Visible Man by Khalil Umrani

He had fought for years for his own welfare before he became famous for street boxing and realized he could make money from the publicity he got. He fell in with people who were used to making money off of others, mostly from women and men who had sex on video and were paid for their performances like actors, only they weren’t acting, instead lowering their standards for love and affection to the point that they were special and worthy of receiving money for doing things that most people normally do, only not in the realm of public perception and not to the extremes that they would.

The men who employed these people were invariably white and in their mid-30’s, unafraid to use and trade people like wheat and sugar, quick to dump them on the street when they were finished being profitable, sitting there alone until they were picked up later by other men with lower expectations than the ones before, trying to milk the last bit of use from a commodity that had ceased being a person years before.

These white-men found the fighter on the streets and he fought strangers on film for them and was paid for it. The strangers he fought were people like him: poor and waiting to be used by the white-men so that they too could make money off of their miserable desperation and temporarily pay for their family’s foods so they could live like normal people for a time, no matter how short. Using the internet as a means of free advertising, the white-men made the fighter famous among the young purveyors of the video sites, mostly young men who were the sons of the middle and upper class and thirsted after violence like a drug and worshipped the dregs of society with a fervor matched only by their reliance on their parents money, and were no different than the white-men who were once like them and who now guided the fighter at every turn in hopes that he would both entertain them and sustain their hedonistic dreams that became less real with every year and thus their desire for them ever more desperate.

He fought many times in backyards and empty gyms against increasingly skilled opponents and they filmed him taking punches to his body and head in order to fulfill the unspoken contract that he and the white-men had, the street fighter unaware that they were not capable of respecting him because he was different and subhuman, something like a trained animal wearing a penguin suit dancing to a theme played at their whim. If he had been crippled during a fight or lost an eye to a wayward finger, the white men would have expressed sorrow at his misfortune and slowly disappeared from his life, at first ceasing to visit him in the hospital or at his home, and later not returning phone calls or messages.

The fighter might have known about the contemptible nature of his relationship with the white-men but fought anyway, choosing to risk his livelihood in order to sustain himself and his pride.

As his fame grew the white-men sold the fighter to another, richer white-man who had grand plans and a fighting organization, pitting the fighter against professionals in a cage in an arena so that richer people could buy tickets to see the man in a cage fight against people he didn’t know and didn’t care to hurt so that they could be entertained for the evening and perhaps have a story to brag about to their friends as they ate at a generic restaurant the next night, sipping on their $8 drinks and pretending to listen to one another.

The fighter had become quite popular from his videos on the internet, and the richer white-man was able to use the fighter to broker a television deal with a large television station known in the past for its journalistic integrity. The first night the fighter fought in the cage, six million people watched him fight on TV in order to see who he was and whether or not he was worthy of the fame he had been gifted, acting as judges in their own court giving their opinions on a man who did nothing to deserve their vitriol but was spurred on by people who did.

The fighter was victorious on occasion during the broadcasts and brought in the same amount of viewers every time, viewers who were hungry to see him lose and rejoice in his failings and see all the wealth he didn’t deserve taken away from him. They secretly hoped he would be injured, perhaps even seriously so they could look wise for thinking he was in over his head. He was nothing more than a large black man from a nameless poor neighborhood that fought when he was told to, a single man in a group of millions who were starving to leave behind the filth and violence of their lives in the more dangerous parts of America’s cities, a group that glorified violence and sexual promiscuity but had ironic, hidden parts that were seldom seen by those on the outside because they were too radical and contradictory, knowledge of which would break the spell that middle and upper-class people had put upon them. In truth they were only financially poor, and did not suffer from a lack of hope, or the ability to dream and fight for them. But the richer people did not care about those people that seemed worlds away though they lived within driving distance outside their gated houses, perhaps working at their local grocery store or fitness center or coffee shop.

As the fighter continued to win his fame grew, as did the expectation for him to fail and fulfill the hope held by those at home who were silently rooting for his suffering as they tensely gripped the arms of their chairs and cheered for the next punch to be the one to render him helpless.
The fighter stood in the cage before his fourth fight in the arena bouncing on his toes and focusing on his young, white opponent. The crowd was ravenous and demanded their desires to be satiated by the two men standing across from one another surrounded by chain-link fencing coated in slick black rubber. They rose and fell with the announcements of the fighters’ names, clutching their beers and yelling into the void in front of them, caring not for who heard them scream but to scream none-the-less so that they too could tell of the intense atmosphere before the fight despite them knowing it was fabricated and disingenuous.

A quick glance over the crowd revealed a large number of white people dressed in mid-priced designer clothing made in some Asian country, doused in inexpensive colognes and perfumes that mingled together in the air to create putrid-smelling offspring. They swooned and crowed together in unison, enjoying the orgiastic experience of being mildly intoxicated in a large group, anonymously bobbing their heads off-beat to whatever unimaginative hip-hop song was playing at the moment.

The people who sat and waited for the fight to begin were those who were too frightened themselves to attempt something so bold but cherished the chance to spend their money to see someone else do it for them. When the fight would begin, these people wouldn’t care if the participants lived or died, only that the performances were worthy of their money. Surely they would mourn if a fighter died from trauma in the ring, but this would not be their initial reaction. Were a fighter to be bludgeoned to the point where he neared death, the only sound to be heard in the arena would be an overwhelming scream of support, the crowd sensing the end and willing to make the small sacrifice of voicing their approval as the fighter beat upon his helpless opponent. They begged for blood, and the rich-men were more than ready to acquiesce.

Drowned out by the ceaseless high-pitched yell of the mob, the fight began. And then, as quickly as he had come up from the streets to stand before the people who had ignored him for so long, oblivious to the struggle of him and his kin, he fell from their good graces. That inevitable, crushing blow landed and the fighter stumbled to the ground, his legs betraying him, helpless to the inevitable series of punches that followed on his supine figure.

His opponent celebrated with the energy of a man who had defeated a champion, though all that lay in his wake was a fighter: a man who was helpless in the face of a game he had unknowingly chosen to play, the pawn of a pawn on a board he couldn’t see, the object of a world ambiguous, expanding, and supremely apathetic.