Skin Deep by Alan Brennert

Author:Alan Brennert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

Trina, I hope you’ll be intrigued by this story. The role you’d be auditioning for is the Room Nurse. Also enclosed are the “sides,” the scene that will be used for your audition.

Best Wishes,

Rod Serling

* * *

Trina started reading. The story was set in a hospital in what appeared to be some sort of future society that prizes “glorious conformity” and condemns “diversification.” The main character, Janet Tyler, is a woman whose face is wrapped in bandages. We never see her face, nor, according to the script, do we get a clear view of the nurses and doctors around her. Apparently, Janet is horribly deformed, and the other characters talk about her behind her back with a mix of pity and disgust. But her doctor and the room nurse are kind and sensitive when dealing with her. As Janet waits for the day when the bandages are removed to see if her treatment was successful, we learn that in this society only eleven such treatments are allowed—after that the patient must be sent to “a special area where others of your kind have been congregated.” The parallels were clear: the “special area” is a ghetto, not unlike the one in which Trina was living.

But then Janet’s bandages are removed, and contrary to expectations she is a “startlingly beautiful” woman—and when we finally see the doctors and nurses, they are the deformed ones: “Each face is more grotesque than the other.”

Trina felt a flash of anger that she had been offered this role because of her own “grotesque” appearance. But who was she kidding? That’s what she was. And by the end of the script—after Janet tries to run away, only to be gently captured by the doctor and nurse—Serling’s intent became crystal clear. Janet is introduced to a handsome man from the “special” area where her kind are segregated. At first, because she shares the same cultural standards of her society, she is repulsed by his appearance. But he gently reminds her of an old saying: “A very, very old saying … beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Trina put the script down. She was buzzing with nervous apprehension at the idea of showing her face on network television after hiding here on the pier for fourteen years. But maybe, she thought, America needed to see her face. Needed to see themselves as the monsters and to see jokers like her as real people and not freaks. It seemed to her that this script—this show—could be the equivalent of those sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, for Negro civil rights. Not a solution, but a necessary first step.

When she looked at it that way … she could hardly say no.

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