David BolesThe Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back
I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.
That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.
The Mechanism
Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.
Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.
I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.
The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.
The Kindness Problem
At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.
Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.
Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.
Harlan Moeck and the Ditch
Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.
Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.
I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.
Cordelia’s Secret
Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.
The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.
That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.
I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.
The Mirror on the Back Cover
One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.
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 lives in New York City.
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