“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.

Once on a tiger’s back, it is hard to alight.

So we’re moving our little opera to the city of Shi. We’re canceling the Philippines and committing ourselves to Cherry and Company. One little glitch: Before we can install Larry in this hospital, we have to return Jade to BJ, check out of our hotels there, then scoot on back. Should be a snap-in our minds we’ve already moved.

Round-trip, however, is going to require two separate journeys.

Our faithful cabbie’s waiting outside the hospital when our party returns from KFC. He’s used the hour to play games on his cell phone rather than catch up on sleep. Making our farewells, Jade, Larry, and I exit the city the same way we entered, via a series of medieval ramps and pulleys, but things look different this time. When we arrived in sunlight, Shi appeared bleak and grimy, a grim town of harsh angles. But with darkness it’s transformed itself into a neon wonderland: sprays and spoutings of illuminated fluorescents. Sidewalk trees, storefronts, and a bonanza of billboards are adazzle with flashing bulbs. I can’t say for sure, because my one remaining contact lens is smeary, but there even seems to be a nighttime amusement area not far from the hospital, where a series of colored fountains provides a blinking liquid backdrop to a promenade on which couples seem to be…figure-skating? Whirling each other round and round?

I’m a sucker for neon, especially when it’s in a language I can’t decipher, and am cheered by its fluid warmth. But a few blocks on, Larry thinks he reads messages in the garish squiggles.