Nothing Was the Same Read Online Free Page A

revert to my regular tendencies of coolness”—he found that experiencing life more intensely was reward in its own right and that life could be found outside of a laboratory.
    When it came down to it, Richard and I simply enjoyed being together. We had a number of close friends in whose company we delighted, and we went out several nights a week for pleasure or work or both. We both loved Washington, were hooked on politics, and when in a new city, headed instinctively to its zoo or its natural history and science museums. We were addicted to ALF , a television program about a small, furry, eight-stomached, orange alien from the Lower East Side of the planet Melmac who had crash-landed into the garage of a suburban middle-class family. We watched ALF avidly—to the detriment of work and showing up at Washington dinner parties—and were distressed when the series ended and ALF, captured by the American military, was unable to return to his home planet. So we spun away our hours coming up with alternative fates for him—medical school at Harvard (one of our colleagues there was legendary for conducting group therapy sessions with patients who believed they had been abducted by aliens), work as a war correspondent, a job as a translator at the United Nations—and drew up elaborate plans for his adopted family and his fellow Melmacians. Richard sketched out a complex new planet and galaxy for ALF, to which we added stars and constellations and cats, ALF’s favorite food. Presumably we had more constructive things to be doing with our time, but it didn’t matter. We laughed and drew and conjured, as though there were no end to time. Years later we were still adding mountain ranges and islands and inland seas and delectable new species of cats to ALF’s planet.
    Life was fun together. I remember a spring day in Los Angeles that began with dire wolves and ended with me on my hands and knees between the sheets of our bed, picking my way through a thicket of green and pink plastic “grass,” hunting for jelly beans and yellow marsh-mallow chickens. Richard had transformed the bed into a “living Easter basket,” which was filled not only with plastic grass and jelly beans but with all sizes and varieties of chocolate Easter eggs and rabbits as well.
    It was a wonderful day, in the way that so many of our days were. We started at the La Brea Tar Pits, which for forty thousand years had trapped and preserved saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and ground sloths. Four hundred or so of the dire wolf skulls were mounted on a wall of the museum built at the tar pits. Richard quickly drifted in their direction. He spent well over an hour captivated by the collection of skulls, calling me over to point out small differences in structure from wolf to wolf. I soon got bored—after the first three, the dire wolf skulls looked very much alike to me—and made my way over to the giant ground sloth. We were as happy as two people can be—in the presence of each other, but alone with our imaginings—and eager to share our mullings over lunch.
    We had dinner that evening at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and Richard, after a glass of wine, took out two pieces of paper. “Write down the first thing that comes to your mind,” he said. This sounded suspiciously like something a psychiatrist might say, and although he was one, it was the kind of free-association blather that was scarcely like him. He persevered, however, as he was wont to do once his mind was engaged in a new idea or plan. He handed me one of the pieces of paper. On the top, he had scrawled, “Richard.” Under this he had put three categories, “Month of the Year,” “Fish,” and “Tree,” each with a line drawn next to it.
    “Write down what you think of when you think of me, and I’ll do the same for you,” he said. We started in on the list; once Richard had set out a game, it was futile to resist. We worked on our answers through another glass