Never especially inclined mathematically, my father,

days past his eightieth birthday, calculated the following:

if all the names of the dead, military and civilian alike,

of every nationality, from his war—the good one—

were blasted into granite, as were those

of the American soldiers who had perished in the bad one, mine,

the resulting monument would be almost a mile long

and a hundred feet deep. Setting aside the engineering challenges,

he believed the greater problem was the names: sixty million,

he ciphered, though I don’t know how. His imagined monument,

a project no greater than the interstate highway system

or the dams across the nation’s rivers, could take decades

to erect. No more than Rushmore or Crazy Horse,

and yet who would have envisioned such a task?

But I remember how, the night of the first moon landing,

he stood in his backyard in the heart of the heart of the country,

straining through binoculars to see what could not be seen

but was. Now, ten years past his monumental calculations,

the only numeral that matters to him is 2. We are not sure why.

Perhaps because my twin sister and I are two. As are he

and our mother, her failing eyes and gentle hands. Therefore

‘two’ is the answer to every problem the young neurologist asks,