Abbi was ovulating when these pictures were shot, and she worried about the pimples on her skin. I quoted Voltaire writing about Paris, and how the city was so dear to him that even its blemishes were something to celebrate. I wouldn't let her use make-up, and these pictures are untouched except for crop and color saturation. I want you to see her as you would see a lover troubled or anxious, on the verge of a decision, and not prettified for a party or nightclub. I need your raw reaction and for this there can be no pose or pretense. Abbi might have been made pregnant, given the pump in her blood and ovaries as I clicked these shots off, and instead she is alone, still, with her thoughts about attraction and love in dangerous places. She remembers the breezes. I remember the stifling heat. We remember things differently. (Warning: There is nudity in this gallery; please go home if you can't handle it.)

You'll be playing the role of Charlie Tana, an assassin who is having problems with her sense of guilt. We'll follow Charlie in one hectic weekend in Amsterdam and Paris as she takes care of the business of corporate pest control. And we flashback to several projects of hers which involve the poaching of rhinos, deep-ocean petroleum extraction, and poison made from the skin of cane frogs. One of the amusing aspects of the travels with Charlie is that she has just found that she made a mistake on the job two weeks previous, in San Sebastian, and appears to have hit the wrong man, snuffing out a scientist with critical information on the state of the planet's atmosphere. So Charlie is not in the best of moods when we catch up with her in Amsterdam . . .

Don't worry about acting or performance, I'm sure you've had to spend many hours being the center of attention without looking bored and that's the essential ingredient here. The first time I visited your website, perhaps two years ago, I was struck by the notes you wrote and how passionate and detailed they were about whatever you happened to be doing. If success is the child of patience, as you say, then art is the child of passion. So I know you can act, and I know you can communicate, and if the whole project is screwed up because it's too ambitious, fine, nobody will commit suicide and the effort will make for a great story. There are many people who can't be bothered to act happy or interested for a single moment, and who don't feel strongly enough to say anything about the world around them, and I've spent my whole life avoiding becoming one of them.

She's on a mission at 71 degrees north, and I arrive in a helicopter at a space research station to take pictures of her in a blizzard. I can't believe she intends to find a victim from among the scientists at the station. Isn't this a little obvious? "Oh, this will be a slow burn," says Abbi as we walk onto the black sand. "The matador makes the moment of truth, and maybe it will come in the sunshine of Spain or Los Cabos, who knows, but the blade will sink until it's stopped by bone or disgust." I laugh and ask if she knows which scientist will be her victim. "The one who exhales the most carbon dioxide," says Abbi. "Don't want to make another mistake, like the one I made with my neighbor." She shakes her head, rueful, tinged with guilt and it's an expression that lingers through the entire session.

ABBI: Sometimes, I feel guilt. That useless emotion. I do things to people which cause pain. I read this because it helps me to forget my feelings. BLUE: Why, because you can rationalize murder and destruction by reading biology? Because life is reduced to a chemical and mechanical level, without morality and that kind of thing? ABBI: Nature has no morality. Only instinct. BLUE: So your instinct is kill or be killed? ABBI: No, my instinct is to stop the killers. I breathe the air, and taste burnt plastic. When I eat, I smell burning rubber. When I sleep, I hear starvation and pain. Even in bed with a lover, I hear the tick tick tick of profit and greed. But there is no pollution when I touch my instinct, here. My belly says: Stop the killers.

One of the things I want to shoot is a scene with Charlie reading a book. In bed, with the sheets strategically falling away with each sentence she reads, she holds a book in her hands by Richard Dawkins entitled the "Selfish Gene." Charlie reads the section he writes about our bodies being disposable machines for our genes, that when the body is no longer of any use to the genetic code, it's destroyed and left behind. And then she reads a bit Dawkins writes about Bach, and the ideas he left behind in the form of music, ideas called "memes." And as she reads, Charlie says she realizes it's not a family she has to raise, but an idea. But which idea? Whose idea? And the book will be every bit as important to photograph properly as the nude model.