The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [43]
Leon described the events leading to his final breakdown. “Previous to 1953 I was engaged to be married and because of electronic imposition that I didn’t realize at that time, I told the particular girl that I couldn’t marry her. I couldn’t give her all of my heart. And, of course, the reaction was that I went into concentration. After six to eight months I went to the climax. At noon I was standing near the lathe and fifteen or twenty men were looking at me. A release of a great amount of energy from my brain so I could see through my cosmic eyes. You hear through the right side, so the lathe that was running very quietly was amplified so loud that it burst in my head, vibrated my brain. I yelled: ‘Don’t stand there! Do something! Oh, you fools!’ I apologized later for calling them fools. The topside was most interesting. I could see right straight up, and I started getting a penis erection, stretched my arms up and went into the fourth or fifth level of light. I felt myself and it seemed real peaceful. It was so peaceful that I would have liked to remain dead, but God didn’t call me.”
—Tell me about your dreams.—
“A dream,” said Joseph, “is a realization of one’s wishes.”
“Dreams,” Leon added, “are due to anxiety, hatred, or love, but can also be imposed—not really one’s own at all.”
“I dreamed I was back in England,” Joseph went on. “Everybody is your friend. Everybody is secure and safe.”
Clyde said that he had dreams but couldn’t remember them. Leon, at first reluctant to discuss his dreams, reported, after a little coaxing, that he dreamed someone was trying to force him to sign checks with his “dupe name.” He couldn’t remember who, because the person went “into the squelch chamber to be ground up.” He then told the following dream: “I was a bird enjoying flying, sometimes not as a bird but flying as a human with my arms outstretched. In Detroit I took a letter to a Reverend—and I saw myself encircling the parish. I flew into his rectory and gave him the letter. My foster father, the white dove, is registered in Washington, D.C., as a mail carrier.”
“Simply distributing mail, why should he be a dove to do that?” asked Joseph.
Leon replied that he had flown on a condor and on an albatross. He had called the airport and told them when, for how long and how high he’d be flying, but in spite of these precautions he had been shot at. He then described a flight he had taken with his uncle, Sir Governor Joseph (the Archangel St. Michael), at 50,000 feet, at the end of which he had crashed right through a wall.
When Clyde and Joseph expressed disbelief, Leon exclaimed: “Man alive! You’ve got a lot to learn.”
“You’re a machine,” rejoined Clyde. “You’re not alive.”
The three men were discussing sex.
“It’s been eighteen years ten months since I had a woman,” Clyde said. “I didn’t get in with a lot of girls and get into trouble. I married the one they wanted me to, then I lost that one. The fifteen-year-olds are not experienced enough, the thirty-year-old ones are the best. There is spiritual food and sexual food and I can’t have intercourse with a woman while I am on duty. Can’t have a woman, and this and that, and damned old guards got it so you don’t have to have a woman now. What the heck is going to be next? Anyone know? I can support a hell of a lot of ’em. I haven’t had any contact with women since 1940, but when this project is finished I can have all the women I want.”
Joseph said he didn’t miss a woman because he was too busy with his work; he wasn’t even tempted. “I wouldn’t have sexual intercourse with a woman unless it was legitimate, only with my own wife. Anything else would be taking advantage of my power. I made the world and arranged it so that individuals had sexual intercourse when they are married.”
Later, when asked why he was so quiet, Joseph replied: “I am thinking about the old days outside. On Saturday nights you take your girl to