Doppelgänger in Dixie: Love During Corona
In an urgent attempt to escape from the character he created, Tyler Lance calls Tara, his online confidante in California, after midnight on August 31, 2022 claiming to be stranded in Kabul Airport as part of a rogue evacuation operation. He is setting up a rumor to be MIA. Except he is in Atlanta for a BombPops concert. Why the lie?
29 year old Tyler Lance has never been the same since "every promise of a blessed future" was destroyed for him in 2014. To cope, he resorts to living in an immersion of gamer simulations, emo punk concerts, and dabbling in fantasies with his local right wing white supremacist militia. No property, no credit cards, and a troubling addiction to Pokémon. The one saving grace is the inheritance left to him by three deceased grandparents and great grandfather but dispersed in a meager monthly allowance by his father.
Tara's impulsive response to Tyler's dark humor on a mutual friends Facebook post in March 2019 sets the stage for a quarantine situation. It begins with a sarcastic joke in a prelude to a global pandemic that cancels Tyler and Tara's April 2020 rendezvous in Atlanta last minute. Love in lockdown ensues in a slow burn fashion between Alabama and California for the next 2 years. By the end of 2022 everything ends in an investigation by the retired federal agent whose daughter is Tara's best friend.
What really matters is everything that happened in between. That's the real story. The three years of an intensive friendship, lengthy FaceTime calls, chronic text messages, social media interactions, and a bond massacred by the unrestrained simulations playing in Tyler's mind that rivals any hologram holodex scenario on the Starship enterprise.
Part memoir/part semi autobiography of the one of many dangerous dynamics formed by the social conditions created by Coronavirus. The riveting mix of social media forged friendship between a dangerous dreamer in the deep south and a San Diego psychiatric resident in a time of chaos.
