by Ray Nayler
Ray Nayler discusses a childhood event that helped shape the rest of his life, and inspired his latest story, “Charon’s Final Passenger,” from our [March/April issue, on sale now!]
I was kidnapped when I was three years old.
It was not by a stranger (an exceedingly rare form of kidnapping, to which we devote a lot of cultural handwringing and television shows). Instead, it was the most common kind of child abduction: I was kidnapped by my father.
My mother had left my father twice—once in Quebec, and again in California, after he came begging for her to take her back. He was able to convince her for a while: he had a way of convincing people—a charm that was a combination of his accent, his artistic pretensions, his frenetic energy, and his fragile good looks.
He was also, unnoticed by the people around him, displaying the first signs of the severe schizophrenia which, in late 2022, claimed his life. But this was not 2022: it was 1979. He was young (my god, they were so young, neither one of them yet 25). Any odd mannerisms he had could be attributed to his rural origins in Quebec’s north, where he was the youngest son in a family of fourteen, or his overwhelmingly large ego: he was an Artist, capital A, and expected everyone around him to treat him like one.
My mother left him the second time when, coming home from work, she found the apartment empty. She finally tracked us down at The Starry Plough, the local bar, where he was passing me around from one person to another while he drank away our money.
She’d had enough. She kicked him out. As expected, he quickly took up with another woman, the daughter of the man who owned the gas station where he sometimes worked. The separation was amiable enough, and they worked out a custody arrangement while the divorce went through.
But after one of my visitations with him, my mother called his girlfriend to tell her she was headed over to pick me up. Was my father there?
“Didn’t you know?” the woman said. “We broke up. I kicked him out. He’s been gone for over a week.”
My mother understood immediately what had happened. My father had done what he had threatened to do once during an argument. It was a statement she had thought was an empty threat, made in the heat of the moment. Now, too late, she understood it had been a real threat, and one he had followed through on. He had taken me away. And that meant back to Quebec—over 3,000 miles distant, and across an international border.
My mother told me, “I was paralyzed. I could hear my own blood in my ears. It was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
He had left with me the day he picked me up. He took me to Tilden Park, near our home, where we rode the miniature railway. Then, carrying only a backpack, he hitchhiked with me in tow all the way to Vancouver. He fed me out of vending machines and at gas station cafés. In Vancouver he took a train to Montreal, and then a bus north to the village where he was born, on the shore of Lac St. Jean.
History—our real history—is just one of many possible paths, as contingent on the seemingly incidental and the decisions of a moment as the fatal route of Franz Ferdianand’s motorcade, or the bomb that might have killed Hitler but did not, or so many other moments in which the world is changed—or not changed—and the consequence becomes our reality.
By the time my mother got to Canada, he was moving from place to place, leaving me in the care of various relatives. She went to a lawyer to see what could be done to get me back. The lawyer was blunt—there wasn’t much. There was no finalized divorce. Quebec was unlikely to take US court decisions about custody or anything else very seriously. To them, I would be a French-speaking kid living with my legal father, and my English-speaking mother would be the one trying to take me away. In the middle of Quebec’s cultural awakening and separatist movement, her chances of getting me back were not good. I might spend years in protective custody while the courts came to a decision.
So my mother made a decision. She would kidnap me back.
Contacting one of my father’s brothers, she convinced him to help her. When my father left me briefly in his brother’s care, he drove me to my mother.
“Were you scared?” My mother asked me when she saw me.
“Nah,” I said. “I knew you would come.”
She took me on a bus to Montreal, and then to the airport.
As we crossed through customs, it almost fell apart. My mother had accidentally packed my passport and documents into our checked luggage. The French-Canadian authorities were suspicious. “How do we know he is your son? How do we know you aren’t kidnapping him?” One of them said, probably half-joking, but hitting the mark.
And then a minor miracle appeared. The US security noticed that I was wearing a set of pearl-handled toy revolvers in a belt and holsters. My prize possession, they had accompanied me throughout this entire odyssey. They insisted that I would not be able to board the plane with them, and they would need to confiscate them. I began, apparently for the first time during all of this, to cry.
This enraged the French-Canadians, who got into a furious argument with the US authorities over their idiotic rule, and their bullying of a little boy. By the time they had extracted a promise that the toy guns would be mailed to me, everyone had forgotten about my lack of documents. We boarded the plane for San Francisco.
A few weeks later the toy guns arrived, as promised.
But I am haunted by a ghost. What would have happened if my mother had not managed to get me back? What if she had not made the bold decision to kidnap me? What if she had not gotten away with it? What if I had languished instead in protective custody, passed around foster homes in a broken system? What if the French-Canadian courts had not decided in her favor in the end? After all, it was the worst possible time to try to convince authorities in Quebec of the rights an English-speaking mother from California should have over a French-Canadian child she intended to take away from his “heritage.”
The ghost haunting me is this alternate self—the one who, instead of growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, grew up in northern Quebec, entangled with a father in mental distress and a large, complex family struggling with all the intricate problems of rural poverty.
That person would have been nothing at all like the person I am today: so much of what I now am relies on my mother’s decision. Her decision is a crossroads, and the other way leads to a life very different from the one I am now leading. And, I would argue, to a person who is fundamentally different from the person I am now. I call that person a ghost because I sometimes almost see him—this person who might have been, but was not.
This is the root of my fascination with alternate histories—the worlds that might have been if a different path was opened up by a decision, or by luck, or by happenstance. History—our real history—is just one of many possible paths, as contingent on the seemingly incidental and the decisions of a moment as the fatal route of Franz Ferdianand’s motorcade, or the bomb that might have killed Hitler but did not, or so many other moments in which the world is changed—or not changed—and the consequence becomes our reality.
“Charon’s Final Passenger,” in this issue of Asimov’s, is an exploration of this. A sequel to “The Disintegration Loops” and “A Rocket for Dimitrios,” the story takes place in the same timeline as my stories “Father” and “Berb by Berb,” all of which were published in Asimov’s (and all of which are available at raynayler.net). “Charon’s Final Passenger” continues to trace a path from an alternate 1938 in which a flying saucer crashes in the New Mexico desert, and the United States uses reverse-engineered technology to defeat not only the Nazis and the imperialist Japan, but also the Soviet Union and the communist forces in China, becoming a unilateral global superpower with no real checks against its will. What happens to a country no-one can resist? What happens to the world, with such a country in it?
Far from being frivolous, I think alternate histories help us, just like science fiction stories set in the future, to better examine our own society and its possibilities. Like those stories, alternate histories predicate a world based upon an alteration. In so doing, they are able to explore the consequences of “what if” in an engaging way—but they also allow us to turn the lens on the world we are reading from and to explore the question of “why this?”
What my own alternate history teaches me is humility. I am aware of how much luck and happenstance has been involved in allowing me to be where I am today. When I think of the series of seemingly random events that brought me to where I am, that allowed me the life I have, I know I cannot take much credit for what I have been given.
But not all of those events were random: some were the result of determination and personal will. I feel a great sense of gratitude to this extraordinary woman, my mother in 1979. Twenty-four years old, alone, extraordinarily brave—she saved me. I owe her the shape of this life, and it’s a debt I cannot ever fully pay.
When you think about it, all of us are living out our personal alternate histories, inhabiting one of the million branches of “what if?” I think it is also good for us to take a look at some of the turning points in our lives and think, “why this?”
And, where deserved, give thanks.
From Earth to the Stars 