Loïc D’Anjou—Roger Bolduc

Loïc and Roger Bolduc are cousins, but their kinship becomes newly urgent when Loïc dreams of Roger inside a skyscraper at the moment the September 11 attacks begin. The dream turns a family connection that Loïc says he rarely thought about into a haunting question: whether he had somehow shared Roger’s final perceptions, and what happened to his cousin in New York City.

Kinship and Distance

Roger is also Isabelle D’Anjou’s husband. When Loïc considers why he might have entered another person’s consciousness, he wonders whether some tie of kinship, friendship, or other affinity could explain it. Yet the possibility troubles him precisely because Roger had not been a frequent presence in his thoughts, and Loïc says he had never dreamed of him before. Their cousinhood supplies a possible bond, but not an easy explanation.

Loïc also considers whether the force of the disaster itself could have produced the images in his mind. The attacks unfolded hundreds of miles away, and he cannot decide whether the dream came from a connection to Roger or from his own response to the catastrophe. The relationship is thus presented through uncertainty: family proximity gives the experience personal meaning, while the emotional and physical distance between the cousins leaves its cause unresolved.

The Dream and the Attacks

On the morning of September 11, Loïc dreams that he is with Roger in a skyscraper with panoramic windows. Something falls onto them like a comet or a flaming stone, and Loïc wakes abruptly with his heart pounding. Later, as he watches footage of the burning towers, he is struck by the correspondence between the dream and the first plane’s impact on the World Trade Center. He tells Isabelle D’Anjou about the dream and its timing, describing how it had troubled him throughout the day.

The images feel to Loïc less like a general prediction of a building on fire than an encounter with an individual mind. He imagines that another consciousness may briefly have crossed his own, perhaps at the instant of death. But this remains a fearful hypothesis, not an established explanation. His uncertainty gives the coincidence its force: the dream appears intimate, yet he has no way to know whether it was connected to Roger at all.

Searching for Roger

After September 11, Loïc becomes convinced that Roger died in the attacks. He searches online for information about the victims and the affected companies, reading accounts from relatives and examining photographs, footage, and the victims’ last telephone communications. The search is not simply for news of the disaster; Loïc is trying to imagine the particular circumstances of his cousin’s death.

He studies available images methodically, copying them so he can replay them, slow them down, and enlarge them. He considers whether Roger was crushed or burned inside a tower, or whether panic and the instinct to survive drove him through a window and into a fall from many floors above the ground. Loïc favors the last possibility and concentrates on photographs of people falling beside the skyscraper. The images are too low-resolution to disclose a face, profile, silhouette, or clothing that could identify Roger, leaving the search without confirmation.

An Unresolved Family Bond

The dream and its aftermath make cousinhood feel like a possible channel of knowledge, but they never prove that Loïc received a message from Roger. What they establish is Loïc’s conviction that Roger died in New York and his sustained effort to understand how. His attention shifts from the distant scale of the collapsing towers to the unidentifiable human figures in free fall: a search for one relative among the victims, carried out through images that cannot answer him.