Freak Show of the Gods by Robert W. Bly

Author:Robert W. Bly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Case of the Monkey’s Mask

It was a deadly dull beginning-of-the-fall-semester departmental party—so archaic that Wentworth found himself actually holding a glass of sherry—sherry, for God’s sake!—while trapped in a conversation with his new boss, Kensington, his newfound rival, Demarest, and two more professors engaged in heated debate with one another. I noticed that though Wentworth tried in vain to concentrate on the discussion—some academic dispute about tribal rituals between two professors who had never spent more than a couple of weeks on the Dark Continent, staying in the comfortable white hotel instead of with the natives, as Wentworth always did for months at a time—his attention wandered to the mask on the wall of the faculty lounge, unprotected by a glass or frame and oddly without a descriptive placard.

It was rough-hewn out of a blond wood reminiscent in shade of an orangutan’s fur, which may have explained why the artist had chosen to carve the mask into an orangutan’s face. The artist had either never heard of sandpaper or preferred a rougher look. The surface was uneven, the edges of the mask, especially along the chin at the bottom, so ragged it was almost as if they had teeth; whenever faculty members handled it, they were well advised to wear gloves or risk splinters.

“Surprised you don’t recognize it,” drawled Demarest. Wentworth groaned. I remained neutral; being untenured, I thought it best to keep a low profile, though I could not help voicing the opinion at some point during the evening that I found the mask a hypnotically powerful piece of native Africana. It is true that I have never been to Africa; my area of specialization is Haiti.

From the moment of his arrival on campus, Wentworth was an odd man out in the anthropology department: the only non-PhD and non-scholar—I’m not sure he even had a master’s degree—he wrote bestselling books for lay readers on his adventures living with primitive tribes instead of living the cloistered life of a college professor, producing the deadly dull scholarly papers his departmental colleagues wrote for obscure peer-reviewed journals, which were read by perhaps a few hundred specialists in the field.

Had Wentworth been humble and appropriately academic in demeanor, I believe he would have passed his year as a writer-in-residence in the archaeology department without incident. But he clearly took pride in being a “real-world” (though under-credentialed) anthropologist in a group he referred to in private as “bubble-headed, ivory-tower academics.” I wondered why, if he thought so little of us, he had chosen to join us for a year. I later discovered it was a combination of writer’s block (from which he hoped his year in academia would offer some relief) and the desire to bed young women (an ample selection of which his classes, and other campus activities, would provide).

While the archaeology faculty was at best indifferent to Wentworth and at worst hostile, the students loved him. The young men wanted to be adventurers and bestselling authors like Wentworth. The women found

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