Ricardo Cortez Cruz

short fiction

Watch What God Do

2 a.m. is your hours. Your ours.

Staggering. You, Kenneka Jenkins, a 19-year-old black woman, loose, alone. Estranged as if your party friends let go of the rope. Just let it go. Now you find yourself in the hallway of the Crowne Plaza Hotel behaving like your/her mind has jumped out of her/e body, reeling toward some shit you didn’t even know, going backwards too. Back and forths. Up and down. In and down. In & out. Psychoanalyzing yourself. You are that girl in the mirror. Reflecting on how you got here. Roughly framed like a jezebel. Or, a woman with seven devils cast out of her, for Christ’s sake. You are Mary Magdalene, hair of wool sheepishly following you in two tales [sic]. You are Zipporah in exodus. Staggering. Disoriented, struggling to recognize your behavior. You are them. We can clearly see: you are not yourself. The mirror stage becomes nothing but a false representation of who you really are. The hotel space tries to frame that girl too, but there’s too much sway. The motion-activated cameras stay on her, the bobblehead, on you, until you wind up in the freezer. Looking all harlot and haggard, at least in some eyes.  

Surveillance ratchets everything up. But… we are here to tell your story. To right what went wrong. To stop the lies, the conspiracy chatter that does you no justice. 

We can imagine Deborah Cox singing “September,” sentimental. So beautiful. You’re ratchet. You’re gone. Now we see you. Now we don’t. We dub you, princess from the hood. Black Eve.

Ninth-floor party with all rooms taken doesn’t require a key [your friend Irene Rob—hate to name names—had never seen that before]. #926 with two beds reserved by some brother and a white person with a fraudulent credit card. A bunch of dudes in there with strong intoxicants, friends of friends who peeped the flyer, plus-ones pretending to be guests of the zeroes. All of ‘em let you split. They even pushed you out. Just two hours later after being seen in fine shape with three friends, video in its native format shows you almost falling all over the place. Some don’t even believe it’s you. Groupthink.  

We got you raped and murdered. Drugged. You drinking from the fountain of youth Cup in your hand full of pink and lavender backwash. Pimped by your girlfriends for 200 dólares. Or, sold by the owner of the Plaza. Or, maybe a host of black men. Your organs harvested for 100. With the smoke detector disabled, your friend Irene [what a character… we put her address on FaceBook] could smoke that much like it was nothing. Unfortunately, she was already X-ed out. She’s not a factor. Everybody forgets you had just gotten a job. You came to Crowne Plaza with your own green and a doppelgänger who’d eagerly kick you down.

20 hours later we find you. Ready to fade out. Dragging your feet but still ramped up. Far away from the Quiet Zone rooms and nowhere near the Visibility Bar but at least tipsy nonetheless if not drunk or worse. Like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, we find you, the gumshoe, exploring the lower terrain of the five-star hotel. In an area that should have been blocked off, you are where everything’s under construction.

The eye in the sky snitches on you. You’re not a girl anymore. And this ain’t no video game. Blue jeans shredded at the front, blue jacket, white sneakers not sure where to go.

Ain’t this a trip?

This cain’t be you. The picture we have of you walking through the hotel’s hallways. Bumping into walls. She runs into the rail of the stairway. You touch this. You touch that. You disappear around the corner, then reappear. Holding your hands outward as if in need of saving grace. Right palm and fingers pointing down as if to say “please.”

You bopping, lean back against the wall. The ghost of Yummy enticing you. The sweetness of life you so want mashed up by your attempt to stay standing, to stumble across the right balance. Footage skips more than we want.  

Long black hair unravels itself too, weaves its way down your back, inappropriately slapping you/r behind. How could no one not notice?

Two narrow frames, meeting each other on the wall, appear to form the shadow image of an upside cross. A bad omen. So scary even the cameras jump.  

Before you know it, you’re in the kitchen with nothing cooking, headed toward the walk-in freezer where the temperature’s less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit and the padlocks aren’t used. Big glow-in-the-dark release button on each door, which should’ve been secured. Camera’s above but no one knows if it’s working. All the ovens are gone. Trash, dirt, and chunks of ice litter the ground. Brownish-red tiles ain’t Hollywood squares. The stainless steel in the empty area dominates. A white Jordan high-top shoe has slipped off. The sole reaches out to us. Foot’s also missing a sock, toenails noticeably painted a stark white. Fingernail is stuck with a sliver of black ice or a piece of a garbage bag. Lord, how did she get in there by herself?

Tape reveals a host of gray areas.   

Intoxicated by what we are witnessing, we crown you Queen Of The Pink and Lavender, of both power and passion. 

3:30 in the morning, nobody knows where you are. Your friends said they’d look for a phone and left you in the lobby. When they come back, you’re gone. Ghosted them. 

4:34 in the morning, you’re missing, and they can’t find you. No loyalty. It seems obvious one of the friends would rather be with a man than this mess. She’s ready to go, tired, gettin’ a little rowdy. They got your momma’s car keys and cell. Your momma pays the bills every month and can’t understand why you’d leave your phone and then just disappear. Something ain’t right. They got two different stories. 1. They left you in the lobby. 2. They left you upstairs by the room door. Pick one. Friends look for you, but hotel threatens to kick them out and call the police. So they gotta go. 

Friends are hard to find. Mya-Mya, Monifah (who look like the star in love and basketball – she as pretty as hell), and Bree-Bree don’t know nothing. 

The cops your momma comes in contact with are a joke. She survives on faint hope. Unsympathetic sergeants suggest she go home and rest and wait a few hours before filing a missing person’s report. More work for them. 

21 hours later, a man says he found you and grabs the Rosemont police. You are both victim and eyewitness. Out of it, your mind runs past possible various entry and exit points. No signs yet of sexual assault. Shaniqua, one of two people who originally checked into the hotel for the party, gets out. She’s got a rapsheet and active arrest warrants, an online pic of herself wearing a blue blouse that boldly says “TRUE.”  She sure seems like a prime suspect to us. Somehow she escapes interrogation. Several attendees with only street names get away too. Police just too willing to let the ladies skirt. 

36 hours later, your body’s finally discovered, officially recognized as you. The kitchen on your neck reeks of dying fear, an untamable growth. Apparently you had no idea what to do once you got into the kitchen: lights off, lights out. Good Samaritan says they found you. Police, re/lax, claim they located you. Academic now, papers citing sources from hotel say an employee saw you first. Legs supposedly straight. Jacket pulled up exposing your breasts. Police claim they see no sign of foul play. Whatever the case, apparently your body had been calling them. God bless you. As if handmade, you feel like Tamar and Hagar The Hated.

Mother Tereasa, misled by the hotel and police from the beginning, never sees you until the wake. Now your mama can’t stop talkin’ ‘bout your murder. Your mama wear black all over herself, including on her face. Your mama can’t grow anymore hair. Turban’s about to have a fallout with any idiot who stares. Your mama’s short fro with the amber alert look like a wave of strands disappeared along with the camera over the freezer. Your mama can’t rap [sic] her head around what happened. You’re already layin’ on a stretcher, in a white body bag. Police don’t even take fingerprints. They call it a normal look. Claim nothing’s suspicious about it.

“God,” gawking onlookers say, using God’s name in vain.    

If you drank one cup, one cup was too much for you. One cup was a drop of blood that forever defined you, had your mother knocking on death’s door, knowing something was wrong. 

People use your mama’s name for a GoFundMe account. Some just want to take care of themselves. Creepers get all up in her story. Nothing but drama drama drama. The hotel just wants to end it. It offers to pay your funeral, grand since 1,000-plus mourners, including strangers, show up to Chicago’s House of Hope for a 2 ½-hour service. But, your mama, mother Tereasa, refuses the money since the hotel never gives its condolences. Many of the loved ones wear purple and white. Others wear black, acting like they meaning it.

Whispers abound, Jesus. “Heaven help us,” pleas the Black community, drudging up its own conspiracy, theory. “Please, spare me the agony,” folks begin to pray. 

On “True Crime Tuesday,” Dr. Oz swears there’s no magical cover-up. So sad. Just Kenneka dying of hypothermia and the possibility of a paradoxical undressing. Brain swollen. Kenneka sweating it out and thus revealing too much of herself, shirt up, her pants sitting low and one shoe off trying to walk away. And, Grace says, “This isn’t right.” 

“There could be something sinister at play,” Oz adds, on the couch, attempting to use his wizardry to explain what might have happened behind the curtain.

So sad. Our heart seizes every time we examine a possible plot, this story of ours. Don’t nobody mess with Ms. Jenkins, so what happened? Certainly, Time was not your friend. The prescription medicine used to treat epilepsy, migraines, and/or weight loss understands time is ticking, time is ticked off. The medicine is cold-blooded. It orders you to “Get Out” before it decides to shut the body down.

The hotel statement goes on to say that “there’s no blockbuster information or proof from Nancy Grace or Dr. Oz… just more speculation and sensational theories.” A lot of people capitalizing on your death. The protests must quit. In her own video, mama has to speak from the crib after breast surgery to end y’all’s agendas. Tube runs from her heart where she feels drained. “I forgive y’all,” she says to the sellouts, begging y’all to stop taking advantage. “I forgive y’all.”

In the Tribune’s brief article entitled “Activist Says Keneeka [sic] Jenkins Walked Into Fridge Unassisted,” Chicago’s Sherlock Holmes holds a press conference stating he investigated, wanting to know if anybody forced her down there, pulled you down there.

A spokesperson for the hotel tells outlets there was never any footage of you entering that box where you eventually died. You do not exist.

Was anybody on the other side when she got there?

Cameras should’ve gotten not only the back of her but the front of her as well. 

From this point of departure, lusts takes over. Protesters profit from the fame and fortune. Mr. Brown, another activist, gets in on the act too. Others chalk it up to too much alcohol for an underage minor and dangerous drugs. They argue, for girls like you, Kenneka, just saying “no” is sometimes not an option.

Whatever the case, tape shows a tragic accident.

Your own mother rightly argues there’s 0.1 percent chance that you could ever do this to yourself. Sisters mourn your death.

Pray for me, her. I will pray for you.

Herstory is the mystery of another black teen who loved to have fun, the video of her enhanced for further examination.

A turn-up queen. She completely touch us. Name still holds weight.    

Haired curled up as if its threads are into a good book. Here a mess. Strands of DNA evidence smeared on the walls and everywhere. 

Brown doors, furniture. Lit. On Hennessy. Among everyday people. You downed a cup, then turned to the bottle. Forget about pop. No pills.

And that’s the Horrible No-Good Truth About Kenneka Jenkins’ death.

Fake pages, everybody claiming to have the real story but no one asks Irene for her side so she has to make her page private to avoid malicious attacks. Got over a million “friend” requests, but cain’t nobody follow her. Irene told yaw.

Irene eventually tells all. 

Your mama closes the YouCaring website/account. Tempted to sue the city for everything it’s got, she’s still looking for answers. 

The negligence that kills black girls and women. Staggering. Someone must be seeing it, the coalescing of black death, black skins. Now you find yourself in odyssey’s coffin. Now you find yourself.    

It’s funny how we don’t know you, Neka, and yet we do, thanks to them graphic and disturbing images that inexplicably show lavish portions of your body exposed. 

We still remember the day – your tender touch. That feeling of being in the dark. Your dead weight or body double eventually passing through River Road. Neka was maybe no angel, but we can’t help but to feel for her, and think about mother Tereasa and how surveillance video first captures her daughter by the elevator.

Then there’s the doppelgänger too, emerging from River Road like Beloved. We don’t know how to walk it back.

With an open casket only raising more questions and poor resolution, family files lawsuit seeking 50 million in damages and leaves the rest in the hands of the Almighty Creator. 

Ricardo Cortez Cruz is the author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding, novels short and funky. He has stitched together a third black body of (s)language—Premature Autopsies: Tales of Darkest America. His autobiographic fiction, including that on Trayvon Martin or soul brother Gil Scott-Heron, as well as his Say Her Name “pieces of mind,” is a broken record. Telling it like it is, his creative work appears in numerous places, including the journals Western Humanities Review, Mandorla: Nueva escritura de las Américas, Packingtown Review’s 2009 inaugural issue, Fiction International’s abject/outcast issue, African-American Review, Urban Reinventors, Crab Orchard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, Postmodern Culture, and Fjords Black American Edition (guest edited by Geffrey Davis), and the anthologies Step Into A World (edited by Kevin Powell), Litscapes: Collected Writings 2015 (edited by Caitlin M. Alvarez and Kass Fleisher), Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson), and The African World In Dialogue: An Appeal To Action! (edited by Teresa N. Washington). Cruz, a professor of English at Illinois State University who specializes in creative writing and things that are black/lit, rights injustices as if his whole life depended upon it.