A standalone novel
Candid
A man lets four teenagers take his picture at a theme park. Fourteen months later his face is working for somebody else, and there is no one to accuse.
Candid
Del Ardoin is thirty-three, good at his job, and one season away from people knowing his name. On a hundred-and-one-degree Saturday at a theme park outside New Braunfels, four teenagers ask to take his picture. He lets them. Walking away, for no reason he will ever be able to explain, he does a bad impression in a voice that is not his.
Fourteen months later his face is selling things he has never heard of, in languages he does not speak, to people he will never meet. The face is his. The voice is his. The spiral running up his left side — five numerals he chose at nineteen, and the one thing about himself he has never told anybody — is rendered correctly, to the digit.
There is no law that helps him. There is nobody to sue and nobody to accuse. There is a spreadsheet he cannot stop adding to, a wife who asked him for a number he would not give her, and a son who has started counting the months.
Then a man drives all night from Tulsa, stands on the front step with a folder under his arm, and tells him what his face has been doing.