I held my father’s hand while my mother gave birth to me. On a bed covered in sand and sunflower seeds. A relatively unremarkable birth, except for where it happened. The room where it happened, I should say. I guess most people are born in rooms. Hospital rooms, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms. But this was a hotel room. A discounted hotel room in Croydon, suite # 212. The suites were not much bigger than the regular hotel rooms, but they all contained a pull-out sofa. 212 is the same number as the room where, many years ago in the same city, a woman gave birth to a prince. I was not a prince, but my father hoped I would at least be a boy. When he saw that I was not a boy, he burst into tears. Since that day, we have taken turns disappointing one another over and over. But wait, I’m not done telling it yet.

Suite 212, July 1945, Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair. At that other birth, the one with the prince, his father had wanted his son to be born on Yugoslavian soil, so that he might have a Yugoslavian passport. Since his mother was going to give birth in England, this was impossible. It defied the laws of time and place. The father asked Winston Churchill to declare the hotel room a part of Yugoslavia, like an embassy is thought to be foreign soil. Churchill obliged, the boy was born and given a Yugoslavian passport instead of a British one. The father, who was a king, was basically a boy himself. Seventeen years old. I’m not sure if he truly understood the magnitude of what he was doing, essentially requesting the head of state perform a magic trick. Surely after the birth occurred, the room would be reabsorbed, revert back to being part of England. Or would it?

My father was much older than the boy king. He could not get the prime minister to cede his precious territory and declare the room to be part of his former country, but he had the same desire as the king. He wanted me to be born on the soil of his people, in his homeland. That was important to him.

What is a homeland. Where does a homeland live. In the language, in the fields, in the children, in the stories, in the ground? The king, or probably one of his servants, placed a small box of soil under the bed in the suite, so that his son could be born on Yugoslavian earth, although the queen did not give birth to the prince on top of the actual box. My father did one better than the king himself; he had red volcanic sand, the type that filled the beaches of his motherland, imported. Men with mustaches came in one by one carrying boxes of the volcanic debris and dumped them out onto the floor. The sand rose steadily in great red mounds, the TV remote hopelessly buried beneath the soil. My mother did not understand what was going on. My father assured her everything was perfectly alright. She nodded, her eyes rolling back in her head. She asked for more painkillers. She was given more painkillers. She asked for sunflower seeds, spat them out. She asked for cigarettes. She was given cigarettes. Very glamorous, my mother, even when giving birth.

My father was not a king and he did not have the ear of the prime minister and so he had to declare the hotel room to be another country by himself. He took off his boots and his socks and stood barefoot on the soil. He closed his eyes, and he tried to believe he was home. England was no home for him. He would never, as long as he lived, learn to love tea. He would never be fully accepted. When he first came to this country, he had a bruise on his cheek from a scuffle with his brother. The border officials thought it was a sign he had syphilis and they sent him back to live in an orphanage in another country, where he stayed for years. But eventually he would make it to England, where he would marry an English girl. He could not return to his own country because of war. Yet he would be damned if his child was going to be born on a cold island instead of the place he loved.

He was manufacturing his life, my father. Just like the king, he was making things become what he wanted them to be, instead of what they were. He was denying reality and imposing on it his own one. Hundreds of kilograms of red soil. Martian dirt. Red dust clouds forming over the headboard around the bed, my mother coughed. He would’ve built her a scarlet castle from the sand, if there had been time. But there wasn’t time; I was determined to come out.

Elsewhere, the South Korean artist Nam June Paik made a diary about New York City. He called it an electronic collage. The title of the video series? Suite 212. Did he name it that because of the suite at Claridge’s Hotel? Did he see his work as a kind of portal into another world, a room that dared to refuse the rules of being a room?

In the video, John Cage performs his famous 4’33” piece in Harlem, using the I Ching to tell him the exact locations to carry it out. Nam June Paik grabs the microphone from Cage and asks the bystanders, Do you like street sounds? A young man tells him yes, he likes street sounds, but he likes music more. The music is what’s happening.

Passengers on the subway sped up, colors inside out, their colored insides. Faces hidden under a giant blue clock. Allen Ginsberg on fire, encased in an infrared rainbow. Jazz plays as the sea collides with a rock at Coney Island. A man grinning in freeze frame, holding up strands in a ball of dough he’s making into Chinese noodles. A TV screen, caught between a woman’s legs. Someone unraveling pink cotton candy in reverse. A child shoves a microphone into a dog’s face until it barks.  

These are some of the images in Nam June Paik’s Suite 212. His version of 212 was a window into another world where everything was wrong and backwards and yet you didn’t mind. It was like being in someone’s crazy head. I wish it were true that the title was a reference to the prince’s suite 212, or even my suite 212. I read somewhere that it’s actually the New York area code, combined with the musical form, the suite. I went to New York only once, to see a girl who broke my heart. I bought a bad hot dog. I bought an I (Heart) NYC T-shirt, and wearing it felt like a lie. I prefer the electronic collage version.

Nam June Paik once said: I am a poor man from a poor country, so I have to entertain people every second. My father also believed this, about himself. That was probably the only thing he and Nam June Paik would’ve agreed on. I showed my father one of his films once and he kept asking what was the point, what did it mean. What’s happening. I couldn’t tell him. Nothing is happening. The music, is what’s happening.

My father was afraid I would die the day I was born, that’s why I held his hand. I tied two knots in the umbilical cord, and it cut off my circulation. I was not going to die, and I knew that somehow, so it was my job to reassure my parents. I told them I would be ok, I would grow up strange and make art and try to figure out what everything meant. I saw my father’s face relax a little, saw him be reassured by my touch. I was not a boy, but he still wanted whatever I was.

Everyone agrees that the story of my birth is a good one. It has the air of folklore about it. My father liked telling it to strangers and observing the way they looked at him, trying to figure out if he was being truthful. I find it touching that he wanted to give me this very first gift of being born on the land he loved the most. But you should know that none of these stories are real.

It doesn’t make any sense that I would be born in a hotel room. Who was there to untie the knots in the umbilical cord? Who cleaned up all the sand afterwards? Where did my father get the money for this? There are no videos of my birth, not even any photos of my mother and father holding me afterwards. My mother said she blacked out when she gave birth, she does not remember a single thing. They couldn’t find any evidence that Churchill ever declared Suite 212 to be a part of Yugoslavia, though the tale keeps getting repeated. It will not die. No photos or documents left behind. Historians shake their heads. The prince is still alive, so you could ask him, but he will likely not remember.

And now? Now there is no more king. There is no more queen, there is no more Churchill, there are no more sunflower seeds, there is no more box of soil, there is no more Yugoslavia, there is no more John Cage, there is no more Nam June Paik, and there is no more my father. There is no more Suite 212 in Mayfair, at least not under that name. The room at Claridge’s Hotel is now Suite 214, and has been renamed after the prince who was born there. I do not know if it is still considered foreign territory, but it comes with 24 hour butler access and champagne.

One day, I know, there will be no more me. But for now, I am still here, telling this story to you. There are still images floating around in my skull from all the stories my father told me. I can still picture our Suite 212 as though it is right in front of me, even if it never existed. I can see the TV remote under layers of red silt. I can see the men with their mustaches, marching in one by one. I can still see my father there, old and afraid, in a cheap hotel room with a pull-out sofa, up to his ankles in red sand. Desperate milky eyes, a crazy man. Standing alone in his invented universe, waiting for the cry of a firstborn.