[In the Italian original, this passage is in the passato remoto, though these events are recent. Italian’s literary tense is an old vehicle that will take you anywhere if you keep it well-oiled, but it’s also, at times, a bit obsolete, when applied to current situations, for instance: while I’m writing, it’s spring, I live in Milan with my sister, and I’m describing something that happened last winter. At this point, since it’s the same setting and this happened so recently, I should use the passato prossimo, the present perfect, the tense I used yesterday when I told this story to a friend at breakfast—but writing in an unyielding tense makes even the closest things evasive: they’ve been tainted by what went before, like the photos of my sister, her therapy, funded secretly by our grandmother, the trip with the moving van, a memory so fleeting it almost sounds made up.]

I was by the steps to the entrance, which led to her condo, inside this old building that felt somewhat unstable, like an art pavilion—an impression made even stronger by the brightly painted interior seen through the high windows—when a man appeared in the doorway and greeted me playfully with those lines I’d heard so often from La Dolce Vita: “Marcello! Come here!”

My sister wasn’t home, “she doesn’t live here anymore,” a second man added, smiling, wanting to get in on the fun. As a kid, she used to play these jokes on us: she made up entire worlds, tricked us into thinking we had aunts and uncles in the secret service, or that Mom had actually stolen her station wagon. I had dinner with this couple, uncertain if Irene was hiding upstairs or orchestrating this prank at a distance. I got drunk on Moscow mules, sucked on slices of fresh ginger, smoked some pot. My family had enjoyed Irene’s good nature (Irene’s name, by the way, means “peace”), but starting in high school, her humor grew more sinister, so I wound up forgetting how much we’d enjoyed her cheerfulness before.

As the drinks kept coming, the situation grew hard to read, I was texting with Barbara and chatting with these two television hosts while we passed around a joint. Maybe they were my age but that gray in their beards and their shaved-side cuts … After dinner, I fell asleep to a comedy on their smart TV and woke to a tapping on my shin. My sister stood over me, a tender look on her face. “What’re you doing—I don’t live here anymore!”

She had hair, real hair, thin like mine, but plenty of it.