A sense of purpose is a hard-fought and hard-learned achievement for anyone, but for a twin it is always overshadowed by a sense of duality. Shared reference points—languid and lazy summers, tiny tragedies—dodge and weave together and remembrances are broken into equal parts of self and mirror self. Was it his observation or mine? Who made the comment and why? Since the twin is an ever-present reflection, the narratives of shared discovery from the earliest days mask differences.

Mom calls to us as we look for satellites between Jupiter and Mars, “Harold! Mike! Time to come in now!” The damp summer grass is at our back. Just audible, beneath the chant of crickets, is the murmur of cottonwoods at the edge of our yard as a breeze crawls up the canyon.

“I got one. North to South,” my brother says and swipes at the stars with his hand.

“Where?”

He points again and I ease my head over to his shoulder to try to line up with his fingertip.

Finally it resolves for me as I defocus and refocus my eyes: a pinprick of light in the indigo sliding between the silvery weave of stars.

“Spy satellite. Polar orbit,” I say. I try to imagine the view from the satellite, as if I was a hitchhiker holding on to the solar panels and looking down at the dark Earth below. Dish antennas rotate and twitch, seeking out radio signals far below the faint splashes of city lights. Space is cold and quiet, even the wind tamped out, until…

Mom is calling again.

It is the summer of 2002 and Harry and I are both 10 years old. We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico and our lives and our purposes are unremarkably simple.… Read the rest