"I'm a small fish," she says, "stuck in this small ocean. And outside that door? Outside is air--dirty, filthy yellow air, suffused in smog and sweat and sin, and it's all I want to breathe.

"So I go and I leave the water. I evolve and crawl onto land, and I breathe, and I choke, and when I can't breathe anymore I crawl back into the sea. I'm a small fish. And outside is air, and outside is death."

She's been renting the motel room for half a year now, and she says she's never strayed far. She's on the ground, sitting up against the far wall opposite the window, and the late afternoon sun shining through the vertical blinds cast prison bars of shadow across her. She's wearing a Spider Jerusalem tee-shirt a few sizes too big for her and white lace panties. On the floor next to her are an ashtray and a plastic two-liter bottle of Popov vodka. She's got one arm dangling over her knee, her fingers loosely wrapped around a Pall Mall, half its length smoked to ash. An old pair of Ray-Ban Aviators sit draped around her throat. Her voice is smoke and sandpaper, and her skin is pallid. Her hair is brown, loose, and wild. Her eyes are big and round and stare dully past me and out the window.

Outside I can see the boardwalk and the fringes of the city, the people in inline skates and tank tops, the dog-walkers and beach-crawlers and bicyclists. From here their tanned faces are a distant blur of gold.

I focus the camcorder back on her. Through the viewfinder, she appears grainy and washed away. She lifts the cigarette to her lips and inhales; the ash spills from the ember and tumbles in a cold ballet to lie at her feet. She shifts her legs, and I can see through her underwear. If she's noticed me staring, she gives no indication.

"Just like it's the people who don't start wars that suffer greatest from them," she continues, "it's the people who aren't from here that this city wounds the most. Small town folk and the pilgrims who came from the east. The kings of Main Street and the high-school beauty queens who thought they had what it took to shine in the night sky forever and ever, names in gold and faces in silver. They wanted to be legends, and they were told that they could. So they came. They came in trickles and droves, singly and in pairs, an exodus of dreamers and hopefuls, the crazy and the lost. Virgins in every sense of the word. They took their dreams and their mad wishes with them, and for most, that was everything they had, the only things they could bring along, the only things driving them in the first place."

She looks at me, perhaps for the first time, and fixes a smile. Genuine and forced at the same time. It's a pretty smile, but it looks alien on her face, confused and wandering, unfamiliar. It fades moments later as her gaze drifts, and I know that I'm invisible once more.

"They never had a chance," she says. "They were only human, after all. Children, dreaming dreams that didn't belong to them, dreaming the dreams of gods. They came with their unwise hearts and their soft flesh, and they were torn to shreds by the inhabitants of this place. Inhuman and ice. Inside, they are meat and chemical, ugly and malformed, brittle-boned and weak like insects. But on the outside they are radiant and diamond-hard, oiled and bronzed and shining like stars. Outside they are beautiful--so, so beautiful--and are made terrible for it. Aphrodite and Apollo and the androgyne, the men and women who aren't men and women but are angels ...

"Angels. A whole fucking city of them."

She tilts the bottle to her wine-colored lips and drinks the last of the cheap vodka down. The smile flits back onto her face, fragile and butterfly-winged, all broken. She smiles at the floor, at the frayed carpeting and the flakes of ash, grey as corrupted snow.

"And the worst part? Having learned all of this, the children of men still longed to be like them. We still do. We've sacrificed everything that brought us here, and not for wings nor halos, not even for the sky, but for that moment when we can look in the mirror and believe in what we say when we lie to ourselves that everything will be all right."

She pulls the shades over her eyes and falls into a stony silence. I keep recording anyway. Outside the sun begins to set, and I know that by the time I leave the room the lights of the city will be blazing, bright and burning, and shining like all the lights of Heaven.