The Fighter

Prologue

They say a man can change his personality — the basic essence of who or what he is — by five percent. Five percent: the total change any one of us is capable of.

At first it sounds trivial. Five percent, what’s that? A fingernail paring. But consider the vastness of the human psyche and that number acquires real weight.

Think five percent of the Earth’s total landmass, five percent of the known universe. Millions of square acres, billions of light years. Consider how a change of five percent could alter anyone. Imagine dominoes lined in neat straight rows, the world of possibilities set in motion at a touch.

Five percent: everything changes. Five percent: a whole new person.

Considered in these terms, five percent really means something.

Considered in these terms, five percent is colossal.

I wake in a dark space. Blinking, disoriented, a dream-image lingers: a nameless face split down the center, knotted brain glimpsed through a bright halo of blood.

A tight bathroom. Peeling wallpaper, mildewed tiles. Stripped bare, I wash myself at a stone basin. My body is utilitarian: bone and muscle and skin. A purposeful body, I think of it, though from time to time I miss that old spryness.

To look at me, you might believe I entered the world this way.

My legs: crosshatched with scars from machete wounds I took in the northern plantations harvesting sugarcane before moving south to the cities. An arrow-shaped divot is gouged from my right shank: on sleepless nights I’ll run a finger over the spot, the hardness of shinbone beneath a quarter-inch of scar tissue.

My chest: networked with razor wounds, mottled with chemical burn scars. Lye fights — our fists wrapped in heavy rope smeared with a mixture of honey and powdered lye. A sand-filled Mekong bottle stands beside the cot; I hammer my stomach for hours, hardening my flesh for combat.

My hands: shattered. Knuckles split in dumdum X’s humped over in skin that shines under the bathroom light. They’ve been broken — how many times? I’ve lost count.

So brittle I once cracked my thumb opening a bottle of soda.

Blind in one eye: those damn lye fights. My upper incisors driven through my gums, half embedded in soft palate. Cauliflower ears — jug ears, my old trainer would’ve said — and my hearing cuts in and out like a radio on the fritz; when it goes I’ll smack the side of my head, the way you would a finicky TV to get the picture back. A raised line runs from the base of my scalp to a point between my eyebrows: my skull was split open on the concrete of an empty oil refinery. An unlicensed medic — there’s no other kind around here — wrapped a leather belt around my head to keep the split halves together. This wound healed into a not-quite-smooth seam like blocks of wax heated along their edges and pressed gently together.

They say a man’s body is a map of his existence.

I’m shrugging on a pair of floral-print shorts when the telephone rings. It’s a warm evening; the air is heavy with the scent of something, though I can’t quite place what.

The phone falls silent. I know what the caller wants. I know what night this is.

During World War II the roof of the Boeing aircraft factory outside Seattle was camouflaged to look like a fake city. There were little buildings, the same shape as regular buildings, only about five feet high. The streets were made of burlap; the trees were wire mesh topped with green-painted beach umbrellas.

They even had mannequins: mannequin mailmen and milkmen; mannequin housewives pinning laundry on wash lines. A Hollywood set designer oversaw the whole thing. The buildings and houses had depth to them — glimpsed from overhead by a Japanese bomber pilot, it would look like a quiet residential neighborhood.

Under this fake city was the factory, where construction went on around the clock. During wartime, a B-17 Flying Fortress rolled off the line every seventy-two hours.

I’ve come to realize all societies are much like this. On top you’ve got the world most live in, a safe and sanitary place, airbrushed, a polished veneer — a world I now find as fake as those five-foot buildings and mannequins must have seemed from ground level.

Underneath lies the factory, which few know of and fewer still venture into.

The place where the war machines are built.

The streets rage with bicycles and Tuk-Tuks and pickup trucks. An old woman skewers shark fins on a length of piano wire in the greasy light of a deli. Clusters of shirtless men crouch in fire-gutted alleys passing bottles of Mekong. One shouts as I walk past — catcall or cheer? I’ve never learned the language.

Young foreign men all around. Talking too loudly, spending too much, laughing at nonsense. Drunk on Mekong, some will return to their rented rooms with cross-dressing locals they’ve mistaken for women. There was a time when I could count myself one of their number. Their life was my life, their wants my own.

But now, recalling the man I once was, it’s as though I’m considering someone else altogether.

A figure stands before a metal door set into an alley wall. His face, half shrouded by the lapels of his duster coat, is netted with old razor scars. The nickel-plated hammers of a Rizzini shotgun jut through the folds of his coat.

“You on tonight?”

When I nod the man steps aside.

“What’re you waiting for, asshole — the Queen’s invite?”

The door is gunmetal gray, set in a brick wall touched black by old fires. I knock.

A slot snaps back. A pair of dark considering eyes. The deadbolts disengage.

The hallway is lit by forty-watt bulbs behind wire screens. Cockroaches feast on mildew. I roll my shoulders and snap my neck, limbering. Quick jabs, short puffing breaths. I plant my lead foot the way my trainer instructed years ago: Pretend a nail’s pounded through the damn thing, okay? Turn on that point, now, pivot hard. Work that power up through your feet, legs, hips and arms and hands — bam!

Another door leads into a prep room the size of a tiger cage. Wooden benches set at intersecting angles. The smell of resin and sweat and wintergreen liniment. A chicken-wire ceiling allows bettors to size us up before placing wagers. They can be real bastards: my scalp is pitted with burns from the Zippo-heated coins they flick through the wire.

The other fighters lounge on benches or pace restlessly. Scars and welts and bruises, missing ears, not a full set of teeth among them. My father once told me to never trust the word of a man whose body was not a little ruined. If there is any truth to that, these are some of the most trustworthy men on earth.

I check out their bodies. That guy’s got a slight limp — his left side is weak.

That guy’s wrist is bent at a peculiar angle — it’s been busted once and could bust again.

A fighter known as Prophet comes in. A burn scar in the shape of a crucifix marks his chest, self-inflicted with an acetylene torch. Tattooed above the crucifix: cry havoc. And below: let slip the dogs of war.

This is a rough place to fight, but not the roughest. In Brazil, this whippety little bastard locked a jujitsu move on me and pulled my elbow apart — turned the joint into oatmeal. I heard they were tough in Brazil but wanted to see for myself. I won’t be going back.

An ancient ragman steps into the room. He’s got a bale of hemp rope in his right hand and a bucket of white powder hanging from his left. Nobody fights barehanded here; you can watch a fistfight on any street corner in the city.

Spectators crave blood in torrents, disfigurement, death. We fighters oblige.

Concertina wire. Pine tar and busted glass. Turpentine. Razor blades. Tonight our fists will be dipped in yaa baa — Thai methamphetamine.

Numbers are drawn. I get #5.

A Spanish fighter sits at my side. His right eye is gone; a ball of knotted flesh sits in its place. He killed the guy who took it, pounding with fists of barbed wire until the other man’s head was little more than red mush loosely moored to a stump. £l estol6 mi ojo, was all he could say afterward. Él estoló mi ojo. He stole my eye. Sounds so much more poetic in Spanish, don’t you think?

On the floor, between my spread legs: a ladybug. They look different on this side of the globe: nearly the size of a dime and bright purple. It lies upon its back, legs knitted like tiny black fingers. When I pick it up its legs unknit and it hangs, weightless, from my thumb. The floor is scattered with dozens of dead ones. What could have drawn so many of them? Whatever they were searching for, it’s not here to be found.

I hold my thumb toward the Spaniard, who extends his cupped palm to catch the insect as it tumbles off my ragged thumbnail. We trade smiles — the very nick of time — and he sets it on the bench beside him, where it sits with a deathly stillness.

“Numba ei’!”

The Spaniard stands.

“Numba fi’!”

The arena is wide and low-ceilinged and packed to capacity. Stands rise in tiers from the circular arena floor in the style of a Greek amphitheater. Men in dark sunglasses and silk suits sit beside street gamblers in madras shorts and baseball caps. A blonde with cut-from-the-sky blue eyes sits in the front row; her face is specked with blood.

We fight on white sand trucked in from beaches to the south; it feels so soft beneath my feet. I snap my neck to drain the sinuses and for an instant the fear grips me — I could die here — but the emotion is as undefined as bodies at movement in a darkened room.

Scars tough as rawhide adorn the Spaniard’s face; the surrounding skin is so tight a few good shots will rip it all apart. He catches me looking and smiles.

There are three signs you’re up against a real fighter. They’re not what you might think; nothing to do with how big the guy is, or the size of his fists. The three Harbingers are:

1. A calmness, almost a deadness, in his eyes.

2. That he insists upon shaking your hand and makes no effort to crush it.

3. When he asks your forgiveness for what comes next.

If you find yourself outside a bar faced up with a guy who shakes your hand and begs forgiveness before putting up his dukes, my humble suggestion is that you run.

We meet in the center of the ring. The Spaniard bows like a toreador. The crowd’s chant is familiar though I’ve never understood the words. It feels as if I’m dreaming and the dream is also familiar: a dream shot through with the smell of blood.

Sometimes I’ll think — often right in the middle of a fight, when I’ve made a mistake and loosened my guard, in the instant before that fist opens up a part of me — I’ll find myself thinking, How? How did I get here? How does a man fall off the civilized slope of the earth, and how far down does that slope go? I’ll think of those men I’d see every so often, nameless strangers stepping off a Greyhound bus in the witching hours with nothing but a duffel bag, men with no family or friends who must have made their way down to the factory that is constantly running under the veneer of polite society. I’ll think about how every factory needs its workforce.

And I often think about how it all flowed, so ceaselessly and unerringly, from there to here and then to now. I marvel at how absolutely my life was guided upon its new course and wonder: how close are any of us to those moments? How near to our hearts do they lie — behind what doorways, around which corners?

The Spaniard holds his hand out. I raise my own. We touch fists gently.

“Perdónam”

“And you me.”

I breathe deep, hold it, and exhale.

And waiting. As ever, waiting.

For the bell.