Cheating Underground Man

He hated us all anyway, so why shouldn’t I cheat. That was my stream of consciousness up to the very point Underground Man returned to the living room where we’d been playing Go Fish. We were playing a variation where the winner was the person who put all their cards down first; it didn’t matter who had more ‘books’ or sets of four placed down before the other. I had three aces and three kings. I knew it was very unlikely that he had one of either, given I’d asked him with my previous two questions before, serendipitously, picking up a third ace and third king on my last two goes. As he walked out onto the balcony he was hidden behind heavy, velvet curtains, burgundy… I was hidden also, to him. I scrambled silently to find the fourth ace and king in the deck, before putting both cards on my lap. It would be too conspicuous if he returned to see that I now magically had eight cards instead of six. No, I would place them on my lap and switch them with whatever the next two cards were that I picked up, discreetly, below the table top that restricted his vision.

Why cheat? I was playing with one of misanthropy’s personifications: a man whose self-imposed stoicism was incompatible with his disposition of reflection and sensitivity. If I didn’t cheat, he’d hate me all the same through some lens of fecklessness or pity. Moreover, any pain he had was his own doing and any I dished out would always simply be infused into the petri dish of misery he carried everywhere. Was it not he who simultaneously denied love and inflicted pain onto poor Liza? The young prostitute he’d met, fell in love with before condemning her like a Roman? I still don’t understand why he’d purposefully be so self-destructive… My confusion was even more so then, being fifty-three years ago, before the revolution had spawned.

He returned from the fresh air - then still pre-industrial by and large – with an air of Christ ready to forgive Judas. What right had he! Had he peeked through the impenetrable curtains? Deduced my body language was awry? Perhaps he prophesized that I’d cheat that first instance I grimaced at his mention of ‘lowly man’… He sat down and glanced at the deck, as if to check its composition resembled the same as before. Of course it didn’t and I confessed my sin.