The Borrowed Saint
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About This Book
A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change.
Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him something that should be impossible: the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent. He will never smell his own skin again.
Over the next fifty years, Asa consumes more than a hundred faces. Each acquisition deposits a blueprint into his nervous system and extracts an irreversible sensory payment. He rises through political consulting into institutional power, constructing public personas for candidates and eventually designing the face that governance itself presents to the world. His most potent invention is the kindness persona, a performed goodness so convincing that audiences worship it on contact. The warmth their trust generates is narcotic. His body is allergic to it.
Brown. Amber-flecked. Unchanged since birth, unchanged through every face.
The Architecture of a Borrowed Life
Inside Asa, the consumed are accumulating. Phantom gestures surface in his hands. Stolen smells flood rooms that should be scentless. A murmur builds from whisper to chorus, the collective output of a hundred absorbed lives pressing against the walls of his consciousness. His composite face begins to slip in public. Features shuffle. The archive is spilling.
Through it all, one figure recurs: Harlan Moeck, a boy from elementary school whose authentic kindness Asa could observe, catalog, and never replicate. Harlan appears three times across five decades, each time performing the same function that Asa's entire apparatus cannot produce: genuine goodness without performance, without strategy, without expectation of return. Harlan digs the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.
Structured in five sections that mirror organic processes (The Seed, The Branch, The Tree, The Fire, The Ash), the novel tracks a life from its first transformation to its final dissolution, with a clinical appendix that reframes everything the reader thought they understood about Asa's mother, Cordelia, and the distance between them that was permanent and that was not her fault and was not his fault and was the fact of their lives.
The Five Skins
Section 1: The Seed · Childhood in Decker, Ohio. The bathroom mirror. The first shift. Cordelia's closed face. Harlan Moeck in the front row. The discovery that faces are currency and different faces purchase different things.
Section 2: The Branch · Adolescence in Kellam. The composite face. Garrett Voss and the first whole-body consumption. The party on Caldwell Avenue. The consumed begin to press outward.
Section 3: The Tree · Adulthood in the city. Cormac Phelan and the grammar of public performance. The discovery that goodness generates worship. Leda Carraher, who notices the absence. The burn begins.
Section 4: The Fire · Institutional power. The corridor. The kindness persona's threshold contracting to minutes. The shuffling in the back of the car. Harlan at the conference table, unrecognized. The composite cracking.
Section 5: The Ash · Dissolution. The consumed break through. The public collapse. A figure before a mirror. Rest. Reflection.
On the Lability
The novel closes with a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa's condition in medical language. Congenital morphological lability affecting the craniofacial complex. Each reconfiguration accompanied by permanent, irreversible sensory loss. And an addendum, filed separately, about a woman who came to a clinic in 1987 and asked whether the condition could be passed to a child. The attending physician's marginal note is illegible except for two words: carrier and contained.
Prognosis: structural failure.
From the Text
The boy stood in the bathroom and looked at the mirror and the mirror looked back and neither of them was satisfied.
His face was not fixed. And if his face was not fixed, then the world's reaction to his face was not fixed either.
He was eight years old and this was the closest he would come to understanding his own limitation. He would spend the rest of his life building better and better replicas of windows, and people would praise the craftsmanship, and light would never pass through any of them.
Author Interview
Related Reading
The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back
The Ditch That Carries the Water: On Invisible Labor and the Faces We Build Over It
The Applause of Fools: How Erasmus Predicted Every Century After His Own
About the Author
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He is the author of the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, Abandoned in Place, What the Light Carries, Beautiful Numbness, Passage Land, and The Failed City, among other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.
He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City.
See Also
Fractional Fiction Series · EleMenTs Trilogy · Touching Everything, Holding Nothing · Passage Land · The Last Living American White Male · About David Boles