“Larry, I think we made the right decision not going to the Philippines.”

“I know, plus they just blew up a shopping mall there this morning. I saw it on Al Jazeera.”

“Not only that, they’re illegalizing kidney transplants for foreigners, just like here, but punishable by twenty years in jail and a forty-eight-thousand-dollar fine.”

“I love how you don’t plan things, Dan.”

“You, too, Larry.”

WHY I’M MORE AND MORE FOND OF CHINA

After we go our separate ways-Larry to dialysis and me to some city errands-I wade through various crowds, leaving behind people deconstructing my passage. Even if it’s a gang of teenage punks trying to act disaffected, all is hubbub behind me as they diligently process my greeting: “Hello, how you.”

If it’s a gang of college girls, they’re polite, but afterward they cover their mouths and giggle, thinking they’re out of earshot just because our backs are turned.

When I pass a little park, I see a young tree propping up an older tree, and I understand that it was planted specifically to do that, and:

That reminds me of Larry’s story about his father, Sam, working for his older brother, Irving, and how it was traditional in old Russian-Jewish families for the younger brother to serve and prop up the elder, and:

This makes me feel that the world is connected in all sorts of ways I can’t even fathom.

Every now and then, I can hear the sound of old China, a tinkling of old-fashioned bicycle bells, reminding me that on my last visit I brought bells back for the children next door, and for a couple of years I had the sound of China in my neighborhood at home, and:

This makes me doubly homesick, in a lovely way, for a China that no longer exists and for the neighborhood children who are now grown up.

I feel I can’t get lost. No matter how far I wander, I always have the landmark of the eleven-story hospital, with its two arms outstretched and a water tank like a nurse’s cap on top. And when that’s obscured by smog, I can’t get lost anyway. What a rush, to feel unlosable!

Fireworks are likely to occur anytime, because someone’s always celebrating something. Could be a wedding or just a job promotion, but they ignite out of nowhere with a sound like two tons of pebbles cascading out the back of a dump truck.

When all is said and done, people here seem happy. At least that’s the conclusion I come to after hearing so many of them, including policemen, humming quiet tunes to themselves on the street. Can we say the same about Queens?

When I return, it’s dusk. Back in the hospital, I confront the usual emptiness in the lobby, punctuated by far-off badminton sounds. But the Giant Mushroom has aged forty years in the hours I was gone. New blotches and stains. Those hairline cracks in the crown moldings weren’t there before, were they? That gummy decay around the doorframes? And Larry looks Minged up-smudged and tattered, caved in on himself. I’m horrified to watch him in his sleep, like an emperor from the 1500s in a state of active decomposition. No wonder he’s doing everything in his power to get off dialysis-in the hours since I’ve seen him, they’ve taken out all his blood, scrubbed it clean, and put it back. The procedure leaves him ruined.

Tiptoeing in his half-darkened room, I silently lay out my care package: Sponges. Napkins. Dishwashing soap. Silverware. But the silverware clinks.

“Sam?” Larry mumbles.

“It’s me, Larry. Go back to sleep,” I say, unbagging hand soap, straws, shampoo.

“Who?”

“Me, Dan, your cousin.”

“Oh, hi, Dan. I’m sorry. I didn’t. Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital, in China.”

“I’m sorry. China?”

“Yes, don’t you remember?” I say, opening the bathroom cabinet and laying in toothpaste. “We came to China, and we found a hospital to get you a new kidney.”

He takes this in.

“What time is it?”

“Eight.”

“A.M. or P.M.?”

“P.M.”

“Oh. For a minute there, I thought I had to call Judy and tell her where I was. I’m very.”

“You’re in a safe place, Larry.”

“I’m a little. Can you tell me something? Judy. Is she alive or dead?”

“I’m sorry, Larry. Judy died a couple of years ago.”

“Okay, that’s what I. I just.”

“I know, it’s very misorienting. You’ve had dialysis this afternoon.”

“And my mutha? No, wait. She’s gone, too?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“It’s the dialysis. When I wake up, sometimes I don’t remember, and then I have to mourn for them all over again.”

“That must be horrible.”

“The one person I never wonder about is my futha, because he was dead to me so long ago. Oh, I’m doozy.”

“Don’t try to sit up, Larry,” I say, straightening his pillow so he can lie back down.

“Dialysis always leaves me weak, but this one was a whopper. I think the dialysis here must be more aggressive than at home.”

“That’s entirely possible, Larry.”

“I was dreaming about my futha. As you know, I had a very faulty bonding with Sam. He resented everything I could do that he couldn’t. When we were in South Miami once, he laughed because I couldn’t read the signs all in Spanish. ‘Now you know what I go through,’ he said.”

“But you had a dream about him?”

He doesn’t answer for a minute, lies there sweating in the half dark.

Out came the sun and dried up all the rain, comes the tune from the invisible softspeakers.

“We were fishing, I think. Because one thing we bofe loved to do was fish.”

He coughs sadly for a minute, without sentimentality.

“No, he was dropping me off at school. Second grade. In second grade I just wanted to go home. I just cried and cried to go home. I was worse than Judy.”

He breathes, head sunken on his chest.

“Did you know I had to repeat fourth grade?” he asks. “This for a kid with an IQ of one thirty-one.”

“Because you were too busy rebelling from your teachers?”

“I know where you’re coming from with that question, but no. It was because I was so shy. I was so short on self-confidence that when the teachers called on me, I’d always say I didn’t know, just because I wanted them to get to the next person as quickly as they could.”

“I didn’t know that, Larry. You were always filled with such bravado.”

“At sixteen I dropped out of school, but I didn’t get a job at Irving ’s garage, like everyone told me to. I made it my business to enroll myself in a private school that I researched myself. Within a day I knew I had made the right choice.”

“How’d you pay for it?”

“With my winnings from KFC.”

I want to say, “No wonder you’re so devoted to them,” but I restrain myself. Instead I say, “Larry, that was nothing less than heroic. You altered your circumstances. What’s that old expression? You picked yourself up by your bootstraps.”

“I did.”

“You could have withdrawn from the world. But you found something in yourself to hoist yourself up. It’s like how you cured Judy’s epilepsy. These are heroic actions, Larry. Why do you never give yourself credit for them?”

“That’s a good question. I’m confused about that.”

“Why do you think?”

“I’m too busy giving myself kudos for the things I oughtn’t, and not for the things I ought?”

So help me, I love the quaint language coming out of this miscreant’s mouth. The truth is, and he doesn’t want this to get around, but he isn’t a miscreant at all. He’s a gentleman, checkered like all gentlemen, with a gentleman’s checkered heart.

“I’m hard on myself,” he says. “I don’t want to be selfish.”

“It’s not being selfish to give yourself credit, Larry. There ought to be a better word. It’s being self-generous.”

I can feel him struggling with this concept in the tropical dark.

“So when are you going to claim your right to take the coldest Coke in the cooler?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I got my pilot’s license just to see if I could do it, and even then I still had my self-doubts. I do this, I do that-”