The Boy Kings

Paulo skyline. It felt, fittingly, like being in a room-sized white iPhone. I was glad that it all looked so modern, for Mark’s sake. Whenever I mentioned my passion for Brazil to Americans they tended to think it is a lawless, third-world country where they will be kidnapped immediately. In reality, while violence does occur in some places, the country is rich and powerful, and Mark had to know this if Facebook was going to work at winning the country over.
    We ate dinner that night at a high-end barbecue place, lush and very Brazilian, with open breezes and a beautiful tropical tree growing directly from the floor of the restaurant. I resumed a conversation that Mark and I had been having earlier about the fact that I thought it was unconscionable that we were not going to Rio on this trip. “I know São Paulo is the business capital,”I said, “but Rio is the heart of Brazilian culture. Everyone knows this in Brazil, even the Paulistas who think that all people in Rio do is party and go to the beach all day. We cannot not go to Rio!” I was impassioned about this because my Portuguese professor at Johns Hopkins was a Carioca, or native of Rio de Janeiro, and the first thing she told us in class was that she was going to make us all Cariocas. My sudden vehemence about the Rio issue was proof that she had been successful. Even Mark seemed willing to be convinced. “Hmm, I’ll think about it,” he said, and actually seemed to be considering it. Well this is a first, I thought, that I could convince Mark to change his mind about anything.
    I ordered us a round of caipiroskas, a national drink made of vodka mixed with fruit and sugar. Mark could barely drink his and called me crazy for drinking mine so easily. I shuddered to think what he would have thought of the nights in Brazil in 2005 when our Hopkins student group danced samba until morning, fueled by caipirinhas and the local beer. Some of us even did lines of coke in the bathroom. Mark would have passed out on sight. He hated drugs. I was told that he’d go pale at just the thought of them. At Facebook, we all knew never to even mention the word drugs near him. I made a mental note not to tell him that he was “the package,” and that package means drugs in Baltimore slang.
    However, there was no danger here of bumping into any drugs, samba clubs, or favelas: For the next few days, we were all business, visiting television studios and meeting with journalists on the rooftop restaurant at the hotel. One of these journalists, who, like a true, casual Carioca, wore a shirt printed with palmtrees, said just as I had that we could not not go to Rio! Mark turned to me and said, “Whoa, you were right about this.”
    At one point, on a trip to the MTV Brasil studios across town, we had to stop in a park so that Mark could take an important, secret phone call. As he paced back and forth on the sidewalk, his security detail fanned out across the park, pretending to be strangers out for a walk. “They are like his ‘muscle,’” I realized, as usual, entertaining myself by thinking of analogies to The Wire . Mark talked on the phone while his muscle tensely watched all the park’s corners. The scene looked exactly like Stringer Bell taking calls in abandoned lots of Baltimore. Maybe, I thought, sitting in the van waiting for Mark to finish, he got to be Stringer after all: obsessed with business and winning, and perhaps not the one with the most heart, like Avon, but the one who got to the top.
    The following day, we were sitting at lunch on the roof of the hotel with the skyline of São Paulo stretching as far as we could see when Mark declared imperially, as he gazed at the view, “We’re going to write a book about Facebook together someday.” That sounds fun, I thought, but then my mind reeled with questions. What would that book even be like? The book I would write about Facebook would be so different from the one Mark would write. It was weird that he assumed I thought the same way he did. My face must have betrayed my doubts and questions, because Mark looked at me with his typical coy smirk, and said, more directly than usual, “I don’t know if I trust you.”
    You shouldn’t, I thought, giving him a half-innocent look. But Mark’s idea had planted a new one in my head. I could leave to write my own book, I thought. And after so many years of bitingmy tongue and speaking on behalf of Facebook, it would be a relief to finally speak and