“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.