Artist	Song
They Might Be Giants	The Statue Got Me High
Stone Temple Pilots	Regeneration
John Vanderslice	Continuation
Atmosphere	Bird Sings Why the Caged I Know
Peter Bjorn and John	The Chills
Radiohead	Bodysnatchers
Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire	Tea and Thorazine
The Roots	Clock With No Hands (feat. Mercedes Martinez)
Tom Petty	Free Fallin'
Red Hot Chili Peppers	Scar Tissue
Juno	A Thousand Motors Pressed Upon the Heart
Feist	The Limit to Your Love
The Decemberists	The Perfect Crime II
Elvis Costello	Watching the Detectives
Aesop Rock	Coffee
John Vanderslice	Dead Slate Pacific

Comment:

"We're missing something."

The junkie doctor was sure of it. But maybe reason was just taking a vacation today. It would explain the patient's increasingly long list of symptoms, each more bizarre and disjointed than the last. It would explain the false memories. It would explain the almost miraculous overnight cure for his bum leg - ketamine, of all things. Most of all, it would explain why the normally intelligent hospital director had decided to solve the overcrowding problem by placing the guy who shot the junkie doctor earlier that day - and was now recovering from bullet wounds himself - in the same room as his would-be victim.

"You made her kill herself," the shooter explained inexplicably. "You told her I cheated and it drove her to suicide."

"You can either shoot me or get an apology," the retort came. "You don't get both." No sense in arguing with this passing-the-buck illogic. It reminded him a little too much of Catholic grade school and that original sin crap they pushed.

"Sometimes these things just happen," she said, attempting to explain away the new symptom. "It's inexplicable."

"Just because something's inexplicted doesn't mean it's inexplicable." There was always an explanation. Houdini did illusions, Jesus was a lunatic, and SOMETHING was causing these unpleasant symptoms. It couldn't be out of nothing.

"You think that if it's not something you can measure, that it isn't real," the shooter lamented as the junkie doctor continued his fruitless calculations. "Forgiveness from a silent father, emotional damage from a spoken word, an apple plucked from a tree when no one's around... for you, none of these things count. But it's real to them, and that makes it real enough."

"...I'm sorry."

The junkie did a double-take at his own words. "No, it doesn't." Something snapped into place. "I've solved the case."

If it's not something you can measure, it isn't real. That's the key. This he calmly explained to his team as they struggled to stop him from tearing out the innards of the patient with the untraceable symptoms. But they struggled in vain, for they and the body before him were phantoms. Phantoms have only the strength you grant them.

As the shooter's bullet fell out of the patient's hand and rolled toward him, he said goodbye to this supernatural world.

He awoke in medical chaos and recognized the rushing walls of the emergency wing. He lifted his head a bit from the fast-moving gurney and recognized the distraught director's face. He also recognized that the supernatural world had granted him one thing of value. Before unconsciousness took him again, he spoke to her the name of his savior.

"Give me ketamine."

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