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When Gene was a child, he had been given a dog. He had named it Caimon. His mother had laughed, indulgent, and brushed her hand through Gene’s dark hair. “He’s not much of an alligator, mon petit.” The little dog proved her wrong when he broke into their neighbour’s yard and playfully bit a chicken, causing Mr. Godin to shoot him with his hunting rifle.
Gene had cried, heartbroken, as his father buried him in the yard. “Lovin’ hurts,” his grand-mère told him, sympathetic. “But we do it anyways.”
When Gene was fifteen, his grand-mère slipped out of her chair and did not get up again. “A heart condition,” the physician said authoritatively as they took her body away. “She absorbed more pain than she could take,” said the other Traiteurs.
Gene could not remember her funeral. He sat in the pews, sang the hymns, stood in the graveyard, accepted the condolences freely offered, but he did not remember who was there, what was said, anything but the thick, heavy feeling in his limbs and the soft buzzing of the cotton in his head.
He was a quiet, pale, solitary boy by nature. No one noticed that he had detached himself from the world around him, distanced himself from the pain. His grand-mère would have noticed, would have drawn him back and warned him against it, but she would never turn her wise eyes onto him again.
The army made him a medic, and Gene never knew whether it was from a question he had answered on one of the examinations or if they just looked at him, slender and pensive, and preferred him to hold bandages instead of a gun.
He grew to know the human body more intimately than he ever would have wanted to. He knew what the brain looked like (pinkish-grey and greasy) and what a heart felt like (slippery rubber), and what blood tasted like when it spurted up from an arterial bleed onto his face (warm and cloyingly metallic). He had been covered in guts and gore not his own, had vomit, feces, urine, sweat and pus smeared on him from men who fought for their lives with dirty faces and panicked eyes. He knew, even if not the anatomical names of all the little bits and pieces like a surgeon would, when he shoved his hand into a gaping chest wound, how to feel around for what he needed to squeeze, to suture, to try desperately to get to stop bleeding.
He did what he had to do, not shooting Germans and feeling victorious, but running through the firefight to patch up and carry boys who were the Germans’ victories. He distanced himself to spin a tourniquet while ignoring the severed limb almost underneath him. He detached himself to run with artillery exploding all around him, following the distant call for a medic while ignoring the bodies he was unable to save lying around him.
“Gene?”
In Bastogne he had almost distanced himself too far, and had found himself unable to reconnect with the real world after the screams and blood and chaos and cold and hunger and fear and desperation had caused him to retreat into the fuzzy haven of his mind. He had been pulled out of his stupor forcibly, yanked out of his hole where he had been deaf and blind and pushed into a world where there were gushing leg wounds and shattered churches.
He had allowed himself to join the group a little more after that, called Babe by his nickname, sat with Spina and stood a little closer to the group when mealtime came around. He cared more than he knew he should for these men, had known them for too long and had grown too close.
Then he had ran in the Bois Jacques towards the broken shout for a medic, and found Buck Compton standing over Guarnere and Toye. He pushed himself away, so quickly and harshly that he had a moment of disorientation as he fell to his knees, calm, steady and stoic, and whipped out his morphine and tourniquet.
“Gene?”
He had searched for dogtags in the bloody dirt of the hole that had once held Muck and Penkala. He had wrapped the hands of the soldier who tried to dig a foxhole with his fingers. He had jabbed a syrette into a shoulder missing an arm, picked pieces of metal and tree out of a back, shoved a bandage on a head where an ear was supposed to be, dug a bullet out of a thigh, and used a dead man’s scarf to wrap the shredded shin of another man when he ran out of bandages.
Gene had held the intestines of soldier’s gaping abdomen in his hands at Noville, slippery and looping, as the soldier screamed and gagged and thrashed in the snow, on a jeep and on a stretcher until he could be left in an Aid Station because he had not had enough bandages to pack them outside his body.
And Gene had not felt a thing.
“Gene!”
He had detached himself too far again, his mind a drifting grey sea, his body on automatic, until even his body shut down to the world around him. A part of him shouted to get up, move, see where else he was needed, get back to his company, but it just echoed in the fuzzy cotton of his mind, and then faded away.
“Gene!” There was someone shaking him. He blinked, and vision moved from an indescribable point off in the distance to focus on the person in front of him. His brow furrowed, but his limbs were heavy and unattached, and he merely observed the individual shaking him. He felt empty, like there was a part of him missing, like there was a hole in his chest, like he had left a part of himself somewhere in the cold forest.
“Gene, can you hear me?”
It did not occur to Gene to respond. A palm impacted with his cheek, sharp and biting, and his face swung to the side with the impact.
“Gene, you’re fuckin’ scarin’ me.” The front of his jacket was in the man’s hands, and the jostling of it made his head knock back against whatever it was he was leaning against.
“Babe?” Gene said, his lips foreign, recognizing the wide brown eyes that were just across from his. Babe’s nose and cheeks were red, his ginger hair mussed, his helmet on the ground beside him.
“Gene!” Babe looked insurmountably relieved. “I’ve been tryin’ to get you to talk for ages!” His voice was high, a reminder of how young he really was. “What’s wrong with you?”
Gene could not shake his head, could not move, could not react, could not respond. He was too frozen, too numb, too distanced from reality. Babe’s hand rested on his cheek, warm and human and whole.
“Spina sent me to find ya, to bring ya back. We’re movin’ on again.” Babe’s voice was tight with anxious concern.
“I can’t feel.” Gene was surprised when he managed to force the words out, his voice sounding strange even to his own ears.
Babe looked at him, eyebrows drawn together. “What?”
“I’m numb, I can’t feel.” His hand, without conscious effort on Gene’s part, moved up and covered Babe’s own against his cheek.
“Can you feel this?” Babe put his other hand on the other side of Gene’s face, almost hesitant, the dry and chapped skin of his palm a warm weight against his cheek.
Gene nodded, and his own hands reached out to Babe’s chest, resting on the coarse fabric of his jacket. Gene could feel Babe’s heartbeat against his hands, solid and reassuring, no blood coursing against his fingers, no slippery innards to hold. Warm. Human. Whole.
His thoughts were swirling, no longer grey and fuzzy and insubstantial but sharp and terrifying. Blood, there was so much blood being pushed around the human body by the heart. The rubbery, slick heart. Lub-dub, lub- dub, lub-dub. Something inside Gene ached: not pain, but sheer gnawing emptiness.
His fingers were curling into the fabric at Babe’s chest, and before he knew what he was doing, he was drawing him closer, fisting his hands in the cloth.
“There’s nothin’ there anymore,” Gene heard himself say, over the rushing in his ears. “I can’t feel; I need to feel…” Tugging on Babe, trying to bring him closer, as if by sheer proximity he could absorb some humanity, return to life and the world.
Babe allowed himself to be dragged forwards, unresisting as Gene brought them together until their chests were almost touching. Babe’s knees were tucked on either side of his, straddling his thighs, his hands still on either side of Gene’s face.
“I need to feel,” Gene begged, cold and numb.
“Alright,” Babe breathed, and he leaned in and pressed his lips against Gene’s.
At first Gene did not respond, the connections between his brain and body still awry, emotions still locked tight away for self-preservation. Babe’s thumb stroked Gene’s pale cheekbone. Then Gene felt something inside of him shift, like the click of a key turning in a lock, and he clutched Babe to him, sitting up from whatever he was leaning against and pressing their upper bodies together. He kissed him back, feeling Babe’s hand slip around to the back of his neck, nestling in the soft dark hair there. Gene felt warmth return to his body like the reanimating of a corpse.
When they broke apart, Gene took a stuttering breath and looked at Babe, whose lips were as red as his flushed cheeks, who looked unsure and nervous. Gene’s mouth turned upwards in a small smile, feeling. Terror, agony, grief, joy, love… they coursed through his veins, searing along the way, bringing him back to alertness and life.
“Shit, Gene…” Babe’s voice was high, worried. Gene looked at him, confused, and Babe brushed his thumb over his cheekbone again, this time the movement obscured by a film of wetness on Gene’s cheek. Gene, with conscious effort, disentangled his hand from Babe’s jacket, and reached up to wipe his fingers across his cheek, then look down in wonder at the tears coating his shaking, bloodstained fingertips.
He was crying.
Gene could not remember the last time he had broken down in tears. When his feelings became too much, he simply disengaged – it was his way of coping.
Lovin’ hurts, but we do it anyways.
He had not wanted to hurt. He had blocked off and distanced himself from his painful emotions and refused to let himself feel enough to be hurt by it. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten how to feel at all.
But to live, you needed to feel. And along with the good came the bad.
Gene knew what blood felt like after it seeped through your clothing and dried next to your skin. He knew what eyes full of pain and terror looked like the moment they lost the living spark in them. He knew what the inside of the human body, wet and pulsating with each heartbeat, smelled like. He knew what it felt like to run up Curahee and beat your best time. He knew the sight of men laughing, even when they had all the forces of the world piled against them, just because they were together. He knew what chocolate smelled like.
He knew what it felt like to kiss Babe Heffron.
Babe was pulling away, scrambling to put some distance between himself and Gene, his eyes on the ground. Gene realized they were behind the Aid Station and he was leaning against the wall.
“Babe,” Gene tried to say, but it came out “Beb” and he stopped a moment. Beb was the Cajun word for Sweetheart.
“Beb,” Gene repeated, and Babe paused and looked up at him, hesitant, embarrassed. Gene smiled, sincere and soft¸ his face still marked with tears. “Stay. Please.”
And Babe did.