Lost At Sea Part 46

"OK, I guess," replies Robin.

Casey pops his head around the bathroom door and grins. Now they head off, in the snow and the dawn, toward their operations. Now they are in the pre-op room.

"I'm debating whether to keep my eyes open when they put the knockout drug into me," says Casey.

He's sitting on a chair, his body covered in a tight stocking, like a leotard. "I keep trying to focus on the spiritual side of this," says Casey. "The motivation behind the donation. The benefits of it. Yeah. I'm trying to stay in touch with the One who's making it all possible."

"Do you have any doubts?" asks Christine.

"I'm just, uh, trying to stay open to what G.o.d wants," says Casey.

Now, from his bed in the pre-op room, Casey tries to phone his mother to tell her that he's about to go into surgery. But she's not there. The phone just rings out. Casey hangs up.

Now the hospital porters arrive. There are hugs from Christine. Robin and Casey are wheeled away toward the operating room. The camera clicks off. When it comes back on again, Casey and Robin are just beginning to stir from the anesthetic. Casey is mumbling. Christine is stroking his arm. There are drips, and bandages cover their stomachs. The camera clicks off.

"I'm feeling very dizzy and nauseous," says Casey-his voice is hazy, as if he's still in a dream. It is the next morning. "I just vomited up some gastric juice or something. You wanna come and have a look at my wound? The pain medication is making it really itchy. I keep scratching. You want to see me press my morphine b.u.t.ton? Ah!"

"That's my buddy," says Robin. The camera clicks off.

The days progress. Casey tries walking, but he has to sit down again. His colon is twisted from the operation. For a while he lies under the duvet cover. He says he doesn't want to talk to anyone, and he wants Christine to stop filming him. He says he wishes he hadn't done it.

"I keep asking myself, 'Why did I donate?'" he says. "I was trying to do something good and this pain is what I get for it. Maybe G.o.d is having me go through this trial to make me feel more sensitive to other people who are uncomfortable and in pain. I have to be careful not to become hateful or bitter. That's what I'm working on now."

The next day, Casey and Robin are wheeled out into the sunshine. "We heard a little bit about the recipients today," says Robin. "My kidney went to a fifty-nine-year-old man who's been a diabetic all his life. So the fact that he's fifty-nine and he hasn't needed a transplant until now is an indication that he's been looking after himself. Apparently, it's going really well for him. The kidney began producing urine straightaway. Tell them about your recipient, Casey."

Casey seems happier today.

"My recipient was a fifty-three-year-old woman who had been on dialysis for five years," he says. "Her time was nearly up. Hopefully, she doesn't have to worry about that anymore." Then he adds, "A lot of people pray to G.o.d for a miracle specifically relating to kidney failure, and all it takes is someone to step forward and say, 'I'll do it.' That's the miracle. That willingness to step forward. That's G.o.d's miracle. We don't have to sit around waiting for G.o.d to do all the work. He's waiting for us to do something."

"We can make a miracle happen," says Robin.

ON MARCH 15, I receive an e-mail from Dave McKay. He's decided to kill off Anita. He realized that attempting to control the tabloids and the anticult groups was bound to backfire.

"I know we're going to cop to it sometime. We just wanted to have control over when we cop to it. I just wanted to show how adept the media is at turning something good into something evil."

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 doc.u.mentary 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentary.

"It would be great," Roland said, "if you could say something like, 'h.e.l.lo, 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 ent.i.tled 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 G.o.d.

A few weeks pa.s.sed. 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.