Page A1: NC trucker becomes emblem of new phenomenon

It was the wee hours of the morning on December 26th, and Christopher Barton was driving his 18-Wheeler home to spend a late Christmas with his family. He was only a twenty-minute drive from his Charlotte, North Carolina home when he stopped in at a convenience store for a cup of coffee and a scratch-and-win ticket. He was about to become part of a very different sort of lottery.

"It was about a quarter after four in the morning and I was really lookin' forward to gettin' home and wakin' the kids up," said Barton who, at 6' and almost 230 lbs was a picture-perfect trucker in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. "[Barton's wife] Marjie'd been up all night and I'd just called her on the cell phone sayin' to expect me home soon, and that I had presents."

Barton stood at the counter scratching the ticket. When he found out he hadn't won anything, he was about to leave.

"Then all'a sudden," he goes on to say, "I get this funny feelin', like I'm fallin' or drownin' or somethin', but really it was like when you stand up too fast. I was a bit concerned, but as a trucker I figured it was just tiredness, and it passed, so I made my way back to the truck."

But when Barton got to the truk, he found something was missing.

"I'd laid my keys on the counter and I thought I'd left 'em in there, so I went back in, grabbed 'em, and drove off."

Barton arrived home at nearly 5 AM, and called for his wife. She came from the kitchen to embrace her husband, but instead shreiked with horror when she saw him.

"It wasn't my Christopher at all," Marjie recalls, "I thought I heard him call my name but when I went to see him, some other man was there. I nearly called the police!"

Christopher watched on, mystified, as his very own wife ran screaming through the house in search of a baseball bat she uses to ward off intruders. Little did he know, the intruder was him; he'd become the first victim of what has since been called, "swapping."

As Barton puts it, "I went to the mirror, and what do you know? I see a brown guy staring back!"

Swapping is a recent phenomenon that causes otherwise regular people to be, all at once, transported into the body of another person. Barton had swapped into the body of Rajiv Patel, the clerk at the 7-11 where Barton had stopped. Since this incident they've occurred a number of times and make no regard to age, creed, sex or geographical location.

"Hypothetically," said Dr. Arthur Gulf, who has been studying the swaps, "You could find yourself as a NASCAR driver in the middle of a race, or as a sailor at sea. The unpredictable nature of the swaps makes them very dangeorus. Since the Barton incident, the distance between swaps has, on average, been growing."

The first difficulty the Bartons found was in convincing anybody. "They all thought I's crazy!" laughs Barton, whose voice twangs between Hindi and 'North Cackalackie.' "Then a few weeks go by and more and more these stories start goin' on the news. Suddenly I realize what's happened to me."

As the cause of the swaps is yet unknown, there is know known way to reverse them. As of yet, however, Dr. Gulf has made a few observations.

"Of the few dozen that have occurred," Gulf says, "None have happened during sleep, so nobody seems to be in danger of waking up someplace strange. None of the swaps have occurred between the human and animal kingdom, either."

While researchers scratch their heads in search of the cause, the government is making steps to accommodate the situation. The United Nations is working with world governments to establish a series of International Bureaus to apply a bureaucratic process for swapping.

Said a government official, "Swapping represents a potentially dangeorus x-factor to international diplomacy, not to mention a disruption of their own day-to-day lives. We're looking to have every swapee register and carry a card to indicate who they are and what they can and cannot do." Extreme swaps will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, as precendent builds up.

"There will be many more to come," cautions the Dr. Gulf, "There are more and more reported swaps every day, and that number certainly doesn't look to be slowing down." The Doctor re-iterates the likelihood of a "life-changing" swap by saying, "7 out of 10 swaps thus far have occurred across gender lines."

As the Bartons try to get on with their lives amidst testing and near-obsessive media coverage, Marjie laments, "Sometimes, I don't feel like he's my husband any more. He looks at me with those eyes of his and I don't see him. But then he'll do or say something and I'll think, 'That's my Christopher.'"

Barton has retained his old job, but noted an unexpected change. "I've been findin' I can't eat the same types of foods no more, I don't take cream in my coffee and I can't keep a burger down, which is hard since I love a good steak," observing the fact that Patel was on a strict Hindu diet. "But at the end of the day, I'm the same guy I always was. I still love my kids, and they still love me. I just hope other people who get dealt this hand get it as good as I do."