ILLEANA HAS BEEN sitting on the ground with her legs straight out in front of her for more than two hours. Her mouth is full of artificial snow, that stuff they make from paper. Breathe through your nose, they told her; it’ll be fine. It’s not fine. Her back hurts. Her mouth is incredibly dry. She’s buried to her neck in artificial snow, and she isn’t allowed to wriggle or even blink. For a while she was picking at the cuticle on her thumb with the nail of her index finger, just to have something to do, but eventually that caused a minor avalanche and the director yelled at her because it distracted Sam from pretend crying, which he was doing because her mouth was full of artificial snow. Sam usually does TV, the kind where everything is big, and whenever he cries he cries too much, and the director has to explain to him that in 1972, in South America, a thirty-seven-year-old man would not have cried like that.

Illeana is being dead. She has been being dead all day today and half of yesterday. If Sam could only figure out how to cry more stoically, they could get on with the next scene and her work would be done, she could go home. She would love to go home. The snow in her mouth is fake, but the rest of the snow is real, this is a real glacier, and it’s the coldest she’s ever been, she thinks.