The Art of Losing
By Son of Hermes

On a patch of mountain highway the maps call Little Nineveh, there is a gas station. Aside from gas, there are the usual assortment of snacks, tobacco, and lottery tickets on offer at the Gassy Jack™. Being remote enough from any major town, the store is also qualified as a licensed agent of the liquor control board. Newman Nguyen gets ready for the night shift.

10:15 p.m. Newman falls out of bed at the sound of his alarm, “Sex Machine (Get on Up!)” by James Brown. He waits several seconds before letting out a perfunctory “Ow." Picking himself up off the floor, he considers a shower and gives his pits a smell. He’s fine (he’s not). Newman, having slept in his pants, throws on his Gassy Jack™ polo and shuffles towards the fridge of his studio apartment. Yogurt and a scoop of chocolate protein powder is his usual breakfast fare, but he has leftover chili that needs eating and opts for that instead. Cold.

11:00 p.m. After eating breakfast and watching many nearly-pornographic TikToks, Newman is ready to walk to work. He grabs his thermos of scotch and soda, carefully diluted to a strength of 10% ABV. He figures that he could get away with saying it's full of tea, if anyone ever asked. No one ever had. Just outside the door, Newman performs several rounds of body percussion on his pockets, in case he forgot something.

11:27 p.m. Walking along the highway at night is a dangerous commute, at least theoretically. He’s not a native girl, so he figured there was no risk of him being spirited away. He's still as likely as anyone to get hit by a car. Newman, as a result, made a rule of not drinking until he was at work. Once there, he needs to be judicious with the thermos, first to not appear visibly drunk at work, and then to ride the buzz through most of his shift. For these reasons, those being the careful management of his drinking, he is able to resist any thoughts that he might be an alcoholic. “Asshole,” he mutters at the high beams of a pick-up truck.

1979 A.D. Newman’s parents arrive in Vancouver as “boat people.” They happen to both (and separately) arrive by plane, but "boat people" is how the wave of post-'nam refugees are remembered by history. Having fled communism out of sincere Catholic convictions, they meet during a church luncheon, where there is an instant attraction. They marry, and have a son some years later.

11:49 p.m. Entering the Gassy Jack™, Newman heads for the office. “Hey,” says Steve, the transmasc lesbian, from behind the counter. Newman grunts in reply. He’s got about ten minutes to do the thirty seconds of payroll paperwork required of him, which he spends watching more TikToks. His shift begins properly when he hears Steve, the transmasc lesbian, say “See ya later,” and exit the shop.

12:01 a.m. Things start as they usually do, with the store totally empty. Newman pours himself a cap of scotch and soda. He’s dreading checking the bathroom, which is always fucked somehow, and decides he’ll have two more caps before braving it. There’s also inventory to check, fuel lines to inspect, sweeping to do, and the weight of all this sheer tedium makes Newman severely depressed. Not a good start, but it’s how things usually start.

12:42 a.m. The first customer of the night arrives. Pygmalion “Pig” Esposito is a local white nationalist, perennial candidate for village council, and Gassy Jack™ regular. “Ni hao,” he says to Newman, before picking up a handle of vodka and several cans of beans. “Prepping, are ya?” Newman asks. “That’s classified,” replies Pig, “darkies get left in the dark. You people have no sense of self-preservation, no connection to the land.” Newman chuckles at the "classified" remark, being quite familiar with such LARPing by now. He scans the items, asking “Hey man, how come you always stop short of calling me a gook?” Pig gives a wink and taps his debit card. “See you soon, bugboy,” is Pig's belated reply, awkwardly maneuvering his purchases into his arms. “Alright, buddy,” Newman thinks to himself a few minutes after Pygmalion has already left.

20000 y.a. The first people arrive in the interior of what is today British Columbia. They live nomadic lifestyles, hunting, fishing, and foraging up and down the forests and river valleys of this land. This continues uninterrupted for thousands of years, with developments in toolmaking, agriculture, and architecture serving mostly to augment what became finely-tuned adaptions to the local climate and availability of game. The traditions and spiritual beliefs of the vast majority of these people are lost to history, save for what is dubiously preserved in the oral tradition. There are vast differences in these accounts among the various Indigenous peoples of modern-day BC. Today, the Secwépemc are (tokenly) acknowledged as the traditional stewards of the (unceded) land where Little Nineveh sits.

1:34 a.m. After his third cap, Newman begrudgingly checks the bathroom. As expected, someone has pissed all over the floor.

1985 A.D. Newman speaks Vietnamese as his first and only language, at least until he started pre-kindergarten. His parents decide to make a concerted effort to switch to English, in the hopes of easing their child’s integration into Canadian society. A mixed success. Today, he remembers the difficulties of having learned English, but has no real recollection of speaking his mother tongue.

2:02 a.m. Someone in a semi-truck drives up for gas. Newman almost hopes that he’ll come into the store, since coked-up truckers make for good conversation. The trucker pays at the pump and drives off. Newman marks the fuel lines as checked, given that nothing exploded. Not like he gives a fuck. He buys a $2 scratcher to kill some time. Not a winner.

2:13 a.m. Newman loads up disc 4 from a The Simpsons Season 2 DVD set, which he keeps stashed in the office. It makes him nostalgic. He remembers watching it as it came out, yes, and that era of the show was still kinda saccharine. He was one of the only kids in his class allowed to watch the Simpsons, mostly because his parents didn’t understand that it was an adult cartoon, and that it was considered raunchy by the standards of the day. The nostalgia always turns to poison during the episode “Lisa’s Substitute,” however.

Something in the triangulation of Dustin Hoffman’s character, his relationship to Lisa, and Lisa’s relationship to Homer makes him feel sick to his stomach. It's not daddy issues, Newman thinks, at least not entirely. If he were explicit with himself, he could say that it's because he's wasted his life. If someone handed him a note of encouragement that read “You are Newman Nguyen,” he’s pretty sure he’d kill himself immediately. Here he is, mid-40s in a dead-end job, with a dumbass screen addiction to boot. No car, no money, no woman. Makes him fucking sick.

1998 A.D. The Nguyen family are delighted by the receipt of an acceptance letter to the engineering faculty of the University of British Columbia. Well, Newman is more shocked than delighted. He doesn’t think of himself as a strong student, and is wary of the workload required. He loads up on breadth electives in his first semester, hoping to ease his way into things. Even to these, he doesn’t take very well, and flunks several of them. The only thing he retains from this time is “One Art,” the poem by Elizabeth Bishop.

1999 A.D. The winter semester is even worse, where he’s doing actual math. He finds all the figures and formulas impossible to keep straight, no matter how much he’d studied, and they leave his mind entirely come midterm season. He decides to drop out. Newman keeps going to school for appearances’ sake, but is found out at the beginning of the next fall semester when it comes time for his dad to pay tuition. His parents, as one might expect, are livid. They kick him out of the house, and disown him in so many words.

4:03 a.m. This is the point of the shift where it stops being “late” and starts being “early.” Newman’s DVD has finished, and he starts on inventory, slightly drunker than he meant to be at this point. He uncases a load of Monster Energy Zero Ultra, a popular beverage for reasons he can’t understand (he's tried several times). As he stacks the white Monsters, a customer walks in. “With ya in a sec,” Newman says.

4:10 a.m. He doesn’t know the name of the guy, but Newman recognizes him. Every week or so, he comes in the early morning to buy a pound of pepperoni sticks, queso dip, and a pint of ice cream. Suffice it to say, the guy is well over 300lbs. As the guy approaches the register, something strange comes over Newman. He asks, “You like these pepperoni, huh?”

4:12 a.m. Immediately, Newman is worried that he’s offended this fatass for being fat. After a pause, the guy replies “Yeah.” Another, longer pause. Newman begins scanning the haul, when the guy starts up again. “I feel really lucky, you know? I get to wake up every day surrounded by beautiful nature, here in the deep mountains, but still there’s a twenty-four-hour shop nearby,” he says before taking a deep breath. More, “Whenever I’m having a bad night, a sleepless night, I can come to Gassy Jack™ and get my snacks. It’s really incredible that I’m alive at a time when this is available, you know?”

The fatass keeps repeating “you know?” as if Newman did know that it was incredible or lucky for him to be alive. He certainly doesn’t feel that way himself, and he resented the use of this phrase. The guy carries on, “I wouldn’t want to work the night shift like you, you know, but at least you get to watch the sunrise over the highway. You get the quiet, you get the peace. That’s special in its own way, you know?”

Newman could kill this fat fuck. He’s fuming now, but only sighs “Yeah, man,” and gestures towards the debit machine. “Oh, it’s actually cash tonight,” the guys says as he rummages for his wallet. “Piss off,” Newman thinks. “Die.” He tallies the guy’s change and hands it back, muttering “Have a good night.” The guy smiles, “You too, brother, have a good morning. Keep an eye out on the sunrise for me.” Fucking hell.

2012 A.D. Newman is priced out of Vancouver. Despite the Stanley Cup Riots the previous year, gentrification continues apace. He packs his things into his beater and drives into the Interior, looking for a good place to kill himself. Never one to be satisfied, Newman keeps driving until his car breaks down in Little Nineveh. Forgetting about suicide for now, he begins work at the gas station to pay for repairs.

4:56 a.m. The last of the scotch and soda is gone, having become mostly flat anyway. Newman is still pissed off at that guy. "Where does he get off?" he asks the empty store. He begins imagining all sorts of fantasies about just how profound of a loser this guy is. He's an inbred mountain mongrel, he lives off of benefits from disability-level retardation, he literally has no cock, and so on. Newman begins his sweeping furiously (very effective), cursing the guy all the while, and then mops furiously (somehow ineffective). "Piece of shit," Newman whisper-shouts, throwing down the mop.

5:15 a.m. The sun begins to peek over the mountains. Newman resentfully turns to his phone, scrolling through TikTok softcore.

5:28 a.m. The commuters start filing in to get their caffeine fixes and quick breakfasts. This is the easiest time of the shift for Newman, being all action. Some of the old fellas go so far as to put their change in the tip jar, and the literate among them (having read his nametag) even say "Good morning, Newman." This morning, it makes him cringe a little, but he couldn't say why.

6:34 a.m. Feeling sober now, he gets a text from Steve, the transmasc lesbian. "If he wants me to cover a shift, he can kick rocks," Newman thinks. Instead, the text reads "hly shit listen to cbc its anout pig." He turns on the radio, tuning it from the country station to Radio One:

—eveh, police and fire services responded to an explosion early this morning at the home of Pygmalion Esposito. Police report that Esposito has ties to several far-right organizations in Canada and abroad, but they have yet to confirm whether the explosion is connected to any political motive. Fire services' initial findings suggest that the explosion was likely, quote, "an accident," unquote. A body has been removed from the scene, but it has not been confirmed whether it belongs to Esposito. We reached Fanny Kipling, mayor of Little Nineveh, for comment:

"Of course this is very concerning when something like this happens in a town like this or anywhere. But knowing Pygmalion, something like this was bou—"

Holy shit is right.

7:00 a.m. Locals start to congregate at the Gassy Jack™, talking about the news. Some of them say that they drove by the house, saw the body, and that it was definitely Pig. Others say that if they'd actually seen the body (as these others were now claiming they had), they'd know it was burnt beyond recognition. Newman doubted that anyone had driven by in time to see a body. He was more concerned with the fact that, if it was Pig, he may have been the last person to see him alive. He may have even borne witness to his last words: "See you later, bugboy." What an asshole. What a way to go. He holds on to the possibility of this strange, private memorialization as he sells patrons of the now-buzzing Gassy Jack™ their snacks and cigarettes.

8:09 a.m. The rest of the shift goes quickly, save for the last nine minutes waiting for a late coworker. Tony, the nineteen-year-old, is the replacement. "Wild news, eh?" Tony says. "That's Pig," Newman replies, and rushes out the door without further remark. There are even more villagers outside the store, also gossiping, and the fat guy is among them. "Hey, hear the news? Wanna ride home?" the guy asks, over-familair and clearly sleep-deprived.

"Yeah no, sure," Newman says, forgetting all the vitriol he spat just hours ago. It turns out the guy has a nice car.