Loïc's Childhood “Flying Insect” Experience

Loïc’s Childhood “Flying Insect” Experience is a forgotten episode from the winter of 1952 that returns to him during psychoanalysis in Ottawa in February 1977. It begins in bodily distress and a child’s terror of a worm inside him, then opens into an apparent transformation and a journey through Touladi’s concealed emotional and spiritual life. The episode matters both as a formative vision and as an unresolved memory: Loïc connects it to the cameo’s malign influence, while also wondering whether fever, imagination, and an earlier flight with his aviator father shaped what he saw.

The Memory Returns

As an adult, Loïc is discussing an existential crisis connected to his divided position in the Canadian prime minister’s office after the sovereigntists’ victory in Quebec. He tells his psychoanalyst about a worsening nighttime agitation: spasms and twisting sensations that seem to rise from his toes to his throat, as if he needs to escape his own skin. He wonders whether the sensation brings back the trauma of his birth. In response to the analyst’s question about what the feeling suggests, he identifies a spruce budworm. The image sets off a chain of associations, and long-buried scenes from childhood break through a quarter-century of forgetting.

The recovered episode is set in the winter of 1952, after Guillaume D’Anjou has left hospital, narrowly surviving an illness but emerging so physically weakened that he walks in tiny, old-man’s steps. Loïc’s recalled distress is at once physical and uncanny: his stomach twists, nausea rises toward his throat, and the nights fill with intestinal gurgles, whistles, imagined cracking cartilage, and points of light in the dark. Fever, a persistent stomachache, and the fear of an internal parasite shape the experience. The narration does not settle whether these sensations have a bodily cause or belong to the child’s delirium.

Becoming the Worm

The worm takes shape first as an explanation for the child’s discomfort. Loïc remembers his adoptive mother examining the contents of a chamber pot and showing him tiny pale worms that she regarded as a sign of recovery. The sight, rather than reassuring him, intensifies his stomachache and his sense of being invaded. He imagines a great solitary worm consuming him from within, an image linked in his mind to the rich food eaten at his grandfather Bolduc’s house and to the poisonous insinuations surrounding the quarrel between the fathers.

At night, Loïc hides under his blanket, calls for light, and feels surrounded by the worm. Laurette comes to him, reassures him, switches on the corridor lamp, and leaves his bedroom door ajar so that the room remains partly lit. But in the fevered vision, fear gives way to a more radical transformation: the child becomes the worm, and the worm becomes him. He feels it uncoil inside him and emerge from his mouth ring by ring, luminous and transparent, its segments lit from within. His body seems to turn inside out and divide into a long, glowing creature. The movement carries him beyond his body, at once terrifying and captivating.

A Hidden Touladi

In this altered state, the worm can pass through things and enter the invisible underside of ordinary life. Loïc moves along walls and ceilings, past religious prints and the solemn portrait of the Founder, and above sleeping bodies. The narration renders minds as transparent, their neural lights flashing through bodies, while unspoken desires, prayers, and the voices of the dead circulate through the night. What he perceives contradicts the village’s daytime appearances: the confident can seem weak in the hidden register, and private resentment, grief, tenderness, or kindness surface beneath public speech.

The vision is not uniformly benevolent. Loïc feels the village’s suffering as a weight pressing down on him, and one night perceives an enormous dark radiance encircling the village, especially his home. He traces its source to the Founder’s house and understands it as the cameo’s diabolical magnetism, a force no safe could contain. In the vision, the malignant ray crosses the Founder’s portrait and points toward the cellar and the house foundations, where stillborn children lie. This perception joins the object, the family home, and buried death in a single ominous image; it is what the episode seems to reveal, not an independently confirmed account of supernatural power.

Forgetting and Interpretation

The extraordinary perception lasts only for a few weeks, and Loïc does not remember the nighttime journeys during the day. The division works in one direction: at night he retains awareness of daytime events, but experiences himself as above the people and circumstances he observes; in daylight, the nocturnal knowledge disappears. Eventually the experience vanishes into inaccessible memory. Loïc later wonders whether its disappearance coincided with television’s arrival, his departure for school, his leaving the village, Guillaume’s death, or the cameo’s move to Quebec, but he cannot identify a cause. For decades, he retains only the unsettling sense of a blank space in his childhood.

When the episode returns in the analyst’s office, Loïc allows for more than one explanation. He tells the analyst that he may have dreamed it, or that fever provoked hallucinatory episodes. Looking back, he also considers whether the flying worm developed from an airplane trip with his aviator father: a child’s aerial view of the village transformed into an escape from the painful division between hostile fathers, and from the weight of time, space, and fate. Yet he cannot exclude the possibility that an invisible double drew him beyond the mirror of ordinary reality. The recovered memory therefore remains suspended between bodily illness, imaginative transformation, and paranormal perception. Its image of the cameo’s force gives it later significance, while its uncertainty preserves the essential gap between what Loïc experienced and what he can prove.