Daniel had played a dying man in four different productions over six years: a Victorian consumptive, a mobster, a king, and once, memorably, a computer scientist in a one-act that ran for nine performances off-off-Broadway. The directors all told him he was good at it, which meant something different each time. What they meant was that he didn't oversell it, that he made the audience feel the dying rather than watch the performance of dying. He had developed a way into the role that he did not discuss in interviews: he spent the first week of rehearsal doing ordinary things with the knowledge that this character was doing them for the last time. Eating breakfast. Walking to the subway. Reading the news. It gave his performance an attention to ordinary moments that the directors called authentic and that Daniel knew was something closer to grief rehearsal. The problem arrived between productions, in the gaps when he was not playing anyone dying. He found himself unable to entirely stop the exercise. He ate breakfast. He noted it. He walked to the subway and the walk had a weight it had not had before he started acting. His therapist said this was occupational bleed and that it would pass. It passed and then it came back with the next role and he decided, sometime around the fourth production, that he did not entirely want it to stop.