What Happened to Firefly Farber?

My parents moved out of the Falls two years after I graduated (class of ‘09, go Lynxes). So I hadn’t actually visited in person until this weekend. Me and my roommate Dylan went back and stayed with his parents for the long weekend. He and I basically lived in their basement, aka the Bunker Room, from ages 13-18 so it was like a different kinda homecoming. 

Anyway we were watching movies on their big old TV like we used to. Dylan and his stepdad had a big collection of Kung Fu movies they collected over the years at garage sales and video stores and we picked a few favorites to marathon for the night. Around like eleven, I was laying on the couch getting sleepy already, and Dylan was on the floor and hadn’t said a word for the entire movie. 

He grabbed my ankle suddenly. Scared me back awake. 

“Hey, you remember Firefly Farber?”

At first I had no idea what he was talking about, but it came back to me pretty quickly. I don’t know if everyone remembers Jeremy Farber anymore, but people around our age and maybe older probably met him a handful of times. If you don’t know, this was the biggest story in Falls for a long time. 

On July 10th, 1992, Jeremy was in a car accident with his parents when he was around nine years old. Coming back from a summer festival downtown, a drunk driver t-boned the family car and pinned it against a tree, where Mr. and Mrs. Farber died on impact (obituary link here). The Drunk Driver’s engine caught fire and he died from smoke inhalation. Jeremy was the only survivor. He had a broken femur and severe TBI (traumatic brain injury). 

He was in the hospital for almost the rest of the year recovering. Had to learn to walk, talk, and spell all over again. The people who said they went to school with him or knew his family said he was a regular kid before that. But he came out of the hospital a shell of his former self. I always heard a bunch of different things about what he was like after. Jeremy had at least two foster homes, but his medical issues made it hard for anyone to handle him financially and practically. 

Something was off about him, that was obvious. 

Most kids, whether they knew what happened or not, came up with different explanations for him. He was deaf and dumb, he had asperger's, he had a ten-second memory, he had a photographic memory, he was telepathic, he had the mind of a 2 year-old toddler, and every kind of slur you could call a mentally ill person. No one really knew what to do with Jeremy and even less so did anyone want to take the time to figure him out.

I knew about the accident by the time I was in elementary school, but I didn’t actually ever meet him or see him until the 4th grade. That would have been the second time he was arrested for interfering with a fire. Someone had left an oven on in the Fox Hill Condos on Galveston Rd one night and caused a big fire (article here). Took out half the complex. 

When the first responders arrived, some people pointed out that Jeremy had appeared out of nowhere. He wasn’t doing anything, but he was as close to the fire as he could get. Some of the neighbors tried to pull him away but he fought them off. He even tried to run from one of the firemen. It didn’t really make him look innocent.

That is until it came out what had really happened. Jeremy was let go, but now everyone had more reason to wonder what was going on with that kid. And then later that summer, a brush fire had broken out near the interstate. Someone who was evacuating the area saw Jeremy walking the freeway in the direction that the fire was blowing. Took the police a few hours to actually find him, but again, he had nothing to do with causing the fire. He was just there.

The name Firefly Farber caught on…well like a wildfire.

Jeremy always walked around town by himself. He had his routes he would go up and down the main road and you could usually find him at the library or the supermarket, or sometimes the pizza place. Always by himself. My mom would sometimes offer Jeremy rides, especially in the winter after a big snow storm. I met him a few times that way. He was always polite and said his please and thank yous to my mom in a real soft and whispery voice. She would ask him about what he was doing and where he was going, and tried her best to make him feel comfortable. 

The only time she ever had an issue with him was when he got in the car with a paper bag filled with old smelly toys. It turned out he had been on the outskirts of town and pilfered through an abandoned house. Some of the things he picked up were not well taken care of and smelled pretty bad. There was a plush rabbit sitting at the top of his sack, it was ratty and had holes in it. 

“Jeremy, it's not safe to be going through old abandoned houses. You don’t know what kind of germs and diseases those hoarder homes have.” My mom told him.

“Addison wanted me to get her stuff.” Jeremy said quietly.

“Who’s Addison?” Mom asked.

“My friend.”

Anyway, there would be periods of time where no one would see Jeremy for weeks. He’d disappear out of thin air almost. It turns out, Firefly Farber got braver and braver as he got older, and would travel out to fires outside of Manitou Falls. I think the farthest he got was somewhere in Arizona during one of their wildfire seasons. 

I didn’t see him much by the end of high school. I think the last time I saw him was when I was driving through the backroad to get home after baseball practice one Saturday afternoon. He was walking by himself, as he did. I smiled and waved. He waved back and stopped, almost like he wanted to say something to me. But I was tired, I just wanted to go home and play video games. So I rolled down my window and said, “Have a good weekend Jeremy.”

That’s the last time I ever saw him. 

So back to the present. Dylan mentions Firefly Farber again and I don’t get the connection. We had been spaced out and were watching a Jet Li movie, nothing crazy. But I told Dylan I remembered and then immediately asked, “why?”

He started rambling about a garage sale. He and his sister Desi were out looking for presents for their stepdad’s birthday or Father’s Day one weekend and came home with a box of tapes. He said they went through at least twenty of them before coming across this special VHS and that’s when Dylan got really excited. 

“I have no idea how this ended up in that box. I woulda thought something like this would be in a news archive or destroyed or something. But me and Desi freaked the fuck out when we watched it.”

I got nervous, but I wasn’t sure why. “What’s that got to do with Firefly Farber?”

Dylan was on his knees looking through a cabinet behind the TV. He turned and looked at me and his face became serious. He said, “I know what happened to him.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. “What? Did he like, die or something?”

“Dude, Jeremy straight up vanished. I thought you knew that.”

“And that tape is supposed to be what then?” I asked him because I didn’t want to see something bad. I didn’t need to see some kind of video of kids beating Jeremy up or him getting in trouble again with the police. I had no idea what Dylan was even excited about in showing me.

He put his hand out, trying to calm me down even though I wasn’t saying anything. He paused the movie and ejected it from the VCR. Then he took out this tape, all black without any labels on it, and placed it inside. The lights were off in the basement so the few minutes of black on screen was just a reflection of me and Dylan staring back.

I didn’t like it.

He pressed his finger on the FastForward button and the screen turned blue and then static, until a white background came on screen. In the regular courier typeface in the center of the screen a title came up, “CHANNEL 6 - LONGMIRE - B-ROLL”.

Longmire? Jonathan Longmire, a cameraman at the local news station. He and reporter Gina Navarro did a lot of stories together. Longmire wasn’t usually on the news segments with Gina but during the holidays, the station always went around and did a behind the scenes exclusive to show the audience the cast and crew of folks who worked at the station. Jonathan Longmire had been a cameraman for the studio for twenty-three years before he retired. 

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Gina who came on camera, but some strange young man in a jacket who I didn’t recognize. He was a passenger of a vehicle that had pulled off to the side of the road. Longmire had the camera fixed on him, although not on any tripod because the camera kept moving. The young guy in the jacket was talking excitedly about something, waving his arms around and pointing over the railing and down the overpass. 

The audio didn’t sync up perfectly and the tape itself seemed pretty scratched up. Longmire’s voice crackled. “When did the fire start?” I heard him say.

The other person’s voice was completely garbled. It was like listening to an alien language, but the camera bobbed and wobbled, as if it was sentient and understood the conversation happening between the guy and Longmire. 

Dylan pressed the button again, the video tape sped up. “Sorry, it takes a minute.”

The camera follows the young man down the shoulder of the highway briefly before the tape abruptly cut to another location and later in the evening. The sky was ablaze with orange light. The camera shook, as if intimidated by the fire itself. 

The young guy’s voice garbled, “-worse than the Hixson Fire!”

The focus zoomed out, revealing a long flaming path that cut through a patch of mostly empty land. However at the end of the road was a farm. Trucks and cars were driving away from the road as firetrucks and police cars barricaded the area. Wherever Longmire was standing from the highway, he was capturing the broad scope of the entire wildfire. The young guy in the jacket looked back briefly at the camera and his eyes turned red as the refraction of the camera’s light hit his eyes.

His eyes glowed red for a second too long before the scene cut again. They were in a car driving down a backroad that allowed Longmire to film the fire from a different angle. The flames tilted now, glowing almost pure white as the car kept moving. Over the radio of the car sounded like a police report, which meant they had to be in the news van and they were tracking the updates with a scanner. It was so hard to listen to though, it was basically incomprehensible. 

It was like they were recording their descent into hell.

Dylan pressed the pause button quickly and the entire screen froze. “There, there, there! You’ll see his shadow in a second.”

He pressed play but altered from switching to pause, trying to capture a specific instance on the video. I leaned forward in my seat looking for something out of the bright flames. As Dylan paused and restarted the video over and over, I waited for something to emerge. Little did I realize how small it would actually be on screen.

In between the pauses I could hear Longmire’s voice break through. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like he was surprised. And then the other voice, though more garbled, sounded just as alarmed. 

“Someone’s there!” 

And Dylan paused once again. His finger tapped at the upper right section of the large TV screen, focusing in on a shifting black blurb. I strained my eyes to focus, looking very hard for the shape. 

“Do you see him? Firefly?” Dylan asked after a moment.

I searched over every part of the screen where Dylan was pointing too. Sure there were shadows, but no shadow stood out from another. I held my breath as I waited for the moment to happen where I saw what he wanted me to see. But all I saw was the stream of fire that engulfed the silhouette of the forest. 

Dylan seemed disappointed by my lack of response. He rewound the tape and we watched intently as the scene unfolded once again. Garbled noises and bright white flames ravaging the upper screen. However, I still didn’t see any person in the shadows. 

We tried again for a few more minutes, letting the scene play out farther and farther. Dylan grew frustrated himself, losing confidence in what he was once so sure about. He looked for the shadows of Firefly Farber, scrolling through the video beat by beat and yet he couldn’t see anything. I got a bit annoyed with his constant pausing. Although in all honesty, the concerned distorted noises were really starting to get to me. Longmire and his companion’s voices never once became clearer and their shared distress as they recorded the fire left me feeling helpless and anxious. 

I asked Dylan to give it a break. He finally agreed and paused the video. We went upstairs to wash up before we hit the sack for another night. I came back down about twenty minutes later with my toothbrush in my mouth and a glass of water in the other hand. I squared up at the couch, ready to make a makeshift fortress out of the blankets and pillows for the night. 

I’d forgotten that Dylan didn’t turn the TV off. 

I saw the flames frozen in time, an incomplete destruction. I slumped off the couch and crawled over to the VCR. My thumb ran across the button tabs and I hit the first one. The video started up again, startling me deeply enough that I couldn’t move. Something about being this close to the TV captivated me. I don’t know why I didn’t stop it and hit the eject button. 

I don’t know what was different this time.

But I saw a shadow. Not where Dylan had so prominently pointed for several minutes when he was trying to show me what was likely the last recorded instance of Jeremy Farber chasing another fire, but within the flames itself.

Three shapes, tall and shifty. Moving slowly into the flames, farther and farther into the fire, disappearing into forever. 

And then I heard his voice.

The softest whisper, breaking through the static. “I have to go this time.”

It wasn’t possible. How could I hear such a distinct whisper amidst the chaotic footage and the sounds of the vehicle, Longmire and the driver, and every little crackle from the tape? 

Jeremy, why did you tell me this? Who were you going to this time? Is this who you were looking for every time you chased a fire? 

God, I hope they were waiting for you.