"To quote Herman's Hermits' 1965 pop hit I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am (another numerically insistent work), One the Gun includes nary a Willy or a Sam: Almost all of the book's characters carry numbers in their names, beginning with One the Gun himself, a run-of-the-mill private eye who's something of a cross between a would-be Sam Spade and one of Albert Einstein's loops in time."
"And One the Gun, as it turns out, is dead, at least in some version of reality that seems on hold because of the time warp: shot to death late in the never-ending day by some unknown person whose identity the dead/not dead Gun is determined to discover, even as he pursues the identity of whoever killed Five the No Longer Alive."
One the Gun is a private eye among a cast whose names include numbers such as Zero the Hero, Two the True Blue, and Five the No Longer Alive. He experiences the same day repeatedly, retaining memory across loops while others do not. He exists as both dead and not dead in alternate versions of the repeating day after being shot, and he pursues the identities of his killer and the killer of Five. A Waitress with the Doe Eyes aspires to become a lawyer to take cases to trial. The story blends detective noir and time-loop mechanics as One tests whether altering actions across loops can change past and future outcomes.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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