The Boy Kings

came, I hardly looked at it as I signed, knowing that, like Thrax on his search for the most expensive restaurant in town, I could now, finally, charge anything I wanted to.
    The ’round-the-world trip was a strange mix of power and disorientation, as if I were poised on the next great turn into the unknown of the cycle that I had signed onto almost three years before. When I left Tokyo a week later, and flew directly to Rome, it was the day before my check landed in my bank account, so I didn’t have enough money to get Euros to pay for a taxi to the city. Sitting on my suitcase with my BlackBerry dying, I searched the Web until I found instructions in English for a train from Fiumicino airport to the city center. I sighed with relief when I was sitting safely on the train, its heavy steel wheels rumbling loudly into the ancient heart of civilization.
    Having been traveling for almost twenty-four hours, I was so eager to get to the hotel that I accidentally got off the train a stop early and ended up walking the last blocks, trailing my suitcase along the dark cobblestoned street, exhausted and disheveled after a long flight during which the sun never set, allowing me to take photographs of Siberia that I later posted on Facebook. It was as if a part of me, childlike and overeager, still couldn’t believe that I was doing this: flying around the world leading a charge for a company worth millions that would take over the world. At other times on that trip, I still felt like a kid alone in Europe with a backpack and not enough money to get to the next city.
    However, once I was ensconced at what the Internet told me was the best hotel in Rome, I could relax, and took great pleasure in doing so. The room was small, as they are in Europe, but the walls were covered in baroque gold leaf and the bathroom was covered in black marble. I ordered room-service spaghetti from the Michelin-starred restaurant on the roof of the hoteland figured out how to order cars in advance to get anywhere I needed to go. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I was steadily learning how to play this business-trip game.
    While Tokyo was interesting, Rome was, for me, much more comfortable, which made sense, for a million cultural reasons. There, in the musky villas of Italy, one of which housed the translation office where I worked with translators, was where the whole concept of conquering, and sociality, seemingly native to Italians, was invented (or at least that is what we were told in elementary history class). As I dressed each morning to take the car to the office, I felt like the female version of an ancient conqueror, intent on taking over Italy.
    In my off hours, I ran around the city in gladiator sandals that would be perfectly in fashion when I showed up at Coachella two weeks later. Touring the Colosseum, I noticed a sign etched with a quote from Agricola that read, “The Romans, great robbers of the world, after all the lands have been devastated by their exploitation are exploiting the sea. They cannot get enough of East or West; they alone desire to possess with equal madness the richness and misery of nations.” I took a picture and uploaded it to Facebook. Ironically or not—I couldn’t tell anymore. At this midpoint in my career, I was on a mission to conquer the world, and the words resonated. That afternoon (which was the middle of the night in Palo Alto and prime engineering work hours), Thrax reached out to me, over AIM:
    “Where in the world is Kate?”—thrax96
    “I’m in Rome, conquering.”—k8che
    “I’m at my desk, conquering.”—thrax96
    I supposed then that we were both right, and whatever earlier misgivings I held about conquering it still felt exciting to be the bearers of this new world. That evening at Harry’s Bar on Via Veneto, a luxe-styled vintage expatriate hangout with copious velvet drapes and tassels, I made sure to toast to our exploits. “To conquering,” I said with a slight tip of the glass towards the Colosseum, never quite sure, as one can never be sure on the Internet, in its flat tones and wide openness to interpretation, whether I was half-mocking anything, including myself.
    After a week and a half in Rome, working late nights and then the next day until dusk, taking a break in the early evening to drink Americano aperitifs on the Via Veneto and watch the passersby, I was ready and happy to return to the United States. In truth, I felt a new sense of victory and