Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life Read online

  Medically, it’s even murkier. Take him away from his American doctors to find a foreign organ that may or may not be up to snuff?

  Legally—let’s not even go there. Even Larry admits it’s illegal.

  For all these reasons, and countless more that flood the brain, it’s clearly a fool’s errand.

  So, case closed. It’s a few hours later, and the chairlift is shut down for the night. The kids are fast asleep in the darkened hotel room on either side of their sleeping mom in the king-size bed. With a light on in the adjoining bathroom and the door closed, I’m sitting in the empty bathtub Googling the words “transplant,” “kidney,” “cousin,” “death.” Just to satisfy myself that what Larry’s asking is preposterous.

  Kidney: The organ that cleans blood, without which the body shuts down and dies.

  Dialysis: The procedure to artificially clean blood when kidneys fail. The patient is hooked up to the dialysis machine at least three times a week for at least four hours per session, typically followed by twelve hours of addled sleep.

  Transplant, waiting list: A dire situation. In America alone there’s a backlog of seventy-four thousand patients, forty-four hundred of whom died last year while waiting. Average wait is seven to ten years, longer if other medical problems make patient a less desirable recipient.

  Transplant, options: Given the dismal prospects, more and more people around the world are crossing international borders to obtain the care they can’t get at home. So-called medical tourism is risky and controversial, but sometimes it’s the only viable option.

  Transplant, donation: I’m off the hook, in case there was a question. Our DNA’s so distant it’s doubtful we’d have a match. Larry and I are probably as different in that division as we are in everything else.

  Guilt: I don’t need to look that up. I know all about how Larry missed out on the privileges the rest of the family enjoyed. But is that any reason to consider raiding the home piggy bank, especially at a time when my books aren’t exactly feathering the nest? Of course not. No, no, the answer is no.

  The tub’s getting crampy. I perform a couple more searches before shutting down the laptop. Oh, here’s a nice one now: kidneys, eaten. Apparently, back in 1968 at the height of the frenzy that was China’s Cultural Revolution, several accounts report that the bestial Red Guards ate human kidneys as part of their revolutionary zeal. Simmered the corpses of their enemies in large vats, then fried their organs in oil.

  Great place he’s asked me to revisit. Typical Larry.

  I flick off the bathroom light and make my way across the hotel room by the glow of the moon coming through the curtain. For a minute I watch over the sacred sight that is my family in the moonlight. A vein ticks in each of their necks, blue and tender, right below the surface of the skin. A microscopic image comes to me from my Googling: the tips of two fifteen-gauge needles piercing a blood vessel for the dialysis procedure. Then, just as quickly, I’m into macroscopic mode, picturing the millions of haggard patients languishing on kidney lists around the globe.

  Their veins ticking, too.

  What was that memory Larry was alluding to? Bailing me out at his bar mitzvah? I have a faint recollection of the tubby thirteen-year-old mumbling his prayers into the microphone, softly impedimented, as though he had strawberries in his mouth. I remember feeling sorry for him. I remember feeling angry for him. But nothing beyond that. Something about a piece of cake…?

  And then, more recently, something about Larry going to China alone, pathetically trying to find a kidney without me, dying over there all by himself? Or maybe that’s a memory that’s not supposed to happen?

  I watch my wife and boys in the moonlight, pooling their body heat as they sleep. They’re healthy, thank God; Larry’s not. Luck of the draw. But why would I, flawed and fucked-up as I am, why would I desert my darlings to go half-cocked into business where I don’t belong?

  Game plan: Why doesn’t my laptop have a link for that? Where’s the Web site to tell me what to do? But what if—being completely crazy here for a minute—what if I promise my family I’ll make it up to them, entrust the boys with feeding the ducks in our pond when they get home to Massachusetts, arrange to meet Larry in Beijing, and buy a round-trip ticket with the return date to be decided later? Then—still speaking theoretically—say we give it one week in China and another week or two in neighboring countries, just long enough to prove that it’s an impossible mission?

  I yearn to stay and share in the body heat my family promises. A shiver of cold runs through me, to think how wrenching it would be to thrust myself into the vast beyond. I’d have to force myself to be extra chipper, and chipper is the last thing I feel.

  Sleepily, I climb in among the bodies of my family, making four. Soon enough, in the cosmic scheme of things, each of us will end up going our separate ways to points unknown, but for this night we share a king-size bed. “Dad?” cries one of the boys, looking up startled. He takes my hand and curls it with him back to sleep.

  I lie awake.

  CHAPTER 2

  McMao

  You cannot fight a fire with water from far away.

  Commotion. On the next Sunday, I’m being driven from the Beijing airport through the sweltering smogshine that feels like a moist anvil on my head. I’ve managed to hustle an assignment from a magazine to report on the changes in Beijing since I was here twenty-five years ago—airfare and all expenses paid for one week. The hotel package comes complete for six days with this Red Flag limo, mercifully air-conditioned, and a fetching tour guide. Very fetching.

  But what changes! Ole BJ has been buttered and Botoxed for the Olympics. Once a low-lying labyrinth of grainy neighborhoods, it now reminds me of Kryptonopolis in the early Superman comics, a futuristic metropolis with soaring trains and heatstroke-inducing architecture. All the feverish activity of twenty-five years earlier—men and women scampering across bamboo scaffolding like ants on a picnic plate—has resulted in a supersonic McCity of gleaming chrome and smoked glass and blue kryptonite-duplicator rays, for all I know. The effect is akin to going from the run-down department store that is your everyday life, with its faulty fluorescents and grimy escalators, into a strobe-lit video arcade. Snap, crackle, zap! Instead of those grandmothers you could still see a quarter century ago shuffling through the rag stalls with bound feet, movie starlets with French pedicures are mobbing the malls, impatiently stamping their designer sandals. The tour guides have changed, too—twenty-five years ago they were tight-lipped and severe, hiding their little hair buns in gray Mao caps. By contrast, the luxurious Yuh-vonne from Happy-Go-Luck Travel bounces flirtatiously, with nuclear pink highlights in her pageboy that’s like the mane of a punk thorough-bred.

  “I like you shirt, blue and green!” Yuh-vonne says vivaciously, sitting in the leather-seated back with me while the driver bullies his way through the circuslike traffic. “Blue and green is good omen in China. Green thimble-ize humanity. Blue thimble-ize heaven, divine, all that. Red, what does red thimble-ize?”

  “No idea: blood and death?”

  “Oh, you are clever one. Hairy homeboy, you make deep impression! No, red does not mean blood and death. It mean longevity! So many thing in China mean longevity! Ward off evil spirits, blah, blah, blah. Quiz at end of car ride, ha, ha.”

  “What is this?” I ask, pointing at a four-story computer store pulsing orange beams through the milky air like a space-age lighthouse.

  “‘What is this, what is that?’” Yuh-vonne mimics me. “You so curious man, ask many question. I like curious man, but not too much!” she says, tugging playfully on the brim of my panama hat.

  “Hey, look,” I say, “Mamma Mia is playing in Beijing!”

  “Hey, look,” Yuh-vonne says, “what are you job?”

  “Free-range writer,” I say. I’m in an okay mood because my nonstop scoot from Denver was so short it felt like a nap—not even long enough to incur bad breath.

  “Ow my God,” Yuh-vonne says, hidi
ng her smile with rhinestone-covered fingers. “A writer, my God!”

  “Believe me, it’s nothing to get worked up about,” I inform her. “We’re a dime a dozen back on the East Coast.”

  “But not travel with family? Selfish bad boy!” she says, jabbing me playfully in the ribs. “I only joking,” she resumes, for the record. “Your wife is a considerate girl. Beautiful, too?”

  “Oh, yes, very. Very.”

  Yuh-vonne is momentarily subdued enough to adopt a serious tone. “Yuh-vonne not my real name,” she says. “My Chinese name unlikable for you, so I take name I read on Web site for my favorite TV show. You know Batman, Adam West, all them dogs?”

  “Yvonne what’s-her-face? The one who played Batgirl?”

  “See resemble?” she says, flitting her long eyelashes. “But correct pronunciation Yuh-vonne.”

  “But it’s French—”

  “Your bad! I read on official Web site!”

  “Whatever,” I say. “And you can call me WillandGrace.”

  “Ha ha, that’s a humor one!” Yuh-vonne laughs, slapping my knee. Aren’t you supposed to slap your own knee when amused? I can’t remember. I’m forgetting my American customs already. The flirtatiousness is making me a little light-headed, though I remind myself not to take it personally—beautiful Asian women often waste their wiles on undeserving Western visitors, just in case we’re higher up on the food chain than we necessarily are. Anyway, I’m fascinated by her laugh, which is more like an openmouthed bray, before it turns suddenly into a rough bark at the driver, who executes an extreme left turn across four lanes. Lesser cars scurry to acquiesce, for the sole reason that we’re bigger and shinier. At home if a limo barged through like this, he’d get the finger at least, but here everyone clambers to the curb as though we were a shiny black fire engine.

  “I can’t believe this traffic,” I marvel to myself.

  “You prefer last time, only bicycles, eh?” Yuh-vonne says.

  “That’s right. But how’d you know I was here before?”

  “Fact file,” Yuh-vonne says, yanking a bright red three-ring binder onto her lap. “Free service kindly provided by my agency. Have you age coordinates, you food preference, even you college transcript. Not so good in French language, we note, maybe that why you have problem with my fine name?”

  I’m not sure if she’s kidding and all those pages are merely the itinerary she’s worked up for our week together. But the laugh’s on her in any case, because I didn’t even take French in college—further evidence that Chinese surveillance, if that’s what this is, is more Keystone Kops than anything else. A fact I learned to my amusement and horror twenty-five years ago, and one that even Yuh-vonne seems ready to concede.

  “But fact file have sorrowful gaps,” she goes on, “as to what-is-you-mission, what-is-you-choice-liquor-recreation, so on so forth. You fill us in, please, so we make accommodate as possible.”

  “Well, it’s true I’m partial to bicycles,” I say, relaxing into a reminiscence. “The whole way in from the airport last time, we were practically the only car, it was past midnight and the driver kept his lights off to save gasoline, flashing them from time to time to light up the swarm of bicyclists everywhere. Then we had these banquets twice a day that called on us to make these amazing toasts—”

  “What-is-you-mission?” Yuh-vonne barks, so severely that she reminds me of the guides of twenty-five years ago.

  I weigh the question. Only a few minutes in the country and here it is already, the first test of my undercover chops. I’m aware that this is the moment I’m supposed to be super-surreptitious in this top-secret assignment of ours. But you know what? Surreptitious isn’t going to get me where I need to go. Furthermore, Yuh-vonne doesn’t seem to know such basics as my arrest here last time. So much for her alleged “fact file.” Even if she were a Keystone Kop, I wouldn’t judge her a threat.

  “I’m here to help my cousin Larry,” I say.

  A statement that sends Yuh-vonne into eye-flitting mode again. “Laurie is handsome?”

  “Whoa!” I say, almost bumping my head against the ceiling when we run over an unknown object. The pause gives me time to be judicious. “Well, he has a certain animal vitality,” I reply. “If you’ve ever heard of a guy named Al Goldstein—publisher of Screw magazine, squat and tough—Larry looks sort of like him, minus the cigar. Kind of the friendly family pornographer type, but you know he could deck you with a sucker punch if he wanted to.”

  “He bald as billiard ball?” Yuh-vonne asks.

  “Great head of hair, I’m happy to say. Women find him endearing.”

  “Now is talking turkey!”

  “Yeah, well, he’s a charmer when he chooses, with a razzle-dazzle smile despite a couple of teeth knocked out when he was a kid. And he uses these quaint expressions from an earlier age when chivalry wasn’t quite—”

  “Cutting to chase, what are he job?”

  “Hard to describe,” I say.

  “You not like Yuh-vonne enough to try?” she says, pouting. She also slaps my wrist. Not that playfully.

  “Okay,” I say, “you’ve probably never heard of a professor packing a semiautomatic before.”

  “True that!”

  “Well, I exaggerate,” I say. “Or rather he exaggerates. He calls himself a professor, but really he’s just an adjunct at some Catholic college down South, with links to the underworld and a sometimes-lucrative sideline of suing people. Mostly he’s an inventor of get-poor-quick schemes. The latest one I heard was Canine Kippahs, yarmulkes for dogs, though that might have been one of my inventions I was trying to sell him. That’s the thing about Larry: He’s so much like a part of you that you don’t want to admit, you start to think like him after a while and come up with wacka-doo schemes yourself. At least I do. But the point is that everything the guy’s ever touched has turned to dust. He’s been close to making a million dollars more times than I can count, and always at the last minute he blows it, like he’s programmed to self-destruct over and over again.”

  “Bottom line, he is unemployed?” asks Yuh-vonne, a little winded from working to stay ahead of me.

  “Always been his own boss,” I clarify. “He’s an operator, a finagler holdover from the Old World, which is why the rest of the family’s kind of embarrassed by him, a throwback to the ghetto—the kind of shtetl gangsta some of us may have been before we all evolved into Ivy League doctors/lawyers/Indian chiefs.”

  “I want meet him!” Yuh-vonne says.

  “Let’s let him rest till tomorrow,” I say. “He was scheduled to get into his hotel late last night and must be exhausted. He’s got a lot on his plate the next few days.”

  “What on he plate, exactly?”

  Here it is again, another moment when the rule book calls for caution. But caution works best, sometimes, when thrown to the wind. I’ve decided to try to enlist Yuh-vonne’s help.

  “We’re trying to find him a kidney transplant,” I say.

  Yuh-vonne betrays no emotion at this news. “But so then Laurie is Chinese?”

  “American. Why?”

  “How he can use Chinese kidney?”

  “We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin,” I say. “In fact, come to think of it, that may have been one of the toasts I made twenty-five years ago. Let me think a minute….”

  “I am suspicion of that biology,” Yuh-vonne says. “Look me in the eye.”

  “It’s true, organs aren’t race-specific,” I say. “So Larry and I’ve had a couple of conversations, and the plan is, we’re giving it one week in China, and if nothing turns up, we’ll try the Philippines, then maybe Singapore and Hong Kong, see if we can shake something loose.”

  “You one sunny-side-up dude. How you go about it?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest yet. Black market, maybe? Is there maybe a Kiwanis-type club for kidneys or something? Networking one way or another, isn’t that always how it goes?”

  “Hmmm,” Yuh-vonne says. “
You have contacts?”

  “Only a distant one,” I admit. “Some embassy friend of a friend I e-mailed the night before I left. But I have something better than contacts. From my previous visits, I have a sense of how huge China is and how things tend to fall through the cracks. One hand doesn’t know what the other’s doing, plus the law isn’t applied equally. There’s even a proverb that says the farther you are from the emperor, the less you can hear his voice. Meaning things are a little looser away from the center of—”

  “I mean contact lenses,” Yuh-vonne interrupts. “Your eyes behold me so bright!”

  “Oh,” I say. “Must be the pollution.”

  Yuh-vonne has one word for me. “Guanxi.”

  “Guanxi?”

  “Connections. Meaning it more depend on who you know to get things done, personal relationship under radar, so to procure what you desire without no one knows.”

  “Perfect,” I say. “So I’ll jump right in by asking if you have any leads.”

  “I? Ha ha ha.”

  “What about our driver?”

  Yuh-vonne performs a double gesture, one hand waving no, the other to her lips with a shushing sound. “But why no relative depart him with kidney?” she asks in a whisper.

  “Well, that’s a sad story,” I say. “Larry had a twin, Judy, who would have been the ideal donor, but she was chronically depressed and killed herself last year. By the time they found her, the kidney was beyond salvaging. And the rest of his immediate family’s gone. He’s all alone in the world, except for the larger family that he’s alienated because he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

  “This of course not microchip you speak about.”

  “No, more like a gigantic grievance because of the way the family is structured,” I say. “See, he’s the son of my grandmother’s baby sister—technically, he’s my first cousin once removed—but the family dynamics were such that he was born into a different class from everyone else. My grandmother was this regal Boston lady, kind of like a prettier Eleanor Roosevelt wrapped in a Persian lamb collar, but by the time her baby sister was born, eighteen years after her, her parents had fallen on hard times and the sister ended up marrying a lovable but illiterate garage mechanic who kept having strokes. Shall I go on?”