I didn’t get up. My body felt heavy, the pot hadn’t made me paranoid, and right then just lying where I was seemed like a gentle, restrained show of affection and gratitude. The way she shook my hand was so bizarrely formal, I wanted to get up and give her a hug, then thought better of it. I saw the two guys lying together on the other end of the couch, and they told Irene they couldn’t remember if they were supposed to explain the situation to me or not and decided it would be funnier not to, and I had just gone along with it, no questions asked: “He wasn’t the least bit worked up—no, your charming little brother just went to sleep,” and we all laughed.

[I promise this is so much sweeter in the Italian—it’s lovely to keep using the passato remoto for something so close at hand. A fictional balm.]

We took a taxi across town. Milan is small, but it has a traffic light every fifty meters programmed to always avoid a “green wave,” and so our driver didn’t even try to beat the lights: he would approach the next red never going over twenty-five. He was listening to a commercial radio station, to the newscast between the music and other programming, an emotional piece on the Syrian refugees that European countries kept dumping on each other. No one considered them human, so much so that when the public learned they had cell phones, the response was bewilderment and suspicion. Our silent drive, where to, I couldn’t say, through a Milan that was empty, rainy, unthreatening. It was a miracle, a pleasure to be considered human just for being Italian, dressed, and clean: I could lean my head against the window, even if I wasn’t sure where I’d be sleeping and I was in a taxi with a sister who, for a short while, I’d considered not inviting to my wedding, which might have made my attempt at reconciliation impossible.

(At this point, I’d say it was less reconciliation than rediscovery.)

The whole way my sister was texting with someone. The taxi stopped at the corner of Viale Gran Sasso, by an odd entryway, with a small gate to the left and a ramp to the right that dropped down into the belly of a building, below a glass hallway leading to elevators. It was a bold solution in this building that must have gone up during a time when cars seemed like something clean, potentially in harmony with man. The ramp was so much a part of the place, I practically perceived it as carpeted (I was still stoned). But the point was my sister really didn’t live at her old place—she lived on the other side of town.