Heimwee

The gallery was a white box behind a storefront off Sarphatipark. The first time I visited I missed it completely. Walked up Van Ostadestraat using the blue dot on my phone, down the street, back up, down again. Must have walked past five times before I finally saw it.

The gallery wasn’t open until midday, so I waited. Stood in front of the window and pinched skin on my face. Five minutes later an old lady approached me. She had grey hair and looked frantic, wore baggy jeans, a tartan scarf on her wrist. “I’m lost,” she said in English. “Young man, can you help me?” I looked at her for a moment. I asked her where she lived. She walked away when I did.

The gallery was called Heimwee. They needed volunteers, human models for their next show. This girl I hooked up with told me about it. I met her in the kitchen at a house party in Noord. She had short hair, shorn, with bleached tips. There was a tattoo of a geometric pattern on her shoulder. Her skin was pale, like very white, like a ghost. “How much do you sleep at night?” she asked me. She was smoking out a window. “Bad,” I said. “Maybe four hours, tops.” She nodded. “You can tell a lot about a person by how much they sleep. Are they anxious, hard working, depressed? My ex used to claim he needed ten hours. That was before I realised he was a high-functioning narcissist.” I asked what kind of person she thought I was, based on how little I slept. “The fact you don’t know is kind of a sign,” she said.

Sometimes I pretend my English is bad. People act differently when you do that. They treat you like you’re stupid. I squint or shake my head as if I haven’t understood. At parties, too, I like to act drunk. More drunk than I am, I mean. I pretend I’m high, that I’m all fucked up, when in reality I’m sober. This one time in Athens I got so bored at a studio party I pretended I was overdosing on speed. Sat on a chair in the corner of the room, rubbing my face and saying, over and over again, “Idk, man. Idk.” Most people looked awkward about that. Another time in Paris it was a finissage party for a painting show at a gallery called Mal du Pays, where I laid down on the street, groaning that I’d drunk too much wine. I even closed my eyes, as if I’d passed out. When I opened them again I was in the emergency waiting room at Pitié-Salpêtrière. Someone from the party had driven me there and dumped me off.

The Heimwee gallerist looked hungover when he arrived. He was unshaven, overweight, and wore a pair of silver-black Sorgs, sneakers everyone was wearing back then. He read his phone the whole time we spoke. My role in the show was very simple, he yawned, standing in the empty space. To the right of us there was a false wall with a gap at the bottom. For the exhibition, I had to lie in the crawl-space behind this wall, stick my hand out through the gap and move it about in a grasping manner. On the other side of the wall, just out of reach, would be a bunch of keys, and people would come and stand and watch the hand try to reach for the keys, blindly, but never find them. The piece was called The Strange Death of Altruism, Part Two. I asked the gallerist if there was a part one. “It’s just a title,” he shrugged.

“We can’t pay you by the way,” he added, outside on the street. “You know that, right?” I repeated, very slowly, “No pay,” as if I was trying to translate, before the gallerist shut the door. I suppose he took that as a yes.

During that time in my life I’d call myself a balloon. What I mean is I was floating. Floating around all kinds of places. Paris, Naples, New York, Berlin. Couchsurfing with folks I knew from RISD and RA. Friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances. I didn’t have a job, didn’t want one. Didn’t want much of anything, really, only the feeling that I was moving around meaninglessly in circles. Paris, Rome, L.A., back to Paris. I liked this going-nowhere feeling. It made me feel powerless, like a leaf. I slept on floors, in strangers’ apartments, hostels. I had two million euros in my current account at any time. Sometimes my father’s secretary, Xiao Bing, would send me money for no reason. Sometimes he’d send me keycodes to random properties across Europe, luxury flats my father had bought up as investments. After being harassed by him about where I was that week, I’d lie and tell Xiao Bing I was in Milan, and he’d reply with the address of some apartment in CityLife. “The bed has no sheets yet but we can order you some,” he’d email. Usually I didn’t tell him where I was. I didn’t want my father to know too many details about what I was doing.

My only connection in Amsterdam was through a guy I knew, Carl, an American who’d studied at DAI two summers prior. Someone he knew was subletting their room, and so I took it, saying that I had a residency in July. My roommate there was called Delfina. She was an Argentinian girl with wet curls and little biceps and a lisp. She barely asked me any questions about myself, just droned on about her love life, which was tortured, she said, by endless beautiful women. Delfina took me to parties, openings, clubs. One night we dropped acid and strolled around the canals, talking about how plants are in fact aliens from another planet. Because of my accent people tend to assume I’m American, and so I like to tell them what they think they already know. In Amsterdam I told people all kinds of things. I was an artist. I was a DJ. My DJ name was DJ Cunnilingus. They’d stand there and nod and say, “Nice, man, nice.” People believe made-up stories. It’s the truth they don’t like. Whenever I told them that my father was in fact the wealthiest man in the Pearl River Delta, one of the ten richest in China, and that the household appliances his company manufactured could be found in pretty much every one of their homes, they’d laugh. “Get the fuck out, dude,” they’d say, in their German or French accents, and then I’d smile and shrug and say, “Okay, you got me.” Sometimes I’d add, “I’m not even Chinese.” At which point they’d get annoyed and call me weird and walk away.

During the days I had nothing to do. Most mornings I’d sit in a Pret and watch commuters rush to work. Well, someone has to. These kinds of people need an audience.

Folks in Amsterdam were talking about the Heimwee show. I slept with this one girl who bragged she could get me an invite to the preview. She wore tiny square-shaped sunglasses that she didn’t take off during sex. “I’m good,” I said, about the invite. The artist whose work I was performing, Dax Gay, was an up-and-coming Dane known for ‘human sculpture’ pieces. Two of these I’d seen in Basel the year before. In one of them, an overweight model sat on a stool behind a large wooden easel, scrawling crude pictures of whoever walked past. The piece was called Life Drawing. Next to him was another enormous model, another overweight man, facing the corner of the booth with his back to everyone, pretending to masturbate. That piece was called Voyeur. It was the talk of the fair. I didn’t tell anyone in Amsterdam I was participating in the Heimwee show. I pretended I didn’t know who Dax Gay even was, but folks in the scene talked about them all the time. They were a figure of controversy. Despite being queer, they spoke in favour of conversion therapy, though it was hard to know if they were joking or not. Recently, Gay had sold a painting to a right-wing UK influencer, and posted a photo of them together on IG, before appearing on the guy’s podcast. Folks got enraged by that. Dax Gay was a fake they/them, people complained. Their pronouns were a ruse to get away with being offensive. Even their name, Dax Gay, was offensive in itself. “Doesn’t matter if he’s queer or not, he’s a troll,” a man with a shaved head complained at a house party. “Super talented, though” a person wearing foot-gloves countered. “They,” someone corrected. Conversations went on like this.

At Heimwee I was alone all day, stuffed in a crawl space behind the wall. The keys remained out of reach on the other side of the partition. The gallery had put out amenities for me, a bottle of water, a row of pillows for my back, but they may as well not have because I was a dead body back there. The place was quiet, only the creak of shoes on the gallery floor, the whisper of visitors. People would turn up and stare at the hand, my hand, me, and analyse its activity. “Kind of tame,” someone said, sighing. “Like, I was expecting something crazier.” This was a widely-shared critique. At parties people complained the piece was ‘boring,’ ‘bland,’ ‘obvious.’ Someone said, “I got so restless, watching it.” Viewers expected much more from Dax Gay, something shocking. Though one night after my shift, a girl at a house party, a girl who wore flared leggings and gothy high-heeled Crocs, spoke about something that happened outside the gallery. When she turned up at Heimwee in the middle of the day, she said, this old lady had approached her, a homeless woman or something. This old lady claimed to be lost, asking the girl if she could help, and at first the girl said no, sorry, she couldn’t help, but the old lady persisted, pestering the girl. She kept trying to get in front of her, eventually blocking the girl’s way into the gallery, her hand waving in front of her face, a tartan scarf on her wrist. Finally, when the girl relented, asking where the old lady lived and that she would help, the old lady walked away. “Just like that,” the girl said. 

Behind the wall I’d fall asleep sometimes. My hand would go limp, or I’d shut my eyes like I was meditating, though I wasn’t, I was just lying there with my eyes closed. Every time I shut my eyes, day or night, my father would appear, sitting behind his desk, forlorn, smoking. Sometimes in these visions he looked tired, his face drawn. He’d shut his eyes and shake his head as if he was sad about something. Every time this happened I’d open up my phone and there’d be an email from Xiao Bing. “Your father is incredibly disappointed in you,” he’d write, or something like it. ‘‘How long are you going to punish him with your recklessness?’ Then he’d wire another fifty thousand in Euros.

Visitors seemed increasingly bored by the show. Their behaviour got weirder. I could sense people getting worked up on the other side of the wall, their feet tapping, their breath getting short. One woman got so impatient she bent down and put the keys in my hand. “There,” she said, angrily. Two younger people came in, giggling nervously. One of them kicked the keys across the room, far away from the hand. Another woman cried, watching it move about on the floor like that. One day out of nowhere someone crouched down and took the hand in theirs. They held it tenderly like I was a dying relative. I got so freaked out that I flinched, taking the hand back behind the wall like I was protecting my purse. The visitor left, not saying a word.

I’m getting bored of this story, so let me tell you another one.

It was October, months later. I’d left Amsterdam and gone to London. Xiao Bing had emailed me the keycode to an apartment we owned, this modern tower block in London Bridge. When I arrived the place was deserted. No heat. The fridge was unplugged. There was a brand new mattress wrapped in plastic on the balcony, the plastic bobbled with rain. The balcony overlooked a train track. My first night there, I sat and smoked and watched the people in carriages below go in and out of the city. I mean the mattress and I watched them together in the dark. 

During the next weeks, I didn’t go out and try to meet people. I didn’t go to parties. Instead I stayed in the apartment and ordered takeout. Rain outside, constantly, it felt like, and I slept on the couch while years passed by, I mean the days and weeks passed, only they felt like years. In many ways they were years in fast motion. Once or twice I’d venture out of the apartment in my sweatpants and stained t-shirt and get in the elevator and wander around the upper corridors of the tower block, with their blue carpets and corporate art on the wall. One afternoon I saw an apartment was open. The door was unlocked, a set of keys left dangling in the lock. It was weird, I thought. Like someone had run out of there in a hurry. The keys had a card attached that said ‘Treize Estates,’ a realtor.

I went in and looked around. The show-apartment was empty, furnished with tasteless modern decor. Not that this put me off. I feel at home anywhere. Warsaw, Copenhagen, Tbilisi, Oslo. I can go into any kitchen and see appliances with our company logo on the side. A washing machine, a food blender. These were my father’s children, just like me.

I wandered into the kitchen of this apartment and opened the fridge. Inside there was a bottle of skimmed milk, a tub of protein shake, a half-eaten cucumber wrapped in plastic and left on the shelf. I went to the bedroom. As I did I could hear people enter the apartment. “The door was open?” one of them asked, and so I crawled under the bed for a place to hide. I laid there for a while. As I did I could hear them, a man and woman, talking in the next room. I assumed it was the realtor taking a client around, but then minutes turned to hours with me still under the bed, and then they came into the bedroom, kissing and breathing. They started to have sex on the bed, the springs creaking, until they stopped. The man had started crying. “What’s wrong?” the woman asked, but the man sobbed and sobbed. After a while they got dressed and left the apartment. I stayed there all night. When I woke up it was morning and no one was there.

The Heimwee show closed after three weeks. “Someone bought the piece,” the gallerist told me, looking even more hungover than before. “Dax wants it taken down right now,” he said. That was fine by me. I left the job, partied at Club RAUM, got high one night with a group of eco-activists at their squat. “The world is ending,” one of them told me, lighting up a bong. I took a hit and looked at my phone. Xiao Bing had sent an email in Chinese. “Your father is sick,” he said. “He’s dying, Li. Come home.” Though I was so stoned by that point I thought I’d imagined it.

The next day it was hot and folks went swimming in the IJ. Delfina and I watched people dive into the water. They came back sleek as seals, squeezing water from their hair. Delfina pointed at all the women on the grass, on blankets, that she’d slept with. “Her,” she pointed, “and her, and also her.” All of them were beautiful.

Someone interrupted us. We looked up. It was an old lady with grey hair, the same I’d met outside Heimwee my first day there. She was still skinny, in a stained ragged t-shirt. She asked us if she could have one of our cigarettes. Delfina gave her one, and the woman thanked her and walked away. “Wait, your scarf,” Delfina called, holding the lady’s tartan rag, but the woman didn’t hear her. She was already gone.

I told Delfina I was going for a swim, and went down the steps into the water with everyone else. I laid on the surface, floating, my eyes closed. I saw my father in a cloud of white fog, sitting behind his desk with the fog over his face. When I opened my eyes again I was far off from the bank. The current had taken me and I was floating away from the city. People shouted after me, but I was fine, totally happy. I smiled. I was content. I can’t even swim.