Verre

I was in a seemingly ordinary room, white-walled and minimally furnished, when something unusual caught my eye. Near the leg of a chair was a tiny little human, no more than two inches high. Closer inspection revealed that it was Donald Trump!

Trying to figure out what was going on, I remembered hearing that this room had been designed as a sort of art installation by the punk rock impresario Malcolm MacLaren. All the furniture was subtly oversized in order to make one feel smaller, maybe even bring back memories of navigating the grown-up world as a child. But what I was seeing now was a much greater shift of scale than I would have expected. Just how big is this furniture, if it makes a grown man look only two inches tall? I knew that Malcolm MacLaren had been rich, but it would have cost a fortune to build an installation to a scale like that!

Then I realized that my scale was perfectly ordinary in relation to the furniture, which could mean only one of two things. If the furniture were vastly oversized, then I too must be an enormous giant, so that if I left this room I would be blundering through the city like godzilla... but that seemed unlikely. I was pretty sure that I remembered being in ordinary scale to the world outside this room. The other possibility was that Donald Trump is actually only two inches tall. That made a lot more sense, given the extent of his overcompensatory bluster. I wondered if it might help if other people came to perceive this.