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the Burger King billboard when we got off the highway—you’re not really hungry but you want a Double Whopper with Cheese anyhow. There’s a part of your mind that’s singing ‘I Want to be Sedated’ and there’s a part that’s still in Fallujah, in a firefight. The machine guns and rockets are echoing in the background behind everything else.”
    “I’m not in Fallujah,” I said but he turned back to driving without a reply. It took a few seconds to hear them—the guns, the rockets, the shouting and screaming and all the rest, everything he’d described, all there, all at once, once I listened. I realized I didn’t really listen a whole lot. Especially to the Fallujah part. I didn’t want to listen to that.
    “Don’t be stubborn,” Mr. Dulles said. “You saw me do it with the landlady and you knew it for what it was. Your rational mind resists but your instinct knew, right then and there— he’s reading it in her face . That’s what you told yourself and you were 90% right. A minute ago, when I told you I wasn’t making fun of you—you hadn’t accused me out loud. I’ve done that several times before, though maybe not so openly.” He leaned in and I waited for my head to heat up but he only wanted to talk. “The most important thing is: you knew . You not only knew I was reading the landlady, you knew she damned her memory that she couldn’t remember me. You knew when Mark was standing at the peephole of his door. You knew he was still drunk from the night before.”
    “I could hear him slurring,” I said. I shrugged, apologetic, in Tauber’s direction and he shrugged back. I’ve known other people over the years who drank from habit—after a while, their dignity gets pretty flexible.
    “Some people slur all the time,” Max said. “Some people have speech impediments. You weren’t guessing—you knew .”
    “What are you saying—I’m a mindreader?”
    “I’m saying everybody mindreads,” he answered. “Almost everybody. They’re just primitive about it. This is scientific fact, not fact published in medical journals, but fact nonetheless, science that’s been distributed for years in manila envelopes, hand to hand in code to those with a need to know. And if it’s ever published, if the New England Journal of Medicine ever provides an acceptable rationale, mindreading will be routine in three years.” He tapped the steering wheel as he talked and I realized we were in a moving car, on the highway again. I’d gotten so drawn in I’d lost all sense of the world, of where we were.
    “You mean we’d all be doing what you just did?”
    “Hell no,” Tauber shook his head.  “That’s like sayin’ anyone could paint the Mona Lisa if you give ‘em paint and canvas. Some people’ll do it better and quicker.” He looked at Max. “He’s very quick.”
    “Most of them would justify their wishful thinking and call it mindreading,” Max said. He looked over to see if I was satisfied.
    I was nowhere near satisfied. This was without a doubt the most ridiculous explanation of anything I’d ever been asked to swallow. There was not one thing about it that felt slightly real—except that it did explain every weird thing that had happened since morning. Once I took the whole thing in wide-angle, I realized I had to either doubt everything that had happened since Dave was shot or this was the best explanation I could think of. It was the only explanation that didn’t force me to doubt my own sanity any more than usual.
    “When you first told her about the check, she wasn’t convinced. She didn’t want to check on it. You made her.”
    “Bravo,” Mr. Dulles said. “Good work. Yes, I made her.”
     “The job was readin’ minds and planting thoughts in other people’s minds,” Tauber explained. “He made her think checkin’ was her idea.”
    Mr. Dulles grimaced. “I still think we should stop,” he said, talking to Tauber. “Beyond this, he becomes an asset—for