Beth Gordon

It’s three days after my birthday & I’m explaining my life to JD. Or if not my life, exactly, I’m trying to explain my job. Resumes & executive assessments & the way I am paid a living wage to judge my fellow humans. I’m a magic mirror of half-lies: a metal detector for all the things left unsaid. A cog in the corporate elevator. A repository for thousands of life stories reduced to what they can remember about their last three jobs. I’m not saying I’m proud of this. I’m saying there’s a poison called money that I swallow every day. I’m saying that there are only two degrees of separation between my existence & every person who has let me wade in the dangerous waters of their past. It’s three days after my birthday and we are talking about every job we’ve ever held. JD tells me that I don’t know about the levels. He used to write test questions for the SAT organization. Another sanctioned method of judgment. He said the first level is basic recall. Implying that memory is the lowest form of functioning. Implying that everything I’m writing here is suspect. Memory is like an escape room. Which is a weird thing for me to say because I would never pay money to be trapped inside unfamiliar walls & asked to work with a team of my best friends to find the unlocked exit. I’ve always been bad at directions. When my youngest daughter was six years old, she led me from one end of Six Flags to the other because my contact lens had crawled up under my left eye lid & I needed to find a mirror. Even without this impediment I would have not been able to retrace our steps back to the entry turnstiles, back to the well-lit, poorly cleaned bathroom so that I could retrieve a tiny silicone-hydrogel bowl, spit on it, return it to its orbit & be visually functioning again. Did I mention my daughter was six? Did I mention that she held my hand & ignored me when I said, “are you sure we shouldn’t go left?” I promise you this is true. In the taxonomy of learning I live at the bottom of the pyramid. Bound to my memories like Rumpelstiltskin to his straw. There’s gold inside my hippocampus I’m sure of it. JD says this is just the beginning. The second level is understanding. As in – do you understand all the ways a person can die? As in – do you understand that every religion believes in the survival of the soul? As in – do you understand that there are zero degrees of separation between a Buddhist & a Baptist? Now construct a multiple-choice question. Provide diagrams & illustrations & flow charts. The way that every moment of my life flows like honey into the sticky current. The way that every funeral I’ve been to flows like a river of blackbirds. The way that my daughter & I returned to Hurricane Harbor & stood underneath the artificial waterfall like freshly baptized converts. If understanding is evolution, then I must understand that if I were a murderer, I’d use poison. Something slow acting like ricin. Or beautiful & toxic like oleander. Or painful & cruel like arsenic. Pay attention: this will be on the final exam. If I were a murderer, I’d make a wrong turn when leaving the scene of the crime & end up in an empty field, low-flying airplanes lighting my way. If this is a hypothetical scenario. If the mirror behind the airport bar is a portal to my other lives. If I stayed home that night & refused the reaper’s persistent knock. If memory is a nest full of sleepy wasps poisoned by smoke. Then what? If I were a good person, I’d never put out traps for spiders & mice. But I do. If I were a good person, I would have no fear of my judgement day. But I do. I tell JD I’ve reached my limit. I’ll never advance to the third level. Instead I live with one simple truth. The answer to every single question is all of the above.