Fragments of Fahey

The kids were queued up outside a club, a liquor brothel bereft of light, rocking with the hum of drunken debauchery. Melodies coiled in the air, a copulating of inaudible speech and bass frequencies. I say kids, these figures were grasping a lost youth with office-stained hands, tobacco residue dangling from their three-day beards, tufts of stress and photocopied memories, lies inscribed on a Bullet For My Valentine t-shirt. The talk was of sisters or cisterns or some other offhand topic easily linked to a punchline. Swaying garrulous to a whiff of whiskey treasures, they dandered towards the bouncer, the gateway standing behind him. Just then, in the hazard ambience, a cascading wind flows down from above, circling at mid-torque over the crew. They break conversation, struck by the eerie whispers wrought by the wind. A summons of blue and chanting mumbles riffed and rocked. Then the wind assumes a form, stealing mystery from the air. The onlookers blink their eyes, amazed in space, for what floats in the air above their heads is none other than Jeff Fahey.

Yet before phone-cameras and digital soul-catchers can be retrieved, Fahey dissipates into the ether. Glances are fired around, person to person, did you see that? was that a face? was that him from Sketch Artist 2: Hands That See hovering in the air? They all shuddered querulous, lacking the faculties to comprehend the event. In the end, they went into the club and got pissed and fumbled a conquest or two, but never for a second did any of them forget the image of Fahey above their heads.

It’s not a rare occurrence for Fahey to appear in odd, seemingly arbitrary places at unexpected moments. Peppered throughout history are numerous such instances, Fahey flashes before Napoleon for three seconds when he’s in the bath, Fahey travels on one of Hannibal’s elephants, Fahey hangs over a crevice opened up when Pinatubo blew a few years back. History is embroidered in Fahey’s must.

But terrestrial history isn’t the only plane subject to Fahey’s fleeting visitations. Reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld we can find some 200-pages in the penetration of Fahey into the fiction. A veteran nun named Alma Edgar runs errands in the name of the Lord, driven by a young nun named Grace Fahey. Naysayers see this as Fahey invading the intimate spheres of our fictions, our fantasies and cherished dreamworlds. But Fahey has no pernicious bone in his body, his disclosure comes with the most virtuous of motives: to enlighten while effecting pristine pleasure in the eyes and ears. Grace Fahey is a fragment of Fahey interpolated into DeLillo’s opus to remind us that even when Too Hard To Die has finished, even when Epicenter gets thrown back into its box, Fahey remains nestled next to your soul, spitting up piety in a liver shadow.

One would presume a search on Google for ‘Fahey’ would bring up legions of web-altars dedicated to Jobe’s blonde and JT’s barbeque sauce. The truth is that other Faheys come up, Faheys not preceded by Jeff. Just another instance of Fahey’s fragmentation. John Fahey is a constant example, forever ready to lurch forth when you’re trying to acquire information on that one-liner Jeff said in Maniacts, the one that had you flicker ablaze with laughter.

Siobhan Fahey as well, another particle on the prism of Fahey, her name arises from the mold of Google Enterprises, reminding us that Fahey is, essentially, sexless. In fact, the Shakespear’s Sister song ‘Stay’ was inspired by Fahey yelling a “Fuck off” to his kids in Darkman 3.

Irksome so this omnipresence may seem, it is merely Fahey brilliantly permeating everything. Why would you want this state of affairs to be any different?

Kant once wrote that Fahey appears in the interstices of our world. His form twists into sight in the gap between the look-alike and the looked-like, in that moment of judder squeezed into reality by a stifled laugh, in those dwindling seconds between love and lust, wet and dry, pleasure and displeasure – he swells existence into one gargantuan Fahey-shaped monolith.

Fahey remains a surplus of the dialectic, neither thesis nor antithesis, but as an arbiter between both, and he also makes a damn good cowboy, as evidenced in Ghost Rock.