| Brian Hitselberger |
| Paintings and Installations |
“Once I visited a great university and wandered, a stranger, into the subterranean halls of its famous biology department. I saw a sign on the door: ichthyology department. The door was open a crack, and as I walked past I glanced in. I saw just a flash. There were two white-coated men seated opposite each other on high lab stools at a hard-surfaced table. They bent over identical white enamel trays. On one side, one man, with his lancet, was cutting into an enormous preserved fish he’d taken from a jar. On the other side, the other man, with a silver spoon, was eating a grapefruit. I laughed all the way back to Virginia.
Michael Goldman one wrote in a poem, ‘When the muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write;/ She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you, stand here.’ What made me look in that cracked door?”
“It was three or four dollars, and I paid her. Then, I don’t know why, I asked her what she’d do with it if she had it, all the money those robbers got away with.
“She laughed, and I saw all her teeth.
“I don’t know what came over me then, Les. Fifty-five years old. Grown kids. I knew better than that. This woman was half my age with little kids in school. She did this Stanley job just the hours they were in school, just to give her something to keep busy. She didn’t have to work. They had enough to get by on. Her husband, Larry, he was a driver for Consolidated Freight. Made good money. Teamster, you know.”
He stopped and wiped his face.
“Anybody can make a mistake,” I said.
Shevek’s face had taken on the cold, grave look it had worn when he left the Fort in Drio. “You know what I want, Chifoilisk. I want my people to come out oof exile. I came here because I don’t think you want that, in Thu. You are afraid of us, here. You fear we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justicewhich you began and then stopped halfway. Here in A-Io they fear me less because they have forgotten the revolution. They don’t believe in it anymore. They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity. I want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked for it as I could on Anarres, now I work for it as I can on Urras. There, I acted. Here, I bargain.”
“With what?”
“Oh, you know, Chifoilisk,” Shevek said in a low voice, with diffidence. “You know what it is they want from me.”
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