The lake is not a lake. It’s a reservoir forty minutes outside Thousand Oaks, rented for eleven hours by a production company that also shoots car commercials and one regional casino, and at 6:40 a.m. it is the color of a melatonin gummy. In the middle of it, kneeling on a paddleboard in linen pants nobody has ever worn near water, is a 36-year-old actress named Dana Whitley, who is being paid to look peaceful while a man in a van reads her the pharma ad side effects list.
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The list is four hundred and twelve words. Legal says it has to be audible.
“Take nineteen,” says the first AD.
Dana rises. The voiceover begins — a baritone like a divorce that’s going really amicably — and gets to the liver about three strokes in. Dana keeps her chin soft. Liver damage, including liver failure. She lets the paddle kiss the water. Decreased kidney function. She does the little half-smile that focus groups in Phoenix rated “hopeful but not promising anything.”
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“Dana, love it, but you’re playing brave,” the director calls through the megaphone. “Don’t play brave. Play Sunday.”
She resets. She floats back to the mark, which is a pool noodle zip-tied to a buoy. The brand rep on shore, a woman holding an iPad like a communion wafer, says the pancreas line needs to land cleaner this time, because last take Dana blinked on it and blinking on the pancreas reads as fear.
Dana does not have the condition. Dana has an MFA, a lapsed PPO since March, and a HSA with nineteen dollars in it that she thinks about more than she thinks about her mother. She has a therapist she is ghosting over a billing dispute. The irony is not lost on her; it has simply stopped being interesting, the way everything stops being interesting after take twelve.
Take twenty-three. Adrenal insufficiency. She glides. A drone chases her at hip height. Rare but serious infections. She tilts her face toward the light the way the mood board — three Patagonia ads and one photo of a woman who clearly just got good news — demanded. Tell your doctor if you have a history of. Her ex texted at 1:40 a.m. asking if she still had his Criterion login. She does. She uses it.
Gallbladder. She laughs at nothing, luminously, at a lake, alone, for money.
“Gorgeous,” the director says. “Now give me that but like the gallbladder was your idea.”
Take thirty-one, Dana paddles past the pool noodle. Keeps going. The crew starts yelling around the thyroid. She is three hundred yards out when the voiceover guy, who cannot see the water from inside the van, continues into his pop filter, serene and unbothered, listing organs into an empty reservoir for a woman who is no longer in frame.