Dizzy and frightened, I squeezed my eyes together only to hear a familiar voice order me to open them back up.

When I did (but boy, was it hard to get them apart), I was astonished to see Dave's reflection staring back at me off the surface of a pair of very funny looking glasses.

But my eyelids felt so heavy that I'm sure they must have fallen closed. I could feel him touching my face (but man, oh man, did my eyes burn) until I either fell asleep or maybe fainted.

I awoke some time later to find Nurse Betty helping me down from the gurney. Confused more than scared, I quickly scanned the room.

A surgeon was standing in the corner and scribbling in the chart.

He stopped and looked up at me and I recognized my face. Astounded, I tried my best to talk to him, but my mouth felt like it was filled with cotton, and then he got up and walked away.

Nurse Betty acted like she didn't recognize me, either, and instead helped me out to the waiting room where she released me to the custody of a bum I’d never seen before.

Outside was still dark. A vagabond at each arm, I found myself staggering across the parking lot.

From out of nowhere a pair of headlights came at us, and we barely had time to dodge a speeding sports car. Though not before I'd recognized the driver—that very same surgeon at the wheel of my red killer coupe!

One tramp yelled out something about "that-snoopy-burger-bastard" and then the three of us teetered off towards Friendship Park and their unlit private resort beneath the oaks.

Thus, I became a bum (although I am not one any longer).

Safe at the commune, I assumed ownership of Dave's box, his dog, his wardrobe of second-hand sweats, Hawaiian shirts, and rubber flip-flops (only one pair of work pants, zipper stuck), and, most notably, his vagabond frame of reference.

Although not completely.

I still thought myself the physician and so I doctored to my cohorts, removing their splinters and lancing their boils and, of course, teaching them how to take out my eyelid stitches.

A few days later I was detained by a park maintenance man when I tried to stop two lady joggers to ask them for spare change to make a phone call for help. I told the park man about all that had happened to me and assured him that I was, believe it or not, an abducted plastic surgeon, an MIA.

All he did, though, was to haul me back to Box City.

Within days, I sensed myself embracing the change, and this scared me no end. Whose blood was coursing through my veins? Whose air was I exhaling?

How had the skin on my lily white surgeon's hands become so dirty and calloused and scabbed? Whose stubby fingers were now wiggling from the ends of them, nails filthy and cracked cuticles?

When did I develop so much dandruff? Why did my cologne smell like B.O.?

Plus, I was worried half to death about poor Dave. If I'd become him, then by reciprocity had . . . he become me? Or, was I still both he and me, and if so, well then—Jeez!, what the hell happened to that poor old accountant so down on his luck?

Broken hearts, I knew, could mend, but what became of split personalities?

The burger-eating plastic surgeon continued his pilgrimages to our park and for a while I sensed a mental link with him, as if his disembodied consciousness had been trapped inside the body of a centaur.

But as our memory chains went on enlarging and thus grew more dissimilar by the day, I could perceive the bond weakening.

The same seemed to be happening to him, as if his preoccupation had become transfigured into an actual real-life bum, and so I guess his obsession-turned-object gradually lost its pull as a ruling passion.

In any case and for whatever reason, his appearances grew less frequent until one day they stopped all together. I continued to see him occasionally driving by the park in my fat red muscle car, but he spent less and less time looking at us and then no time at all.

(conclusion on page four)