"Greg Egan - Reasons To Be Cheerful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Maybe I was afraid that the tumor would grow back, but not that afraid. The swift victory of the virus in
the first round should have counted for much more, and on one level I did think of myself as lucky, and
suitably grateful. But I could no more rejoice in my escape, now, than I could have felt suicidally bad at
the height of my enkephalin bliss.

My parents began to worry, and dragged me along to a psychologist for тАЬrecovery counseling.тАЭ The
whole idea seemed as tainted as everything else, but I lacked the energy for resistance. Dr Bright and I
тАЬexplored the possibilityтАЭ that I was subconsciously choosing to feel miserable because I'd learned to
associate happiness with the risk of death, and I secretly feared that recreating the tumor's main symptom
could resurrect the thing itself. Part of me scorned this facile explanation, but part of me seized on it,
hoping that if I owned up to such subterranean mental gymnastics it would drag the whole process into
the light of day, where its flawed logic would become untenable. But the sadness and disgust that
everything induced in meтАФbirdsong, the pattern of our bathroom tiles, the smell of toast, the shape of my
own handsтАФonly increased.

I wondered if the high levels of Leu-enkephalin from the tumor might have caused my neurons to reduce
their population of the corresponding receptors, or if I'd become тАЬLeu-enkephalin-tolerantтАЭ the way a
heroin addict became opiate-tolerant, through the production of a natural regulatory molecule that
blocked the receptors. When I mentioned these ideas to my father, he insisted that I discuss them with Dr
Bright, who feigned intense interest but did nothing to show that he'd taken me seriously. He kept telling
my parents that everything I was feeling was a perfectly normal reaction to the trauma I'd been through,
and that all I really needed was time, and patience, and understanding.

****

I was bundled off to high school at the start of the new year, but when I did nothing but sit and stare at
my desk for a week, arrangements were made for me to study online. At home, I did manage to work
my way slowly through the curriculum, in the stretches of zombie-like numbness that came between the
bouts of sheer, paralyzing unhappiness. In the same periods of relative clarity, I kept thinking about the
possible causes of my affliction. I searched the biomedical literature and found a study of the effects of
high doses of Leu-enkephalin in cats, but it seemed to show that any tolerance would be short-lived.

Then, one afternoon in MarchтАФstaring at an electron micrograph of a tumor cell infected with herpes
virus, when I should have been studying dead explorersтАФI finally came up with a theory that made
sense. The virus needed special proteins to let it dock with the cells it infected, enabling it to stick to them
long enough to use other tools to penetrate the cell membrane. But if it had acquired a copy of the
Leu-enkephalin gene from the tumor's own copious RNA transcripts, it might have gained the ability to
cling, not just to replicating tumor cells, but to every neuron in my brain with a Leu-enkephalin receptor.

And then the cytotoxic drug, activated only in infected cells, would have come along and killed them all.

Deprived of any input, the pathways those dead neurons normally stimulated were withering away. Every
part of my brain able to feel pleasure was dying. And though at times I could, still, simply feel nothing,
mood was a shifting balance of forces. With nothing to counteract it, the slightest flicker of depression
could now win every tug-of-war, unopposed.

I didn't say a word to my parents; I couldn't bear to tell them that the battle they'd fought to give me the
best possible chance of survival might now be crippling me. I tried to contact the oncologist who'd
treated me on the Gold Coast, but my phone calls floundered in a Muzak-filled moat of automated
screening, and my email was ignored. I managed to see Dr Ash alone, and she listened politely to my