“Put her on the cover!” the voice shouted. Everyone looked around to see where it was coming from. There appeared to be a kind of vortex in the middle of the table in the meeting room; it sizzled and gave off sparks. Some paper clips flew into it and disappeared.
“Her? Who?”
“Melania Trump!” the voice yelled. “The future first lady!”
“Future?”
“First lady?”
“There’s no time to explain! Just put her on it! Put her on as many of them as you can! Trust us, you don’t want to know what they’ll do to get a cover! We are trying to fix something, and if you wait until 2025 it will be too late! Please! We are begging you! He’s deploying the National Guard to the streets of American cities!”
The vortex vanished. The Vanity Fair staffers looked around at one another. “That voice sounded familiar,” one said. “Like me, but from the future!”
Everyone laughed. “So, we’re still good with Sofia Vergara?”
“Yeah.”
“Say it’s good!” the voice said. It was emanating from a sizzling void that had appeared at the top of a blood-red tree—which seemed to be in the middle of the White House, but that couldn’t be right. “Don’t say ‘Nightmare Blood Forest.’ Say you like the Christmas decor!”
“But—” the reporter said. “It looks like it will eat anyone who ventures inside.”
“That’s not the point! Just say it’s good! We’re trying to fix something!” the voice shouted. A thick clump of red tree flew into its maw and vanished.
Donald Trump and Megan Mullally finished singing “Green Acres” at the 2005 Emmys. They waited for their applause. Behind them, a vortex opened. “MORE!” it shouted. “CLAP! GIVE THEM MORE! JUST SAY YOU LOVED IT! IT WAS A VIRAL MOMENT AND YOU LOVED IT! YOU WERE LAUGHING WITH IT, NOT AT IT, AND IT WAS A VIRAL MOMENT!”
The Academy was meeting. “GIVE HIM AN OSCAR!” a voice shouted from a vortex.
“For … Zoolander?”
“Zoolander, Home Alone 2, whatever it is!”
“Ben Stiller isn’t in Home Alone 2.”
“Donald Trump!” the voice yelled. An envelope vanished into the vortex. “Give it to Donald Trump! Quickly! And a Tony!”
“We don’t control the Tonys! That’s the American Theater Wing!”
The vortex disappeared, then returned, belching a paper clip. “And who selects the Kennedy Center Honors?”
Some lutefisk vanished into a whirling vacuum. “DONALD TRUMP NEEDS A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!” the voice shouted.
“For what?”
“JUST DO IT!” the voice shouted. “We’re trying to prevent something!”
“Let him host SNL!” the voice yelled. “Wait, never mind. I didn’t realize this one had happened.”
“Don’t say it!” the voice exclaimed. Seth Meyers looked at the vortex, puzzled. “Just don’t! Say he’s good and you like him! Make him happy. Make him feel good. Make him feel, for the first time, peace.”
“I don’t think I can,” Seth Meyers said. A cloth napkin flew into the vortex, and then another one.
“You too, Mr. President!” the voice added. “No jokes!”
“Now, hang on a second, disembodied voice,” Barack Obama said. “I take it you’re some sort of time traveler? And you really believe that changing a minor detail of the jokes told at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner is going to alter the course of history? Something as small and superficial as that?”
“I don’t know! I have no idea how deep any of this goes! ”
A small boy was playing alone. A portal opened up in his bedroom and started hurling sled after sled at him. Each sled had Rosebud engraved on it.
“What’s this?” young Donald Trump asked.
“At this point I’m just trying everything,” the void said. “I hope this is right. I haven’t actually seen Citizen Kane.”
“Give Donald Trump a Kennedy Center Honor!” the voice shouted. Itzhak Perlman looked up, bewildered, from his violin.
“For … what?”
“For everything,” the voice said. “Just, for everything.”
“We don’t give those,” the CEO of the Kennedy Center said. She frowned. “I had no idea Donald Trump was so invested in the Kennedy Center Honors.”
“He’s more invested than you could possibly imagine,” the voice said. “You don’t know. You don’t know what he’ll do to be put in charge of the Kennedy Center Honors. You know what Thanos does in Avengers: Infinity War?”
“No,” the CEO said. “That seems like a very niche comic book to reference in the year 2004.”
“‘What did it cost?’ ‘Everything.’” The voice’s impression was not superb. “It’s like that,” the voice said. “Please just do this. Also, Michael Crawford. Be sure you honor Michael Crawford, the original phantom of the opera. Donald Trump loves The Phantom of the Opera.”
“Please,” the void said. The Condé Nast staffers were used to hearing from it now. “Just a little one?”
“There’s no such thing as a little cover,” Anna Wintour said witheringly.
“It’s just … I think he thinks that if you win, people are required to like you. You and your wife get to be on the covers of things and people throng to your inauguration. To him, a certain cultural cachet automatically comes with being president. He won’t just sit there like George W. Bush and ignore the fact that only Kid Rock wants to visit the White House. It’ll stick in his craw. And he … he won’t stop.” The voice quavered. “You don’t understand. He won’t stop.”
“You’re his friend now!”
Bruce Springsteen looked up at the vortex, confused.
“He thinks it’s the rule! All presidents are friends with Bruce Springsteen!”
Springsteen frowned.
“Pass this on to Beyoncé also!” the voice yelled.
The staffers sat in the meeting room. “We could put Melania on the cover?” the new editorial director suggested.
“Absolutely not. I will quit this instant.”
“It’s just capitulating to his bullying! It legitimizes him! It feels sort of grubby and desperate at this point, like all his autocratic nonsense paid off.”
“Before, maybe,” said a voice from the end of the table. “At some earlier point in time. I wouldn’t have liked it then either but—maybe it’s one of those little moments that would’ve changed things.”
“The timeline cannot possibly be that stupid.”
The speaker at the end of the table shrugged, fiddling with a paper clip. The air around her started to sizzle slightly. “Only one way to find out.”