“Did you notice all the massage parlors in this town, Dan?”

“Where?”

“There! There! We just passed another one! You’re going to have a good time in this town.”

It’s like a Rorschach test, I think. He’s managing to read into these foreign graphics every kind of fantasy vision. And just like Larry to use such a grandmotherly word as “parlor.” Well, I suppose there’s something to it. If I squint, I can see some of those letters looking vaguely like a woman’s legs. Or hips. Wiggling hips, because the neon’s moving. Wait a minute-those are breasts being advertised there! The target of neon squirts and spumes. Larry’s right: There are massage parlors all over the joint! With real-life hostesses in ankle-length gowns beckoning real-life customers, all washed in vivid, reflected color.

“Let’s just call it Massage Central,” Larry suggests. “The real city name is too hard to pronounce anyway.”

Larry is still coming off the high of mealtime. The attention of so many female medical residents at dinner has apparently made him feel munificent toward womankind. He directs his attention to Jade in the front seat. “What do you do, dear? Dan tells me you’re a grad student. What are you studying?”

“Foreign relations.”

“From what I can see, I’d say you’re already very successful at foreign relations,” he tells her. “As Dan may have already told you, I am a professor. Here I’m just a poor schmuck of a patient, but at home, if I ever manage to get back there, they call me sir.”

“What you professor of?”

“Customarily I teach negotiation, which I can tell Dan thinks is just a fancy term for haggling. I also teach mediation from time to time and as such am called upon to mediate complex legal cases. High-status people from the top echelons of society come to me for advice.”

“Is that true?” I ask.

“Moderately,” he says. “Have you ever been to America, dear?”

“I have never been on a plane,” she offers.

The more we drive, the more Larry’s good mood drains off. Soon munificence gives up the ghost. He has cycled through many moods in the hours since Mary left, trying to find equilibrium, and now he has to add fatigue to the mix, as well as nervousness about moving into the darker reaches of China. He’s finally allowing it to hit him that Mary’s gone.

“I don’t feel very well,” he says, commencing a series of wet hiccups. “Usually I would go to bed after exerting myself as I have today. I don’t take a car ride like this ordinarily.”

“No one takes a car ride like this ordinarily,” I say.

It’s rush hour now, so the breakdown lane also contains shards of cinder block, wrecked dishwashers, and the occasional vehicle driving the wrong way. We seem to have mistakenly gotten onto a secondary truck route, a dusty road with a red light every half mile or so, squashingly full of thirty-six-wheelers, none of which keeps our driver from nodding off for four and five seconds at a stretch. In order to find the correct highway, for a time we’re the ones driving the wrong way in the breakdown lane. Eventually we find the right road, but this presents us with a new issue.

“May I ask why they’re erecting tents in the breakdown lane, with women standing by them waving flags?” Larry asks.

“Overnight restaurants,” Jade says. “Not very clean.”

“Do tell,” Larry says, bringing his palm to his brow. He now has a migraine on top of everything else. “You have no idea how bad this feels,” he reports.” Everything itches. Feel right here,” he says, offering the raised scar on his forearm, the fistula.

I make a conscious decision to suspend my policy of not touching him in order to put my index fingertip on the glazed lump. I get a buzz like a soft version of those shockers you conceal in your palm.

“Aches like hell,” he says.

Jade frowns with sympathy for his pain. “Larry is biting bullets,” she says, reaching around and taking his hand.

“I’ve had a lot of bad moments in my life, but this is the worst I’ve ever felt,” he says, chewing on a handful of anti-nausea pills. “This has me thrown, I have to say. This is the most nervous I’ve ever been.”

“Look, all you have to do is get through tomorrow and you’ll be in one of the best hospitals in China,” I remind him. “Movie stars. Saudi royalty. Maybe they’ll fix you up with some Chinese herbs.”

“No thanks. I’m a purist: straight pharmaceuticals for me.” His effort at a smile dies on his face. Between the driving conditions and being abandoned by Mary, he’s not far from having a panic attack.

“More and more bullets he bites,” Jade says, squeezing his hand.

“Oh, I miss my mutha. I miss my sister,” he says, rocking with anxiety.

To take his mind off the present situation and remind him what he’s accomplished in life, I try to get him talking again. “Jade, this is a guy with a heart a mile wide. Wait till you hear his saga about how he saved his twin sister from epilepsy.”

“I don’t know if I can rise to the occasion,” he says, taking little sips of air.

“Give us a treat, champ,” I say. “I’ve never actually heard the whole thing from soup to nuts.”

With a valiant effort, Larry lifts himself from his hunched position and begins to speak.

“The year is 2002. Judy has had epilepsy since she was born, sedatives to keep her down and amphetamines to bring her back up. As a result she never developed any interpersonal skills and limited herself to working more or less full-time at the DMV, then coming back to my condo, where she lived, then locking the door and chatting by phone with our mutha until she fell asleep in front of the TV. Three shows:

I Love Lucy. The Price Is Right. Little House on the Prairie. Occasionally she would break routine and go to dinner with some old people who considered her ‘pretty.’”

“Really?” I ask. It slips out, interrupting the narrative.

“After a certain age, anyone under forty looks okay,” Larry explains.

This strikes me as profound enough for me to shut up. But not for long. “What’d she spend her salary on?”

“Bathing suits, mostly. She found a shop that had bathing suits marked medium that were really extra-large. But she kept buying them, pretending she was a medium and therefore could keep on eating her fruit-and-nut chocolate bars. Only fruit she ever ate, incidentally. I think the store knew what they were doing and mislabeled all their ugliest stuff they couldn’t get rid of.”

“What’d she need bathing suits for anyway, when she had a water phobia?”

“Exactly,” Larry says. “So there we were living in Florida with all its physicians, and our mutha, Rivie, living outside Boston, the medical capital of the country with an arsenal of Harvard-trained doctors, and nuffing was being done. I decided I was going to do something about it. I got on the horn in my condo-nice two-bedroom with private balcony overlooking mini-golf course; I’m still upset that you never visited, Dan-and I did nuffing for two days but make phone calls. Long story short, eventually I’m in touch with a Dr. Finkelstein at NIH, Finkelsteiner, something like that. He finds Judy’s case interesting over the phone, would like to see her in D.C. in three to four months. Much too long. I call Cousin Burton-”

“Wait, you call Cousin Burton?”

“Dan, you gonna let me tell my saga? Burton was a good guy then,” Larry says with a mild expression, as serenely unconflicted as Mona Lisa. “By the way, thank you for not objecting to my going in and out of present tense. It makes the telling easier, plus my mind is misoriented. I don’t always remember what’s past and what’s now.”

“You’re welcome. Good to resume?”

“Good to resume. Long story short, when Finkleheimer gets a call from Burton, we’re good to go in ten days. But now of course Judy doesn’t want to proceed. Trufe is, she’s used to her disease, she’s fond of her disease, her disease serves her. She doesn’t have to apply herself. I say, ‘Judy cut the crap. I know you’re scared, but we’re going.’ Soon as she sees the place, twelve-hundred-acre campus, she does a hundred-and-eighty-degree change. Plus, she’ll be the star there. She likes nuffing better than to be the star of her little medical dramas. That makes her special. In no other arena in life is Judy special except through her medical condition. Bottom line, she goes. Comes time for the surgery, she’s in ten, twelve hours. Chatting the whole time. Most of the surgery, they’re mapping her brain. Only ten, fifteen minutes of actual cutting.”