"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

Val?"
"What?"
"Do I have to go off the Serzone?"
"We'll talk about it in therapy." She hung up and pulled a Post-it out of
Hippocrates' chest.
"Now if I keep this oath, and break it not, may I enjoy honor, in my life
and art, among all men for all time; but if I transgress and forswear myself,
may the opposite befall me."
Does that mean dishonor for all time? she wondered. I'm just trying to do
the right thing here. Finally.
She made a note to call Winston back and schedule his appointments.


four

Estelle Boyet

As September's promise wound down, a strange unrest came over the people
of Pine Cove, due in no small part to the fact that many of them were going
into withdrawal from their medications. It didn't happen all at once -- the
streets were not full of middle-class junkies rocking and sweating and begging
for a fix -- but slowly as the autumn days became shorter. And as far as they
knew (because Val Riordan had called every one of them), they were
experiencing the onset of a mild seasonal syndrome, sort of like spring fever.
Call it autumn malaise.
The nature of the medications kept the symptoms spread out over the next
few weeks. Prozac and some of the older antidepressants took almost a month to
leave the system, so those people slipped into the fray more slowly than those
on Zoloft or Paxil or Wellbutrin, which was flushed from the system in only a
day or two, leaving the deprived with symptoms resembling a low-grade flu,
then a scattered disorientation akin to a temporary case of attention deficit
disorder, and, in some, a rebound of depression that dropped on them like a
smoky curtain.
One of the first to feel the effects was Estelle Boyet, a local artist
successful and semifamous for her seascapes and idealized paintings of Pine
Cove shore life. Her prescription had run out a day before Dr. Val had
replaced the supply with sugar pills, so she was already in the midst of
withdrawal when she took the first dose of the placebo.
Estelle was sixty, a stout, vital woman who wore brightly colored caftans
and let her long gray hair fly around her shoulders as she moved through life
with an energy and determination that inspired envy from women half her age.
For thirty years she had been a teacher in the decaying and increasingly
dangerous Los Angeles Unified School District, teaching eighth graders the
difference between acrylics and oils, a brush and a pallet knife, Dali and
Degas, and using her job and her marriage as a justification for never
producing any art herself.
She had married right out of art school: Joe Boyet, a promising young
businessman, the only man she had ever loved and only the third she had ever
slept with. When Joe had died eight years ago, she had nearly lost her mind.
She tried to throw herself into her teaching, hoping that by inspiring the