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attached to the large intestine near the point at which it joins the small intestine. I had no problem sacrificing that.
    Not only did my father buy into my performance but so did the doctors in the ER. I went out of my way not to blurt out the list of symptoms like an amateur. I just picked a few good ones and mentioned them offhandedly. There was no empty doubling over or cries of pain. I kept my cool.
    It worked. By the time they got me into one of those surgery slip-ons and led me down the tiled floors of pacifying mint green and bleach, I did get cold feet but it was too late. The anesthesiologist started telling me a joke and zonked me out just before the punch line. When I tell this story I often exaggerate and say that my last thought as I was going under was Motherfucker! Like I said, an exaggeration.
    I dreamed that my inflatable raft got ruptured on some craggy rocks just under the surface and that I was about to sink into the depths where some dark shapes were sliding around.
    I came to in a corridor with terrible pain and a confusion of squeaky wheels and people talking and bleach and iodine. I was wheeled into a room, moved to a bed, and the boy next to me had some complications, so they left him open with a tube dripping yellow pus into a plastic container. He looked miserable. The girl on the other side of my bed was bald. She had lice, among other things.
    I remember the ravenous sounds my stomach made when they brought in food for everyone but me and the pus boy. I remember his haircut—a little like Hitler’s—and the way the liquid glucose dripped down the tube and into my vein for lunch. My mom returned from Macedonia early and pulled some nurse strings to come and visit me beyond the visitation hours. She seemed to have bought my performance as well.
    She was there when my doctor came into the room looking more like a butcher than a doctor, with oily skin a-sheen, an unshaven neck, and a mustache as solid as a chocolate log. He told us that Iwas a very lucky boy, that if I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I did I would have died, that the inflammation of the appendix was at such a late stage that it was full of pus and ready to burst. He then produced a jar of yellowish liquid with what looked like a fat piece of decomposing red licorice, twisted and curled.
    The biggest one I have ever seen, he said. That’s including the grown-ups.
    Let me get one thing across: I never, not for a single second during my performance, felt any pain. None. So what happened? Here are some possibilities. Perhaps the doctor found a perfectly normal appendix and realized I was lying and decided to play a little joke on me. Or perhaps I got so far into the role of a boy who’s having an appendix attack that I psychosomatically caused my appendix to inflame. Or maybe God found a twisted way to tell me I needed an operation when my body refused to warn me the usual way.
    So what happened?
    A realization: There is no one solution. Everything’s up for interpretation. It’s all about what the author meant by this or that.
    My mom made me go to school after missing only six days. I took the final exam. Got a C.
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    * Yugoslav “benevolent” Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito died in Ljubljana’s Clinical Center on May 4, 1980, three days before his eighty-eighth birthday.

(. . . germs . . .)
Mustafa was crawling around the apartment pretending to be a scuba diver, like one he saw on Survival . He had on a pair of welding goggles and a red thermos bottle taped to the back of his shirt as a makeshift oxygen tank. In his hand he brandished a straightedge, his harpoon gun, which he fired at things around the apartment, emitting slow, guttural sounds of underwater battles with sea monsters.
    Chasing a particularly nasty and elusive hammerhead, Mustafa rolled into the hall when he heard them talking about germs in the living room. His mother had a guest and he was told not to disturb them. His mother’s friend from work,