A week ago, I got an email from my friend Bruce. He's one of my oldest colleagues in the academic world I half-house myself within, a bicycle-riding, basketball-playing poli sci professor with a beard that makes him look whack-a-do and a shock of hair that is its equal. The email read: Please call me immediately. The letter was cc'ed to other people who knew me. If anyone knows where Tom is, it read, please have him call me immediately.

When I read this, I was sitting in the parking lot of an Indiana supermarket. The email was four minutes old. It felt grave. Someone's died, I thought. It's someone I know. The world, the one where I'd been contently rushing off to grab two artichokes, receded. Everything seemed about six feet from my face. Cement gray skies. Bad haircuts. Shopping carts lousy with wobble. I called Bruce.

Someone had died. That part was right. But no one I knew. My panic drew down. "Do you know Aaron Swartz?" Bruce asked. I told him I didn't. "Do you know who he is?" I thought he might be some guy Bruce and I once played basketball with. I considered bluffing that. Then I told him I didn't. No, I said. "No idea." This did not satisfy Bruce, for some reason. He repeated the name. "Aaron Swartz," he repeated, waiting for it to mean something.

"Is he that basketball guy? I think his name was actually Sanchez, Bruce."

"Have you been reading the Times this week?" Bruce said.

No. I'd been concentrating on learning to dance using my son's Xbox. I have a new dog. I'd been yelling his name a lot. But I'd seen some news here and there. "The computer guy," I mumbled. "The hacker. He died."

"He committed suicide," Bruce said. Then he rattled off more details, which I'll admit I didn't listen to. Bruce speaks quickly and precisely. Rambling catalogues of impressions, numbers, rankings. I love the guy, but I let myself relax a bit. Moments earlier, I'd been worried that my sons had met some peril. Now the details seemed miles from me, like something I might read in a news crawl. Brooklyn. Endless federal trial. Depression maybe. Federal prosecution. Then Bruce mentioned his daughter. Taren. I snapped to. She was Swartz's girlfriend. Bruce used the word partner. She'd found Swartz after the suicide.

"I'm sorry Bruce," I said. "So sorry." I meant it, too, me, the schmuck who had allowed himself to feel relief, if even for a moment, that the trouble was someone else's. I'd known Taren since she was four. In those days she considered me guru of the Etch-a-Sketch, because I could draw anything on one. Now she was 30, a liberal activist I often saw on television.

"I do know who he is. I read the story," I said. "I didn't know that about Taren. Yes, yes, yes."

"Now, I'm out of my depth," Bruce said, and I thought he was referring to grief, so I repeated that I was sorry. "But according to Taren, you, Tom Chiarella, were his favorite — or one of his favorites, I'm not sure — favorite writers. If not you, then someone named David Foster Wallace. And maybe another one." He seemed to be checking notes. "Robert Caro? I am not in my element here. I don't read that sort of writing."

I told him it was good company.

"So, at worst, you were his third-favorite writer," he said. "Though I understand David Foster Wallace is dead."

"Yeah," I told him. "Suicide too."

Then he said it: "So, they want you to speak at his memorial," Bruce said. "Day after tomorrow, in New York."

Me? I said. Why me?

"Well, as I said, this is not my specialty. But, at the very least you were his second-favorite living writer. I think 'essayist' is what Taren said. Don't quote me."

"Taren is asking," I said.

"Correct," Bruce said.

Forty-two hours later I found myself in New York, sitting in the basement green room of Cooper Union's Great Hall, at a long wooden table with ten of Aaron Swartz's closest friends and associates. I'd introduced myself to each, and they'd looked up, weary and angry. Some offered me the saddest handshakes in the world. I didn't know who any of them were, and not one of them had a clue about me. Open source advocates, founders of various internet entities — the director of thoughtworks.com, the organizer of Freedom 2 Connect, the director of business development for Twitter, the co-founder of givewell.org. At one end of the room, Damian Kulash of the band OK Go was rehearsing the musical number he was to perform. I'm telling you, I was a stranger in a strange land. So I sat quietly, which is not easy for me. Most of them were still working on their talks, on laptops, or iPads, or sheaves of paper, and this made each of them cry at one point, making the whole thing a sniffling, silent editing session, with a table holding bowls of shelled walnuts. And me.

Earlier, I'd spoken to Taren by phone, and she'd told me she hoped I would read some passage of David Foster Wallace, since he was a writer Aaron loved. She did not want to put me in a position where I would be forced to eulogize a man I didn't know. "Aaron would have been really happy to have you deliver it," she said. "That would've been more than enough." She said she had no idea what passage to read. "That wasn't something Aaron and I shared," she told me. I told her I had some ideas. Not to worry.

Now, in the green room, I saw that they'd left my name off the program, which didn't bother me. But the second page read:

READING

David Foster Wallace

Which gave many people the impression that I was David Foster Wallace. I know this because three people thanked me as "David." And one person called me "Dave." I tried to correct them, but it didn't matter. No one was paying attention to details of the world that we'd walked out of. Manners, like spirits, were fragile. Aaron Swartz, who invented RSS feeds at 14, who co-founded reddit.com before he was 20, who worked, argued and hacked for open-source practices, was the tragically complete story in that room. For each of them, Swartz had somehow coalesced the talent and purpose of their companies, their projects, their causes. What exactly the kid was responsible for seemed pretty vast. And he'd suffered while under relentless federal prosecution for violating terms of service of the JSTOR digital library, and kept this pain from most of his friends. The uncertainty of the trial, the outsized potential jail sentence (35 years), the bullying investigations, the seizure of his passport — all this had left Swartz rattled, stressed, terrified. People in the room that day were mightily, and supremely pissed. And hurt. So see, it didn't matter if I was or wasn't David Foster Wallace.

And it is not every day that you can say that.

The ceremony started late and ran long, but not one person walked out. The screens on the back of the stage were filled with images of Swartz, bearded, sweatered, geared up, thoughtful, happy. He looked like what he was: A kid. Anyone's kid. Glorious in the way they all are.

When my turn came, I clarified who I was not, and I admitted that I didn't know Aaron. I felt that was only right to be honest, to name myself. At first it made things easier for me in the speaking, less nervy. I'd written something about a dream I'd had the night before, and I was breezing right through it, maybe speaking a little too fast. I wanted to get to the other me — the David Foster Wallace part — since that's what's I knew people wanted. At the very end of my story, I looked down at a line I'd written, about what my father once promised me regarding the way cities work — that they were by nature orderly and disorderly, but that it was essential to believe that they could be governed fairly — and I found when I got to the end of that sentence that I could not look up. I, David Foster Wallace, was about to cry; the words would not fill my mouth. The words were "intellect, knowledge, compassion." And I was struck by memories of my father, and by visions of this kid I'd never met.

I have given 21 eulogies in my life, including one for my dad, and I have never been left dumb like this. I swear, for one sweet second I considered giving up, just walking off the stage. I wasn't worried about the reaction; everyone would blame David Foster Wallace. And I would skulk back to Indiana with my own little surprise grief in my pocket.

But I looked at the next page, filled with the prose of the real David Foster Wallace and I knew I would be okay. I read. I finished. I went back to my seat and listened.

Later that night, my son got off work and came to have dinner with me at a Mexican restaurant on Ninth Avenue. It is not insignificant that he looks a great deal like Aaron Swartz. Actually, the restaurant was full of guys who did, of men sitting in pairs — one older, one younger. I told my son I thought we might be in a gay Mexican restaurant. Neither of us thought they actually existed. The accidental gay Mexican restaurant, we said. And we drank.

He adores his work, which made me happy. And he was hopeful about the future. He'd saved a little money too. He looked at me at one point, and said, "I'm really doing exactly the work I should be doing." He said, "I'm happy."

This kid. I love him. To be a father in a moment like that? Rare. Worth every second of the bullshit that came before, and the defeats which may or may not follow. But that's not why I started crying then. And I don't cry often. I wish I did. This was flat-out weeping, into a cloth napkin which stank of refried beans.

See, I was thinking about the happiness of Aaron Swartz. I hoped it had many times been this complete. I think this was so. And I hoped his father and mother had seen it. I think they had. And I was thinking how the federal prosecutors beat that happiness out of him using the law. If they did that to either of my boys, I'd pull the world apart. No fucking wonder the kid was scared. You can invent things and still be plenty scared.

So: crying for every two-top in the accidental gay Mexican restaurant, for every child of every one of us. Remember, I was happy.

My son said, "Dad, it's okay."

I looked at him. My everyman. My genius. Inventor of my love. My Aaron Swartz. He and his brother both.

And Aaron Swartz, the one who'd gone, the one I'd traveled all this way not to meet. I'd come to love his hope, his conscience, the depth and vision of his ability, of his work.

I'll never know what he liked in mine.

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