The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (22 page)

Leon is chairman. There is a period of silence while he signs his name—Dr. R. I. Dung Sir—on the Chairman List. They sing
America
. More silence.

“The floor is open for complaints,” Leon finally says. “If there are no questions or problems to be discussed, we can be in silence. You can snooze or snore as far as I'm concerned, and enjoy yourself in silence.”

Silence. The aide asks Joseph if he has anything to discuss. “The chairman's duty is to bring up a subject,” Joseph comments. To this, Leon responds: “I discovered you get ensnared if you talk for the sake of talking.”

Joseph talks about the snowstorm and about his stomach getting better. Clyde says Joseph is looking better. Joseph discusses going back to work.

The aide tries to get Leon to talk. Leon says he's resting. On the urging of the aide, Clyde talks about his money, whereupon Leon discourses briefly on the misuse of hands and feet as negative behavior. But the three men soon lapse into silence again and when Leon is once more reminded of his duties as chairman he says merely that silence is golden. He then goes to the toilet.

For a while Joseph talks about his job and about the fact that his wife does not want him to be released from the hospital, and Clyde speaks further about his carloads of money. When Leon returns from the toilet, Joseph says it's time to adjourn. “Excellent idea, sir,” Leon agrees. They sing and adjourn.

June 13. Today we obtain some further insights into why Leon spends so much time in the toilet. He tells us during the daily meeting that he has made a relic by taking nine sheets of cigarette paper and blessing them with actual seed. He has blessed eight sheets, five without trimming, three with. He prays in the toilet. Joseph says that you can't bless without the proper materials. To this, Leon replies that Joseph has a penis and testicles too, so he could bless the material also if he wished to do so. Joseph says that it's a waste of time to talk about it.

I ask Joseph what Leon has been talking about and he replies: “About a relic, like a symbol, an amulet.” He avoids any mention of the sexual aspect. I ask Leon to tell us again how he made the relic. Joseph still avoids any mention of the way Leon “blessed” the relic. But at this point in the exchange Joseph diverts the conversation in an extraordinary way: he balances a cigarette on his nose.

July 29. The meeting drags on; nobody wants to say anything. I prod Leon, who is chairman, to keep the conversation going. He says he's sleepy. He believes in meditative silence. When I insist that the chairman is responsible for the discussion, Leon comments that these meetings are coming to an end, when the shaking off takes place. He hasn't cared for these meetings, he says, since the first day. Joseph says he's marking time too; that's all he can do. I complain that the interest in the meetings has deteriorated.

“Listen!” says Leon. “Meditative silence is a healthy thing for a person and puts a person in their own focal point.”

—
Up to a point. Too much isn't healthy
.—

“There are people who can do it for years.”

—
Psychiatrists call that withdrawal
.—

“There's such a thing as withdrawal because of external influences and there's also internal perspective because of the love of the internal perspective. Free choice of the individual—this is sound.”

As the meeting adjourns I announce that the following week all meetings will be held at 3:00 p.m. sharp in A building and will be only for those who want to come. Moreover, I continue, it's up to the men to get there by themselves. My purpose here was to find out whether they would still come to the meetings if they had to take the initiative of picking themselves up and going somewhere
else
to attend.

August 1. Monday. Today is the first day that the voluntary meetings are to be held in A building. Will the three men come? I am fairly sure that Clyde and Joseph will arrive, but not the least bit sure about Leon.

At three o'clock, none of them has shown up. Not one. We go out to investigate. A phone call to the ward reveals that Joseph is still there. We drive to the store. Clyde is there, drinking a double cola. Where is Leon? We scour the area, but he is nowhere in sight. We give up. We then phone the ward again. Would the aide try to find out from the men at supper tonight how the meeting went?

We decide to continue this procedure for a few more days, and then to interview the men and try to find out more about their reactions—or should I say, their failure to react?

At supper that evening the aide asks Joseph and Leon how the meeting went. Joseph replies that he didn't know anything about a meeting, and Leon that he did not go to the meeting but that he was represented there by the cosmic robot image.

August 4. Interview with Joseph. He says he didn't go to the meeting at A building because he was sick, and had been keeping
pretty much to himself; when he's sick he is not sociable. He complains that he doesn't want to work in the vegetable room because it's not healthy.

Interview with Leon. I ask him if the men have held any meetings this week, and he says no. I tell him that we missed him at the A-building meetings, and that since neither Clyde nor Joseph came, the research assistant and I held them alone. Leon seems extremely depressed, more depressed than we have ever seen him before. He sighs. I suggest that he stand up and try some exercises. He refuses, accusing me of trying to make him misuse the palms of his hands. He says he has been told not to jump. I do not insist, but instead remind him that we provide individual meetings so that people can get things off their chest. He cuts this short by saying he gets things off his chest to the Righteous Idealed Governor, and he adds that he didn't go to the meetings because he has his own counsel, which he prefers.

Resumption of Conflict Between Leon and Joseph

It became clear very early in the experiment that Leon was an incredibly sensitive observer of human behavior. He knew from the very first why we had come, and even during the period of peace that began with the rotating chairmanship there were subtle indications that he continued to have a solid grasp of our purpose and that he may therefore have anticipated future tension-producing confrontations which could come without warning.

Prior to Leon's change of name there had been a marked reduction in conflict among the three men and a marked increase in friendliness among them. The issue of their identity was not raised, and relations seemed to improve all around. But, as we said earlier, this very improvement was probably a threat to Leon; one of the reasons for changing his name to Dung was the need to arrest and possibly suppress the positive feelings he was beginning to develop, especially toward Joseph, as a result of their mutually satisfying everyday relations. Joseph had become a powerful ally on
whom he had come to depend—an ally against us, particularly me —and the two men were joined together in an unspoken agreement to avoid the subject of identity and to brush aside all attempts on my part to bring it up.

But a few weeks after Leon changed his name the “holy alliance” between him and Joseph was broken and conflict erupted once again. This time, however, their struggle was not over identity, but over an even weirder issue: the question of which of them was the rightful owner of a cosmic squelch eye. This running argument went on for several months and perpetuated itself through mutual reinforcement until it spilled over into other areas. Let us look in on the first of these arguments.

February 29. Meeting. Leon launches into a discussion about cosmic squelch eyes,[
3
] claiming that he has, in addition to his two eyes, a cosmic squelch eye located in the middle of his forehead. But, Leon adds, “you can lose these eyes through imposition.” He then brings Joseph into the picture. “In my case I prepared myself when Mr. Cassel passed away in connection with that body. I automatically received that eye.”

Whenever Leon launches into a long, delusional discourse, Joseph typically withdraws into himself. He leafs through a book or magazine,
or stares vacantly ahead, or looks out the window. He gives the impression that he is disinterested or bored. But not this time.

It should be stated that the full psychological meaning of the squelch-eye episode continues to elude us. However, the Biblical reference is inescapable. In Matthew 6:22, we find: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” Since this verse immediately follows one which Leon quoted on another occasion (see Chapter XIII, p. 216), there can be little doubt that he was familiar with it.

“Well, I'll get it back then,” he suddenly says.

“No, sir,” says Leon, “you cannot because I earned it.”

“Anything that belongs to me will be mine, not yours. You haven't earned anything from me.”

“You've imposed on the frequency of my life, I was told.”

“I think you have T.B. You were told! I don't give a shit what you've been told. I'm getting my values back if it takes a hundred years!”

(To Leon)—
Maybe if you told us how you earned this eye?
—

“I've already told you, sir. I don't care for presumptuousness to the ignorant, when it has already been explained.”

“I don't understand a word of it,” Joseph says.

“I was quite polite. I explained it twice. That's sufficient.”

“How come you have three eyes when you only have two eyes?” Joseph asks.

When we ask Clyde what he thinks, he breaks into a smile. “They keep pretty even—first one and then the other,” he replies.

“It's untruthful,” says Joseph.

“Truth is truth,” Leon replies, “no matter if only one person speaks it.”

“I know what happened at the table,” Joseph says suddenly. “Ever since then you've been picking on me.”

“I'm trying to be charitable toward all,” says Leon.

When asked what happened at the table, Joseph replies, pointing to Leon: “He went screwy. He didn't want to be honest about it. Happened two or three years ago.”

“I don't know what he's talking about,” Leon retorts.

For the next four or five months we were to hear many variations of this squelch-eye controversy. Leon would accuse Woman Eve or Mary Gabor or Joseph of having stolen it from him. Sometimes he would accuse me of having stolen it from Woman Eve or Mary Gabor. Joseph would in his turn claim that it was his squelch eye, that he would continue to be a weak God until it
was returned, and that it was Dung who had stolen it from him. Leon would often appeal to me to return the squelch eye I had stolen, and Joseph in turn would appeal to me to get his squelch eye back from Leon, so that he could regain his power. And I, in turn, tried very hard to give each of them the squelch eye he so badly needed. But this didn't seem to help, because Leon and Joseph both insisted that there was one and only one squelch eye.

I have already said that the squelch-eye controversy spilled over into other areas. One afternoon Leon was writing a letter—to his uncle, he said. Joseph challenged him. “Mr. Dung, you know you have no uncles or parents or sister or even any friends and, furthermore, you tell fibs.” An argument followed.

Another time, after dinner, Leon sat down immediately next to Joseph; he was doing this, he said, to balance the cosmic energy in the room and not because he had any personal attraction to Mr. Cassel. Joseph exploded: “Mr. Dung doesn't know what he is talking about; he's just a big pile of shit.”

“You are so right, sir,” Leon replied. “I am a big pile of righteous-idealed shit.”

During one period Leon refused to sign the Chairman List because, he claimed, Joseph wrote his name with a fancy C, and this created a new electronic imposition. Joseph was upset. “It's my C,” he yelled, “and if you don't want to follow the rules, we'll get someone else in here. Mr. Benson and I can get along. I've been giving in, but no more. Put someone else in!”

The battle over the squelch eye came to an end in the latter part of July. Joseph had been hospitalized for several days as a result of an altercation on the ward. A patient named Gibson lay down on Joseph's bed, and Joseph asked him to lie on his own bed. Gibson, who was easily upset and had assaulted others in the past with little or no apparent provocation, punched Joseph in the face and fractured his cheekbone. Speaking of Joseph's altercation, Leon had commented: “It was the cosmic evil eye that got him in trouble and it's the evil eye that I hate.”

Joseph was very apprehensive when he returned to Ward D-16.
At the meeting he said: “I want to ask Dung to give me a hand so they won't hit me anymore.”

“When you are in the wrong,” Leon replied, “I can't be on your side. I heard the discussion. The man told you twice to leave him alone. You took yourself the initiative to drag that man out of bed and he got up and he let you have it. It so happens that you started it and he finished it.”

Clyde said he saw the fighting and that the other man had been transferred to another ward, but he did not attempt to take sides or to assess blame.

Joseph, who was still extremely apprehensive that he could be hit again, then expressed the fear that Leon would hit him, and from then on he would no longer stay in the sitting room when Leon was there alone. Thus was disrupted a behavior pattern which had become amazingly stable over the period of a year—Leon and Joseph sitting in close proximity to each other in Ward D-23, then sitting together in their small sitting room in Ward D-16. Leon now occupied the sitting room mainly by himself, except when the men were eating or having their daily meeting.

Other Changes In Leon's Delusional System

In contrast to the significant changes which led up to Leon's emergence as Dung, relatively few additional changes took place afterwards in his delusional system. We did note some changes in his behavior. He spoke much less about sex, masturbation, manliness, etc., and he dropped the appelation
Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doktor
. The only significant change in his beliefs was an addendum to his earlier assertion about his foster mothers. He now said that Madame Dr. Blessed Virgin Mary, who was married to his light brother, was also his foster sister. Beyond this there were only minor additions and elaborations in his delusional system.