To vacate the self is to ventriloquise what one is not. The sex worker’s voice is taken over by set scripts: the “porn talk script” she tries to memorise becomes “background blanketing of white noise”; in fact, another obliterating snow storm (43; 44). This self-evacuation enables a Zen-like calm:
a half-smile on my face a Zen-like imperturbability (44)
Further shaming comes from other parasexual workers like the stripper who looks down on massage parlours as “grope-a-thons” (45). “[G]o to a tanning salon” is her advice if Rose is to rise above abjection (45). In fact, in her abject passivity, Rose’s persona becomes the sadist’s prey. Note the nominal verb, manifesting the predator here:
“Coming back with my boys to kill you, whore!” […] his ragged shadow in the corner of my vision sharking up off the table (48-49, emphasis added)
Taking refuge from the shark of murderous intent, Hunter’s persona finds herself plunged even deeper into abjection amongst the cumulus of spent cum, itself like a swarm of circling rays:
handkerchief-sized white rays with kite-like pectoral fins heavy with water and the spit-like parts of them they come here so violent to leave behind (51)
Abjection spreads like a virus, with an offal-like invasion saturating the whole scene:
on the futon with bile like, chartreuse and oxblood brown wave breaks, the foaming disintegration, throat-sharp and spilled-chemical catastrophe (65)
And one might ask what perspective, if any, is available to traumatic memory? Hunter deploys a shattered, quasi-cubistic, multi-perspectival take, in which the reader supplies the negated scene of violence:
What
Could have been seen from there was not
much, right
(velvet don’t flutter)
maybe that’s the point
from the front of the building these
were the things that didn’t happen: the man wasn’t
a tall hard shadow who shut the door behind him
and pushed me to the floor.
[…]
Sorta disbelief, sorta struggle like inside
my skin like my skin
was a plastic bag to panic-wriggle out of, or a straitjacket; where
did my arms disappear to, then?
(71-72)
This shibboleth, sourced in Law and Order: SVU sums it up: “You can’t rape a hooker” (77).
Acquiescence to the violence meted out to the sex-worker is a “silence deep as fangs” (77). Aligned with her entrapment, and the encroachment of deadly menace, the reader is plunged into a cascade of auditory images, becoming kinetic, olfactory, and tactile:
The buzz on the door, the pop of vacuum unsealing; hats, gloves, coats, peeling the white water rushing of steaming milk, the ruff-scruff on caramel bristles of door mat, the background trip hop with leaf-rustling rummage static of newspapers (82)
The high specificity and acuity of this soundscape stems from its sourcing in Hunter’s journals and one can only be grateful for Hunter’s almost surgical suturing of her archive:
‘radioactive’, I called my journals later I bundled them into a plastic bag sealed it with cummerbunds of masking tape like a drug brick ; stashed it in case some random snooper would be so interested! In discovering what a terrible person I was? Not just what I did for cash but what I had to tell myself, to crawl back into a liveable headspace, crawlspace scrawl place (82-83; emphasis added)
Hunter assumes the voice of prowling masculinity in the sequence ‘Why We Are Girls’, demonstrating shockingly with what metamorphic, reductive plasticity instrumental desire operates on the “girl”:
A girl is a wisp, a potato chip barely there, a girl drifts by the side of the road until you show up (111)
Echoing the tactile acuity of the earlier “drug brick” image of taped-up journals, Hunter closes with a bleak evocation of her ritual counting of the “bills”, this endlessly “slippery” testimony to her “value in the world”, or to her commodification:
[…] to feel the matte and slippery paper under my fingers brown, red, and green bend them lengthwise slightly so they sat flat in their little stack I had value in the world here was the paper proof and how the proof came in, and went back out (so slippery), and later I couldn’t understand how I’d kept none of it but in the meantime floorboards and bills with music playing and vodka going down like easy; yes this was what a friend was, what a home was I thought (137)
The evanescent mirage of home and friendship is thus devastatingly proffered via the oblivion of vodka and bill-counting, a ritual bound to bleak repetition, just like the stuttering of fragmented, traumatic memory that recurs throughout this disturbing and most courageous work.
