Dave says that Casey and Robin are recovering well. Casey’s had regrets, but now he’s pulling out of it and is glad of his decision again. Susan’s relationships with C in Scotland and Larry in Colorado continue to flourish. She hopes to donate to one or the other of them as soon as she can. Dave hopes to donate within a few weeks, at a hospital in Australia.
He says the hospital in Minneapolis gave Robin and Casey’s address to their two recipients, but neither has written to thank them.
AFTERWORD
Dave McKay hated the story I wrote. He hated it. I’d been filming the group for a Channel 4 documentary and the moment Dave read the article he pulled the plug on the filming.
He said he wanted me to think about what I had done.
I didn’t know what he meant. I thought the story was fine. I’d spent about £40,000 of Channel 4’s money, and now Dave had pulled the plug on the filming.
For the next three months or so, Dave consumed my life. He kept saying I had to think about what I’d done. I needed to find a way to continue filming, so I began to suggest things I had possibly done wrong. “Mentioning the whole Anita Foster thing?” I e-mailed to ask.
Dave’s mysterious, cold antipathy turned into rage. He began e-mailing long, furious explanations of what I had done wrong. Scores of e-mails arrived, containing line-by-line analyses of all that was bad about my story.
How I was always looking for cheap laughs or scandal. How I was more insidious than a tabloid cult-buster. At least you knew where you stood with the tabloids. I buried my attacks in clever, sneaky little phrases like “There is a silence.”
The Jesus Christians were saving lives. I was attacking them with nasty sarcasm and underhanded, belittling tactics. Why, Dave asked, did I go on about Casey’s brief regrets when he was recovering from the operation? “A woman in labor probably regrets ever getting pregnant,” he e-mailed.
These e-mails from Dave arrived almost every day for months. I began to wish he would donate both his kidneys. I’d open my in-box each morning with a knot in my stomach. The e-mails read like admonishments from a teacher, like I should feel grateful that even though Dave was at the end of his tether he was still taking the time and trouble to point out my faults to me. He hated the line about the poisoned chalice, and read it out sarcastically in a video message he sent me: “‘I begin to think of the story that has been handed to me as a poisoned chalice. I feel queasy about the decision Susan has to make and I feel queasy about Casey.’ So why did you write the story, Jon? It was your poisoned chalice and you drank from it with gusto.”
No tabloid frenzy ensued as a result of my story appearing, only an article in a local paper called the Catford News Shopper.
“You are only reaping what you have sown,” Dave e-mailed, referring to the trouble I was in now that he’d canceled the filming. “Welcome to the real world. Love, Dave.”
After a few months of this I began to agree with Dave’s criticisms of me.
I agreed especially with his criticism that the line “‘It’s a big deal for the recipients,’ I snap” was intensely annoying, as it was erroneously presenting me as some kind of journalistic knight in shining armor. Eventually Dave and I agreed that if I pledged to publicly apologize in the documentary for what I had written in the Guardian, I would be allowed to continue filming.
“An apology is a GREAT idea!” Dave e-mailed to say.
I met up with Roland, one of the London-based leaders of the Jesus Christians and Susan’s husband. He drafted an impromptu apology for me to read out in the documentary.
“It would be great,” Roland said, “if you could say something like, ‘Hello, I’m Jon Ronson. I really must apologize for my article. I said this . . . Blah blah blah . . . It was wrong. And I guess I’ve been doing it for many years—reading into things or trying to make them more exciting—and in my zeal I misrepresented a few things. And I apologize.’”
“Many years?” I thought.
I didn’t say anything. I had been admonished into submission. Roland said he thought Dave was “extremely patient” with me when it came to pointing out my faults. “I was marveling at the amount of time he took over it,” he said.
“It certainly took many e-mails from Dave for me to see the error of my ways,” I said.
“It was worth it,” Roland said.
A month or so earlier, Roland’s wife, Susan, had gone to visit C in Scotland, and I went with her. This was the woman with kidney failure Susan had been corresponding with by e-mail, along with Larry in Aspen.
C turned out to be a young woman called Christine.
“When I first read the e-mail,” Christine told me when Susan was out of earshot, “I thought, ‘Nutter.’ A part of me still thinks there has to be some catch. But as yet I’ve not sussed it out. And maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s just my untrusting nature. She doesn’t seem like a crazy, off-her-head person. She seems like a normal, sane person. So she obviously knows what she’s doing. She hasn’t been brainwashed, as far as you can make out. It’s what she believes. And everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, right? What’s the group called?”
“The Jesus Christians,” I said.
“I’ve not heard of them,” she said.
“They’ve never been that successful,” I said, “because they aren’t the most fun religious cult to be in.”
“It doesn’t sound like it if you have to give a bit of your body away to join,” Christine said, shrugging. We laughed.
Now, Roland told me, Susan had decided to donate her kidney not to Christine but to Larry in Aspen. The decision came to her in a dream. In the dream, she met a sixty-year-old man with gray hair, a little overweight, and he was happy to see her because she was about to give him her kidney. That’s exactly what Larry looked like, which is why she took this dream to be a message from God.
A few weeks passed. Then I received an e-mail from Dave in Australia. He wrote that Christine from Scotland was dying. He said he could instruct one of his members to give her a kidney, but if he did I would only accuse him of manipulation. So instead, he wrote, he had decided to let Christine die and let her death be on my conscience.
He posted me a video message. It was him, sitting on a sofa, speaking directly into the camera.
“It’s one thirty in the morning here in Australia,” he said, “and I’ve just received an urgent telephone call from the UK. It seems that Christine in Scotland has had a turn for the worse and I have to make a decision immediately if we’re going to help her at all. At the moment the only person in the community available to help Christine is Reinhart, and he’s booked to fly to India tomorrow morning. The problem with Reinhart is that although he’s willing to donate, he’s not very keen. I could push him into it. I have to make a decision, and there’s a life dependent on it.”
Dave paused. The bags under his eyes practically reached down to the end of his nose. His beard looked stragglier than ever.
“The decision I make,” he said, “is going to have to take into consideration repercussions from the media—people like yourself. As you know, we stopped the filming after your article appeared in the Guardian. Among other things, I was upset about the fact that you portrayed me as a manipulator, forcing or coercing Casey into doing something he might later regret. I think that was terribly unfair both to Casey and myself. No way did I push him into doing it. I didn’t even approach him. It was his idea and he ran with it. And that’s why we decided not to cooperate with you. But after this phone call tonight I’ve had a rethink. I’m prepared to go ahead with the documentary, but on one condition: You use this video. You see, I’m not going to say anything to Reinhart. I’ll let him fly out tomorrow. And I’ll let Christine’s blood be on your head, Jon, and on the heads of the authorities there in England, those people who felt that because a group of Christians wanted to donate their kidneys to strangers, there was something wrong with us. So go ahead. Make your documentary. But don’t forget to tell them about the recipients. That’s the big picture, Jon, and that’s been overlooked. These recipients are real people. People like Christine.”