When I was twelve, the local ‘Y’ was flooded when the pool overflowed.  Approximately 200,000 gallons of water filled the bottom floor of the building causing an estimated $2.3 million dollars in property damage and various other damages.  A young man of fourteen, Jerry Ashby, was nearly drowned during the incident and, last I heard, still suffers from delusions and nightmares related to the event.

That is how the paper reported the ‘incident’ anyway.  The way I remember it, I was hanging out in the pool with a few friends – Mike, Rob, and Joe – during the last fading days of our summer vacation.  Living near a defunct canal in Central New York brought insane humidity to an already smoldering day and made the ever present stench of carp and other fish, dead and alive, all the more prominent.  The pool inside the YMCA was a blissful reprieve from this stifling cloud of depression and the cool water made it easier to ignore the continuous barbs of harassment that came from the older kids who kept us from truly enjoying our time inside.  As all kids know, it is the duty of the older ones to do one of two things: guide us or belittle us.

My friends and I had agreed months earlier that it was this particular group’s duty to make us feel small and useless.  They were led by the self-proclaimed badass Jerry Ashby who had made it his personal goal to make our lives a living hell.  Given that we had only known of him for a few weeks, he was already well along in meeting this lofty goal.

I forget what he was saying, but Ben was articulating some piece of geeky wisdom with much arm flailing and hand waving when Jerry decided it was time to get in his hourly quota of harassment.  With little or no ado, Jerry walked over to me, stared me straight in the eye with his dark brown eyes, opened his mouth as if to spit yet another poisonous barb at me and…

… he left off the barb.  A thick loogie hit me right above my right eye and I fell back against the cool tile that surrounded the pool.  It is a strange feeling being surrounded by the sterile scent of chlorine yet having a possibly disease-ridden piece of phlegm slowly working its way over the ridge of your eye.  I vaguely remember the panic that struck me as realization set in, but I still have no idea how I got in the pool.  My guess is that Jerry picked me up and threw me, probably with a guffaw and some lame line like, “You should take a bath!”   It’s equally possible that I actually threw myself in with the desperate hope that the astringent-like water would save me both from the germs and bacteria as well as from the shame and embarrassment that was to come.  What I do know is that I went under water and while surrounded by that falsified sea green, I learned two things about myself.

The first thing I learned is that, when pushed, I have a temper unlike any I had seen up until, or since, that moment.  Under that water I scrubbed at my face like a thing possessed, scratching, drawing blood, feeling the soothing sting of chlorine as it cleansed the shallow wounds.

The second thing I learned is that I have a special relationship with water.  Very special.

That moment defined my life and set me on a course that would take me from my Podunk town to London, England, Derbent, Russia, Rome, Italy, and much further.  My youth was spent learning to channel this power, to use it in the service of my country, to participate in small, quiet wars that echoed the greater battles of the world, but decided much, much more.

… you have realized what happened at the pool, right?  To make a long story short, I control water in nearly every form, though the mixture in most multi-cellular organisms still eludes me.  I can create or destroy tsunamis; I can purify millions of gallons of water or poison it.  Technically, I could probably single-handedly murder most of the USA or the UK, but luckily, I am something of a nice guy (though I do sometimes call up an aging taxi-driver named Jerry and ask him how his swimming lessons are going).

Nowadays I work as a Senior Systems Administrator for a small start-up company in San Francisco.  I live down in Pacifica on this road called Esplanade for the very reason that it overlooks the ocean.  Most days, when I’m not on-call or playing a video game or something, I work my way down my private path from the esplanade to the beach where I sit and just let the apparent immovability of the ocean wash over me.

It’s usually somewhere during this time, triggered by a unique crash of wave on stone or a gull crying as it races past, that the thoughts of my time with the Flamel Group come back to me.

(Flamel Group?  Get it?  Nicolas Flamel?  Alchemist?  Elements?  Ugh… nevermind…)

Of course, all good things come to an end and I eventually retired from the Group – if you would call it that.

I know, I certainly didn’t call it retirement.  I was only twenty four when an assassin found my cover and stabbed me in the left side of my back twelve times on a drizzly evening as I walked back from a pub in Dublin.  He left the knife in my back during the final strike when I yanked myself free and drowned him with his own saliva.  That final twist jerked the blade between my vertebrae and quite literally severed my ties with the Flamel Group.

© Michael J. Wyant, Jr.