Title: I Am Alive and You Are Dead

Author: Kate Camp

In: Sport 29: Spring 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2002

Part of: Sport

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Sport 29: Spring 2002

Empathy with the devil

Empathy with the devil

Romand told Carrere that his life of deceit started as a second-year medical student when he failed to attend the year's final examination. ‘On the morning of the exam,’ Carrere writes, ‘the hands of his alarm clock indicated in succession the hour when he should have got up, the hour when the exam began, the hour when it ended. Lying in bed, he watched the hands go around.’

How human Romand seems at this point! How great the urge to reach into the narrative, to shake him out of bed and send him off to explain himself. And how easy it would have been for him to recover from the error, to make an excuse to the school, his family and friends.

The most striking thing for me about this account of Romand's missed exam is how strongly I empathise with him. I can feel those slightly untucked sheets, can recognise the smell that beds have during the day. In my mind's eye I watch the turning hands of the clock with the same resolute sense of accomplishment that an anorexic might feel as she denies herself a morsel of food, a kind of power of non-doing page 212 that is the trademark power of the depressed and, perhaps, of the teenager.

Romand can't account for why he didn't go, can give no reason or explanation, offers no excuse. He was a young man, and young people, as we know, are prone to lie in bed when they should be doing other things. They are prone to create disasters through inaction, preferring in their youth to doze sullenly through life's opportunities, perhaps as a kind of passive resistance to the expectations of those around them.

At this point one certainly has the feeling that Romand, as one critic writes, merely ‘went a long way down a path most of us have set out on at least once’.4 It is easy to imagine, or remember, ourselves in his place.

And yet, did we really start down that same road? Were the self-destructive errors and lies of our youth really the start of a slippery slope that would see us one day club our mate to death with a rolling pin? Many critics suggest that Romand's deception started in a normal way and simply snowballed towards mass murder, but could it really have happened to any of us, as one of the terrible fates mother predicted if we didn't get up in the morning?

The part of the story that hooked Carrere in, and the part that most intrigues me too, is the time that Romand spent when he was supposed to be at the office.

The details of Romand's embezzlements, the way his double life had taken shape over the years, the roles various people had played, all that, which I would learn in good time, wouldn't tell me what I really wanted to know: what went on in his head during those days page 213 he supposedly spent in the office, days he didn't spend, as was first believed, trafficking in arms or industrial secrets, days he spent, it was now thought, walking in the woods. (22)

The thing that strikes one about Romand's secret life is that it was utterly dull. He didn't bunk off work to snort cocaine or gamble or have illicit sex, but to sit in his car, go for aimless walks, or read newspapers in cafés. These are the activities of a man at a loose end, waiting for something to begin, or simply killing time.5 They are hardly, one imagines, worth lying for.

And yet for some reason I have a very strong feeling of empathy with that grey, empty time. Carrere too felt an affinity with it, likening the experience to that of the writer. ‘I know,’ he writes, ‘what it's like to spend all one's days unobserved: the hours passed staring at the ceiling, the fear of no longer existing.’ (79)

Romand's hours in the car remind me of wagging school. For no real reason we'd catch the train into town and spend the day mucking around, bored and uneasy, but somehow elated too. We'd pick up half-smoked cigarettes from the ashtrays at the bottoms of lifts and light them on the street with matches, the taste of the match heads in our mouths. Sometimes we went to the Friendship Centre, where you could have a cup of tea for forty cents. It wasn't enjoyable, really, and I'm not sure why we did it, since I quite liked school and certainly would have had more fun there than haunting underground shopping malls and the empty foyers of movie theatres.

Other experiences that I align with Romand's ‘dead time’ are characterised by this same odd combination of exhilaration and staleness. Secretly sleeping with a dangerous ex-boyfriend, I would wake in one of his damp flats—they were always damp—and feel a certain thrill in the knowledge that no one knew where I was, and no one could know. At the same time, there was something cardboard about the experience, I felt somehow insubstantial, like an actor or double of myself.

That sense of being somewhere one cannot be, of somehow not page 214 being seen by life, comes upon the traveller too. ‘When I'm overseas,’ a friend once remarked, ‘I feel like I'm not attached to anything.’

That dead time of Romand's—and the experiences I align with it—are a kind of suspended animation, a time out of time, where one is still living, but not in one's own life. It is both an escape, and a limbo to be escaped from, both seductive and unsatisfying.

I wondered what he felt in his car. Pleasure? A mocking exultation at the idea of so masterfully fooling everyone around him? No; I was sure of that. Anguish? Did he imagine how it would all end, in what way the truth would come out, what would happen next? Did he weep, resting his head on the steering wheel? Or didn't he feel anything at all? Was he, in his solitude, becoming a machine that drove, walked, read, without really thinking or feeling, a residual and anaesthetised Dr Romand? (79)

The psychiatrists who interviewed Romand concluded that he suffers from a massive depression, which he staves off by sheltering behind fake identities. In prison, Carrere writes, ‘the character of the respected researcher has been replaced by the no-less-gratifying character of the serious criminal on the road to mystic redemption’. Like the cartoon coyote who runs off a cliff, Romand will only fall into the abyss if he looks down—and to date he never has.

In his shut-down, spiritless mode of being he exhibits the classic behaviors of a depressive, and anyone who has encountered that most banal of mental disorders may feel a degree of empathy with this devil. But despite some fellow-feeling for Romand, in the final analysis I must agree absolutely with journalist Martine Servandoni's assertion ‘that in every case, without exception, painful lucidity [is] better than soothing illusion’.6 (180) To recover himself—if such a soul exists—Romand would need to stop running and suffer the fall that followed.