I was in bed. In this new, slightly uncomfortable bed in this new place in—was it Mohawk, New York? Where sheer chance had brought me in my panicked flight from Catamount Falls.

Recalling now, as remnants of the dream lapped about me like a shallow stream, that the small red asthma inhaler had belonged to my high school classmate Tyrell Jones.

Of course!—Tyrell Jones.

Had I ever seen another asthma inhaler in the intervening years?—I was sure that I had not.

And now it came to me: Tyrell Jones was the dark-skinned man with the briefcase whom I had seen on campus . . .

It was not surprising that Tyrell Jones was a student here at the State University at Mohawk, as I was. Now I could recognize Tyrell’s odd, distinct manner of carrying himself, the self-conscious posture with which a naturally shy boy might carry himself in a school situation. Tyrell’s close-cropped hair had not changed much. Possibly Tyrell was stouter, less boyish. The wire-rimmed eyeglasses he’d worn in high school that had given him a prim schoolboy look had been replaced by chunky black plastic glasses that disguised half his face.

It was a shock, to think that Tyrell had to be my age—twenty-six.

Twenty-six! Not young. At least in my case, not young at all considering that my true life has yet to begin.

PAINFUL TO RECALL HOW I’D LEFT A NOTE IN TYRELL JONES’S locker—I love you.

What had I been thinking!—I could not imagine.

So young at the time, naive and impulsive. Imagining a sort of kinship between Tyrell Jones and me, each of us tormented by the math teacher whose name I’d made an effort to obliterate in my memory.

Now it seemed to me significant that Tyrell Jones was a student here at Mohawk. That we’d glimpsed each other—(for I had no doubt, Tyrell Jones had noticed me)—could not have been an accident. Though I’d come to Mohawk more or less by chance, as a branch of the state university that would honor my transfer credits without difficulty, I could not believe that it was purely chance that Tyrell Jones was also here.

After the day when Tyrell had almost collapsed in math class, unable to breathe, I’d done some research on asthma in the school library, fascinated and appalled. A sudden inflammation of the sinuses, the nasal cavity, a sensation of suffocating precipitated by pollen, exacerbated by emotion, particularly anxiety, fear. In a local drugstore I’d examined asthma inhalers, fascinated and appalled. For perhaps one day Tyrell would collapse and I would be the one, the only one, to know how to “save” him . . .

These memories returned to me now, lying in my bed in Mohawk, New York. Had I actually been in love with this boy, with whom I’d never exchanged a sentence? No other boy of those years had meant anything to me emotionally. I had not even any memory of any other boy. Young men with whom I’d been involved, sexually, in recent years, and including now my older lover Orlando Metti, had not meant so much to me as Tyrell Jones had meant, though I was sure that Tyrell would be baffled if he ever learned.