The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [114]
When the meeting is over, we wish Leon a pleasant weekend. Leon replies: “Considering that so much imposition has been shaken off—has been taken off—I feel like dancing. However, I won’t admit it. I have no intention of arousing Miss Anderson. I mean, I feel relieved.”
CHAPTER XV
THE LONELY DUEL
“SO MUCH imposition has been shaken off … I feel like dancing.”
This exuberant exclamation, so unlike Leon, marked the beginning of a bitter struggle which was to rage within him for many months. The struggle centered around the question of how he was to relate himself to Miss Anderson, whom, we have seen, Leon had endowed with god-like properties. To allow himself to trust her or not? to need her or not? to love her or not? Before long he began to link these issues with a broader one: to return to reality or not to return?
On November 8, four days later, he asked Miss Anderson to stay after the meeting to discuss a “personal problem”—his wife and his sexual needs.
“Normal sex release,” he told her, “is twice a month for me, so for two years I requested 1,344 comes. I did get a positive response from my wife. Ma’am, when you come in here, do you think you’re having a lecture or something?”
“I listen to you as if it were a lecture sometimes.”
“I try to make it as interesting as possible,” Leon went on. “I can sense it to a degree when you’re listening, and if you’re not— is there anything you didn’t understand?”
“Well, if I didn’t I can’t even ask you about it.”
“Well, Dung,” he addressed himself, “the next best thing is to tell it to the palms of your hands. The way you’re looking at me, ma’am, incites. How can I express it? ‘What is that creature trying to tell me? Is it truthful?’ ”
But, apparently frightened of the feelings he had expressed to Miss Anderson, Leon began three days later to work on a blindfold, which, when completed, turned out to be a neat rectangular affair made of dark-green cellophane that fastened at the back of the head with rubber bands. Although he could barely see through it, he wore it all day long—at work in the vegetable room, during meals, at the group meetings, and even when he was in bed at night. Reading and watching television were now out of the question, and when he needed to look at the food he was eating or to see where he was going he had to look down from beneath the blindfold.
The day I first saw Leon’s blindfold, I asked him why he was wearing it. “If you studied metaphysics,” he replied, “you’d understand, sir. You wouldn’t have to ask.”
“He made it and put it on and he’s wearing it,” Clyde interposed. “That’s all I know.”
“For his eyes, I guess,” added Joseph.
—Is that right, Mr. Dung?—
“G. G. M. Ruth told me to wear it, or hinted at it against imposition,” Leon explained.
During this time he refused to see Miss Anderson after the meetings, and during the meetings he alternated among withdrawal, anger at both of us, and sulking. When Miss Anderson asked if he was uncomfortable, he replied that he didn’t care for lamebrain treatment. In contrast to his earlier behavior, he now refused to accept a light from her but would accept it from me. At the end of the meeting he would loiter about with his back to us, refusing to speak but responding to my goodbye with: “A pleasant afternoon to you, sir.”
Leon continued to wear his blindfold for the next week, but now it was bigger than before and included—to use Leon’s word— blinders: pieces of white cardboard at his temples which cut down his vision even further. On one occasion when he asked an aide for a light, the aide commented: “That sort of limits what you can see, doesn’t it?”
Leon laughed. “Yes, sir, it’s sort of like living alone, behind a shield.”
“Is that why you wear them?” a nurse asked
“No, ma’am, it’s for metaphysical reasons, and I don’t care for the inquisition.”
But Leon apparently was dissatisfied with his shield. The imposition, he said,