Roger's Disappearance in the 2001 World Trade Center Collapse

Roger Bolduc’s disappearance in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers turns a family loss into an unsettling recurrence of dates and warnings. In autumn 2001, as Loïc thought about his missing cousin, he realized that Roger had turned forty-two only days before the attacks. The discovery drew him back to Touladi and to another September 11, in 1959, when Grébiche vanished in a fire whose cause and circumstances had never been settled.

The disappearance and its immediate context

The account gives no scene of Roger inside the towers and does not confirm his death. It identifies him as having disappeared in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, leaving his fate unknown. The event reaches the reader through Loïc’s realization in autumn 2001: Roger’s age, which Loïc had not previously connected to the attacks, makes him reconsider the family’s history.

The timing sharpens that reconsideration. Roger was forty-two only a few days before the attacks, and he had been born just days after the September 11, 1959 fire at Grébiche’s home. The coincidence does not explain what happened to him, but it brings two disappearances into the same pattern of dates.

The 1959 echo

Loïc remembers that Grébiche’s disappearance took place on September 11, 1959, when he was still in Touladi because rubella had delayed his return to school. The fire consumed her home and adjoining shed, and the surviving remains could not be identified. The civil report attributed the blaze, without detail, to an apparent mishap; local rumor instead insisted that she had been murdered and burned to conceal the crime. Her fate remained unresolved.

The village stories also preserved Grébiche’s public quarrel with Romuald Bolduc two days before the fire. After Romuald’s wife had given birth to Roger, Grébiche had confronted him following the death of Maurice Duplessis, whose government had awarded Romuald lucrative rural-electrification contracts. During their argument, she cursed Romuald and his descendants. Loïc’s memory of that curse gives Roger’s disappearance a foreboding family dimension, without establishing that the curse caused either event.

Loïc’s reading of the pattern

The passage makes the 2001 disappearance reverberate backward: the attacks bring Roger’s birth date to mind, and the date summons the fire and the curse. Loïc sees the old imprecation as newly prophetic because the missing man is one of Romuald’s descendants. His response is not certainty but a charged association, strengthened by his affection for Grébiche, whom he regards as an extraordinary woman.

The event’s significance therefore rests on the unresolved space between fact and interpretation. Roger is missing in the towers’ collapse; the earlier fire remains unexplained; and the curse persists as village memory rather than proven cause. Their linked dates make the past feel active in the present, while leaving Roger’s ultimate fate—and the meaning of the apparent pattern—open.