Craig Davidson - The Fighter

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.