The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [109]
Still September 29. Later in the evening, after our attempt to show Leon that Dr. Broadhurst had nothing to do with the letters, an aide informs him that there is a person-to-person long-distance call for Dr. R. I. Dung. Leon replies that he is busy and doesn’t want to be bothered. The aide tells him that it is a man on the other end of the phone. Leon asks who it is. The aide replies that he did not give his name, whereupon Leon comes to the office and picks up the phone. The voice at the other end identifies itself as that of his Uncle George Bernard Brown, and goes on to say that he has been in touch with Madame Dung, that they are both working for his redemption and that Leon must not say that Madame Dung, who is also God, is insane or negative. Leon listens, apparently with much interest. Then suddenly he interrupts: “Sir, excuse me, sir, your voice doesn’t sound like my uncle. Goodbye sir!” And he hangs up and returns to the sitting room.
About a quarter of an hour later, the aide goes to the room where Leon, as before the call, is praying on his knees. When the aide inquires about the call, Leon replies: “Don’t bother me, sir. The call was from someone at the other end of the extension. This was done through the switchboard. I don’t believe in mental torture, sir. What he said doesn’t matter, sir. Now would you leave me alone, sir? Thank you for helping me, sir.”
It was now clear that we had failed in our last-ditch effort to reinstate Madame Yeti Woman as a positive authority and that, moreover, our effort had only succeeded in making Leon extremely upset. The time had now clearly come to terminate any further experimental attempts in this direction.
[1]Matthew 6:21. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
[2]This would appear to be a slip of the tongue, which Leon corrected the following day, when he announced: “God Almighty walks in the shape of—is male and female; and such person has to be my father, my foster mother and my wife. She has no ovaries because of the age of that body. He and She is within me.”
CHAPTER XIV
A RESEARCH ASSISTANT BECOMES GOD
“I have to see the relationship to
infinity.” (Leon Gabor)
WHAT LEON did not find out from his uncle’s phone call on September 29—because he hung up too soon—was that an important change in the research personnel was to take place in the next four days. Mr. Spivak would be leaving then, and his replacement—a woman—would arrive. I wanted a female research assistant on the project primarily because of Leon’s unresolved attitudes toward his mother and his preoccupations with the delusions about foster mothers and wives, morphodites, and other women who wanted to commit adultery with him. Perhaps Leon’s conflicted attitudes toward women would resolve themselves in a more healthy way if he were to have daily dealings with a sympathetic, devoted female research assistant.
I had deliberately witheld any information about the impending change from the three men because I was not at all sure how any of them—and Leon, in particular—would react to the news. Of one thing I was fairly sure. If Miss Anderson, the new assistant, were to appear suddenly and without warning now, when Leon was having “trouble” with his wife and was delusionally refocusing on the new female resident psychiatrist as the source of his woes, the probability was strong that he would change once again and perceive Miss Anderson as the real culprit. It was because I wanted at all costs to forestall this and to assure, as much as possible, that Miss Anderson’s presence would from the very beginning have a maximum therapeutic affect, that I had planned to have the news of her arrival come from Leon’s omniscient if delusional uncle, rather than from us. But Leon’s refusal to listen to