Charlie Witt knows his brother is a superhero, but Michael is too dim to realize it. Stuck in a grimy old smelter town in southern B.C., he dreams of escaping.
The newly elected American president annexes the small Canadian city as part of his scheme to “Make America First Again.” The Canadian parliament, prorogued by a rogue prime minister, struggles to mount a defence.
King George VII, meanwhile, persuades the British parliament to take control of the former colony and its military. With the help of his lucky green bunnyhug, he vows to stop the American invasion cold.
The story spans the globe and the realms of imagination as the insidious dim reveals its true nature. Will Charlie master the overwhelming power, or will it push all life—and death—into a crisis that can only be called: The Big Stupid?
Charlie Witt knows his brother is a superhero, but Michael is too dim to realize it. Stuck in a grimy old smelter town in southern B.C., he dreams of escaping.
The newly elected American president annexes the small Canadian city as part of his scheme to “Make America First Again.” The Canadian parliament, prorogued by a rogue prime minister, struggles to mount a defence.
King George VII, meanwhile, persuades the British parliament to take control of the former colony and its military. With the help of his lucky green bunnyhug, he vows to stop the American invasion cold.
The story spans the globe and the realms of imagination as the insidious dim reveals its true nature. Will Charlie master the overwhelming power, or will it push all life—and death—into a crisis that can only be called: The Big Stupid?
Tuesday, January 21st, 2025
Valley, British Columbia, Canada
8:06 a.m. PST
Who the fuck puts an onion in the freezer?
Charlie was staring at the lone yellow onion with absolute, open-faced disgust, completely frozen, just sitting there, staring back at him.
Mocking him.
And why shouldn’t it? Charlie was mocked by everyone and everything that had ever crossed his path. Too short and clumsy for sports, too anxious and petty for the ladies, he spent his forties like he spent his thirties and his twenties: alone.
And this onion, this affront to sanity and respect, was another stupid moment crammed into a stupid day stacked on top of a stupid life for Charles Gregory Witt.
“Charlie!” came an unwelcome call from behind him, “You gonna get them onions off the pallet? We still got three more of them coming in, bud.”
Harvey Stills, grocery manager at Mancini’s, was not in the mood for Charlie and his usual moping bullshit. It was already 8 a.m., and two more trucks were in the lot, waiting to be unloaded. Meanwhile, the cold weather was wreaking havoc on the fresh greens. He was standing with his hands on his hips, dirty glasses reflecting Charlie’s dismay.
“On my way, Harv,” he said, opening the stand-up glass freezer of assorted vegetable medleys and removing the offending onion, “Just gotta clean up after some idiot.”
Harvey snorted, shaking his head ruefully as he walked back to the loading dock. Cleaning up after some idiot, indeed. Ironic that line would come from Chuck Witt. He had been a produce clerk since the nineties and still had to ask about the difference between yams and sweet potatoes. Some people just weren’t destined to get anywhere worth being.
Charlie slowly plodded down the produce aisle back to the loading dock, staring hatefully at the frozen onion all the while. He was sure someone had put it there to piss him off. The list of possible suspects was long, unfairly so. Everyone had it out for him. He was the easiest target for idiots to dump on and always had been.
Especially his brother, Michael.
Older by a year and change, Mike Witt was unique. Charlie had been jealous of him since kindergarten, when Michael got to be a grown-up and go to school, while he had to stay home with mommy. Even as a little boy, he knew Michael was odd. Special.
Charlie was sure he was a superhero, but he was just too stupid to know it.
The supernatural power Michael possessed was not something truly physical or mental, either. It was an unconscious aura, and people who got too close to it were adversely affected. They got stupider. Like, a lot stupider.
Since they were kids, he could see its effects whenever someone interacted with Michael. People forgot basic things, stumbled through sentences, and often forgot entirely why they were speaking to him in the first place. He made his whole world stupid just by looking at it. Just by existing in it.
And the worst part was how Charlie was immune. He couldn’t even escape into the magical stupor that everyone else did. He had to watch it.
He had to feel it.
There was a time when he tried to warn people of his brother’s dark energy. He had even taken to referring to it as the dim in a converse homage to the only book he ever read. But no one believed him.
No one could believe him.
That’s how insidious the dim was. Even when faced with direct evidence of their poor decision-making in his presence, they still accused Charlie of being a jealous little brother. Michael was better at everything, and he would always be a distant second. It was painfully unfair, but by the eleventh grade, he had decided to ignore everything other than getting the hell out of town and leaving his brother behind as a bad, distant memory.
But then along came Amy.
And Charlie fell in love.
Of course, Amy was Michael’s girlfriend. And of course, she was completely befuddled by the dim. Long legs, emerald eyes, and flaming red hair blew away Charlie’s dreams of escaping the little smelter town. Amy Allison Anders (or Triple A, in those days) was the prettiest girl in school, in town, in the whole goddamn world: bright green eyes, raging ruby hair, the sexiest smattering of freckles on her ashen skin. Charlie hated how much he loved her, how badly he wanted to tell her that his brother was a freak of nature and needed to be kept far away from her. It was the greatest injustice in the history of the universe. At least it was for one jealous little brother.
Two months was all that Charlie could stand. Michael and Amy had graduated, and that summer, Michael got promoted at the grocery store and started renting his own place, which Amy promptly moved into. Then one day, Charlie finally mustered the courage to tell Amy how he felt about her. It was cut clean by agony. Amy was pregnant.
And she was marrying Michael.
The news was incredibly well received, thanks to the dim. Michael had a simple job that hardly paid the rent, Amy was pregnant and unemployed, and neither side had any real family support. Amy’s mom had left her and her drunken father three years earlier, and he had nearly slid entirely into his cirrhosis then. Michael and Charlie’s father had died of lung cancer at age 32, while they were both just children (too many years in the zinc mine), and their mother never really recovered. Charlie assumed she was hit too hard by the dim over Michael’s childhood, and the death of her husband destroyed her immunity.
She lived long enough to see Michael’s wedding and the birth of her grandson, but her decline into psychosis kept her from seeing Charlie graduate from high school. He found her that very morning, graduation day, in the family Subaru. It was running.
Inside the garage.
And she had duct-taped a garden hose from the tailpipe to the window.
Charlie still couldn’t bring the full memory to bear, even twenty-five years later. He would try, and it would wiggle. It would slip. She would always wake up, crawl out of the car, start coughing, and give him a giant hug. And he could never twist the memory back to the truth.
He blamed Michael for that. He blamed Michael for everything.
With no formal will, no life insurance policy, and substantial debt, the bank foreclosed on the house, and Charlie was forced to move in with Michael, Amy, and their newborn baby. They bought a new house when Amy’s father died, over on the other side of the river. Instead of attending college and securing a good job, Charlie had to take a job at the grocery store, working for his brother and stocking the produce shelves. It was the final humiliation, but Charlie was powerless against it. Something, some last dream of freedom and happiness, broke inside him, and the sludgy ichor slowly began to spread through his person.
Charlie was a toxic stain, and Charlie did not care.
Kicking open the double-swing doors to the loading dock, Charlie was instantly assaulted by the cold wind of January. He tossed the frozen onion into the big garbage can and grudgingly began to unload the giant pallet. Each bag weighed twenty kilograms. Eight bags in a row, ten rows high. Charlie struggled with the math and the physical weight equally.
Sixteen hundred kilograms, Charlie concluded, finally, four bags already stacked. That’s over a shit ton of onions.
All around him, co-workers were hurriedly unloading carts and pallets. The weather had finally turned, and winter unloaded after nearly a season of nothing. The parking lot was an absolute mess, and the army of semi-trucks coming and going this morning did not help the condition. Valley, B.C., was nestled, ironically enough, in a long river valley in the East Kootenay Mountains. The weather was generally mild, but when it snowed, it buried everything beneath a thick blanket.
And that was just fine by Charlie.
Perched on the edge of the mountain, high up above the grim valley, was the reason a town existed here at all: the smelter. It was a relic. A monster. Ugly. Dirty. Loud. And the whole region carried a peculiar odour that outsiders could only define as “metallic”. Built in 1920, it had been retrofitted and upgraded over two dozen times in the hundred years since, but it was still a hideous beast that spewed its toxic filth across the local ecosystem.
There was only one type of tree that would grow in the poisoned soil: a scraggly elm that wept nasty red sap on everyone. It was planted everywhere and seeded into the steeply eroded riverbanks in a lacklustre attempt to smear lipstick on the pig and hold the strata together. Water trucks patrolled the downtown streets overnight, spraying down the contaminated dust with “water” (but water doesn’t foam like that …).
And the local children still had to have their blood tested yearly for lead poisoning. Lot by lot, yard by yard, playground by playground, the massive International Resource Extraction Company (IREC) was attempting to remove the topsoil and replace it with family-friendly, lead-free dirt for the over six thousand residents. They were behind their mandate, sadly, which led the surrounding townships to dub them collectively “lead babies”.
Even sadder was the state of decline the smelter had experienced over the last decade. Low commodity prices, high operating costs, and numerous environmental fines led the company to massive rounds of layoffs. At one time, the smelter (and the attached fertilizer plant) employed over ten thousand people. However, after years of hard times, the staff had been reduced to barely two thousand, and many were only part-time or casual.
The town itself showed the textbook effects of a single industry dying in agony. Downtown Valley had become home to the unhomed, driving honest commerce to look elsewhere for purchase. Bylaw services were overwhelmed with encampments and the issues that accompanied them. Meth was everywhere. Fentanyl deaths were rising out of control. People were desperate, and the system that promised to help them find their feet had ultimately left them floundering.
Charlie finished the pallet of onions with an overwhelming sigh—not of triumph, but of defeat. There were still two more pallets stacked seven feet high to unload, and his back was starting to do its broken glass impersonation. This miserable job was killing him.
Not fast enough, he thought, reaching up to grab the box of red peppers teetering at the top of the stack. His stringy brown hair was unkempt and always fell over his eyes when he got sweaty. The pace of work around him was still classified as swirling, but he was unaffected. Too many years of the same monotony had robbed him of his ability to connect anymore. His coworkers were only that, and he wouldn’t consider any of them a friend.
Friends required attention, kindness, even affection. Charlie never really understood the rules of engagement when it came to social interaction. He was far more likely to brand people with mean nicknames in his head than to get to know them.
Like Roytard and Stewfus.
Roy Wilson and Stewart Vance were a reasonably intelligent pair of welding students at the local trade school. They worked their weekends and evenings stocking the shelves at Mancini’s to pay for tuition. Charlie couldn’t stand their poofy haircuts and their stupid ball caps perched up there like goofy cartoon characters. Listening to them speak was absolute agony for him, like they invented some ridiculous language that was almost English but just twisted enough to annoy anyone who tried to decipher it.
Bitter was the only flavour Charlie enjoyed.
“So, does that mean, like, we won’t get hired?” Roy was pushing a hand truck through the double swing doors, followed closely by his ever-present bruh, Stewart
“No idea. Steve said that if Dirk’s tariffs start on Monday, then no one will buy steel, so no one will need millwrights, fabs, or even welders. Blame the Americans. They started this shit.” Stewart slammed his own hand-truck into a stack of empty pallets and nearly knocked them all over.
“How the hell could they vote a lunatic like him president? He sounds like that giant chicken from those ancient TeleVista cartoons,” Roy said as he grabbed a case of frozen peas off the pallet next to Charlie’s and dropped it on the truck. “Boy, I say boy, that is not how to handle a weasel running ‘round in yo’ britches!”
“He’s Ricky Bobby, bruh. Shake and bake. If you ain’t first, you last.” Stewart was loading his own truck with flats of pickles.
“Or that old dude who scalps all the Nazis. My dad watches that stupid movie once a week.”
They were talking about the newly elected American president: Lancaster Dirk, former naval aviator, NASCAR lord, and notorious bad boy. He had appeared everywhere from professional wrestling to reality TV, with that long Kentucky drawl winning the hearts (and other fun bits) of fans for over thirty years. And when he was suddenly presented as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in the fall election, he was seen as a ridiculous long shot.
At first.
In time, it became clear that he was not just a pretty face with great hair. His platform was radical, his policies brash and bold and prejudiced toward wealthy white folks. He slid into the American political scene like he was sliding into the window of his stock car. And he raced to the finish line with the same gruesome determination.
The Democratic Party candidate running for reelection, however, got there first. Earl Wilson was a woefully old man, and most Americans were amazed he had survived his whole first term as president. But sadly, he did not survive going toe-to-toe with Lancaster Dirk.
On their first televised debate, Dirk unloaded a volley of rhetoric that would have given the great statesmen of old a run for their filibustering money. He hit him with immigration reform, military underspending, and even snuck in a few age jokes. Maybe that’s what finally stopped the old lion’s heart. Either way, he died at the podium without ever firing a return salvo, live on demand, in front of an audience of millions worldwide. It was a truly American moment: horrifying, galvanizing, and witnessed by the entire planet.
Wilson’s running mate, suddenly thrust into the limelight halfway through the campaign, never had a chance, even though she did an outstanding job as the vice president for the last four years. Lancaster Dirk’s momentum was unstoppable. He played the right notes by tapping the right heartstrings at precisely the right time. He was arrogant but forgiving—brazen, but wise. The man’s magnetic charisma carried him to what seemed an easy victory, and then the world held its collective breath to see what would happen next. Would he keep all those wild promises about censorship, trade, education, and healthcare?
He did. He kept them all.
Lancaster Dirk began his presidency in epic fashion. Day one, he dissolved every previous trade agreement with every previous ally and immediately slapped massive tariffs on all imported goods. The world was shocked. He promised radical trade reform and delivered on it. He told his people they needed to build their own lives, not beg for cheap goods from lazy neighbours. They needed to grow their own food, dig for their own minerals and refine their own crude oil. The world was taking advantage of American ingenuity, American blood and tears, and giving back nothing but scorn and empty promises.
And the people bought it.
There was no proof of that, though. The American economy had made considerable gains for the exact opposite reason. But no one wanted to hear that. People were angry. People were tired of being broke, tired of thinking that everyone in the world was doing so much better than they were. He made people believe that their lives would truly and radically improve if they only stayed on course and followed his dream of America.
And Charlie Witt, being as politically savvy as a crowbar, could not care less about it. People who talked about politics at work could screw a rubber goat. Same with religion. Same with everything. People should just shut up.
Always.
Maybe you little bitches should worry about your own country, thought Charlie, tossing the last box of red peppers on the stack. It’s not like there’s a real government out east anymore.
The Canadian parliament was a mess. Third-term Prime Minister Mad-Max Fournier (another English dude with a French name), having realized that his legacy would be one of extreme corruption, prorogued his government early to delay a non-confidence vote he could never win. In other words, he ran for the hills, leaving the big chair open, and no one in power to ask for Royal Assent. As a constitutional monarchy, Canada still owed allegiance to the British Crown, although this allegiance was largely ceremonial in the modern age. However, during a suspended parliament, the daily governance duties fell to the governor general, the actual Canadian head of state.
Josephine du Maurier earned her appointment primarily through her career as a political journalist for the CBC. Charlie faintly remembered her from the National News when he was a teenager. Charlie was a horny little boy, and she was deceptively attractive. Likely why she got the job, he thought. The camera still loved her well into her fifties, and her political appointment kept her current, and currently smiling for it.
The double swing doors kicked in suddenly, and all eyes turned to the figure who loomed within. Lorenzo Mancini, the larger-than-life dynamo who inherited his father’s local mercato, was scanning the loading area for—everyone hoped—someone who wasn’t them.
“Heyya, Charlie,” he called, and Charlie cringed from toes to nose.
“Yuh?”
“Have you seen Harvey?” Lorenzo kept looking beyond the scurrying minions hauling cabbage around, searching for the grocery manager.
“Office,” Charlie answered, immediately relieved that it wasn’t him on the menu.
“Damn. I need him to review the price list from the last Pellington truck. We were paying way too much for the same berries they bring up from ….”
And Charlie saw it, the look.
Lorenzo was a natural orator by all accounts, a Toastmaster in the old days. He was stately, formidable, and sharp-witted. And he was suddenly getting dimmed.
His face slackened ever-so-slightly. His eyes went dull. The words he was speaking trailed off as he struggled to keep his train of thought on track.
And right behind him, standing there with that idiotic grin on his idiotic face, was Michael, holding an enormous, and very dented can of garbanzo beans.
“Oh, hey Lorenzo,” said Michael, holding up the obviously swollen can, “I have a customer here, a very nice lady named—what was your name again, dear?”
Following closely behind him was the tiniest old lady Charlie had ever seen, even in a town where little old ladies were ordinary. There was no way she was even five feet tall.
“My name is ….” she trailed off, thinking. Charlie didn’t know if she was getting dimmed or just going senile, or both.
Lorenzo caught himself first. Sometimes folk could struggle through it, he had noticed, like fish suddenly swimming in syrup.
“Mrs. Pinsetti, you don’t want those beans.” Lorenzo fought the dim better than most, but it still knocked him off his trolley when it flared up enough. “That can is ….” He shook his head, a helpless gesture against the invisible cobwebs. “Michael, would you please throw that out and get Mrs. Pinsetti a new one. I am so sorry, dear. We’ll get you straightened out right away.”
Lorenzo turned and directed the tiny old lady back to the aisle she needed. Michael looked intently at the can, studying it, completely lost as to why it would pose any danger. He finally shrugged and tossed it into the same garbage as Charlie’s frozen onion.
Charlie looked at his brother, Michael, the old hatred simmering in its own juices again.
How are you still alive?
Michael looked up through the window, saw Charlie staring at him with what could only be naked rage, and waved.
Happy. Peaceful. Unconcerned.
That was Michael Adam Witt. He exuded such vapidity that the world provided no resistance to him. Hapless and plain, simple and calm, Michael just plodded along, oblivious to his effect on everyone who came close.
And not for the first time, Charlie imagined what an advantage that could be, if used correctly.
Put him in the right courtroom at the right time, and he could get murder legalized.
Charlie had over forty years to ponder the possibilities, but had never managed to get the hang of manipulating it. Often, the dim would cause bigger problems than what he was trying to solve.
Someday, Charlie thought, hatefully turning back to the last pallet of produce, Someday, I will figure out how to use it. It can’t just be for nothing.
But today was freight day, and the produce wouldn’t unload itself.
No matter how stupid he thought that was.
I’ve never given much thought to the question, sometimes asked at job interviews or on speed dates, “if you could have any superpower, what would it be?” However, in the future, should anybody ask, I shall promptly reply that I’d choose the power wielded by Michael Witt, in David Hamilton’s burlesque novel “Dimwitts: the Big Stupid.” Specifically:
“The superpower Micheal possessed was not something truly physical or mental, either. It was an unconscious aura, and people who got too close to it were adversely affected. They got stupider. Like, a lot stupider.”
Michael’s brother, Charlie, calls this phenomenon “the dim.” Charlie is no Einstein, himself. A loser in love, stuck in a job and a town he hates, he’s bitter and looking for revenge on everybody, especially Michael.
The narrative begins as an over-the-top lampoon, with sharp resonances with current events. Lancaster Dirk, the renegade, newly-elected U.S. president dispatches massive troops to the Witts’ hometown—Valley, British Columbia— to annex it and seize control of its valuable smelter. Canada must respond, but the prime minister is missing, so in desperation the government turns to England’s King George VII to lead the defense of his former colony.
Meanwhile, Charlie discovers that he can channel his rage to focus and amplify Michael’s dim, so he aims it at the American invaders. Unexpectedly, a resulting global meltdown called the “Big Stupid” sweeps the planet.
While the first half of this novel unfolds like a farcical political spoof, from this point it launches warp-driven into galaxies of comedic fantasy. Readers meet, among myriad other oddballs, a shadowy billionaire international arms dealer, a mysterious doctor with a machine “to devour everything that ever was,” and a supernatural feline named Squinkles, who is the “protector of all things forbidden.”
Apart from this book’s many colorful characters, to me the funniest role belongs to the god-awful town of Valley, itself:
“…There was grime on everything, a grit to the air, a sheen on the water. The city suffered some painfully obvious side effects of living under the ancient smelter…” which evoked stench akin to a “lingering robot-fart of death dipped in vinegar and lit on fire.”
Credit the author with superior comedic chops. Still, some readers, myself included, will prefer the character-driven satire of the book’s first half to the unfettered absurdity in its second.
Before committing to “Dim Witts,” be advised it ends with, “to be continued.”