Is he hallucinating?
Or is our
hero actually travelling into vintage photographs?
Robert
Eringer takes you on a journey unlike any other, running into Mark Twain, and
others from bygone eras—all the while paying homage to an iconic TV series, The Twilight Zone.
Last Flight Out is a highly imaginative
odyssey unlike any other in literature and, if you’re willing to suspend
reality, may be the most fun reading you may have had in a long time.
Worn down
by the stresses and strains of everyday life, harassed bar owner goes for a
drive, winds up at the airport and, on impulse, grabs the last evening
flight. Onboard, he meets a woman in
retro garb that recommends he continue to Sausalito and visit a vintage
photography shop.
Finding
himself outside the shop while walking around next morning, he wanders in and
discovers a vast collection of black-and-white and sepia photographs. Feeling for the proprietor, an elderly
hippie, for whom vintage pics is clearly a passion, he springs for a photo of
Mark Twain.
Much later,
in his hotel room, after an evening of food and drink, the bar owner feels
giddy then suddenly finds himself facing off to Samuel Clemens across a pool
table. Stunned, he allows himself to be
goaded by Clemens into a game of billiards—and the adventure begins.
Just as
mysteriously as he traveled to New York in 1908, he is back in his hotel
again. Convinced that the gallery
proprietor slipped hallucinogenic drugs into a Tootsie Pop that came with the
photo, he returns to the gallery to demand an explanation.
The
proprietor vehemently denies doing anything remiss, suggesting that every photo
in his shop is an adventure, and that the nature of the protagonist’s journey
is his alone. But then the proprietor
has an idea of his own: If the journey
to see Mark Twain truly happened, why not do the same with a photo of President
Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 and prevent an
assassination that, in the old hippie’s mind, caused an escalation of the
Vietnam War leaving many of his friends’ dead and his own life in turmoil. He quickly finds such a photo, taken at Love
Field, and the next journey begins...
