Strange Kindness

Lina could have just left town. 

Plenty of people were doing that these days: D.C. felt like a particularly dangerous place to be, even if Lina wasn’t sure anywhere else was better. No one had heard from Estelle in months and several of Lina's co-workers’ desks had been empty for twice as long—though, Lina supposed those could have been forced disappearances as easily as willing. (At least their bodies hadn't been discovered yet, eyes open in horror beneath concave foreheads.)

Regardless Mallory would’ve understood if Lina had simply stopped visiting one day, might not have even cared.  But there was experiencing the rapid breakdown of society, and there was being abandoned. The former was almost comforting in its impersonality, and the latter—

Well, Lina had never fully recovered herself from the latter. 

She showed up at Mallory’s doorstep with a couple bags of groceries. The grocery store shelves were getting worryingly sparse, but they weren’t empty yet. 

“Oh,” Mallory said. Her voice was, as always, flat and incurious. “Did we have a…meeting?” 

“No. I’m sorry—I was in the area.” 

Mallory didn’t like when people showed up without notice—it was one of the few preferences she still expressed strongly—but Lina knew if she had to tell Mallory in advance, she would’ve never gone through with it. 

Mallory opened the door wider, as much invitation as Lina was going to get, and Lina followed her inside. 

Lina walked into the kitchen and started putting away the groceries, while Mallory stayed in the living room; Lina could hear her closing the door to the balcony. Mallory’s food was delivered on Mondays and the cleaner came on Fridays, so Lina always tried to visit in between to fill in gaps. There was a smell today, faint but pungent, and Lina searched around briefly for the source, expecting overflowing trash, rotting food. But the kitchen—as spare and impersonal as the rest of the duplex—seemed clean enough. 

“Do you want anything to eat?” Lina called. 

Mallory had taken a seat at the living room table. Through the cut out in the wall between the kitchen and the living room, Lina could see her blank face, her hands flat on the surface of the table.

“No, thank you.” 

“Do you want anything to drink?” 

“Yes,” Mallory said. “A….” 

Lina didn’t try to finish the word for her. When Lina had been sick, she’d hated when people tried to plug the gaps in her speech with their eager guesses.

“Glass,” Mallory finished.  Lina knew she meant a glass of water.

“Coming right up.”

Mallory didn’t respond, her face settling back into blankness. It was how Lina imagined Mallory always was, when no one else was around: sitting alone, lost in the thicket of her foggy misfiring brain. 

But it was too late for Lina to feel guilty. She filled Mallory’s glass. 

*

“Do you think she’s fucking with us?” Estelle had asked, three years before. “Just a little bit?” 

It had been two weeks after Mallory’s injury. Lina, Estelle, and Robin—Mallory’s closest law school friends—had gotten together to discuss a schedule for checking on Mallory once she was discharged from the hospital. A cousin was in town to help take of her, but they’d heard enough about Mallory’s feckless relatives to rely on him. 

“She has brain damage.” Lina was already feeling herself getting defensive. “She was attacked.”

“Ooh,” Robin said, nervously. “We don’t know that for sure.”

Mallory had been found wandering around one of the more densely forested areas of Rock Creek Park, dazed, with blood at her temple, and no idea of what had happened to her. There was the possibility that Mallory had gotten drunk, wandered off, and accidently injured herself—though Lina had never believed it. Mallory was a partier, but she wasn’t an idiot; she didn’t wander around D.C. drunk and alone at night. 

“Well, regardless, she’s been hurt—” Lina insisted.

“I know, I know,” Estelle said. “I’m not trying to—but it’s so extreme. Yesterday, she said ‘sky water’ instead of ‘rain’? Totally straight-faced.”

“She introduced me to someone as ‘a known person’,” Robin said. 

Lina tried not to let her anger color her voice. “It’s called aphasia. It makes it hard to speak coherently. You can’t think of a word, so you grab a word that’s related, even if it’s a little off…”  

Lina remembered how it had felt, every sentence like trying to cross a crumbling bridge. 

“But what if she’s…playing it up a little bit?” Estelle said. “So we’ll be relieved when she drops the act—” 

“It’s not an act!” Lina found her voice rising, anger breaking through. “She’s doing the best she can; her brain doesn’t work the way—” 

“Yes, we know, you’re the brain expert,” Estelle said, rolling her eyes. 

“You got better didn’t you?” Robin said. “After you got sick—you’re better now?” 

“Yeah, mostly.” 

Lina’s had spent the latter half of her college years experiencing a debilitating range of neurological issues—brain fog, aphasia, vertigo—owing, doctors eventually determined, to an infection that had gotten into her brain. Fortunately, her brain was young enough, plastic enough, to compensate for the damage, and she'd recovered after about six months. 

In the weeks immediately following Mallory’s injury, everyone had hoped her brain would recover too. 

But Mallory was the exact same, three years later. 

*

Mallory’s eyes stayed fixed on some point near the ceiling, as Lina came into the room with a glass of water. 

“How’ve you been?” Lina took a seat across from Mallory, and placed the water in front of her.  

Mallory didn’t answer. Lina remembered what brain fog was like: as if you were submerged underwater, words and stimuli filtering through dimly and belatedly, or else not at all; the way the sunlight never made it to the sea floor.

“I’ve been good,” Mallory said, finally. Her eyes met Lina’s, with a flicker of focus and life.

“Good. And how’s that project going at work?” 

It surprised Lina somewhat that Mallory had managed to return to her job after the injury (one of those D.C. government jobs you weren’t allowed to tell people about). Lina had been forced to drop out of school for a semester, because she hadn’t been able to concentrate in class or do her work.

But then brains were strange. Maybe it was easier for Mallory to focus on work than on social interactions, even though she’d been so social before.

“Good. My project’s about to…it’s finishing.” 

“That’s exciting,” Lina said, genuinely. Mallory couldn’t tell her specifics but Lina knew she’d been working on a big project for years.

“Yes. I will have to...finish here as well.”

"You're working from home?" Lina wondered if this was Mallory's way of telling her the visit needed to be short.

"Just--in order to finish things," Mallory said. "We have to escalate."

"Oh yeah, the final push on a project," Lina said. "I get that."

Mallory nodded but didn't reply.

This was how conversations always were with Mallory; stopping and starting, needing always to be nudged along. 

In the early days, Lina, Estelle, and Robin had spent a lot of time trying to get Mallory to recall what had happened to her in Rock Creek Park; how she’d ended up there at 3am on a Wednesday. But Mallory had never remembered more than: “I woke up…and I was there.” 

(It was the same basic thing hundreds of other people would say in similar reports over the next few years, explaining their appearance in empty fields, wooded areas, abandoned buildings. I woke up and I was there).

Eventually, Estelle had moved onto to trying to get Mallory to engage with stories from before the injury—Remember that time you barfed in the booth at Catch & Release?—as if landing on the exact right memory would jar something in Mallory, restore her to the person she’d been before. 

It had reminded Lina too much of her college friends after her illness, when they still tried to get her to come along to their nights out, even though she could barely talk, barely walk. As if acting if things were normal would make them so. 

These days, Lina tried to make it clear she didn’t expect anything from Mallory. If Mallory seemed uninterested in talking—or too hazy to manage it—Lina simply let the conversation die. 

But today, she had something she actually needed to say. 

Her heart thundering in her throat, she said: “Mallory, I actually—” 

Mallory got abruptly to her feet. “I need to use the restroom.” 

“Oh. Of course—” 

“I’ll come back.” Mallory was looking at Lina was uncharacteristic focus and intensity. “But I’ll understand if you leave before I do.” 

Mallory turned and walked out of the room, leaving Lina with the horrifying impression that she had known, somehow, what Lina was going to say.  

*

“I just—I never get the sense that she even wants me there,” Robin had said, two years before. 

It had been a year after Mallory’s injury, and Robin and Lina were having a rare dinner together. Robin’s tone was beseeching; she was seeking absolution Lina had no intention of giving. 

“It’s like I’m pulling words out of her. And if she’s not getting anything out of it…”

“She is getting something out of it,” Lina said. “She needs people to check on her, and make sure that she has everything she needs—”

“But she gets everything delivered. And she talks to her co-workers every day.”  

Lina knew that Robin had been talking to Estelle, because these were the same justifications Estelle had used the year before. “And besides, I don’t think…she’s not really Mallory anymore,” Estelle had concluded. “The person I considered my friend—I think she’s gone.” 

Lina had been so appalled she hadn’t talked to Estelle since. 

Remembering this conversation only made Lina angrier at Robin, and Robin seemed to recognize it, because she said quickly: “I also—I worry about travel. I have to take the metro, now that I’m in Virginia…”

“It’s a twenty minute trip,” Lina said, flatly, even though she knew it was the murders Robin was concerned about. There had been two metro murders in the past month—as violent and inexplicable as the rest, the victims's foreheads caved in like dented pots—though it wasn’t like the metro was to blame. The murders were happening everywhere.

“It just doesn’t feel safe—” 

“How do you think Mallory feels? Do you think Mallory feels safe all alone in that apartment?”

“I don’t—” 

“—because out of all of us, Mallory has the most reason to feel afraid.”  

“I know,” Robin said miserably. “I know.”

The police had never figured out who was behind Mallory’s attack—or the near-identical attacks reported across the globe in the year since—and as far as Lina knew, the police had stopped looking.

Waking up inexplicably in an unpopulated area was the least of what could happen to a person these days.

“So what?” Lina said. “What are you trying to say here?”  

Robin was shredding her paper napkin into her lap. Unlike Estelle, she hated confrontation; in law school, she’d almost failed her Oral arguments because she couldn’t make eye contact with the judge. 

“I dread it,” she said quietly. “I make plans to go see her and I dread it, for days beforehand. And then after I leave—I almost feel worse, guilty and depressed and….” She met Lina’s eyes.  “Do you? Do you enjoy it?” 

“That’s not the point.” 

“But if she’s not enjoying it…”

“That’s not the point either!” Lina said. They had to owe more to each other than that. They had to deserve more from each other.

“It might be you one day, you know." Lina got to her feet. "One day you might be the one who’s alone and sick and afraid, and then you better hope that the people in your life care enough about you to stick around.”

Lina had gone home her Junior year in college on medical leave and had never heard from any of her college friends again.  

“Lina, please, I’m—” Robin started, but Lina didn’t stay to hear her protest. She’d left the restaurant in a righteous fury.

It had been so easy, back then, to think of herself as better than Robin, and Estelle, and her college friends, all those worthless people who had abandoned a friend at her lowest. 

To imagine that she would never do the same.

*

Lina was opening the door onto Mallory’s back porch, searching for the source of the smell, and trying to come up with what she was going to say when Mallory came back. Because she wasn’t going to leave Mallory an explanation; she at least owed her that. 

With how bad everything’s getting, Lina rehearsed, I feel like I really need to go home to Texas. 

She had moved to D.C. to make a fresh start of things after she’d recovered, but now she felt the tug to go back, to be with the people closest to her, the same way she had in college after she got sick. 

But she was one of the few people who still visited Mallory. Estelle had stopped. Robin and her boyfriend had been murdered in their bed soon after that awful dinner.

There was no one else. Eventually the cleaning person would stop coming. Eventually the food would stop being delivered. 

Lina knew she was a hypocrite, for deciding that—under the present circumstances—all she could care about was herself and her family. It was the same sort of calculus, surely, that Robin, Estelle, and her college friends had made, when they had decided the sick friend in their lives wasn’t worth the time or effort of visiting.

Did it matter, Lina wondered, that everything was going to hell? Or did that make her abandonment worse? 

As Lina looked through the windows of the duplex unit next door—seeing what she had feared ever since she’d noticed the smell—she could only wish that she’d left town directly, without visiting Mallory at all. 

“Mallory,” she called. She left the door to the balcony open as she stumbled back inside. The bodies sprawled in front of the neighbors’ windows—mouths agape, foreheads neatly and bloodlessly dented—were far from the first she’d seen. “We need to go.”

The best practice, when you saw a body, was simply to leave.

“Mallory!” Lina said again. Lina could feel brain fog starting to settle across her thoughts, blurring their sharp urgency. This happened, under stress: even though Lina’s brain had healed itself, it still remembered the old symptoms and returned to them, like a dog gnawing at an old wound. 

“Your neighbors have been killed—” 

And then Lina remembered: Mallory had been closing the door to the balcony when Lina arrived.

She must already know they were dead.

Mallory walked into the room, but Lina's plea died in her throat. It wasn't Mallory.

It was impossible to say what had changed, the transformation was so complete, yet outwardly the same. The body walking towards her was still Mallory’s, but Lina knew, with bone-deep horror, that Mallory wasn’t the one walking. 

“You....” Lina started, but her words fell out beneath her, collapsing planks on the bridge she was trying to cross. 

The bodies next door. Robin in her bed. Millions of others, across the world.

Mallory had been injured three years ago, and then the world fell apart.

The thing that wasn’t Mallory came to a stop in front of her. It held Mallory’s arms loose at its sides, and Lina understood something awful about the anatomy of the body crouched inside of Mallory's body, straining inside of it.

Lina reached out for purchase, for any word that would hold—

You killed them. You killed them.

“...kill,” she finally said. 

“Yes.” The thing nodded, a human movement made horrible. Its voice was as flat as ever, but smooth, unhalting. “We have been forced to kill. Especially now, as we near the end."

The thing took another step closer to Lina. Lina could almost see the way it would’ve moved unencumbered by Mallory’s body; she thought she would gauge her own eyes out if she ever saw more than that fleeting edge.

She needed to run. She needed to escape. But she couldn’t move, her brain adrift in the sea, her body lost to the seabed below.

“But we are not an unfeeling species. We recognize kindness."

The thing's gaze was focused and intent, with none of Mallory's usual fogged remove—with nothing left to hide the fearsome, horrible intensity of what it was.

It wasn't Mallory. It had never been Mallory.

“I have recognized the kindness you've shown me."

Estelle had been right.

It made Lina want to scream or retch or rip the skin from her face, but she couldn't do anything, as the thing reached Mallory’s hand toward Lina’s forehead, as it said in Mallory's voice: "And I will not forget it."