Liquor going down like love/American Dream

Did you ever feel the malignity which rises from a swamp? It is real, I could
swear it, and some whisper of ominous calm, that heavy air one breathes in the
hour before a hurricane, now came to rest between us.

But compassion,
the trapped bird of compassion, struggled up from my chest and flew to my
throat. "Deborah, I love you," I said. I did not know at that instant if I meant
it truly, or was some monster of deception, hiding myself from myself. And
having said it, knew the mistake. For all feeling departed from her hand, even
that tingling so evil to my flesh, and a left a cool empty touch. I could have
been holding a tiny casket in my palm.

The darkness came over like air
on a a wound when the dressing is removed. My senses were much too alive...I had
one of those anxieties which make it an act of balance to breathe: too little
air compresses the sensation of being throttled, but too much - one deep breath
- and there is the fear of a fall.

I wondered if I were close to
fainting...I knew at last the sweet panic of an animal who is being tracked, for
if danger were close, if danger came in on the breeze, and one's nostrils had an
awareness of the air as close as that first touch of a tongue on your flesh,
there was still such a tenderness for the hope one could stay alive. Something
came out of the city like the whispering of a forest, and on the March night's
message through the open window I had at that instant the first smell of spring,
that quiet instant, so like the first moment of love one feels in a woman who
has until then given no love.

I swayed once, feeling a bout of misery
again. There was the king of panic which comes from a dream where one is killing
cockroaches. They were about me, literally; I saw several run off in jagged
directions to follow their mysterious trail - that line of pure anxiety - which
one sees in the path made by a car driving over a lake of ice.

...As if
indeed it was Deborah and me on one of those rare occasions when having fought
to a bruised exhaustion we would grasp each other in a kind of sorrow, my sense
of myself as a man all gone, her sense of herself as a woman equally gone, both
of us reduced to the state of children in a tearful misery, in that soreness of
the heart which looks for a balm and makes the flesh of man and woman equal for
a moment.

I got into a bar before closing, and had a double bourbon, the
liquor going down like love...

Extracts from Norman Mailer's American Dream

Norman Mailer