“Maybe so,” snaps George.

That evening I get to talking with Dr. Admiraal about George’s idealism.

“He’s too good for this world,” Admiraal says. Then he adds, “I’ve been observing him for a long time, and I’ve asked our psychiatrists to observe him. He is, in my opinion, enjoying the death of another person. And that’s dangerous. I have the strong impression that he wants to be there and see something dying. Well, he cannot help that. It’s his character. It’s a kind of phobia to enjoy death. And that’s why he says, ‘I will commit suicide.’ Because he will want to die at that moment.”

(Later, Admiraal clarifies this. He says he doesn’t mean George derives psychopathic pleasure from being around death. Instead he thinks George is too in love with the afterlife. He believes in it too much and the pleasure he gets is from clapping and cheering his clients to a better place.)

I’m beginning to feel the same way about George. I’ve noticed that very few of his clients are terminally ill. Most are depressed or suffering from psychosomatic diseases. When I ask him about his client list, he says, “Many of my colleagues will avoid such persons like the plague, but I feel a very strong identity with the story of the Good Samaritan. I stop while others walk by and ignore their pleas.”

How, I wonder, do George and his clients find each other?

After the conference I visit Derek Humphry, author of Jean’s Way and the father of the modern right-to-die movement. He’s from Wiltshire but now lives in Oregon, where we sit in his cabin in the forest.

“Once or twice a week,” he tells me, “I get very strange people on the telephone who are anxious to commit suicide because of their depression or sad lives. When they get your number they want to talk and talk. And they call again and again. And they also call all the other right-to-die groups, who say, ‘We can’t help you. It’s not within our parameters because you aren’t terminally ill.’ But they pursue you. They call and call. And eventually someone will say, ‘George Exoo will probably help you.’ And that gets them off the phone and on to George.”

“Isn’t that terrible?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” he says.

So George is like the backstreet abortionist of the assisted suicide world, getting under-the-counter referrals from the more respectable mainstream.

Three years pass. Even though the Irish government has been pressing the FBI to arrest George, they don’t. Meanwhile he’s traveling around America, helping nonterminally ill people die.

In the spring of 2007 a package arrives at my house. Inside is a videocassette. The postmark on the envelope is Beckley, West Virginia. I close my office door. I put it into the VCR and I press Play.

•   •   •

IT IS AN EMPTY ROOM. It’s a mess. It’s overflowing with detritus—paperweights, books, novelty ornaments, papers, coffee cups. Then George appears in the shot from behind the camera. He looks like he’s been awake for days.

He says to the camera, to me, “Now. What I’m going to do is call my friend Shirley, who is out in a western state in a motel.”

He picks up the phone and dials. He says, “Hey, Shirley. This is George. The hour has come that we’ve been planning.” He hasn’t bugged the phone, so I can only hear his end of the conversation. “I know you’re nervous,” George says. “You’ve never done this before. But that’s all right. We’re going to get through this. It’s time for you to”—he sighs—“drink the potion that’s in front of you. It’s bitter and horrible-tasting, so it’s important that you chugalug it right down. I ask you to raise that glass and I want you to know how honored I am to be with you at this moment. ”

There’s a silence of perhaps ten seconds. Then George’s voice hardens impatiently: “I know it’s bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down.”

He’s talking to Shirley like someone would talk to a child who had disobeyed them. Then he chants a Buddhist chant: “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate . . .”

(Gone. Gone. Gone completely beyond.)

Then: “Shirley? Can you hear me?”

He looks into the camera. “I think I heard the phone drop. Which would mean she is probably now gone.”

He shrugs slightly. “And that’s it. That’s the way it’s done.”

He turns off the camera.

In May 2007 George begins teaching a friend, Cassandra Mae, the ropes. He says he needs an assistant in case he’s arrested or kills himself. I arrange to meet him at Cassandra’s house in North Carolina. I arrive before George. Cassandra lives alone. Her house is filled with plastic lizards. She’s in her forties. While we wait, I ask her how they met.

“I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993,” she says. “It was so painful I wanted to die.”

She says she called the official right-to-die groups, “but they wouldn’t help me.”

“Because you weren’t terminally ill?”

“Yeah, they rejected me. But then somebody said, ‘You might want to call George.’ Kind of like under the counter.”

Cassandra says she would have killed herself with George’s help—he was perfectly willing—but she couldn’t find anyone to look after her pet snake. Eventually, they got to talking. If she wasn’t going to be his client, perhaps she should be his assistant.

•   •   •

GEORGE ARRIVES. He has a second job now, buying up houses that have been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit, although he hasn’t managed to sell any yet.

“You could provide the full service,” I say. “You could sell them a house, and when the banks foreclose, you could help them kill themselves.”

We laugh. I say to him, “In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, ‘It’s bitter,’ and you snapped, ‘Drink it!’”

“Absolutely,” he replies. “Because I’d been through that argument with her before.”

“She’d tasted it before?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s getting annoyed with me. “I’d been with her twice before in person. What kind of bull twaddle is that? If you’re serious, you’re going to drink it and not whine about it!”

“But this is somebody who doesn’t know whether to kill themselves,” I say.

“Just drink it,” he says, exasperated. “Three or four swallows and you’re going to go to sleep. Permanently. In ten minutes you’ll be off this planet. Yes, I was probably pressing her to some extent. But I was pressing her to make up her mind one way or another because I can’t go flying across the country week after week and have nothing come of it. I want her to either go on and live her life, or check out. But it’s her choice. It’s not mine.”

We go for lunch. Cassandra has told me that her multiple chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so severe, there is only one local restaurant she can eat in where the atmosphere does not set off her symptoms. But we eat in another restaurant—an all-you-can-eat buffet—and she is fine. She eats all she can. I begin to see Cassandra as living proof that George really shouldn’t help people like Cassandra kill themselves.

After lunch I tell him some people think he’s on a slippery slope.

“What slippery slope?” he asks sharply.

“Not being able to stop helping people because you see it as your calling and you like to be there at the moment of death because you get something out of it. And you may consequently be encouraging them toward suicide.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “It just hasn’t happened. Otherwise these people wouldn’t be hanging on for years and years and years.”

And that part seems to be true: He’s always said he has clients who have been vacillating for years.

George drives off to do some real estate business and I’m left alone with Cassandra. We sit on her porch. “I see this as a business,” she says. “George sees it as a calling. There’s a big difference there. For me it’s ‘No cash, no help.’”

“What’s your price?” I ask.