It all started with the lost week. No, wait. It all started with the episode, the day before the lost week. The episode consisted of Mr. Smith suddenly being possessed in a fit of shouting and screaming in some language Mrs. Smith was quite sure wasn't English. They took him to the hospital, but the doctors didn't find anything amiss in the CAT-scans, and Mr. Smith seemed to have returned to normal, so they sent him home. Mrs. Smith instead called on the local preacher, who told Mrs. Smith to keep an eye on her husband – he might be speaking in tongues.

Alternatively, the preacher noted, he was possessed by the devil. Despite Mr. Smith's assertions that he was 'perfectly fine', the next morning  Mrs. Smith woke only to find her husband missing. The car was gone, as was a change of clothes, so the police assumed he had simply up and left the distraught Mrs. Smith. However, after 48 hours and no contact, a 'missing person' notice was put up.

A week later, Mr. Smith was recognized, based on a milk carton picture, in Wisconsin, three state lines away. He was in a state the police officers picking him up described as "distressed". He was, however, able to remember where he lived and his wife, who he was very happy to see again. When pressed for an explanation by the media, he claimed to have had some kind of psychotic break with reality and that he would begin seeing a psychiatrist.

To Mrs. Smith, he explained the situation in earnest. He had, he said, been possessed by a spirit claiming to be over 5000 years old, and who had once been Emperor of China. Said spirit had informed him it wanted to die, but that it first had to take care of some business, and needed Mr. Smith's body for it. Once the business was done, the spirit promised it would let Mr. Smith continue with his life as normal and, in the process, gradually fade away.

The week had been one of nigh incomprehensible adventure, as the spirit  - in Mr. Smith's body – had visited and talked to a cavalcade of people, in various languages, apparently tying up some kind of loose ends. There had even been an incredibly tense meeting with the Chicago Yakuza,  that nonetheless ended amicably. At the end of the week, the spirit relinquished control over Mr. Smith's body back to Mr. Smith, and told him it would now attempt to disappear into the background and, as it were, 'die'.

Now, Mr. Smith explained (quite distressed) to Mrs. Smith, he didn't want that to happen any more! The week had proven to him many a thing, among them that he himself and his life (and consciousness) wasn't much compared to a being that had lived for five thousand years, jumping from body to body whenever the old body died. He explained he was trying to convince the spirit to live on, but with little success.

Mrs. Smith  quietly called the men in the white coats to come take her husband away. As they hauled her away, he shouted at her, eyes wide open: "No! They're not going to let me kill myself! Come on! He'll die! He'll die if I don't kill myself!"

Five years later Mr. Smith was released onto the streets, no longer deemed a danger to society nor himself. After two years, he started saying the spirit was dead, and fell into a depression. After three, he started asking to be let out (now that the spirit was well and truly dead). After five, he said there had never been a spirit.

That, of course, was a lie. The no-longer Mrs. Smith had gotten the house and the kids in the divorce, and had left Mr. Smith with just a deposit of cash consisting of the halves of things that needed to be sold to be divided (the car, the TV, things of that nature).  That suited Mr. Smith fine. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to prove to the world (and, admittedly, to himself) he was not insane.  The spirit had told him there were others. Many others. All he needed to do was find them. His first stop would be that Yakuza in Chicago...