I had just arrived in Ecuador, one night in May of 2001, a few days after having finished, with Jacob, my classwork at Columbia, when I received an urgent message to call home immediately. I guessed at once that someone had died, and my knowledge of Jacob's life was enough that I guessed it was him. I was right, of course, and felt guilty to be right: if I had been able to make that kind of guess, hadn't I also been able to help avert this end?

I'd tried, a little. Jacob and I hung out together, just the two of us, only twice. Once we talked about Wittgenstein. Jacob was well-versed (he alludes to Wittgenstein in the program to the Columbia Thesis readings). I was muddling through a class. But on the other occasion we talked about addiction. That was during the time that he was working to stay clean. I suggested that Jacob move to some place where he didn't have the beeper number of a dealer. He reminded me that most of the people who could give him support were living in New York. As if to confirm that idea, I told him he should give me a call, at any hour, if he ever felt tempted to use. He could come over to my apartment and drink beer instead, or tea.

I think he smirked at the mention of tea. My memory is not strong enough that I'm sure. In any case I always felt, with Jacob, that he was looking straight through me, and, having read his fiction over two semesters, I didn't imagine that there were any stupidities or awkwardnessess of mine, any betraying tics of speech, that he could fail to notice. His satirical instinct seemed so fierce and pure that anything that made it into his Distortion Lens seemed mocked just by its inclusion there, as if to catch Jacob's eye was also to be ridiculed. This meant that when it seemed he liked me, or my writing, I felt curiously spared, granted clemency. It was like looking at his enormous, obviously powerful forearms: there was huge strength gathered there, but no harm was threatened.

Yet I never got to know Jacob well enough to understand his kindness and gentleness (traits he displayed as a person, and not so much as a critic). Those things were abundantly evident, but what thought was behind them wasn't clear, not to me. He may have been, in this sense, like his novel, where the protagonist, a desperate and determined Mormon, seems—in what I read—unable to defend his own faith to himself. It fascinated me about Jacob that he had both a ruthless gaze and a easy, forgiving laugh. I wonder whether he could, intellectually, defend his laughter to himself, when intellectual defenses were so important to him. I don't know; as I say, I didn't get to know him well enough. He and I were part of a group, that last semester, who had lunch together. And we hung out those two times. Our friendship was like a badly-made story: a beginning, an end, no middle.

Even the end has seemed unreal. Being out of the country, I couldn't attend the funeral, and since classes had ended at Columbia (the only place where I knew Jacob), there was never even an informal occasion, like a class he missed, for me to acknowledge that Jacob was really and truly gone. Not going back to Columbia anymore myself, I half-imagined that if I did, I would run into him there.

So I continue to think of Jacob often, almost as if he were alive, and even if I knew him so little that I called him Jacob, not Jake, as his older and closer friends did. I find that I am still trying to catch up with him as a reader, reading the books he denounced with great, casual authority ("a municipal potboiler," he said of Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City) and at least one of the very few books he praised without reservation and wanted to emulate (Gaddis's JR). I also find that I hope what I am writing—not here, elsewhere—would win a bit of his praise, and doubting that it would. Specifically I think of him whenever I use a semicolon. He didn't say he disliked my use of semicolons. He said he "abhorred" it.

I admired what Jacob wrote, particularly his dialogue—the ear he had—and his outraged comedy. But anyone so intelligent, complex, and conflicted as he was, does not achieve his own unique style in a year, or two years. The slick and simple, laconic mode of the workshop would have misrepresented a sensibility like his. And to arrive at his own mode would have taken more time then he ended up having.

I can almost hear the sound of his future prose. I would recognize it. But I can't ever write it, and can't ever read it.

There is something Emerson says in his essay on "Character," where he also writes that "The authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his books." He writes that "somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all performance. The largest part of their power was latent."

Something that's true of anyone who dies young seems to me particularly and keenly true of Jacob: what he was, was also what he was going to be. In that way, maybe even the people who knew him best feel something like the longing that I feel to have known him better. As it happens, I got only a glimpse of the twenty-nine year glimpse the world got of him: a fragment of a fragment. To mourn him in this way is less intense that to mourn someone we knew well—but intense enough all the same that I put off writing this, making even this acknowledgement, as if it were a task from which I might be reprieved. No such luck. So I miss Jacob, I have to admit I will go on missing him, and that's all.

May 31, 2001