Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

by Alexandra Petri

  Michelle nods understandingly.

  “I do have one thing I want to talk about,” Ivanka says. “I heard you go to SoulCycle. Do you like it? I’ve been meaning to try.”

  “You should come,” Michelle says. “Let’s move!”

  “Really? I’d love that.” Ivanka pauses and taps something on her phone. Her nails are shell pink and perfect.

  “Really.”

  Ivanka puts the phone away. “Sorry,” she says. “Just posting on Instagram.”

  “Of course,” Michelle says. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Ivanka points.

  On the way there, Michelle trips over a pair of shoes. Beige heels, suede, with a rounded toe. They have Ivanka’s name in them. Even as she trips over them Michelle cannot help remarking on their beauty.

  When she gets back the TV is playing CNN and it says that Donald Trump has just tweeted something highly alarming. Ivanka smiles apologetically and shrugs. “We can’t choose our families, can we?”

  That afternoon Michelle goes through her closet, on a whim. One of her favorite pairs of shoes has Ivanka’s name in them. She would never have noticed before but now she is starting to see the name everywhere. Ivanka Trump. IT.

  When she checks the closet again, there is another pair. But she must have miscounted.

  After they go to SoulCycle, Michelle finds a gift box on the front doorstep.

  “From Ivanka,” the Secret Service agent says.

  She opens it. It is a sheath dress, impeccably tailored. It is so nice. She is about to put it on but something in the mirror catches her eye. A pair of heels in the hallway. She doesn’t remember leaving them there, but she must have. They are black and strappy and made of smooth patent leather. She puts them back in the closet and shuts the door, feeling suddenly cold.

  They start to see each other as a matter of course. Whenever Donald is on TV, Michelle notices, Ivanka merely watches and says nothing. Her face is perfectly calm and unreadable, like an Instagram picture of a porcelain teacup.

  Barack does not think anything of it, but it lands funny in the pit of Michelle’s stomach.

  The next week, Michelle goes to visit a friend.

  “Is it weird living next to Ivanka?” the friend asks.

  “No,” Michelle says. “She’s nice.”

  “That’s good to hear,” the friend says. “I love her clothes. And you can’t choose your family, can you?”

  Michelle’s foot touches something under the table and she looks down. It is an exquisite pair of beige heels (the tag says “nude,” but they are beige). For a moment it seems as though they are watching her, but that cannot be right.

  Michelle dreams that when she puts on the sheath dress, it catches fire. Everything is on fire. Ivanka sits in the White House and smiles.

  She wakes up, panting. The lights in the house down the block are still on. It is not that the house is watching her. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the house. It is not that the house is waiting for her to make a false move and then it will snap.

  “Have you ever seen them talk at the same time?” Michelle asks.

  Barack sets down his seventh almond of the evening with a pointed clink. “Michelle,” he says, “you need another project. I think you’re getting cabin fever.”

  “I’ve never seen them talk at the same time,” Michelle says. “I’m just pointing it out.”

  Michelle has started going to SoulCycle at odd hours, but it is no good. Every time she looks in the mirror she is aware of Ivanka behind her, cycling madly, blond ponytail bouncing. Something about it feels wrong.

  When she gets off the bike she turns around to say hi, but Ivanka is not there.

  “I hear you’re neighbors with Ivanka,” one of her SoulCycle friends says in the locker room.

  Michelle nods.

  “She made my purse,” her friend says, voice low and confidential. “I was going to boycott all Trump products, but—I think she’s one of us. And you can’t choose your family, can you?”

  Michelle feels as though a cold hand has seized her by the wrist. For some reason her locker will not shut. When she looks more closely she sees that there is a stray shoe: a sleek, blue patent-leather flat, reasonably priced and beautifully crafted.

  “Is this yours?” she asks.

  “No,” the friend says. “But what a great shoe.”

  Whenever they go out to friends’ houses, even friends who object to Donald, Michelle looks around the house and some-times she sees the shoes, two or three of them, peering out from under a chair or the bottom shelf in a closet.

  She stares in the bathroom mirror that night getting ready for bed, thinks of mentioning it to her husband. But “I think Ivanka Trump’s shoes are following me” is not a thing a sane person would say.

  She sees Donald Trump leave the house but she never sees him enter the house.

  She tells this to one Secret Service agent and the agent nods and looks concerned but later she sees her talking to Barack when they think Michelle is out of earshot.

  Ivanka invites her over for macarons and absentmindedly taps something on her phone. Michelle looks down at her own phone. Donald Trump has just tweeted.

  “Just posting on Instagram,” Ivanka says smoothly. Her eyes are watchful. “I like your shoes!”

  Michelle looks down and gasps. When she left the house she was wearing Louboutins. She knows this. But on her feet are delicate white leather kitten heels with a splattered floral pattern.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  When she gets home she tears them off and sits against the wall of the closet, panting. IT. Stephen King was right.

  “Have we ever seen him tweet?”

  Barack looks up from where he is slicing carrots. “Michelle.”

  “Have we ever actually seen him tweet?”

  Barack tries to massage her shoulders reassuringly but she pulls away.

  She gets into a car with her Secret Service agent and asks him to drive her to a certain location in New York.

  Bill Clinton is at home. She rolls the window down and yells. “Where’s Hillary?”

  Bill shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “She’s taken to the woods.”

  Michelle gets out of the car and continues on foot. Her heels slow her down. She does not think she was wearing heels when she left the house. She tears them off and runs.

  Hillary sits in the forest surrounded by a circle of elegant white leather flats. Michelle throws them aside and Hillary looks up at her as if awaking for the first time.

  “You knew,” Michelle says.

  Hillary nods. “She had gotten to Chelsea by then. We never stood a chance.”

  When she gets home, the Secret Service agent tells her that Barack has “gone to see the neighbors” and she walks down the block with a leaden sensation in her chest.

  When she arrives there is no sign of him. Ivanka answers the door before she can ring the doorbell.

  “Michelle!” Ivanka says. Her mouth smiles but her eyes don’t. Michelle is never sure what color her eyes are. “What a lovely surprise! Please, come in. I’m making macarons.”

  “Barack?” Michelle calls. “Barack?” She walks inside. The door shuts behind her.

  Ivanka walks to the kitchen. Michelle stands frozen, a sudden terrible certainty congealing within her. She opens Ivanka’s Instagram and scrolls and scrolls. There is no mention of politics anywhere. Every post is Ivanka, impeccably attired. Ivanka and her children. Ivanka at a podium. And the timing on the posts seems funny. Scheduled, even.

  She hears footsteps: lovely robin’s-egg-blue heels, moving ever closer, clicking on the hardwood floor.

  “Do you want a macaron?” Ivanka calls.

  Michelle must get out of this beautiful house. She tries the doorknob but it doesn’t turn. If she weren’t extremely fit, she would be breathing hard.

  “Everyone has two theories of Donald Trump, don’t they?” Ivanka calls, pleasantly. The heels start down the ha
llway. “One, that he is awful and the other, that he can’t be that bad, because—look at his family. Look at Ivanka.” The footsteps are closer. “All right. Look at his family.”

  Michelle tries another doorknob. But none of the doors is the right door. The next door opens but it is a closet. On the floor lies something like a human skin. It is orange and topped with a curious tuft of hair. It looks like a pool inflatable from which all the air has been released. Its blue-gray eyes stare beseechingly up at her. It begins to puff up, slowly. “She exists to show them that they are safe,” its low, belching voice says. “But no one is safe.”

  “It’s you,” Michelle shouts. “You are not a prisoner of this family. You are this family.”

  Ivanka smiles. It is the same nice smile as ever. “Try getting them to believe you.”

  The door at the end of the hallway is open and Michelle is running. But it keeps getting farther and farther away, and there are shoes in the way. So many beautiful shoes.

  January 6, 2017

  Why Won’t This Career Die?

  Charlie Rose Will Reportedly Host a Show About

  Men Brought Down by #MeToo

  — THE CUT

  Matt Lauer Is Planning His Comeback

  — VANITY FAIR

  Louis CK’s Path to a Comeback Likely Runs

  Through Comedy Clubs

  — THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

  PANTING WITH EXHAUSTION, she let the stake drop from her hands. It was done. She had made her Allegation public, spoken the Killing Words, and the Man’s Career was dead.

  This, at least, is what everyone had said.

  “Do you understand what you’re doing?” they had wondered, anxiously. They knew—centuries of lore, from those who had sought to destroy a Man’s Livelihood before, had warned them—that merely hinting at some sort of scandal would be enough to destroy a Promising Gentleman’s Career for good.

  She had felt bad. If there were a way to punish only the Man. The Career had not been always and entirely bad, and she had been a little sad to be the agent of its destruction.

  But it was done. She had killed it. The worst was over. She heaped dirt and garlic on it, bleeding and exhausted, and began the long trek back.

  The first weeks were pleasant. She went out to coffee with people who told her of her bravery. They asked her how she was enjoying her new fame.

  “What fame?” she asked. (She had gotten three emails that day, but none of them were from admirers; they had been disciples of the Career, and they swore vengeance.) Someone had knocked her mailbox off its post. She spent about half an hour reaffixing it, checking all the screws to see that they were secure. For a split second, as she closed the flap, she thought she heard the Career laughing.

  She felt bad for the Career. It was not the Career’s fault, the things the Man had done. The Career had been a source of joy. It was like a delicious sausage of whose precise ingredients she had been unaware; she could not deny that it was tasty, and maybe there was nothing wrong even in the meat itself, but once you learned that the only person able to make it ate a baby’s arm each time, nothing about the taste changed, except your awareness of what it meant to be a person who liked that taste.

  Sometimes, at night, she thought she heard the Career whisper that it was coming, but she was sure it was only the wind around the house. Only the wind.

  They had said the Career was dead, but it wasn’t dead.

  They had shunned her as a murderer. She saw her own Career wither and die. But at least the thing was gone and it would not trouble anyone else.

  The first twitches were noted less than a month afterward. Someone in an interview had said he missed it, and for a moment she thought she had seen it twitch. But that was nothing, they assured her. She had murdered it (MURDERER!), and it was dead.

  Only it wasn’t.

  She came home and her child was drawing something. It emerged slowly in firm swipes of the crayon beneath her little girl’s stubby fingers. At first it looked like a monster with spaghetti for a head. There was something unshakably ominous about it. Something she almost recognized.

  “What is that, sweetie?” she asked, her voice shaking a little.

  “It’s an inevitable comeback tour,” her daughter said. “Do you like it, Mommy?”

  She swallowed down the sickly sweet taste of bile in her mouth. “You did a very good job with the coloring,” she said. “What made you decide to draw that?”

  Her daughter shrugged, starting on a new picture that appeared to show the spaghetti-headed monster being given an award of some kind by its peers. “It’s only a matter of time, Mommy.”

  She was startled to see it on the cover of a magazine. She blinked and it was still there. The Career. Bloodied and grinning.

  “Never,” they had said when she pronounced the fatal words. “Never again.”

  She showed the magazine to a friend.

  “What?” the friend asked.

  She pointed at the Career in horror. “It’s winking,” she said. And the word next to it was not “never” but “when.” In precise and clinical terms the article explained exactly how it would come back and when you might expect to see it return. When.

  “How?” she asked.

  She got home late one night and her Doberman was choking. She could not tell what it was choking on. She grabbed her little girl and the dog, and they took him to the vet together.

  The vet stared at them with horror and pulled a finger out of the Doberman’s mouth. Around the finger was wrapped a headline indicating that Charlie Rose planned to help kick-start the Man’s Career Resurgence. She screamed and screamed, but her daughter merely observed the images with a deadly calm.

  “Everyone deserves a second chance,” her daughter said, “don’t you think, Mommy?”

  She spoke the words again, but the words did nothing. The Career kept lurching closer and closer.

  Her daughter’s teacher asked whether she had meant to put An Important Man’s Career on the designated pickup list at school.

  “No,” she said, her stomach churning. She rushed to the school and grabbed her child. She could see it everywhere now, coming closer and closer. Whenever she looked behind her, it was there. Every time she blinked it came closer.

  She approached a roadblock and a whole sea of undead Careers came lumbering out of the earth, toward her. They came crawling down off billboards and magazine covers, their jaws hanging cavernously open, the hideous skeletons visible. They shambled nearer and nearer. She took her daughter in her arms and began to run. Her lungs were raw, like a skinned knee. Her heel broke and she stumbled on, gasping, but the Careers continued. They could not move so fast, but they had all the time in the world, and they were undeterred by obstacles.

  As she ran, her heel broken, stumbling in the dirt, she saw another young woman preparing to speak the Words that would end a Career.

  “Think what you are about to do,” everyone around this woman was saying. “You will kill it. You will murder an innocent Career. What you are about to do is unthinkable, and it cannot be undone.”

  That was when she began to laugh. Wildly, hysterically. She started to laugh and did not stop laughing. She was still laughing when it got to her.

  April 27, 2018

  Raising Baby Hitler

  The New York Times Magazine discovered, by polling its readers, that 42 percent of them would kill Baby Hitler. That just goes to show what New York Times Magazine readers know.

  I HAVE OFTEN FELT THAT most of historical Hitler’s difficulty stems from a life spent constantly fending off assassination attempts from the future, an effort that doubtless left him paranoid and exhausted. Do I have proof for this? Well, no, obviously, but it seems right, doesn’t it?

  Frankly I think if you are going to go back in time and interact with Baby Hitler, you should not kill him. You should try to raise him right. Here’s how.

  1889

  You get out of the time machine and tip the driver. It is
April 20 and you are in Braunau am Inn, Austria (yes, Austria! Hitler was Austrian, Mozart was German, as Germany is always reminding us). You are in the Hitler nursery. There is baby Adolf cooing to himself in a lacy outfit. “Yes,” you think to yourself. “This is doable.”

  You pick up Baby Hitler and rock him soothingly back and forth.

  A man and woman (his parents, you assume) rush in and start yelling excitedly at you in German. You had forgotten about them. Also, you do not speak German. When you accepted this mission you forgot to take this into account. You put down Baby Hitler, who is now crying something awful, and begin to gesture. “Achtung!” you say. “Achtung!” (You don’t know any German at all and you are not sure of what achtung means, other than that it was a U2 album title.) “Ein!” you yell. “Zwei, drei! Quatre! Cinq!”

  Mr. and Mrs. Hitler are now more concerned than upset. Mrs. Hitler picks up little Adolf and soothes him. You try the time-honored American method of speaking English loudly and slowly in the hope that suddenly people in a foreign country will miraculously understand you.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hitler,” you say, slowly, “I would like to take this baby and raise it for you. You see, your son here grows up to become the worst dictator in history, responsible for mass genocide, but I—” (well, this sounds really stupid now that you’re saying it out loud, but I suppose you’re stuck) “—feel that I will be able to do a better job raising him than you did.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Hitler speak excitedly to one another and you assume that they are saying something along the lines of “Come into my house and say a thing like that! You really think it’s my parenting that did it? I’ll have you know I’m going to have two more children who will not grow up to be world dictators!”

  You see your opening, grab little Hitler, and make a break for it.

  The next eighteen years are the most stressful of your life.

  AGE: ONE

  Baby Hitler is teething and it is driving you up the wall. Does it still count as traveling back in time heroically to kill Hitler if you do it because it is 3:00 a.m. and Baby Hitler has awakened you from your first sound sleep in weeks? He’s still probably going to be a genocidal maniac, even if you have been playing him a special record called Music Definitely Not by Wagner to put him to sleep every night.