The Handler

The Buick’s air conditioning has been failing since August. He drives with the window down and his left elbow on the sill, and the desert air at four in the afternoon is the temperature of a fresh cup of coffee. He has the manila folder on the passenger seat under a copy of the Albuquerque Journal so it will not look like a folder if anyone walks past the car at the diner.

The folder contains nine pages. Two are photocopies of a 1954 memo that does not exist, prepared by the Phoenix office on letterhead that was retired in 1971, with a typewriter that has the correct period drift on the lowercase e. Four are diagrams of a facility cross-section, hand-drafted by a contractor in Maryland who has never been to New Mexico, showing seven sublevels and a tram. Three are a transcript of a conversation between two officers about a containment incident in 1979. He has read all nine pages eleven times. He could recite the transcript.

He has been doing this for six years.

He thinks about that as he turns south off Tramway onto Central. Six years. When he started, Bennewitz was a sandy-haired physicist in a short-sleeved button-down who ran a small electronics company and had a private pilot’s license and a wife who answered the phone politely. The first meeting had been at the man’s office. Bennewitz had shown him the oscilloscope traces from the antenna on his roof — the signals he had pulled out of the air over Manzano — with the cheerful pride of an amateur who believes he has stumbled onto something a professional will be glad to see.

He had been glad to see them. That was the part that had concerned the office. The signals were real. The signals were operational. The narrative he was then instructed to construct around the signals was the cover.

The cover had grown. It had grown for six years. There were now, in the body of material Bennewitz had assembled from what the handler had fed him and from what Bennewitz himself had imagined under the pressure of being fed it, a base beneath the mesa at Dulce, a treaty, a war in the sublevels in 1979, a population of grays and a population of reptilians and a vat-grown human-animal stock the literature had begun to call nightmare hall. Bennewitz had published much of it. Other people had published the rest. It was, by the autumn of 1986, the largest single body of UFO mythology in North America, and the handler had written, or sketched, or seeded, perhaps forty percent of it.

He passes the cemetery on the south side of the road and slows for the light. He thinks about the contractor in Maryland who drafted the diagrams. The contractor works for a cutout that works for a cutout that works for an office in Northern Virginia that the handler has never visited and whose director he has never met. The diagrams come to him in a courier envelope every three weeks. He has not asked where the contractor gets the architecture. He has assumed, for six years, that someone in Northern Virginia is simply inventing it — that there is a man at a drafting table making up sublevels because sublevels make Bennewitz happier than the truth, which is that the signals are routine telemetry from a weapons program the Air Force does not wish to discuss.

He has assumed this. He realizes, sitting at the red light at Central and Wyoming with the air the temperature of coffee on his left arm, that he has never actually verified it.

The contractor draws very specific things. The tram, for instance, runs at a stated gradient of one in twenty-two between sublevels four and five. The containment transcript references a pressure differential of 0.31 atmospheres across a specific bulkhead. There is, on page six of the diagrams, a notation in a hand that is not the contractor’s hand — a small correction to a ventilation run, initialed RKB — that the handler has looked at every three weeks for two years and never asked about.

It occurs to him, at the light, that the apparatus producing his disinformation may be producing it the cheap way. That it may be easier, for whoever is running the apparatus, to lean on a real schematic and degrade it than to invent a plausible one from scratch. That the man at the drafting table in Maryland may not be inventing. That the man in Maryland may be redacting.

The light turns green. He drives the last six blocks to the diner.

Bennewitz is already in the booth at the back, by the window, where they always sit. The handler can see him through the glass before he parks. Bennewitz has lost weight again. The collar of his shirt stands away from his neck by half an inch. He is turning a sugar packet end over end on the formica, the way a man does when he has been waiting and does not want to look at the door.

The handler parks the Buick. He sits for a moment with the engine off and the folder on his lap. The cicadas are very loud in the cottonwoods behind the diner. He thinks about the initials on page six. He thinks about the gradient of one in twenty-two. He thinks about Bennewitz’s wife, who no longer answers the phone politely, and about the pilot’s license, which has been suspended, and about the oscilloscope, which is still on the roof.

He picks up the folder. He gets out of the car. The bell over the diner door rings as he opens it, and Bennewitz looks up, and the handler slides into the booth across from him and sets the folder on the seat beside his hip, and the waitress comes over with two laminated menus, and he orders coffee, and she goes away, and Bennewitz says, Well?

The handler looks at him across the table for what is, by the clock on the wall behind Bennewitz’s head, eleven seconds.

Then he begins to speak.