ABELMAN

People thought Dominic Abelman was some kind of free-wheeling, easy-dealing middle man at the time he met Yasmine. There were two or three years in which he appeared to support himself without working a regular job—this was or had to be true given how accessible and available he was at all hours, day or night, to so many different people. The devil is a busy man, so everyone knew Dominic wasn’t working a regular job. People didn’t think much of it, though. They didn’t want to ask Dominic himself because they hated watching him stand there and lie to them, and having to go along with it, pretending that it was the whole truth and nothing but, and then maybe even suborning it and getting themselves caught up in “Dominican history.” So no one asked. What would Dominic have said? (“He would have made something up. And you’d have to be like, “Oh-kaay.””). The people he spent the most time with didn’t like him much, or they said they didn’t upon his re-appearance. A couple of them believed in second chances, but this was Dominic and he was just too slick for something so implicitly sympathetic toward one’s fellow man. Yet they came not to mind him being around, although you couldn’t ever trust him, his ambit being what it likely was and certainly had been. It was like he had history, uncertain history, with everyone, so you could just assume that he actually had history with you, too, because, with Dominic, you wouldn’t necessarily know it with the possibility of being six degrees removed. The kind of guy who might have his own skeletons in someone else’s closet, skeletons he himself (or even they) wouldn’t necessarily know about. Maybe that was why they didn’t ask. It was true that they were so busy “tolerating” him that they might not have thought to ask, or maybe they assumed everyone else had already asked him, and that he had lied to them, so it’s not like he’d start telling the truth now. “Shouldn’t you be working, Dominic?” “Shouldn’t you be doing something?” Yeah, right, like such a thing was ever asked of Dominic Abelman. Nobody would even bother. Because he was never honest, as in, “as a rule”—as though honesty itself were the greatest lie, the worst of all lies, ever invented. And he was so nice about it—“I feel so bad for people,” he might say, “that they end up married to someone else’s view.” He could get whatever you needed, especially at that time, which was a few years before weed was decriminalized. He always seemed happy to “help you out.” And he, himself, never got anyone in deep or troubled waters. Such was his level of experience and the smoothness with which he plied his connections. “Good poop,” he'd say. “This is good poop. So enjoy it.” Connected to everyone and everything, and kind of really easy to be around. This was also Dominic.

Travis and Nadia were getting married. Nadia was pregnant. She might have been reasonably successful, certainly locally, as an indie music singer if she hadn’t become pregnant. She was a primary school teacher and Travis was a bartender. Timothy loved Nadia’s voice, said she had real range, power, and dynamic control. She just had one of “those voices.” Travis didn’t really “get” such things, not being classically trained like Timothy was in his childhood. “One time, I tried playing a guitar,” Travis had told Timothy, “And I ended up throwing it against a wall. Literally.” This was probably for the best, because Travis and Nadia were very committed and the pregnancy had not come as much of a surprise for them. Travis and Nadia both knew Dominic “well,” from some past of which neither ever spoke, but from which one could surmise that they themselves had been respectably observant and cautious of their surroundings during that time. When Dominic first started coming around again, when he first rejoined the group, Travis was the first to openly admit to Timothy that he “hated” Dominic. When Dominic and Yasmine first met, Dominic was renting the upper level--two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a linen closet--of a highly liveable two-story on the eastern side of downtown. It was nicer than anything Travis could ever afford on his bartender wages, so how was Dominic managing it? Yasmine was training to be a nurse. She became pregnant and it was Dominic’s. This should have been a shock. But instead, Yasmine was proud, even though she seemed “just a little” unsure of something. You could tell that she was just going to go along with it, that she was hoping for the best and that she could even eventually even resign herself to whatever came of it, with little grief or anxiety, if it came to that. Everyone knew exactly whose child she was carrying, so she herself would have known. How well did she “know” Dominic? Probably as well as she could have known him. Timothy knew, and actually, his view was similar to Yasmine’s, but in the manner of being a friend to Dominic, of being Dominic’s confidant, seldom saying much of anything himself. Dominic probably spent more time with Timothy at that time than anyone else (including a pregnant Yasmine). Dominic had even bragged to Timothy that he had once lived in Calgary where he had sold weed for some of the city’s biggest distributors. He told Timothy that he had actually been Matthew Good’s personal drug dealer when Matthew Good was becoming a star. He would see Matthew Good after shows and once was even flown in to visit Matthew Good in his hotel room when Good was on tour. This caused Timothy to maintain a bit of distance between himself and Dominic and only to use Dominic for his connections if Timothy became desperate. Did Yasmine know about any of this? About Dominic’s suggestively “glamorous” past? It was as if it were nothing to her. Being a nurse, just recently placed on regular shifts at the General, it was like Dominic presented nothing more to her than the most typical validation her art should require. Travis and Nadia were “big and welcome news,” which made Dominic and Yasmine “not news.” Yet this was also no big deal to Yasmine, as it was like Dominic’s past and reputation were something that Yasmine thought were no more than something she would need to “cinch,” “cauterize,” “stitch up,” or “close.” But if Dominic did have a significant wound, if he did, then it was nothing he himself was aware of, or, seemingly at that time, could ever become aware of. If he didn’t, if he conceivably hadn’t been in any way “spoiled,” whether by nature or past injury, then Dominic himself was merely an everyman who might easily confound some straightforward, ready picture many of us hold in reference of the ordinary everyman anywhere.

It was early summer and they would sit in the shade of the crab apple tree next to the garage, along the edge of the backyard of what, at that time, was Timothy’s sister’s and her boyfriend’s house. They did this a couple times a week for a month or so. Sonny was there too, and Dominic would usually bring marijuana, although occasionally they would smoke from Sonny’s stash. Sonny had a stumpy-legged dog that everyone felt sorry for, as sorry as they felt for Sonny, who was staying at the house until he could find more regular work. It was a small house that felt crowded with boys (especially at these times)—although Timothy wasn’t staying there—which was probably the real reason Timothy’s sister would eventually force her boyfriend, William, to tell Sonny that it was time to go. Timothy’s sister could become bad news when something was getting under her skin (and she seldom knew what exactly that might be). Sonny, himself, was the cause at this time, how pathetic his life had become and the sorry sight of his dog which was sort of seen as a reflection on Sonny. Sonny was something of an artist, an artist of comics who especially liked to invent superheroes and villains, colossal figures who could palm human fate like it was little more than an everyday object. “You’re really good, man,” Dominic would say, “Or I should say, you’ve got the art down. But something’s missing. I don’t know what. It’s like your superheroes and villains aren’t human enough.” “Remember Superman versus Superman, in one of the old movies? The evil Superman? That really freaked me out. He really gave good Superman a run for his money. I got butterflies.” This was Timothy. “Actually,” Timothy went on, “the scariest shit in a superhero movie ever was the ending to the old Supergirl movie, that nightmarish world she was in. God, the broken mirror? I still don’t even remember if she escaped. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I remember her dying there for some reason. That she didn’t make it. Imagine that.” “Supergirl? Hahaha!” This was Dominic. “I guess I never saw that one, so what do I know? Anyway, Sonny, it’s like you have to get over Transformers and Marvel. DC is the way to go.” “Not always though,” Sonny said, a bit on the defensive. “It’s the back stories,” Dominic said. “The back stories are better in DC. That’s what you’re missing. Good background on your characters. You need to make them more human.” Timothy knew it was true: Sonny was a decent artist with no story-telling ability, something of a fantasist. Soon, they all knew, Timothy’s sister would return home from work and she would give them all a dose of reality, throw a fit about something, about there being maggots in the garbage, dirty knives left out on the countertop, or the dog having pissed on the carpet again. She blamed almost everything on Sonny because he was usually the only one home all day. “He’s got bladder control issues, I think,” Sonny would say after Kathy had gone back inside the house. Or: “How was I supposed to know the garbage hadn’t been set out? No one tells me anything. I say to your sister: Just tell me how to be useful.” Dominic would take Timothy’s money for the rest of the bag of marijuana and he’d head wherever he went after his visits to the bungalow. Timothy would get in his own car and drive back to his parents’ place where he was living for the better part of that summer.

It seemed everything everywhere was tending toward change in those few months. I suppose it can seem that way at any time, but Timothy was likely numb to it. Of course, I can’t speak for Dominic. Very soon, Sonny would be told to find his own place. But this wouldn’t satisfy Kathy, who was still bothered by something in her rather dreary, work-a-day life, so, next, following Sonny’s departure, she and William would break up and Kathy would move in with a new man, into his more spacious place that was undergoing renovations. This would leave the house available to Timothy, and his parents would offer to cover the rent because he wanted to go back to school. He had been working various menial jobs and pocketing the cash while he stayed with his parents, but they thought it would be a good idea if Timothy lived closer to school with the run of his own home until he found decent roommates, preferably other students, to split the rent with. In the meantime, he would live alone, rent-free, and hopefully regain some of his independence. He fancied himself as something of a budding scholar of literature and philosophy, and although he had a couple rooms full of books, he was reading very little. He also watched very little television, although he did borrow plenty of old movies from the library, movies that interested nobody he hung around with. Perhaps observing this, Dominic called Timothy, “The Monk,” and Timothy went along with it, finding no reason in it to feel dishonoured. After all, Timothy had little to say about video games, had an aversion for popular culture, or “popular noise” as he called it, and he avoided social media. So during Dungeons and Dragons nights at Kenton’s, with Travis, Nadia, Kenton, and any others who might stop by, Timothy took on the character of a monk, knowing of nothing else he could have confidently portrayed as himself. As Timothy tells me about those nights, he describes how useless he felt playing as a monk and how the underlying concept of Dungeons and Dragons beleagured him. “Monks couldn’t really do anything, I figured. I thought, okay, I could cast a spell, but so could anyone else. I could pray for peace and harmony in the…kingdom or whatever, but I’d feel like such an ass, and after doing that a few times, I’d feel bad for everyone having to—well, it would have ruined the game. What would a monk do that no one else could do. So I sat back, got high, and just let everything unfold.” Dominic wouldn’t even be involved in the activity when he showed up, and the seasoned players preferred that he not stop in on these nights, because the game clearly bored him and he would just sit back and smoke cigarettes and occasionally make fun of everything. One night, Timothy got so high and was so disoriented from the twists and turns in Kenton’s narration---how it was just one room after another, a dragon here, an inaccessible stairwell there, the same thing repeating over and over again (and how it all begged the question, why are we here? What is our purpose in this imaginary world?)-- that the room started turning over itself, end-over-end, and Kenton began mimicking with his own vocalizations either the toppling room’s effect on his own mind or Timothy’s outward and obvious discomfort. “Whoooaa, wheee!” Kenton cried, “Oooohhhh, ahhhh!” Nadia noticed the state Timothy was in, and, not reassured by Kenton’s own apparent state of mind (that is, if he wasn’t, in fact, cruelly mocking Timothy), and being now quite far along in her pregnancy, she left the table, sat down on the couch, and began weeping. Weeping for what? Travis didn’t go over to console her, nobody did. Timothy thought she wept for humanity and the state of the world. Perhaps the thought of bringing new life into it was just then getting to her. Timothy felt that he had brought this on, felt an awful humiliation, so Timothy “The Monk” would never again appear at Kenton’s Dungeons and Dragons gatherings, and furthermore from then on, Timothy saw very little of anyone in the old group besides Dominic.

“I never really took stock of Dominic’s circumstances in the way that I took stock of my own,” Timothy said to me. “Or maybe that’s not exactly right. I did take stock, but I suppose I saw similarities, parallels I mean, that probably somehow hid the facts of the seriousness of his predicament from me, being caught up in my own…summer escapades. He was about to be a dad, this I knew. This was foremost in my mind, but I kept this hidden from him, that I would take it very seriously. That I would feel the need to be a good husband to Yasmine. I respected Yasmine. But then there was me, about to go back to school, and after, embark on a life as an “independent private citizen.” I considered myself free to some degree, but I would especially be free of what he was soon to be involved in. But I wouldn’t have deeply thought about this. What happened that summer didn’t really matter to me. It could be leisure or recreation because it wasn’t connected in any way to the future that was about to unfold around us. The future was just a cloud to me. A cloud up ahead.” I asked him what he meant about the future being a “cloud.” He said: “It was basically about finishing what I had started and moving forward, toward it, surviving in the world for myself, getting to the next cloud. But it wasn’t connected to the present at that time at all. But a cloud because…well, the future was more like a place for me, a dreary sort of place, in the way that I was raised to believe it had to be for almost everyone.” And Dominic? “I think that was the big difference between us. How Dominic was facing the future that I was foregoing, that I understood and was avoiding--at least until later in life.” “Dominic didn’t mind?” “Didn’t mind what?” “You not really showing any concern for the tremendous responsibility he was about to be under?” “He just…was too smart…seemed too smart for that. It’s why we could be friends. Because I didn’t hassle him at all. About anything.”

Dominic knew exactly how he was perceived, Timothy would occasionally insist, as though the likelihood of this alone proved the terrible social fact over Dominic’s life, that Dominic actually had to “wear” knowing how he was always perceived by almost everyone. He would have had to relate to people through his own reputation and how people were expected to cave to it in whatever direction. Dominic was nice about this though, if he betrayed being aware of it at all. He wore a large silver star of David around his neck, which was sometimes visible, on display. He did look Jewish, with dark curly hair on his head and chest and the square glasses that made him seem intelligent and creative. But Timothy thought Dominic wasn’t really Jewish--that this star of David was actually his sense of humour, playing on how everyone saw him as some kind of Shylock going about town. Or...maybe Dominic was Jewish. Dominic was disappearing for a couple weeks, and wouldn’t say where he was going, and he asked Timothy to drop by his house once a day to feed his pet snakes. Dominic’s snakes were large constrictors, not poisonous, but this too came to seem typical, loveably typical, of someone like Dominic, how Timothy simply believed no one could love a snake like Dominic could (even more so because most people, including Timothy, hated snakes). Timothy would dig into the massive bags in Dominic’s freezer with tongs and pull out several small rodents, and then, arm extended, drop them into the snake pen. The snakes seemed to take on personality because they were Dominic’s, an extension of something about Dominic that Dominic wouldn’t ever let himself grasp hold of. Something like this would instead forever live in memory as “Dominic and his pet snakes.” If Dominic wouldn’t grasp it, then Timothy wouldn’t reflect on it, probably because it couldn’t really seem like anything important to who Dominic was. Snakes need to eat too, Dominic would probably say. “Snakes need love too”...or was this beside the point? What was Dominic’s philosophy? One didn’t really want to know, for fear “love” had no special place in it.

Payment for feeding the snakes was a few video games from Dominic’s collection. Four video games, actually, which Timothy thought was very generous, especially considering they were old favourites of Dominic’s. Timothy had an XBOX 360 that an old friend had left at his parents’ place a year or two earlier. Timothy had never played it, and he told Dominic that it was just sitting there, on a shelf in the storage room. Timothy never did play the games that Dominic lent him, but he thought about playing them, and they became like all the books he hadn’t read but thought about, with him forming impressions of what these games were like, although the experiences of these impressions were not as vivid or detailed as those of the unread books. They did play video games in Dominic’s room, smoking Dominic’s weed. They played Skate 2 mostly, a skateboarding game that for Timothy captured all the bittersweetness, all the poignancy, of later childhood. They stuck to the game’s trick mode, but they wouldn’t land anything. Instead Dominic would place them at the biggest, most dangerous jumps, and they would see who could pull off the most brutal wipeout. As the skaters picked up speed and then realized in a flash that there was nothing or no one guiding them to a safe landing, they would let go of their boards in a terrible panic and begin to helplessly flail themselves around in mid-air. They would crash into the hard asphalt, permanently mangling their bodies to their favourite form of recreation, banging into and bouncing off objects all around, becoming “decapitated,” “shattered,” or “paralyzed” in Dominic’s and Timothy’s minds. It was all so perfectly, quintessentially, real as unreality. The milky skyscapes and the metallic sunlight, the smoky, billowing clouds, especially in the tumbled-down urban skateparks and the abandoned industrial sites, lent playground light, in feeling memory, the sense of belated or displaced childhood, which became the most sublime experience of euphoria Timothy had ever known. Timothy even remarked on it, high as he was. “The light is so strange in these games. It’s like candy for your mind. It reminds me of something that I’ve probably never experienced before, but now will want to re-experience over and over again.” “Yeah, video games are like that,” Dominic said, “They’re like drugs.” They spent several afternoons smoking weed and looking for new skate parks with new hazards to crash their skaters into, and Timothy said that it was like he was standing on the edge of adolescence without any fear of falling.

A few weeks later, they were in Timothy’s car, which Timothy had noticed had been making a strange clunking noise since he had driven it that morning. Now, he and Dominic were driving across downtown, on their way to one of Dominic’s connections to pick up some weed for Timothy. “What’s with your car?” Dominic asked. The noise had been getting worse since Timothy had picked up Dominic. “I don’t know,” Timothy said, “It’s been doing that all day.” “You better pull over and look. It’s coming from under the rear passenger door.” Timothy pulled over into a parking space and Dominic jumped out. “Holy shit!” Dominic cried, laughing hysterically. “Your car! Your rear wheel, man! It’s on one lug nut! Someone took off all the nuts on your wheel except for one!” Who would have done such a thing? It had to have happened over the previous night. It was fine yesterday. But why? Timothy was so desperate for weed that they left his car and set out to walk the rest of the way, which was about six blocks. He could call a tow truck and be back before it arrived. What if he had been on the highway? Could a car stay up on three wheels? “No, definitely not,” I found myself telling him. “There’s a reason there’s four wheels.” To this day, he still can’t fathom that he could have died. They walked on as though nothing had happened, Timothy probably being in shock, and Timothy asked Dominic: “When’s Yasmine due?” “Huh?” “The baby. When’s Yasmine having the baby? Must be soon.” “Oh, she’s having the baby right now. I’m supposed to head down there at some point.” “Oh,” Timothy said. Timothy didn’t bother asking Dominic why he wasn’t at Yasmine’s side at that very moment, welcoming his son or daughter into the world.

Timothy and Dominic began seeing each other far less frequently when school got under way, at which time Timothy cut himself off from everyone he had been seeing that summer. Dominic was the last of any of them Timothy would see. Dominic stopped by what was by then Timothy’s bungalow one evening, after dark. He had something to show Timothy. It appeared to be a brand new Dodge Caliber. “This is the best car I’ve ever driven,” Dominic said, in genuine admiration of the vehicle. “I needed to have it. I needed to drive it, and then I had to have it. I want to show you something. Here, get in the back.” Timothy got in the back of the car, and Dominic hit a button. The car’s interior lit up with champagne-like light, as hundreds of little bulbs running along a transparent plastic track illuminated the car’s interior. It was beautiful, Timothy had to admit, but he could somehow take little interest in it. He was a student now, and a student might ask where a struggling new dad got the money for such extravagant things. It had the appearance of brilliance like anything practically brand new and state-of-the-art, having been the showroom model the previous year. Timothy expressed amazement, although this had to be dimmed as he thought of Yasmine. “How’s everyone doing these days?” Timothy asked, both of them somehow knowing he meant the old Dungeons and Dragons gang. “Oh, you know, the same,” Dominic said. Timothy then congratulated Dominic on the car and thanked him for stopping by, saying he was busy with schoolwork. Timothy didn’t ask about Yasmine or the baby. And that was the last time Timothy would ever see Dominic. But when Timothy found himself wondering why Dominic hadn’t reached out again, whether Dominic had taken some kind of hint (which Timothy had been careful not to lay out too thickly) or that they both simply understood it now had to be so, Timothy felt that urge to relieve oneself of any concern in mind, not to allow the question to reverberate further, for in thinking about someone absent, they might just as soon feel the need to re-appear.

Later that autumn, Timothy took a day off school and went to Walmart for some supplies. He was glad for the time off from studying and found himself in especially high spirits. As he left the aisle that sold the LCD bulbs he needed for one of his kitchen lights, he ran into Yasmine. She was shopping alone, without either Dominic or the baby. Yasmine and Timothy had got along very well whenever they had seen each another, so Timothy could now ask her: “What’s Dominic up to these days, Yasmine? And how are you two and the baby doing?” “Oh,” Yasmine said with a faint grin, “Dominic’s no longer around. Yep, it’s just the two of us now.” Yasmine’s look was one deftly shorn of any expectation upon Timothy other than his recognition of her own complete unsurprise. “Huh,” Timothy said. He didn’t know what he could say further in having taken in her expression. So he allowed a spontaneous utterance to spill forth from his present elevated mood. “I just love coming here and doing errands, especially during the day!” Timothy’s exclamation could only sound to both of them like that of an overexcited housewife unleashed by her husband for the afternoon. “Oh, I know, right?” Yasmine exclaimed playfully. And you could tell that she was happy, really happy, because suddenly she was in stitches.

Justin Dittrick was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, a small city on the Canadian prairies. He has written five novels and two collections of short stories. He has been a writer for as long as he can remember, even when he wasn’t able to write stories, but only thinking: “I should really be writing right now.” He studied English Literature at the University of Regina and Criminology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He still lives in Regina, and his concentration is in writing that region and its people in all their complexity and character.