24. The Dark Outlines - Lords of Serendipity

Cham faced an early December day on her own in Rome. After Katrina broke up with Mather, she moved out of the apartment the three of them had been sharing. She was staying with her father now. He had flown to Rome to be with her. Which was unbelievable, at least to Cham. Katrina had invited Cham to stay with them over Christmas and then, before Cham could even think of how to reply, she texted again to take back the invitation. This totally felt like a thing. Like a total, total thing.

Wait. Wait, what? Was Katrina that upset about getting disinvited from Cham’s family for last Christmas? Did that, more than her white-dude-for-Kamala boyfriend, explain why she had been an ice princess ever since? Katrina was mad at Cham because of Cham’s parents? Katrina, whose own father had flown to a different country and rented an apartment and was living with her, all because she got an infection from a tattoo and tossed her Ken doll? Cham couldn’t imagine any situation where one of her parents would fly anywhere, just to be with her.

Did you see your sister’s results from Oxford? they only liked to ask.

Mather was packing up his things and leaving that night for a family ski trip in Trieste. Cham didn’t want to be in the apartment on his final day. She was done with his trying to explain why he got a microscopic tattoo of a palm on his palm while Katrina’s was much larger. He had been trying justifications for his betrayal on Cham, whether beta testing what he’d say to Katrina when she finally stopped leaving him on read, or in hopes Cham would convince Katrina he’d actually done it for her, for them, for their future, if they stayed together.

Do you really believe you did that for her, and not for yourself? Cham had asked him.

Yes, he said, his eyes clear like a paid assassin’s conscience. Absolutely, Cham.

You’re going to be president of something someday, aren’t you, Mather.

I just want to do what’s right. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been.

Not wanting to hear any more of his CEO-in-training–speak, Cham went wandering around the city. She had spent very little time in Rome itself since they’d arrived and kept mostly to her room and her screens to avoid Katrina and Mather’s meowing and pawing in the living room. Also to avoid having to hear about Katrina’s research project. You know the world works for you when you get to study refugee women instead of grow up with one.

Her own research project began when she met the astronomer who told her to call him Professor Martin because, he joked, his last name was nearly as long as pi, and also Polish. She met him for the first time that September, at the end of a talk he gave about religion and science at the sixteenth-century church in Rome that had been designed to operate as a telescope. She’d first seen the church on the reality show she watched with Katrina. Martin invited her to visit him a couple of days after the talk, at the Vatican’s astronomy institute in the hills south of Rome, where he was spending his sabbatical from his prestigious university in the greater Boston area. Meeting Cham was useful. He had to report meetings with female-identifying BIPOC students in his annual activity report, and he had low numbers. He could have been creative but if he was audited, he might have to meet personally with the DEI people. If they weren’t all fired yet. Before the election, whenever they came to department meetings they were always very friendly. They laughed and laughed. They all wore preposterous glasses. They were terrifying. To be clear, he didn’t vote for him, but he didn’t mind some of the things that had been happening, since the election. Because so much of what you had to do as a professor these days was a waste of time. Like how once a year, he had lunch with the donor who funded his research, who only ever asked if he taught any Jewish students and if he knew what God promised Abraham about the stars in heaven. No and no.

He met Cham in the little town outside Rome where he was staying for his sabbatical. They had coffee on a warm, sunny patio that opened onto the cobblestoned piazza. All around them were tour groups—old Germans in matching blue kerchiefs; African nuns with phones slipped up under their white veils, held in place against their cheeks; drowsy schoolkids listening to their tired teacher talk.

So, tell me about yourself and how I can help you with your studies. I understand you’re interested in researching religion and science? Am I correct? Then you’ve come to the right place. The Jesuits here are very serious about both subjects and have been for centuries. Would you like me to introduce you to someone? Do you have a specific project in mind?

Well I was wondering whether you’d be interested in supervising my research yourself? Don’t worry, it’s super low commitment. You just need to sign a form for my college.

But you’re not an astronomy student, are you?

No. I’m doing a humanities concentration.

I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about the humanities except Arthur C. Clarke novels.

Oh really? I’m originally from Sri Lanka. Where he lived.

Yes, I know this, of course.

My father has a picture with him, from an embassy reception he went to, in his honor, when he was very old.

Now I’m the one who says, oh really?

They both smiled, and it went from there. With Martin’s encouragement, for her self-directed learning project Cham would look at the ways that Clarke’s Third Law—that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic—had been inspired by his experience of living in Sri Lanka. She was going to research how technology appeared in his fiction as a way to bridge the gap between religion and science.

In turn, Martin arranged for Cham to have a study carrel at the institute’s library, where she was surrounded by super-old-looking leatherbound journals. Once a week she was invited to a lunch of bread and soup and plain pasta with Martin and the Jesuit astronomers who lived and worked at the institute.

The astronomers were all bearded and friendly. The Americans wore old white sneakers and the Europeans wore Birkenstocks. Over lunch she was asked, like everyone else, to offer five minutes of findings from her work. At first, Cham had been clever, the way she was back at Haven and had been in high school, always getting some kind of reaction from others, but she didn’t get much from the Jesuits. They smiled but didn’t laugh, weren’t impressed, weren’t offended or surprised by her jokey speculations about Buddhist AI and provocative observations about space tourism versus Third World tourism. They just went on to the next person.

Taking the train back and forth from Rome to Castel Gandolfo, looking up from the pages of Clarke’s novels to stare through dirty windows at the graffitied walls of the poor people houses and abandoned factories built beside the tracks, Cham started working on better and better things to say to the Jesuits—as in, actual things to say about what she was thinking and learning by applying Clarke’s Third Law to situations in his fiction. Which, it turned out, kind of felt good.

While Mather packed, Cham found a small, empty restaurant in Trastevere and took a long time eating a pizza. She still had hours to kill before going to Martin’s latest monthly talk at what she had learned was the Jesuits’ first church in Rome and the original site of their astronomy research, its roof designed for stargazing. The talk wasn’t happening until later that evening. And she didn’t want to go back to the apartment and have to deal with Mather. She definitely wasn’t going to text Katrina. Who might invite her to dinner with her father, wait a beat, and then take back that offer, too. So Cham walked out of Trastevere and followed the Tiber, crossing on a random grand bridge.

She walked and walked, and the bright cold day slowly and unstoppably became bronze and then black as she made her way through bendy touristy streets done up in Christmas lights and metallic garlands and oversized acorns. In Piazza Navona, facing the central fountain and ignoring offers of cheap roses and glow-in-the-dark selfie sticks from mumbling brown men, their jagged, bluey teeth flashing in the neon light, she could have turned right and made her way back to the apartment. But she didn’t. This time, and for the first time since coming to Rome—returning to Rome for the first time since she’d been adopted, been given up for adoption—Cham walked to her left.

She passed through Piazza del Popolo and could see the great-headed trees ringing the Borghese gardens. She could have turned back at the dark outlines, but she kept going. And then she was there. She was back. Two guards were mashed together in a one-man sentry box playing with their phones. The skinny one came out and, waving his arm up and down, told her to go go go go in Sinhala Tamil English Italian. But she didn’t move, and when he neared and saw a pop-star-princess–looking brown girl at the gate, he turned and motioned for the other guard, the short fat one, to join. She was now face-to-face with two young Sri Lankan men, both of them grinning, their eyebrows moving like thick and hairy roller coasters.

Cham stepped away and smelled rich smoke. An old man was selling chestnuts from a little trolley. She didn’t like roasted chestnuts, but she bought a bag and cupped it in her hands and considered the rusting wrought-iron front of the Sri Lankan embassy. Feeling warm and dry and false, she finally let herself remember how she first came to Italy from Sri Lanka as a small child. How she eventually became the ambassador’s daughter. Who she was before any of that and still was.