The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

Peter employs a self-effacing jocularity. He is an individual who should be entrenched in his entitlement, and yet my experience of these three years has been quite the opposite. Peter is without artifice. Even when he uses the word bro, which he does with hyper-frequency, each bro has built within it a statement about the preposterousness of his own subculture. It took me perhaps too long to understand that Peter’s insistence that I make the short T ride from my apartment in Cambridge to his Back Bay condo went beyond my work on the black box. It dawned on me that his perpetual motion machine of conversation was not transactional. He simply enjoyed my company. Outside of the members of my family—who I often thought were pretending anyway—I’d never met anyone who did.