful driver,” Jade says.
Coulda fooled me. He ducks under an underpass so low that the antenna scrapes the cement ceiling, then emerges from the other side to shoot across four lanes of traffic without once checking his mirrors. For all this activity, he looks half asleep, slumped over the wheel, with a nasty habit of drooping his head every four or five seconds. It’s exactly how I’d look if I hadn’t slept in two days.
“Can you tell him to slow down?” I ask Jade. This works for the short term, but in a minute he resumes dipping in and out of the breakdown lane, which also contains bicycle riders, shards of truck parts, and workers pushing shopping carts loaded with twenty-foot pipes. After an oncoming bus swerves to avoid hitting us, I notice that Larry doesn’t look well. He hasn’t said a word since Mary left, concentrating instead on studying receipts from his wallet. This is the self-defense clicking in again, how he’s maneuvered a difficult life, but I’m not sure denial is healthy just now.
“I think you miss Mary,” I suggest.
“I do!” he says, releasing air out of his face like punctured bubble wrap. “I’m the first to admit it. I haven’t been without her the whole time I’ve been here. She’s taken care of everything. Maybe it’s a moot point, but I have a lot of sympathy for her. Her life has not been easy, by a long shot. Why can’t we pool our resources and make a go of it together? Or is it too late? I don’t even know if she left for good or if I’ll ever see her again…”
His eyes are closed, and he’s resting his head on the side window while excavating a boil on his chin. You’ve got to be feeling pretty low to keep your eyes closed while you do that.
“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I see great devotion in her. To use a strange word. I mean, she’s not gorgeous, but I pick up a lot of sweetness in her. She sat by my side throughout my entire dialysis yesterday, rubbing my back. If I got taken, I’m going to be hurt beyond belief.”
“What would it mean to be ‘taken,’ exactly?” I ask.
He digs a moment more. “I’m not sure,” he says finally. “I don’t want to sound evasive, it’s just that I’m not sure.” The boil done, Larry starts making sounds as though he’s gargling, but with a dry throat.
A flock of guinea hens scamper across the highway. Some of them make it. The feathers of the rest fill the air like a series of pillow bombs.
“How’d her husband die, anyway?” I ask.
“Car accident.”
“Sorry I asked,” I say.
“Believe me, so am I.”
The driver waits with uncharacteristic patience for a truck to pass us before veering into the speeding lane. But oops, it’s a double truck that swipes us, tearing off our sideview mirror. There are no seat belts in back, only a hanging strap, which I access. Larry doesn’t bother. At one point I ask Jade why the driver is going east when before he was going north?
“He not sure. He only know by sun,” she says.
We’re in the countryside now, passing sunflower fields. “This could be north Florida,” Larry notes from time to time, trying to find references to home to help him deal with his homesickness. “This could be North Carolina.”
I’m grateful that this is a highway and not a crooked back street, but we’re tacking and snaking as though it were a crooked back street. It’s like driving slalom on the autobahn, with the occasional trash can or patio chair strewn here and there, kind of brilliant in its own way, though I’m not sure I know what I mean by that. Suddenly there’s a pause in the action.
“Is it me, or did we just stop in the median and the driver got out?” Larry asks.
“He has to go peewee,” Jade informs us.
“Good to know I’m not demented,” Larry remarks. “Merely imperiled.”
The driver comes back minus his chicken claw and resumes driving. I work to keep Larry talking. I hint that he might want to talk about why he never got married. One great thing about Larry, even when he’s feeling poorly, you never have to coax; he comes out and gives you all he’s got. Complete mini-sagas-beginning, middle, and end all wrapped up with a bow.
“Ten-second story,” he says. “I’m fussy, simple as that. Never met the right girl. Well, strike that. There was one with…I don’t want to mention her name, but it didn’t work out with Chelsea-oops, guess I said it after all. That’s the misorientation speaking, whatever you want to call it. Who’d want me now anyway, in my state? What am I going to do, chase ’em with a cane? Those days are behind me.”
Okay, it’s a little shorter than I was hoping, but it does seem to warm him up a bit. I hint that he might want to tell the story about why he initially decided to find a mail-order bride, even though he doesn’t like referring to her as that.
“A lot of people in my coin-trading discussion group asked me the same question,” he says. “Here’s why. Because go to another temple mixer, meet another seventy-year-old overweight real-estate broker? No thanks. How I found Mary was on a Web site I already gave you the name of-it’s not coming to me at the moment-which they claim has forty-nine thousand women, which took me the better part of a week to check out. I checked out the men, too, just to see what I was up against. What a bunch of losers: potbellies, the works. There’s some guy with a big toofy grin saying he’s an astronaut from New Jersey. If he’s an astronaut, I’m a stud muffin. I myself was quite forthright: didn’t mention my illness but was otherwise quite honest.”
Seems like quite an omission, but…must be a boy thing. “But then Mary turned out to be lacking in some of the essentials,” I skip ahead, to keep his rally going, such as it is. He’s looking so poorly that I’m grasping at straws.
“Sadly, yes,” he says. “Though I do want to correct the record on one point, if I may. Mary’s son is not mentally endangered. I misunderstood. He’s actually a very capable young man. He just graduated university, where he was captain of his basketball team, and just got his first engineering job. Mary is very proud of him. I don’t know how I got that wrong, and I apologize for it. Oh, I miss Mary ever so much.”
Gets me every time: this tough guy using Edith Wharton language. But he’s backsliding now, so to cheer him up or give him perspective, whichever comes first, I segue to the subject of…our relationship. “Larry, not counting our recent estrangement, why do you suppose we’ve basically always gotten along?”
“No big mystery, Dan. We’re straight with each other. Not overly straight, not straitjacket straight, but straight enough so it works. Plus, look at this, you’re giving me a fake Cartier from the marketplace. Thank you, Dan. You can never have too much of a good thing. And just to show you how much I appreciate it, I’m going to put the Cartier on my left wrist to go with the Rolex on my right. The Chinese will think it’s a new status thing.”
From here it’s a natural step for him to talk about our childhoods. How we did this together. How we did that together. His memories are much more vivid than mine: None of it sounds even vaguely familiar to me. Two or three hours go by, and the deeper into the countryside we drive, the less familiar his memories sound. The pump of Larry is primed, and he’s talking a blue streak; I couldn’t shut him up if I tried. How at my house he was always nervous around the dinner table because everyone used big words all the time. How our housemaid frightened him-he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to act around her. How one time my mother took him to the train station to go home and she saw he was craving an issue of Popular Science on the rack and she bought it for him, even though he begged her not to because it cost so much-seventy-five cents.
The sagas are flying. But then the world he’s talking about becomes distinctly alien. How his father, Sam, the lovable but illiterate garage mechanic, used to beat him with a belt. How a respected great-uncle manhandled him sexually. What? This isn’t even the same orbit of planets on which I was raised. I can’t accept that. Great-Uncle Auguste, the hero who fought in the French Resistance, abused him as a little boy? Larry isn’t really saying that, is he? Not in so many words, maybe, but he gives me to understand that we view the world from very different starting points. There in the backseat of this tiny rattrap cab, with no seat belts and an empty can of kidney beans for an ashtray, Larry tells tales that make me think I’ve never known my cousin at all, never known the universe we supposedly shared.
As if to mirror my dismay, the air outside’s gotten worse. Dense, chewy ribbons of smog have spread themselves over the sunflower fields like shrouds of mutant spiderweb filament. They’ve moved the smokestacks out of Beijing into outlying regions as part of the plan to sanitize the city’s image for the Olympics, and we’re now in the thick of it. Raw, unscrubbed black smoke tumbles into an already filthy sky, making the air so bad that cars put on their headlights in the afternoon light and you can hear the particulates hissing around like drizzle. Nor does it help that car exhaust is leaking into the cab through the floorboards. We’re awash in bad air, inside and out.
But a little reality check. I must have misheard him before. Auguste, who had that beautiful library of rare French books in leather jackets-a child molester? Could that possibly be true? Could the fact be that all the children in the family were protected from Auguste, but no one protected Larry? That he was expendable, his ass didn’t count for much?
“This could be Georgia now,” he says. “Look at that red soil.”
I tune out for a while, won’t allow myself to take in any more. I watch two grandmothers hobble along the median strip, holding hands. I watch a mattress lashed to a highway sign nodding in the wind. The pollution’s bothering my eyes, making me blink twice as much as usual. Eventually a question is directed to me.
“Dan, do you remember my bar mitzvah?”
“I only remember you saying in your bar mitzvah speech that you wanted to grow up to become a munitions dealer,” I say.
“That was more for shock value than anything else, though it did seem like a pretty sweet life,” Larry says. “But do you remember what happened afterward? After the ceremony when everyone moved into the banquet hall to have lunch, you stayed behind and started making speeches into the podium microphone that you assumed was dead. You didn’t know it was being broadcast live into the banquet hall-”
“Yeah, a vague memory.”
“Everybody thought it was actually pretty funny, except for one person-your futha was fuming around till he found you and kicked you out. Long story short, you were wandering around the parking lot with no lunch.”
“Wait a minute, didn’t you come out and find me after a while?”
“I brought you a plate of dessert, so you wouldn’t go hungry.”
“Do you remember what I said into the microphone?”
“No,” Larry answers, “but I do remember that the dessert was strawberry shortcake.”
This actually puts a lump in my throat. I know it’s a cliché, but the lump is real: It’s hard to swallow for a second. The image of a thirteen-year-old bringing his fifteen-year-old cousin a piece of strawberry short-cake in the parking lot. What a sweetheart.
“You were one of the only people I wanted there,” Larry tells me. “I desperately wanted to emulate you.”
I sway and jostle as the cab swerves back and forth.
“That’s why I say, whatever you think is best about my treatment, Dan, that’s what I’ll do. You make the decisions. I won’t impede you. I put myself in your hands.”
Before I can react, he interrupts me.
“No, wait, I just remembered what it was you were saying into the microphone,” Larry says, “but it’s gone again. Sorry.”
The car stops. “We are at hospital,” Jade says, hopping out.
It’s late afternoon, and we’re in the middle of a provincial capital of nine million that few Americans have heard of. Gray, gritty: “Could be Baltimore after a brush fire,” Larry says, coughing. “If I lived here, I would take up smoking as a defense.”
Indeed, the pollution is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The low-grade, high-sulfur coal that produces most Chinese electricity mixes with the humidity in the air to produce a kind of atmospheric sulfuric acid. My eyes sting. I get out and snap some pictures to try to capture the soupy mix. Two guards come over but withdraw when Jade assures them we’re guests of Dr. X. Like every other skyscraper in this fast-growing country, the hospital itself seems to arise out of the soil like a giant mushroom: First there’s dusty, hard-packed earth, then there’s a gleaming steel edifice. Across the parking lot struts a hearty young pocketbook-toting administrator who speaks blessedly good English.
“Glad you made it in one pieces,” Cherry says after introducing herself as the hospital translator/coordinator. “Sorry to say, Dr. X has already left for the evening; he had appointment with delegation from Zambia. But we are prepared to do preliminary procedure and attend all you questions, if you kindly follow me.”
Inside the hospital it’s quiet. Ghostly patients shuffle about in blue-and-white-striped PJs that look like what Yankee uniforms would look like if Yankees never got honest-to-goodness smudges by sliding into home plate but just hung out at second base for two years collecting dinge. Limbo dinge. Cherry leads us to a waiting room off the main lobby called the Family Crush Room, where a delegation of extremely polite medical residents awaits us. The men have pimples, the women sit with their legs open on the yellow plastic couches, a sight that both cheers and terrifies me; perhaps they’ve delayed their social skills because they’ve been so busy cramming in arcane medical knowledge?
“You must have a gazillion question,” Cherry says.
Larry raises a hand. “Where is the little boys’ room?”
I help him to a bathroom that has extra-fancy bidets with automatic drying features on one side, but on the other loose rocks around the shower stall to keep water in. It’s like we’re in a time bubble somewhere between Stone Age and Space Age. When we’re all reassembled in the Family Crush Room, Cherry reinvites our questions while a nurse draws a blood sample from Larry’s arm and the residents take scrupulous notes.
“Have you had Western patients before for kidney replacement?” I ask.
“Oh, yes, many-many from Middle East: businessman, tycoon, such and such.”
“What about Westerners from, like, the West?”
“Just last year before Restriction, a seventy-five-year-old who was also from Florida like you,” Cherry says.
“What a coincidence,” Larry says, “Not only do we come from the same state, but I feel seventy-five.”
“But after surgery, eighteen!” Cherry says. We all laugh. Beneath his hangdog expression, Larry has a million-dollar smile when he lays it on.
“I’ve never had anyone in America get my vein on the first try,” Larry says, amazed as the nurse deftly holds two Q-tips to his vein for a minute, making it stop bleeding without a bandage. “This is certainly a positive sign.”
“Oh, yes, everything positive,” Cherry confirms. “Flying color for everyone!”
“I know there are a lot of variables,” Larry says with a beam that everyone in the room mirrors, “and I won’t hold anyone to anything that would hold water in a court of law, not that I’m even thinking that direction, but can you give some sense of how much this might set me back cash-wise, because I am not a rich man, despite my esteemed title of professor.”
Despite our best efforts, we cannot get the barest glimpse of how much a transplant might cost or when it might become available. The attempt goes on long enough for a couple of patients’ relatives to come into the room, slip off their shoes, stretch out barefoot on a plastic couch, and fall asleep. The one thing Cherry is unreserved about is that the hospital’s track record with this surgery is exceptional. “Hundred percent success rate so far.”
“Is that possible?” I ask, skeptical. It hurts my eyes to widen them.
“Oh, yes, we do over four hundred surgery last year, not so many this year because of Restriction, but many notable patients, including Saudi prince two months ago, Korean diplomat, also a very famous Chinese film star, but it is pity she is gone.”
“Well, that seventy-five-year-old from Florida, for instance,” I ask. “Would it be terribly unethical to give an idea of what he paid?”
“Oh, not the sort of question at this juncture,” Cherry says. “But in this particular field of organ transplants, we are considered one of finest hospital in all region.”
“Really?” I ask. “By whom?”
“This is the track record,” she says matter-of-factly. “First job now is to see about the patient’s condition. Already I can report from blood tests, he is viable candidate for surgery. During last hour I have been in consult with Dr. X over phone, and he say all system go. Hip hooray! So later when Dr. X assess situation with own eyes, then we discuss financial arrangement, so forth so on.”
“Cherry, this is a city of nine million people,” Larry interrupts, cutting to the chase. “I assume you have some good food here?”
“Oh, yes, we are renown for our fried scorpion dumplings.”
“What I’m really asking is if you have any fast-food franchises?”
In a minute the whole group of us has piled into a cab, and we are on our way downtown to a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Larry is so buoyed by the prospect of an American meal, and a captive audience, that he takes the opportunity to unburden himself on various subjects: the American moon landing (never happened), health clubs (he’d visit them if they had couches to lie on), how to solve the organ-donation problem. On this last he suggests two options: (1) adopt the Spanish approach and make donating the default, so if you don’t officially opt out, you’re automatically an organ donor. With the proper incentives, “lifetime movie passes or what have you,” the problem of kidney donations would be licked within five years. And (2) make motorcycle helmets optional.
Two traffic jams later, our high-spirited group wades through a grove of eighty bicycles to gain entry to a KFC, the hottest spot in town. We wait in line to get served, and just as we’re about to order, a group of secretaries nonchalantly cuts in front and beats us to it. No one seems perturbed, not even Larry, who’s soon tucking into his mashed potatoes, reviving even more with tender memories of his first job ever at a KFC in Everett, Mass.
“This was a part-time job?” Cherry asks. She puts a small chicken wing in her mouth and doesn’t take it out until everything that’s edible is gone and the bones are whistle clean. Despite her elegance and efficiency, she eats KFC the way the Chinese used to eat chicken twenty-five years ago, except for spitting the remains on the floor.
“Goodness gracious yes, I was all of fifteen at the time,” Larry replies.
I don’t remember him being underage, but I do recollect-and I assume it’s a good part of the tenderness he’s manifesting-that it was the locus of his first lawsuit. Slipping on water from a defective freezer case, he managed to spill hot chicken oil on his forearm and ended up suing the establishment, inaugurating him into a lifetime of litigation that has been a lucrative sideline ever since. “How much did you clear on that first one?” I ask him.
“Around nine hundred dollars, as I recall. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old in the sixties.”
“I thought you said you were fifteen.”
“I’m cognitively impaired,” Larry shoots back. “I’m fuzzy on my details, but on my general outline? A hundred percent.”
“Like our hospital record!” Cherry says.
Neither of these boasts does much to allay my qualms, so I privately put the overriding question to Larry. Check in at this hospital or bounce to the Philippines?
“It’s really all the same to me,” he says. “The motel you found in the Philippines is thirty-five dollars a day, and my room in Beijing is forty-four dollars, so it’s a difference of nine. I can’t go wrong either way.”
This strikes me as an imperfect way to choose life-and-death medical care, so while Larry begins regaling the table with a description of how good American coleslaw tastes-and what a travesty it is that Chinese KFC swaps it out for bamboo shoots and lotus roots-I go to join Cherry at the communal washbasin outside the bathrooms, where she’s rinsing her hands.
“Sorry for being pushy about this,” I begin.
“No problem, I will talk hard balls to you.”
“Great, because we’re at a crucial juncture right now. We have to make a decision tonight whether to cancel our flight to the Philippines tomorrow and entrust you with his survival.”
“But impossible to know answers to your questions,” she says. “Every case different. The first important thing is healthy for Larry.”
“Agreed, but is it at least possible to tell me if the price here is roughly comparable to the price in the Philippines? Because the only hard figure we’ve been able to get is that it’s around eighty-five thousand dollars in the Philippines. Is that ballpark?”
“Maybe ballpark,” Cherry says.
“Okay, thank you. Can you also give me an idea of where the kidneys come from? Because we hear all kinds of things in the West about prisoners and religious sects and-”
Cherry cuts me off with a general answer about the condition of the kidneys, which, she assures me, will be top-notch. Dr. X is renowned for this sort of transplant. Medical colleagues all over the Third World send him their relatives to do.
“Am I answer all your question?” she asks pleasantly. “Need more to pump my info?”
“Well, the other main thing I need to know is, is it legal?” I demand.
“Hard to say that, because Chinese people don’t really know laws. But if doctors can get, is okay.”
I look over at Larry, who appears to be demonstrating how he couldn’t eat lotus roots even if he wanted to, “given what condition my teef are in.” Reading my cousin’s lips is not an ability I ever planned on developing.
“So what I’m sort of gathering,” I say to Cherry, “is that it’s official policy not to do transplants for Westerners-”
“But only true so-so.”
I incorporate her interruption. “Which only true so-so. Maybe it’s what’s known as a Beautiful Law, so-called because they look good on paper but there’s no enforcement?”
“Could be,” Cherry says. “No one on the outside really knows, that’s the thing, all secret. You part of secret now, too.”
“So it’s sort of an open secret, but no one knows the details. Made trickier by the fact that the central government makes the laws, but it’s up to the locals to carry them out.”
“So not very transparent situation,” Cherry confirms. “Also liquid all the time.”
“Okay. So even though it’s officially illegal to traffic organs to Westerners, if a well-placed surgeon has a way of procuring an organ for a Westerner, he’s not questioned.”
“Yes, of curse,” she says kindly.
“And Larry and I won’t land ourselves in jail?”
“Jail? No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Of curse not,” she clarifies patiently. “Rest easy. You are in good hands.”
Well, all right then, that’s what I wanted to hear. I’m partial to those five words. We are in good hands. It’s such a human expression, so reassuring on a primitive, tactile level, that I surrender. We don’t know the cost, we don’t know the time frame, but in the end it comes down to hands, and something about Cherry’s makes me trust them. Competent, strong, maybe even wise hands. It’s a leap of faith, but here we go, crossing the Rubicon, making the emotional commitment to put our fate in the hands of this capable young lady. Larry is in my hands, and I am in Cherry’s hands, and Cherry is in Dr. X’s hands, like a series of nesting dolls with Mama Mao at the end.
Our business concluded, I duck into the bathroom to rinse my contacts, and while I’m doing so, the right one shreds in my fingers. The pollution’s eaten it away. My teeth taste granular; when I blow my nose, it feels like the Great Wall. Also, I make out a smudge mark in the middle of my forehead like it’s the beginning of Lent, only I got this from banging into the cab’s ashtray. Scrubbing it off, I wonder how many hours I’ve been wearing this mark of penitence, and no one thought to tell me?
I emerge from the bathroom to a blurry scene. With only one contact lens, I can’t immediately locate our party near the windows. Then I spot Jade, a figure of clarity in a fuzzy, fast-moving space. Seeing me emerge safely from the bathroom and begin to pick my way across the noisy room, she raises her hand in a victory salute to me. I can’t quite make it out, but is she, are her…?
Yes. Those thin fingers are crossed.