Kayla Bartkowski / Getty
I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”
I looked at my watch. It was 1987.
“Who?” I asked.
“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing. Not even enigmas. His name is Jeffrey.”
“Great!” I said. I loved to be introduced to people, in case they could help me with the orphans or connect me to a good sackcloth dealer. I was wearing a lot of sackcloth at that time, out of humility. I put down the biography of William McKinley that I had been reading in order to learn whether tariffs were good or bad. I had hoped that I could read it to the orphans, after we finished with the soup. But that could wait. “Please, introduce me.”
Thus began almost two decades of association that were nothing but miserable for me. I don’t know if you have any friends with whom you have nothing in common, but that was how it was with me and this guy. I assume! I never found out what he did, or how exactly he made his money, or even what his interests were. I would look at him and think,
What a head of hair! “Even better than William McKinley’s!” I would mouth silently to myself. Then I would notice that, below the hair, his mouth was moving, and I’d try to guess what he had been saying, so that I could answer appropriately. Usually, I would just laugh and say, “You know that’s right!”
“You’re a pal,” Jeffrey would tell me. I wondered if I really was a pal. I spent so little time understanding what he had to say, and so much time lost in my own world, thinking about William McKinley and wondering what tariffs were. Tariffs—what a beautiful sound that word has.
Tariff: the tip of the tongue taking a trip from the glorious
Ta to the explosion of
riff!
Again and again, my new friend would drag me to parties that I had no interest in attending. I was miserable. I sat in the front row at the Victoria’s Secret
fashion show with my biography of William McKinley open on my lap. But it was hard to read in the dark room, and I was not getting to the part that explained what tariffs were as fast as I would have liked.
“I don’t want to go to another of Jeffrey’s island soirees,” I complained at one point. “I just want to stay in and read up about tariffs. I don’t feel that I understand them yet.” Everybody knows how much I love reading and how zealously I guard my reading time.
“No,” the mysterious man said. “It’s very important that you attend these parties. We need you in pictures. It’s for the conspiracy.”
I could tell the conspiracy was very important to him, so I always wound up going.
“Come on the plane,” Jeffrey said once. “It’s called the Lolita Express.”
“Sure,” I said. This was the most excited I had been in some time. I had no idea that Jeffrey also loved Nabokov. “I love a literary classic with an unreliable narrator.”
On the plane, I was disappointed. I searched it up and down for books to read but did not find any. Not even
The Art of Translation!
“You should call your next plane the Ada, or Ardor: A Family-Chronicle Express,” I suggested. Jeffrey didn’t laugh. Now that I think back, I am beginning to doubt that Jeffrey had even read
Lolita!
Jeffrey claims I met Melania on his plane, but I am certain I was with the orphans that week. Once I asked Melania about it.
“Have you ever been on that plane?” I asked. “Is that where we met? I don’t think that would have been how.”
She shrugged. “Could be. I do a lot of conspiracy things, what with all the
body doubles. What do you remember?”
“I remember approaching you. I said, ‘I respect women too much to have any sense of what you look like physically, but there is something about your soul that makes me think of tariffs.’ And then you said, ‘Oh, no.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s good.
Tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language.’”
“That does sound more like you,” she said.
Jeffrey kept inviting me to parties or, worse, urging me to throw parties of my own with themes that he suggested. I didn’t want to, but never told him so. That would have been impolite.
“I’m having a party,” I told Jeffrey once. “The theme is respect for women. I respect women so much that I feel bad even singling them out to say that I respect them, because really they’re just people. It’s a party about that, and I’d like you to be there.”
“That’s not a good theme,” he said. “Do a different theme instead.” So we did Jeffrey’s theme. I was very unhappy about it. We were the only two people there. I spent the whole party in the corner with my book about William McKinley, trying to get to the tariff part. I didn’t, though. It was too loud.
The mysterious man who introduced me to Jeffrey in the first place came back in roughly 2002. He had a book for Jeffrey that he wanted me to sign. “Do a picture,” he suggested.
“But,” I said, “I never
write a picture.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He had an autopen with him. “I always carry this, for conspiracy reasons.” He used the pen to make a very obscene doodle and then pointed for me to sign my name to it. There was text above it.
“What does the text say?” I asked. “It doesn’t imply I share a creepy secret with this man, does it? I am beginning to think that he is not on the level, and I wouldn’t like to have it in writing that we had shared a creepy secret if, say, he were later revealed to be a terrible pedophile.”
“It says, ‘I love tariffs!’” the man said.
“Great,” I said. I signed it enthusiastically.
Over the years, the man kept coming to me and asking me to pose for pictures or make incriminating videotapes “for the files.” I should have asked more about the files, now that I think about it. “What are the files for?” I should have said. But he was clearly so passionate about them that I did not want to rain on his parade. When pressed, he said, “Conspiracies to do with the 2016 election,” or, “Conspiracies to do with the 2020 election,” or, “Conspiracies generally,” or, “Ask
Dan Bongino.”
“We’re going to put all of this into files,” he explained. “Reams and reams of really damning stuff. And then we’re going to keep them secret. And you need to keep asking for them. Don’t take no for an answer.”
“This conspiracy confuses me,” I said. “You have spent decades painstakingly assembling this file, but you also will hide it from everyone, and
I have to ask for it to be released?”
“Yes,” he said. “But then you have to stop asking for it to be released. Abruptly, and as suspiciously as you can. Indeed, if Congress shows any interest in having it released, have the speaker of the House shut them down for the summer.”
“But,” I said, “why would Congress listen to me?”
“He’ll listen,” the man said, and winked. “You’ll be the president, although many of the people who voted for you will be people who have felt for a long time that there is a secret conspiracy of elite pedophiles and that you are the one to help them blow it wide open. So they might not be happy when you start calling the files ‘boring.’”
“Why would they care so much?”
“The idea that there are secretly elite cabals of pedophiles wherever you look has been the stuff of conspiracy theories for years. Your supporters will be particularly interested in such things.” He paused. “But this time there’s an actual man preying on actual girls. That’ll be the horrible thing about this: a lurid conspiracy theory wrapped around real horrors that happened to real girls.” He got quiet for a moment.
I was thinking about something else. “You said I would be president,” I said, my voice hushed with wonder. “Can I do tariffs, as president? Like William McKinley did?”
He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Is that really your only question about this?”
I nodded. “Tariffs are all I think about.” I halted for a moment. “And they’re—they’re a good idea, right? Tariffs?”
“Are they a good idea? Are they a
good idea?” He laughed. “Why, you might as well ask if there is reason to cast doubt on the legitimacy of my birth certificate!”
I frowned. “Is there?” He didn’t answer. “Is there?”
But he had already vanished into the parking lot, clutching his precious files.
