Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China by Daniel Asa Rose

Author:Daniel Asa Rose [Rose, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

CHAPTER 12. Shabbos Duck

When the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed.

Next morning there’s a dead body on the sidewalk. Outside a bakery where I’ve gone to grab breakfast, the baker lies faceup on the asphalt, still wearing his white chef’s hat. He’s a big, florid man; it’s inscrutable that he used to have energy enough to keep his bulk upright-and that suddenly he doesn’t. Two women stand above him, waving their arms and making their pocketbooks swing. A police officer also stands over the chef, his car parked casually in the middle of the street. The tableau would have been unthinkable only a moment ago; now it’s as banal as dirt.

Then we onlookers, being not dead, go about our business, as the Vermont poet said. Life goes on: The take-out window ten feet away doesn’t even suspend its business, cash bills handed in, steamed buns handed out. I order a half dozen little pastries with almonds stuck in sweet white goo. A treat: If this is a bad omen of some sort, all the more reason to make sure I keep my spirits up…

Returning to the Super 2, I arrange to keep getting Internet in my room. The unfriendly receptionist in her flounce is never happy to see me, nor is the Internet an easy concept to express to her in party language, but eventually we work it out.

“So it’s all set for me keep accessing from my room?”

“Okay-okay,” she answers with a forced smile.

“I steal Tsingtao shot glass with lukewarm coffee from lobby, okay?”

“Okay-okay.”

“I go upstairs cry my heart out, okay?”

“Okay-okay.”

Sometimes the only way to make sense of your surroundings is to reach out to a far-off source. So now in my little Super 2 roomette, with paint droplets from the construction floating down and hardening on the outsides of my windows, I spend the day deep-Googling. I learn that Shi is an industrial city with little charm, known predominantly for two things: exceptional hospitals and a plethora of massage parlors. The first fact I’ve gathered by now, but the massage parlors are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of the Web sites offer virtual tours of their palatial interiors: fantasy temples with saltwater grottoes, saunas decorated with ceramic parrots and ceramic eagles, complete with discreetly bowing hostesses giving the revolving doors a little spin to help you through…

Larry’s right. Massage Central is where I’ve landed us.

And other facts. (It’s laughably easy to get information, despite there being an estimated thirty thousand Keystone Kops devoted to blocking Web sites seemingly at random.) Those fountains of last night that I found so alien, they were nothing worse than replicas of Old Faithful in honor of the U.S. of A., going off every quarter hour with a big blast at midnight. Also, sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are Chinese, and Shi is among the top performers.

Yet for all its flaws, there’s something about this land that makes people want to waltz. As I munch on cold shrimp

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