Low Tide Rising (eBook)

Chapter 1

January 6, 2021
Pittsburgh, PA

It was the worst day of the pandemic.

The most surreal day in what had been a long series of constantly shifting strange and surreal days. The days of the contagion had now added up to eleven months. Somehow, what was indeed real and what was true, whether it was politics or public health, was dependent on your perceptions aligned with your affiliations. The truth was shifting almost daily. Kelly Porowski was working from home, which was not strange anymore. But unlike other days of the pandemic, on this particular Wednesday, she had three screens going, instead of her usual two. Her laptop, a work-issued MacBook Air, had been one of her few constants since March, when segments of our society closed like the bars on Carson Street at last call, just around the corner from her southside Pittsburgh row house. Doors, both real and metaphorical, closing one after the other in rapid succession, loudly and without pity, leaving us with a sense of the unknown not felt since 9/11 or during the financial crisis of 2008. Well into her forties, she had long outgrown this part of town, but she still enjoyed strolling the neighborhood and shopping in the afternoons before the freaks came out at night. And besides, more often than not, we tend to hold on to things long after they cease to serve us. Pittsburgh was inexpensive, and it had been as good a place as any to ride out the pandemic. Plus, it was close, but not too close, to her mother down in Wheeling. Her job as an Epic software analyst for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center was pandemic-proof and well suited for the new normal of remote work. On this particular afternoon, she was using this computer screen to set up vaccine clinic schedules for the new mRNA coronavirus vaccines that had just been released.

The second screen was her television. It was on without sound while she worked during the day, as it had been for most of the past year. She would turn up the volume during lockdown evenings as there was not much else to do other than watch movies or a Netflix® series nightly. She had watched a lot of them: The Tiger King, the Queen’s Gambit, and The Last Dance were just a few. She started her own one-woman Quentin Tarantino film festival, while knowing that watching that much violence was sure to have a lasting impact on her psyche. She watched a lot of old westerns that she hadn’t watched since she was a little girl, spending time with her grandfather. She watched these shows and movies alone at times. Other times, she would start the movie at the same time as a friend and they would text one another as the story unfolded. On the weekends, she watched every Peter Sellers movie ever made, while drinking wine and smoking marijuana. But while working during a weekday, she would sometimes replay them with the sound off while burning some incense and candles to help manage her anxiety. Anxiety management had become a challenge in the early days of the pandemic and escalated through June with the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests across the country and around the world. It was then that she decided to limit her social media and television news time by deleting some of her apps and trading all day, everyday blitz of Wolf Blitzer on CNN for Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies played in silence. But she switched back to CNN in November leading up to the election, as the president adopted an increasingly fascist tone in his suppression of science and the truth, and became increasingly erratic after his own coronavirus hospitalization. She watched with great intent and checked in daily with friends in DC, during the suspenseful four days that it took to count the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots produced by the pandemic that would eventually name Biden the winner. She continued to watch regularly as Trump unleashed a ruthless assault on the legitimacy of the vote, on democracy, and on the truth. Things became so weird that Jacques Clouseau had become the most reasonable person in her world. She observed the increasing lies and tension through the holidays and the escalating protests in DC, which was now boarded up and largely vacant, hoping that January 20th would arrive before Trump burned it all down. She bought a 9mm pistol, even though she hadn’t fired a gun other than that old shotgun on the farm many years ago. She had a virtual Christmas as her mother, usually the matriarch of her family’s anxiety, was in full agreement with her President that they were “turning the corner” on the viral hoax and hosted Christmas as usual.

She first noticed something was amiss that day when she glanced over and saw a few Trump supporters walking through the Capitol rotunda on the carpet and between the ropes, filming videos and taking selfies. It struck her as odd that CNN would show citizens touring the Capitol, especially when she thought it was closed on the day that Congress and the Vice-President were validating the results of the election. She got lost in her work over the last couple of hours and hadn’t been watching every part of the coverage, but she had caught some silent glimpses throughout that day. She knew there would be another protest that day. She looked up and saw Mo Brooks. She thought about what a clown he was. She saw Rudy Giuliani and had the same thought. He had been such a good communicator as the mayor of New York City in the days following 9/11, and it had been hard to watch his decline. It occurred to her that everything was temporary. Then there was Junior. And then she saw the President speak, and leave the stage, and she then got distracted by her email. It wasn’t until she stepped away from her computer, walked to the couch and turned up the volume, that she began to realize the true gravity of the moment. She listened to the commentary and saw the other shots of the Capitol steps, people scaling the walls and a mob storming the halls of government. She felt her anxiety rise, and she went for a drink. She had been drinking daily for months and had long lost care for any perceptions of herself for having a drink before 5 p.m. Or noon. Or anytime for that matter. Her only guiding principles about alcohol during the pandemic were to not slur her words on conference calls and to not get caught lifting a glass of wine with her camera on during a virtual meeting. The holidays had left her low on quality wines, so she grimaced as she reached for some overly sweet Amish Riesling, a gift from her mother, that she was hoping she would never have to drink. She unscrewed the cap and reminded herself about that one time on NPR where the host said not to attach any stigma to screw-top wines as some of them were of good quality, and it was a more sustainable path for the environment. She considered using what had been deemed her magic wineglasses, which she had purchased from the boutique wine shop on the corner of 14th and Church street in DC, after the obviously drunk French shopkeeper told her that they would appropriately age any fresh wine and “bring back to life” any old wine. She thought the glasses must be magic and she had to have them. But using them reminded her of a lovely afternoon in the capital city, and now all she could see was ugliness. Pushing. Crushing. Screaming and bear spraying and shooting. Bludgeoning with flags and fire extinguishers. Broken glass. Desecrating and defecating and dying. Instead, she poured the bad wine into a coffee mug that had the words “Probably Tequila” written on the side and began walking back towards the couch and the TV. She took a long sip that first brought a wave of nausea and then a little calm. Out of the corner of her right eye, as she passed her desk, she saw movement on her third screen.

The third screen was on an old Dell computer that had a Zoom meeting running for several hours daily for the last several days. Holding an open video conference like this was very similar to how she would set up “office hours” when she was remotely supporting an Epic go-live. It served as a place where clinicians who were frustrated with the new electronic health record could come for a kind face, a reassuring word, and learn some ways to better use the software. And she wasn’t past flirting with doctors and nurses if that helped the change management process. This Zoom meeting was different than the other ones, although the computer on the other end was in a hospital, and she had to flirt with a nurse to have it arranged. But this meeting was in an ICU room of the nearby UPMC Mercy-Southside campus, and it wasn’t with a provider, but a patient, who happened to be her older sister. Her sister was in the ICU with COVID-19 and at the present was proning, meaning that she was face down, on high-flow oxygen, in order to stave off intubation and going on a ventilator. It was one of the techniques that had evolved as doctors learned how to better care for these patients, and it was as uncomfortable as it was effective. The movement that she saw out of the corner of her eye on the Zoom meeting, was her older sister repositioning herself in the bed. She smiled because now her sister’s gown was open in the back, and she could see her sisters naked ass and that stupid tattoo she got one year on spring break in Panama City, FL. It was an intertwined combination of a J and K that both her and Julie, her best friend at the time, got as tramp stamps. Her sister Kathy was two years older than her, slightly shorter, with brown hair instead of her blonde, and somehow had gotten even skinnier with her illness. Kathy...