Roger Bolduc’s disappearance amid the September 11 attacks links the collapse of the World Trade Center towers to an earlier, unexplained September 11 in Touladi. For Loïc, the coincidence turns a recent loss into an unsettling pattern: Roger’s age, the date of his birth, and an old curse seem to converge, though the circumstances of Roger’s disappearance remain unresolved.

The Disappearance and the Date

In the autumn of 2001, as Loïc dwells on the mystery of his cousin Roger Bolduc’s disappearance, he realizes that Roger had turned forty-two only a few days before the attacks on New York. The date prompts him to recall that Roger had been born just days before another September 11: in 1959, the day Grébiche disappeared from Touladi.

The narrative identifies Roger as having vanished in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. It does not establish his fate beyond that disappearance. The uncertainty matters: Loïc is not recalling a confirmed death, but trying to understand an absence whose timing has taken on a disturbing significance.

Loïc’s Retrospective Connection

The passage places the 2001 attacks in the frame of Loïc’s recollection of 1959. The matching date makes the earlier event return not as a proven explanation for Roger’s disappearance but as a possible omen. Loïc remembers that Grébiche had cursed Romuald and his family, and that her words had remained in local memory; in 2001, he hears them anew as a prophecy touching the Bolduc line.

The fire surrounding Grébiche’s disappearance sharpens the association. Loïc likens her fate to the biblical Elijah, asking himself whether she, too, had been carried into heaven in a chariot of fire. His response is not simple fear: he smiles at the thought, recalling his fondness for the extraordinary woman. The image binds the old fire to the modern catastrophe without resolving whether the connection is supernatural or a pattern Loïc perceives in grief.

Significance and Uncertainty

The September 11 attacks give a private family mystery the scale of public catastrophe, while the repeated date draws the distant past into Loïc’s present. The coincidence does not explain what happened to Roger; instead, it changes how Loïc reads the disappearance, lending the old curse a renewed, prophetic force.

The event’s narrative force rests on that gap between fact and interpretation. Roger’s age, the attacks, and his disappearance are stated; the link to Grébiche’s curse is Loïc’s retrospective association. The text lets the dates echo across generations while leaving Roger’s ultimate fate unknown.