There used to be a riot here, said the riot man.

Kalu was used to being shot at. A few botched heists on lagos island that have mansions with trigger happy private securities, being a hired thug for politicians on election year and a confraternity shoot-outs made his body one with the bullets flying. He had developed a knack for the rush, the thrill of evading the projectiles of death. Crime wasn't a means to an end for him, it was a fuel towards salvation from conformity and restraint. There was a time when everyone in the game got that on a mechanistic level, before the advent of the internet frauds and the traffickers. There used to be a camaraderie amongst the contemporary criminals and tools of power, a cause with an efficacious catharsis. Those days were long gone, a new age ushered in by ambivalence and greed. No one was being shot at anymore. He was the last of a breed that never reached glory. No one could tell as he sat at the bank staring blankly at the female staff working in the customer care section.

 "Current or savings?"

"Sorry?

" I said current or savings?". 

" Savings" he said, not minding the petulant tone of the staff. He had just gotten paid for a job. The regular tail and black mail. There were some complications he had to resolve at the bank but he was asked to check back in a few working days. These days he did the dirty work, the petty blackmails and low-level espionage for politicians who were willing to pay. The days of being shot at were behind him, locked in the crannies of yesteryears. The times were changing, politics in Nigeria was methodically absurd. He didn't want to be part of the charade on a macrocosmic level so he settled for the ones that paid the rent. 

Kalu's life was partly ascetic. Before the days of crime, he was a student of philosophy at the University of Ibadan. He hated the word "voracious" but he was a reader, compared to his peers at the time he was cognitively ahead.From Lacan to Satre, Cormac McCarthy to Soyinka, he got himself acquainted with knowledge. He believed in epistemic fulfillment and the expansion of our collective consciousness. He was no savant but he spoke like one, he stood like one, meandered through a bustling crowd with the mien of an aged librarian. But that was before he felt the rush of a brawl with a popular bully at his hostel back then - like all university brawls it all started with a bucket, then came the carrying of bodies and the infliction of pain, the onomatopoeic and pidgin chants from half naked eyewitnesses catalysed the fury and through the hands of a bully, the novel feeling of anatomical failure in the face of survival, Kalu tasted the hardened tissue that was the enterprise of violence and then he was born again. 

The scholar died. The monk remained. The crime settled. That is kalu in a three-fold narrative. He joined a confraternity willingly, going through the hazing process with a sadomasochistic drive. An unabating need to pursue that which invigorates the soul on a cellular level. The confraternity days were good to him. He basked in the ever adrenaline of dicing and shooting at the opposition. He found gratification in abducting academic and non-academic staff that condemned their cause, whatever it was. He morphed into being a thug for electioneering for politicians who posed as messiahs and he made a fortune despite barely graduating. 

Then came the putrid air of change. 

Now,experience was his social currency in the world of crime. Nigeria had no use for causes anymore, no use for thugs beyond the symbolic presentation of power.No need for pure rage as an agent of change. Crime was brash and depoliticized, there was only impunity now and the spectacle of theatre. Deviance was normalcy and confraternities were now conglomerates no longer forged by hazing, shamanic intellect and blood but by money, fashion and political misalignments. All the rage he accrued and the humanity foregone did not prepare him for this. Forty years old, chasing the tails of homosexual ministers who just flew in from Abuja and saying the words "I have a price" like he was a half-written character in an American pulp novel. 

After he left the bank, he took a private cab home. His driver was young, loquacious and hyper-inquisitive, aching to talk about the state of things. Everyone seemed to want to do that these days, like they had any answers, he thought. 

" Chairman, see as you fresh, even in this economy?" 

Kalu was quiet. He rarely dignified praises. There were merely conversational bribes to him. 

"Naso e be? Oya now" 

"Sorry, I'm just having a tough day" 

"Yeah, I understand, Lagos, yeah? " 

the pidgin disappeared. Intentionally, as if proper English accentuated sincerity. 

"Yeah, Lagos" 

"New in town?" 

"Not really, I've been around… sha"

Triptych-structured images of riots and blazing tyres raced through his mind. He hadn't just been around lagos, there was a time he ran the slums. The election years. The bloodlust weekends. He felt a compulsion. He wanted to tell the driver where he organised riots as they cruised the roads. 

"Ah JJC. I grew up here. I'm a student though. Unilag, but I'm doing this to make some cash since we are on strike right now. Can't depend on my parents all the time" 

"I see, assiduous" 

" I don't know what that means o but thank you. So what do you do?" 

" I… I do consultancy" 

"Medical?" 

"Political" 

"Wait like that show… ugh… SCANDAL" 

"Yes, something like that but without the theatrics and snappy dialogue" 

"You and your big words. Work is work anyway. As long it's honest work" 

"Yeah, honest work"

Kalu alighted. He hadn't had a casual conversation in aeons. He forgot how uncomplicated he used to be. How assailable he used to present as. Another penchant of another time, a ghostly apparition wrestling with the reality of now. He was standing at one of the open fields where he organised a riot for the state government during one of the many election years. Those years had become indistinguishable from one another. The field had been co-opted for usage in a grassroots sports program and was filled with young boys playing football. He watched them as they sprinted, oblivious to the violence that baptised the sands their feet stomped on, perhaps they heard about the riot through word of mouth, he thought. The azure sky above him, illumined like a cosmic lantern, holding the promise of change. Change, he thought. The bringer of insignificance, the humbler of rage. He was getting around to the acceptance of the paradigm. He was settling into the house of forgotten matter. 

One of the boys kicked the ball in Kalu's direction so he jogged towards him to keep the ball back in play. Kalu helped retrieve the ball for the boy then he got the inspiration to ask a question. A question propelled by a quasi-curiosity. 

"Thank you sir" the boy said as he received the ball. 

"Did you know there was a riot here years ago?" 

"Oh really? No, I don't. Well, I guess it's a football field now" he said hastily. 

The boy dashed into the field, striking the ball up high into the sky it felt like would cross the karman line into the darkness of space. Kalu watched the ball's trajectory, wishing he was something spherical hurtling towards the cleansing heavens.