
Harbor Daughter is am completed 85,000-word LGBTQ+ upmarket literary novel with fabulist elements told in a third-person single POV.
Opening Chapter:
Nasiriyah, Iraq
Late March 2003
Lt. Tamsin Sand slept and woke to morning prayers and then it was light. She lay on a gurney in a room with a high window. The room was made of concrete and covered with yellow plaster. Nearest her on the wall was a mural of Uncle Sam kneeling before an Islamic flag with a knife in his back.
A door turned on its metal hinges, and a high-ranking Iraqi officer stood against the threshold of a smaller interrogation room. Behind him, electrodes hung by wires next to a metal chair. In the corner, a video camera sat on a tripod.
“You are Lt. Sands,” he said.
It was Chemical Ali, first cousin to Saddam and second most wanted man by the U.S. forces. Intel was that he was stationed with the Iraqi 11th Division in Nasiriya.
“Have you read the Koran, Lt. Sands?” Ali asked.
Two orderlies had come into the room to wheel Tamsin’s gurney out the door.
“Please,” she said. “Where are they taking me?”
The hallway was full of Iraqi casualties from the American invasion. A Fedayeen soldier in a black robe hobbled over from the corner, the side of his face sliced by shrapnel. He spit into Tamsin’s eyes.
Tamsin tried to grab hold of the doorframe as the orderlies wheeled her from the hallway into an operating room. A doctor and several nurses stood around the operating table. The doctor said in broken English, “We need to amputate leg.”
“No!” She thrashed as they lifted her onto the table. Her nose began to bleed.
They tried to clamp a mask onto her face. She shook her head, and it slipped off. Every motion brought a stab of hot white pain to the back of her skull where she’d been shot. She was spitting blood from her nose and yelling at them to stop.
The doctor said something. The nurse pulled the mask away. The orderlies from before lifted her like they might a corpse and dropped her onto the gurney. She screamed for the pain. They wheeled her back into the basement room and left her there.
Seaman Savannah Langue—Savvy—shuffled over to whisper, “They’re keeping us alive for propaganda. To be taken to Baghdad.”
It was only a hallucination. Savvy was dead, as was Herrera, the first casualty, and all the others—because of Tamsin.
Savvy’s ghostly wails came and went, as did the warbling call to prayer from the mosque’s minaret. Dawn through the window appeared as a long square light on the opposite ceiling. Tamsin lay on a sand-filled mattress for her bedsores, not remembering how she got off the gurney. This was day three or four. Images of divine torture passed before the screen of her mind with the dull throbbing of her knee and the return of the pain. They had stopped giving her morphine. As the sun rose, the square of light slid over the mural of Uncle Sam on his knees with the knife in his back until it came to rest on a woman in an abaya prostrate on her mat.
“Savvy,” Tamsin tried to say.
Then a door opened. Inside the dream, it turned on its metal hinges.
Chemical Ali was standing at the threshold. He was smoking a Sumer, an Iraqi cigarette. “Is not war a strange necessity, Lt. Sands? That it should push you to the other side of the world, to fight against people you have no knowledge about, who can steal your trucks right out from under your neck. Is that the idiom? Under your neck?”
“It was you who killed Herrera?”
“Who is Herrera? I do not know this name. I know no names except for Savannah Langue. Who they call Savvy. Very American, it seems to me, that name. And you, Lt. Sands. The television tells me you are a poet whose father suffered a most tragic death.”
The pull on the man’s Sumer. “I had to come see this poet-warrior for myself.”
Tamsin slept and woke to the mosque’s loudspeaker. She smelled rot. Her leg. Chips of bone clicked at the back of her head. The lights flickered and went out, went on. Her life was braided together by the five-times daily call to prayer.
Savvy yelled to let her go. Tamsin heard it for days.
“Did you know a civil war is going on in the Congo right now?” Ali was standing there whenever Tamsin opened her eyes. “I don’t suspect you would know this, no. Americans who have the news available at the click of a mouse do not know a modern-day heart of darkness is happening in the Congo. The death tolls are in the millions.”
Tamsin wanted to ask about her unit. Where are the others? But she couldn’t form the words. She was in shock, shivering. She was covered with a blanket, two blankets. Bright flashes from an electric storm behind her eyes made her head pound.
“It is because it is not in the nature of Western powers to save people for the sake of saving,” Ali said. “Do you understand?”
“What have you done with Savvy?” Tamsin’s teeth were chattering.
Ali ignored the question. “And because, of course, there are no interest groups, no big corporations to lobby in your Washington for the natural resources there. But if oil was in the Congo? Well, then.” Ali laughed. “You would not be here, would you?”
“If anything happens to Savvy.” Tamsin tried to rise, wincing from the pain. She fell back against the mattress. “You will pay for it.”
Ali laughed. “That is very brave. A little ignorant seeing how you are stuck to a mattress but also brave in a childish way. But you see, here is the situation. I have been paying for it my whole life. We all have. Your government has made sure of that.”
Tamsin blacked out and came to again with Ali kneeling by the mattress. “The television has told me you studied Keats! The Fall of Hyperion of all things. I studied literature, too. Did you know that? At the University of Chicago.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“Please now, let us not be hostile. We are two rational people. Keats took for his influence Virgil’s descent into Hades, I do believe, right? Book VI of the Aeneid. I have done my research.” Ali pronounced it Vir-geel. Aene-eed. “Do you remember why Aeneas had to go down to the River Lethe?”
“To get guidance from his father’s ghost.”
“Yes. Very good, Lt. Sands. So we are on a particular theme here then, isn’t that so? You must also remember what she says, the Sibyl, Virgil’s guide to the land of the dead? The way down is easy. It’s coming back out though. That is the tricky part.”
“I’m not sure why it matters.”
“It probably does not. You are correct. I suppose matters over your own life might interest you more? I’ve been standing here deciding if you should die.”
“And?”
Ali shrugged. “This is my point. And? Why am I romancing you, you might now be wondering. Perhaps it is to have somebody to talk to. I was sent to Chicago to learn how to use American ideas against them. To study engineering and chemistry. But I fell in love with literature. It was my private and secret shame. The Koran says there is a barrier between two waters, which meet but do not transgress. Do you get the meaning? The fresh and the bitter had mixed. I was corrupted by the Great and Feared Kingdom ofRonald McDonald, Fisher-Price, and Chevron—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
“It wasn’t us who gassed the Kurds,” Tamsin said.
“Mmm, true. You have got the nail on the head there, Lt. Sands.”
“It’s Sand. My last name is Sand.”
“Which is funny, yes? Seeing as how you have come to this sandy desert to die.” He sucked on his cigarette, his face punched in light. “Here is an interesting fact, though. Did you not know that it was Winston Churchill who used nerve gas on the Kurds in the first place? In the 1920s, this happened, when he was colonial secretary for war and air.”
“Why tell me this?”
“That is your response? Do you not feel anything about my history lesson? I say it only because it is something that has long troubled me. It is not a two-way road. Is that the right phrase? A two-way road. You know my meaning? When the West profits by war,” Chemical Ali said, “it is not evil—why is such a thing so? Is it because Churchill was more civilized? Because he was a white man who smoked cigars and told a funny joke?” Ali laughed then. “We are not funny, us tribesmen, I guess.”
“I don’t really care.”
“No. You really do not. But tell me what is the difference between gas on the Kurds and 2,000 bombs dropped by U.S. Aircraft on our schools and homes? Or perhaps you may tell me who you think supplied us with mustard and nerve gas in the first place? For that matter, look at the serial numbers on our guns. Whose are these? Black market guns and grenades bought from the U.S. government to kill U.S. soldiers. Tell me please how the logic of the West makes sense.”
Ali said something in Arabic and two Iraqi officers came in for Tamsin and pulled her into the interrogation room. She thrashed and cried for the pain as they strapped down her arms and legs.
“Please,” she said.
“Do you know the purpose of the River Lethe?”
“Please,” she said again. “You don’t have to do this.”
“The souls of the dead drank from the river to forget their earthly lives.” Ali powered up the electricity. “Only then was it possible for them to be born again.”