100 Days of Happiness by Fausto Brizzi

and Corrado. I meet them in a little café we’ve frequented since we were in high school, where neither the furnishings nor the pastries have changed since then. I even recognize a stale but optimistic brioche that’s resided behind the glass display case on the counter ever since 1979.
    It’s a very complicated breakfast. Super complicated.
    Someone ought to urgently publish a guidebook titled:
How Should You Act at Breakfast When One of Your Best Friends Tells You He Has Liver Cancer?
It’s the most difficult conversation you can have, out of all the billions of possible conversations. The main problem is nailing the correct tone for the dialogue.
    DIALOGUE WITH GAFFE
    â€œFriends, I’ve got liver cancer . . .”
    â€œReally? My uncle had the same thing last year . . .”
    â€œSo how is he now?”
    â€œOh, he’s dead!”
    ABSURD DIALOGUE
    â€œFriends, I’ve got liver cancer . . .”
    â€œAh, what a relief, I was expecting something worse!”
    â€œWorse? Like what is there that would have been worse?”
    â€œWell, for instance . . . now let me see . . . ah yes, being a paraplegic is worse, I think.”
    â€œThanks. Now I feel so much better.”
    EMBARRASSING D IALOGUE
    â€œFriends, I’ve got liver cancer . . .”
    â€œOh my God! You were always my favorite musketeer!”
    â€œWhy are you using the past tense?”
    ENCOURAGING DIALOGUE
    â€œFriends, I’ve got liver cancer . . .”
    â€œDon’t worry, you’re strong, you’ll beat this!”
    â€œAnd what if I don’t?”
    â€œDon’t even take that possibility into consideration.”
    Â * * * 
    At this point in the encouraging dialogue the tears start to flow and we all sob wholeheartedly together for half an hour or so.
    Â * * * 
    I decide to break the tension myself and discuss my own disease with irony. That’s when I come up with a nickname for the amiable littleFrench fry that lives in my liver. I dub it “my buddy Fritz,” a phrase we use in Italian to describe hypocritical friends you don’t want to name outright. From that moment forward, the word
cancer
is stricken from my dictionary.
    I tell Athos and Aramis that, in the afternoon, I’m scheduled for a CAT scan and that there are people who had the same cancer I have who’ve gone on to live for four and even five more years. By now, I know everything about hepatocellular carcinomas. I’m an expert on the subject.
    They’re both overwhelmed; neither one seems capable of getting out a complete logical sentence. Not that I can, for that matter. We wind up playing foosball, me in a duo with the barista’s pockmarked fourteen-year-old son, and we say nothing more about it. Still, the thing is right there beside us, watching us play, never once taking its eyes off me. My team wins 6 to 4—the kid is a phenomenal goalie.
    Â * * * 
    That afternoon I go to take the too-long-delayed computerized axial tomography. Three very complicated words to say that a bundle of rays analyze my torso slice by slice, separating it like a package of individually wrapped Kraft American cheese.
    The result is the ugliest word in the world after
war
.
    It’s practically a synonym for death.
    Metastasis.
    My lungs are riddled with metastasizing cancer.
    I read it somewhere: the first metastasis of liver cancer usually develops in the lungs.
    I’m a textbook case.

HOW LONG?
    T he main question is: how long?
    How much more time do I have?
    But even as I ponder this one, there is another, which seems even more pressing. How will I tell Paola? What do I say? I can’t even ponder this one. It feels strange, not part of our story. I close my eyes, imagining her face when I tell her, her expression, her eyes. I can’t wrap my head around it, so I leave it alone, something to