Three years ago, in the spring of 2021, I was approached by a researcher named Jack Thomas, who wanted to make me a whole person. After listening as carefully as I was able — and Jack, Dr. Thomas, took great pains to explain things to me — I accepted, and embarked on my third life.

In my first life, I was born in a small timber town not long after World War Two ended. I had loving parents and an extended family in an embracing, pleasant, supportive community, and Down’s syndrome. My parents loved me all the same; my brother was… well, he was a brother, with all that goes along with that, but the torment was mild and the support was great. My community made space for me; I went to normal school (we didn’t have any other kind, tucked up in the woods as we were), I got to graduate from high school, and I worked in the grocery store as a bagger and general helper.

My parents and the timber industry died more or less at the same time, and the town followed soon after; I found myself relocated to Portland to live with my brother. This was my second life: in my forties, in a big city, with my first bus pass… I became a member of a church on the east side, I had a series of jobs that wouldn’t really have paid the rent if I hadn’t been living in my brother’s house, I was tolerated and treated as a sort of mascot, first by the weird art kids drawn to the Pacific Northwest by the fading echoes of Nirvana and then by the tech people fleeing Silicon Valley for much greener pastures. Thus my second life, which ended with Dr. Thomas and his gene therapy.

The brain is a physical system, but the mind is an information system; the function of the mind is informed by the structure of the brain, but the two are intrinsically separate, according to Dr. Thomas. So although the therapy repaired many — most — of the deficits of the Down’s Syndrome, my mind was still formed around those deficits; and so I am working through a process of reforming my mind, essentially by reprocessing my life.

Some of this reprocessing has been done in sessions, talking to people — professionals and other patients — about my experiences; most of it has been done in the solitary company of my laptop, typing hour after hour of my life, creating timelines and filling in gaps, in an effort to recontextualize the entirety of my experience, to create an experience of myself as someone with a high-normal IQ.

This is the beginning of my third life; thanks to the wonders of gene therapy, I expect it to last at least as long as either of the other two, so it’s important that I give it a good foundation.

I’ve found several interesting things, in the process; things that I was oblivious to at the time, but leapt painfully out at me as I walked back through my memories. Some of them, like the fact of my Father’s nearly-controlled, carefully-concealed alcoholism, do not make so very much difference to me now; others — my brother’s tendency to follow in our father’s footsteps — probably need to be addressed.

One experience — uncovered like an unexplainable thousand-year-old clock radio carefully sifted from the archaeological site that is my memories — is worth relating, even if I put myself in the position of being the most unreliable of all narrators, sighting the ultimate bigfoot-flying-a-UFO apparition. So be it.

It was some time in the seventies, and I in my thirties, and it was Tuesday night in the bar-and-grill. It was bachelor’s night; the Sheriff, Roger Emerson, and Father Nuñez, the priest at the Catholic church — which served a number of surrounding communities, making us a sort of religious hub — and I, sitting in a booth sharing a meal and a couple of beers, the Father and the Sheriff talking about the sorts of things thinking people who’ve known each other for decade talk about, and I basking in the companionship of it.

That night, that clock-radio of a Tuesday night, stands out because we were joined, half way through our ritual meal, by Emil Hamm, a driver for one of the logging companies, who slid into the booth next to Father Nuñez and confessed to the ritual murder of twenty-seven young women along the roads around our town.