Tide Lines: A Gay War Reporter, Body Cult, Grindr

With his breakout novel Guapa, Saleem Haddad established himself as one of the most exciting queer voices from the Middle East. Now his second novel has appeared in German. In Flutlinien (Flood Lines), Haddad tells an Iraqi family saga—and a complicated gay love story. We’ve got a reading sample from the furious opening chapter.

“Du musst Ishtar besuchen.”

His mother had spoken clearly and unambiguously. Nizar asked her to repeat what she had said.

“You must coax the family history out of her.”

Nizar looked over the edge of the balcony. Three floors below, the concrete looked invitingly rigid.

“I want nothing to do with her.”

“Nizar, I have no one else I can turn to. I’d like to organize this exhibition while your grandmother is still with us, and I don’t know how much time…”

Nizar could hear the click of a lighter at the other end of the line. “Listen, I’m only asking you for this one thing. Just get her to tell the family story, and write it all down for me.”

“Why don’t you just pay her to do it herself?”

Zainab sighed. “Because I know my sister. She would take the money and then claim that it’s immoral to squeeze the family history into a simplified narrative, and she wouldn’t do it.”

“I haven’t spoken to her since that meal,” he said, resenting how easily his mother forced him to dredge up memories he preferred to bury.

“I suspect she’s in a fragile state right now.”

“She’s always in a fragile state.”

“This ISIS business really got to her…” Zainab paused to take a long drag from her cigarette. “Enough. Are you done traveling for work, Habibi?”

He turned his gaze toward the apartments across the canal. In one, an old man in a bathrobe sat at a desk, typing relentlessly. “I’ve hung up the job,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He considered how to tell his mother about the decision. How to describe that after leaving the apartment he shared with Alfie, he had taken a walk through his new Hackney neighborhood and noticed a CrossFit studio tucked under one of the train arches. How the young trainers with their athletic bodies and garish tattoos drew him in, the white chalk clouds in the air, the way they slapped each other on the shoulders. How he had once looked down on those who spent hours shaping a body that would inevitably fall apart, and yet now he understood how naive his long-held belief had been—that investing in the mind was the only lasting thing. How he signed up for a membership and started going every day. How the anti-intellectualism there felt almost like a grace, because the mind couldn’t wander while the body was in motion; there he could focus only on his endurance, his breathing, his weights. How he endured grueling workouts named after American, Iraqi, and Afghan soldiers who had fallen, and how after each class he collapsed, days of muscle soreness stretching on and on, a sense of purpose fulfilled through the pain. How his shoulders broadened, his thighs thickened, his chest grew heavy with muscle. How his skin began to show the contours of muscles he hadn’t known existed. How disciplining his body gave him a sense of control in a collapsing world; how, when the trainers cried out, “Feel the burn,” he didn’t think of the burned flesh in the explosion, but of the lactic acid burning in his muscles. How he began following men on social media who demonstrated workouts and extolled the virtues of bone broth, and how his algorithm mixed images of half-naked men with those of abused Palestinian corpses and war-traumatized boys from Syria, their body parts scattered like meat: a thigh here, a torso there. How he wasn’t sure anymore whether the photos aroused him or angered him. How his new body drew a different kind of attention, and how a spring scroll through endless torsos on Grindr flashed a message before his eyes: “90 bucks if I can blow you.” The man—corpulent, in his mid‑fifties—had come to him, handed over the money, and all he had to do was unzip his fly.

The impulse had seemed so damn simple that a few days later he tried it again, and again; while corpses piled up and the revulsion multiplied, he turned away from those who sang the praises of journalism and claimed the media as stalwart guardians of truth. Whose truth? With the right twist, a government could make a massacre disappear from the headlines. How could he explain to his mother that it felt more moral to offer his body for money than to sell his soul to some bullshit version of truth? He no longer believed that journalists sought the truth. They were carrier pigeons of the apocalypse, scavengers who pounced on a story and, in their frantic pursuit of clicks, dragged the world’s misery into the light only to stuff their pockets and disappear again, until everyone forgot what had so enraged them and only remembered that they carried a burning ball of anger inside them, pulsing and ready to explode. In his own feed, news drifted down his timeline like a river: death, fires, wars, floods, famines, sex. Starving children in Yarmouk, starving women in Beverly Hills. Swipe left, swipe right, chatrooms, saunas, a sea of changing faces as a masturbation guide, one man to fuck, another to fist.

What else could he do in this out-of-control world but seize control of his own body? What a feat! The glaciers melted, yet he could do fifty double-unders without stopping. Palestine was erased, yet he doubled the weights on his snatches in merely a month. The Islamic State crushed any sense of Syria and Iraq, but his quadriceps remained unbreakable. The Assad regime starved hundreds of thousands, but if he ate only boiled chicken for three days, under the right lighting he could glimpse the outlines of his abs.

How could he tell his mother that sex was salvation? That one could possess his hole, but never his mind. That he had sex because the world grew warmer, hotter, really, really hot, baby. That he couldn’t do anything about oil drilling, but yeah, brother, drill it deep. That afterwards he lay in a strange bed, in a euphoric calm that stretched for a few minutes before the world pressed in again and he needed to find someone new, he had to keep moving, because to bind meant to be tethered, to love someone meant to be enslaved. Better to leave bodies on the assembly line, to keep moving until someday in summer, suddenly and without warning, a twink would call out, “Hey, Daddy!” at which point he would turn around and realize that the twink meant him, that time marches on so relentlessly and mercilessly, and he would grind his teeth not to scream.

“I’ve been a war correspondent all year,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

He looked toward the horizon. “I’ve got to go. I have things to do.”

“Wait,” said Zainab. “The main reason I’m calling— and this is the third time now—is to wish you a happy birthday.”

“Exactly. Thanks. You too.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. On this day you brought me into the world, so I suppose it’s somehow your day, too.”

“Is that so?”

Silence seeped through the rifts in the conversation.

“Thirty-two?”

“Thirty-three.”

“If you ever get the chance to talk to Ishtar…”

“I won’t interfere in your family squabbles. Don’t call me about this again.”

Nizar hung up and stepped away from the balcony railing. Dark gray clouds hung heavy in the sky, trapping the muggy heat in the air, just like that day five years earlier when he’d met Alfie. Back then, in the summer of 2009, he’d stood at a precipice too. In Kings Cross, on the Victoria Line platform toward the north. He’d stared at the filthy tracks, and the promise of death flashed in his thoughts.

He looked up at the orange digits. One more minute until the train came. Or maybe longer? A friend once told him the shown time wasn’t exact—that a minute could feel like ninety seconds, perhaps more. A trick to calm anxious commuters and give them the illusion that the next train would arrive soon.

A deep rumble shook through his soles. He imagined the train’s approach—the rush of stale air it would bring, the twin headlights cutting through the darkness, growing bigger and closer. He pictured his body, limbs twisted, bones broken, blood mixing with the oil and soot of the rails. Would it be quick? A flash of pain, then nothing? Or would he wake trapped in a wrecked body as the world kept turning? He closed his eyes and suddenly found himself back in Baghdad, among the scattered bodies, the bent limbs, in the furnace of heat. He breathed in, his lungs filling with damp, metallic air. The smell of charred flesh and rubber suffocated him. He felt the blood trickle down his cheek, the dreadful silence preceding screams…

A hand at his neck. Direct contact, a violation of the unspoken rules of city life. In other circumstances he would have shoved the stranger away, but a familiarity in the touch kept him from it. The hand drew him back from memory into the present.

He opened his eyes as the train thundered past, a blurred band of white and blue. A gust of wind ruffled his clothes. The unease receded like a tide.

“Everything all right?”

Nizar nodded and followed the crowd into the carriage. The stranger sat down beside him. Nizar saw the hand that had touched his neck just a moment before. The fingers were pale and creased; the hands of an old man. Nizar lifted his gaze to the dark window across from him. In the window’s reflection, the owner of the hand looked younger than expected—late twenties, maybe a few years older than Nizar. The man wore a dark beard and held a cloth bag on his lap. Both arms were tattooed from shoulder to wrist. The man met Nizar’s look in the glass.

At the next station the man stood, pressed his way through the crowd, and got off without a backward glance. Nizar followed him through a cluster of teenagers lugging large Zara bags. When he caught up to the stranger on the platform, he tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned around. Brown eyes, warm and unassuming. Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes, suggesting a happy past.

“Thanks a lot,” said Nizar. The stranger shrugged off the gratitude with a half-smile, his gaze dropping to the floor.

“I’m Nizar.”

“Alfie.”

The publication of the text is with the kind permission of Albino Verlag.