Apophenia, Summer 2007

I spent the summer of 2007 at Princeton. It felt something like a fairy tale after my state college education had given way to a res life job, managing a university dorm for nine months out of the year, to find myself at this Ivy League institution with its big stone buildings and statues of tigers.

It was my first time out of New York State for longer than a vacation. It’d be a long stretch away from my then-girlfriend, too, after our first year living together which had been about equal parts rocky and intimate in cycles that may or may not have caused one another.

When I look back, I consider that month apart, the both of busy at work, rarely finding or making time to talk to one another, foundational to our breakup a year later. The breakup probably had more to do with my move out of state that following winter and falling for someone new that spring, but look back at wide enough swathes of your life, and if you’re like me you start making connections.

Apophenia is a common psychological phenomenon, the crux of which is people fabricating patterns and causal relationships between experiences and observations. People want to find order and meaning. To understand their lives as stories. But sometimes something random happens. Then something else. There may be idiosyncratic overlaps and similarities—a-butterfly-flaps-its-wings-in-the-Amazonian-rain-forest-and-indirectly-causes-a-tornado-in-Texas-level chains of cause and effect. But apophenia facilitates leaps and through lines no objective outsider would call rational.

Apophenia. It’s the kind of term I thought I’d have learned at Princeton.

My first day at Princeton, I learned the campus wouldn’t allow a fire alarm to sound without an actual emergency. My job and my conscience alike required a fire drill and the resolution was for the RAs under my direction to clear out kids from the hall by yelling fire drill at them over and over while corralling them out their designated stairwells and exit doors to arrive at a courtyard where I stood waiting, holding my laptop computer over my head, playing a CD recording of what an actual fire alarm in the building would have sounded like.

Midway through playing the alarm track, I got an AOL Instant Messenger notification. The screen was far away enough for no one to see my girlfriend saying hi, but the sound was universally familiar enough for everyone to know what it was. For teenagers to snicker.

But in between learning there would be no actual alarm and when the RAs arrived on campus for training, and the subsequent arrival of the students, my boss disappeared.

My boss had been the rock of those first days, returning from the previous summer and boasting a reassuring combination of competence and level-headedness I knew by then was uncommon among people in upper management positions. She up and left one evening in a manner that I could only assume reflected some family emergency. She never said goodbye to me and I never saw her again. Her boss would wind up sticking out the summer in her role—rather than returning to the central office to manage from afar as he ordinarily would have. He confided in me when we were friendlier that she never explained her departure to him either, even after the summer when he followed up in equal parts to give her an out and maybe be allowed to work for the program again, and to scratch his own itch of curiosity.

She left and Chris Benoit killed his wife, son, and himself days later.

Chris Benoit existed a world away from our summer academic camp and from Princeton. He was a WWE Superstar respected as one of the most sound technicians of his generation, gifted in athleticism and at figuring out the mechanics of manipulating bodies in front of a live audience; as hard a worker as anyone in the business had ever been. I can’t say he was my favorite wrestler, but I liked him.

Then he was gone.

Benoit wasn’t just dead, but as the details of what he’d done in his final days on earth crystallized, he momentarily became as famous as Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin, but not as a people’s champion but at best as someone whom steroids and brain damage had done a number on, and at worst as a cold-blooded killer of a woman and defenseless child.

When my work at Princeton settled some, I made it to a drugstore for snacks and sodas and a copy of People magazine with Benoit’s face on the cover. Stealing time to learn more about the Benoit murder-suicide was an absurdity all its own—a summer busy enough not to obsess over the biggest wrestling news of my lifetime the way I would have over WrestleMania or SummerSlam, or a particularly good episode of Monday Night Raw at most other points in the year.

I tried to explain about that summer to my girlfriend. I talked about those tumultuous few days of my boss disappearing and the Benoit tragedy and how the two events would always be linked in my mind and maybe the end of Benoit’s life could shed some light on the degree of catastrophe that must have hit my boss’s life for her to abandon her post so suddenly and completely.

It was a moment that bespoke our disconnect—the girlfriend I’d been with for three years by then, who didn’t understand my obsession with or the degree to which I understood the world through a filter of professional wrestling (not least of all because I’d hidden these factors); the summer months apart; it all resulted in a sense of apophenia I didn’t know what to label and that she couldn’t follow.

No, of course I didn’t think my boss was involved in or connected to the Benoit murder-suicide. But I did think her departure and the killing spoke to one another in ways undeniable, too profound to be entirely coincidence. The world turned and these things happened. These things rocked me.

It was a summer of playing alarms through laptop speakers. It was a summer of crushing cockroaches in dilapidated old dorm rooms, and a summer I had an ant infestation in my private bathroom that out of busy-ness and exhaustion I let go for a week before a morning of going through half a roll of paper towels hunting and killing every individual one I could find. It was a summer I bought the So I Married an Axe Murderer soundtrack from a used music store in town and listened to the tracks by Big Audio Dynamite and Toad the Wet Sprocket over and over again.

Maybe murder was in the air that summer. Or at least an end of things I’d known and expected and taken for granted.

Maybe there were no connections at all.