Fiction: I Used to Sleepwalk in the Daytime

I bought a camera out of pity for the old man who sold it to me. I don’t speak the language here very well so at first I thought he just wanted to show me his photos. As I stood waiting at the bus stop, he gestured towards the little LCD screen on the back of the camera. He was stout, his body knotted and hairless. I was transfixed by the strange images, which now I understand he only showed me to prove the functionality of the camera.

The first photo was taken on a sunny afternoon in a parking lot. It showed the man before me doing the splits. He had his arms out and smiled as if to convey that he was just as surprised as you that he could do the splits. The next photo was taken in a forest at dusk. The light fell in weak slats with glints of white particles in the air. A footpath wound through the woods and in the middle of this path, blocking your way, was the man doing the splits. The crepuscular scene made it hard to discern his expression but I was pretty sure it was the same bemusement as in the last photo. The man turned his attention from the camera to me. His speech was fast and flat but I understood he was seeking my approval. Now I know he said something like “The camera works great, see?” but I reacted to the pictures and said “It’s incredible.” Why not encourage this flexible man, who by that point I’d noticed smelled like a particularly treacherous brand of hazelnut vodka. He said a number, which I later realized was the price, and toggled over to the next photo. Suddenly we were on a rooftop, half sky with yellow-green foreboding in the coloration of the clouds and the man in the center again doing the splits. His face was sunburnt and he wore a pale jumpsuit, like a mechanic or a janitor. I wondered if the same person took all these photos.

The man turned off the camera and put it in my hands, speaking quickly and definitively. I felt as though a curse or a responsibility passed from him to me. We stood in ambiguity until frustration emerged on his face. I poured mental effort into speaking his language. The more pressing my use of it, the less likely I was to summon a comprehensible sentence. I wanted to conclude the scene so I grossly overpaid for the camera. Although when I think of all that happened to me because of that purchase I can say I received a lot for what I paid.

I forked over the money and the man went back to waiting as if we had never interacted. He started playing music on his phone; a song by a folk singer from my home country, a guide to the lovelorn of several generations including my own. I couldn't believe he knew the song and was playing it, not knowing what the tune meant to me, an immigrant who hadn’t been able to afford a visit home in a long time and just spent a noticeable amount of money on an appliance I didn’t need.

I debated what to do with the photos he’d shown me, which were now in my possession. Had I bought them as well? I clicked around the settings until I discovered the power to unilaterally wipe the memory card and with a feeling of exorcism I punched Delete All.

My life wasn’t worth documenting with gloss or fidelity. I worked the night shift in the basement of a grocery store known for its chaos and low prices. My schedule put me on another planet. Leaving the store at dawn, I’d see young people still partying. Sometimes I felt a troubling emotion in the morning. Urgency would roil through my body, a siren blaring red and bright without indicating anything in particular, without any possible action to take, the moment just before vomiting elongated in time. I’d get into bed and lose consciousness as fast as possible.

The first time I went to sleep after buying the camera, I set it on my nightstand (would all that follows have happened if I’d placed it somewhere else?) and watched a cube of light pass from the footlong glass at the top of the wall on my right to the blank wall on my left. The glass surface isn’t technically a window because it doesn’t open onto the outside world but onto another tenant’s space. Although it made it harder for me to sleep, I enjoyed the presence of fresh light in my little space. Some mathematics of the time of day and the angles of the apartment meant light, not just illumination but light, only found its way into my room for a month in the spring and two weeks in the fall. Using a defunct piece of electronics to diary my strange and empty way of life felt correct, is what I was thinking as I went to sleep the day it all started.

I was a prolific sleepwalker throughout my adolescence. I always tried to leave the house, but in that half-state I was stymied by doors and locks. I tended to make a lot of noise, so my parents (my Mom) would retrieve me from the front of the house where I’d stand locking and unlocking the door, twisting the knob, trying to pull it off its hinges, somehow always in the wrong combination. I concluded that my sleepwalking self was basically dumb, basically confused, while my parents (my Mom) spoke of him as a clever nocturnal force. She locked every window and door. I did, apparently, try to escape through a 2nd floor window. Since I have no memory of these incidents, I’m not sure exactly when they stopped. I slowly pole vaulted over puberty and my sleepwalking self was no longer a topic of conversation at breakfast.

I woke into the full dark of the apartment. I took the camera with me to the kitchen, thinking I’d take a photo of my breakfast. There had been an incredible deal on high-fiber cereal at the grocery store where I worked, and my cupboard was filled with bags of the dark brown stuff, like I was a rodent. A bowl of this was going to be the subject of my first photograph. Light blue gradient tiles shimmered across the screen as the camera booted up. But instead of the CARD EMPTY screen, I was greeted by this photo:

The hallway of my apartment. My limbs and muscles tensed up - but wait, I must have just taken this by accident, it’s not even angled correctly. But then I thought, with some fear, to check the info tab. The photo was taken at 3:35pm. Could one of my roommates have crept into my room, taken the camera for a joy ride, and returned it before I awoke? If it was a prank, why take such a boring photo? It was both a relief and dismaying that my life was not the kind where it would occur to anyone to play a prank on me. I returned the camera to its spot beside my bed and got ready for work.

I built pallets in the basement with a large but spry man named Etienne. He wore a black baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of a poker website. When we’d pile something heavy on the pallet, like boxes of salt or bottles of apple cider vinegar, he’d make the joke of pretending to hurl one at me without it leaving his grasp. I’d laugh and think something like “We’re boys in the basement. What are we up to down here?”

Etienne had a perfect singing voice and sang old ballads, songs embedded in the minds of everyone who grew up here. I’d previously only heard these tunes at karaoke when it’s too late to learn them. Etienne was, in all practical ways, my best friend in that country. He’d get annoyed when I’d thank him for anything work related. “Work is a job” he’d say in my language, but I kept thanking him anyway because those words were like a buoy I’d clung to since moving there. He did, crucially, speak a bit of my mother tongue, having spent a summer or two in my home country when he was young. Our mutual language was like kids dumping their pillowcases of Halloween candy onto the floor, two collections combined into something which could cover most situations.

I told him I seemed to have taken a photo while sleepwalking and he became quite serious, as if I’d brought up an obscure, delicate religious question. He listened, nodding, put his hand on his heart, and told me to be careful. I had the feeling that in translation it came out as more of a ghost story.

When I got home from work, I checked the camera, half expecting there to be a new photo. There was not, of course. I fell asleep. When I woke up, the camera was at a different angle than when I’d last closed my eyes, rotated 90 degrees. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to see if there was another photo right away. I took a pee, got dressed, coiffed even, depending on whether I know what that means, and turned on the camera. I saw this:

The city’s small beloved Chinatown? I’d managed to sleepwalk all the way there? In waking life, I’d never visited it before so I felt outdone by my sleepwalking self. I left the apartment in search of the spot. Finding the exact location took a bit of foot work. I lined up the viewfinder of the camera for a final confirmation. I felt the impulse to take the photo again but some personal taboo held me back. I stood in that exact spot seven hours ago. I had the sensation of solving a puzzle. As I stood there, uncertain what to do next, I also had the feeling of arriving too late, of missing not an event but an era. The adjacent noodle shop was open, so I wandered in. I tried to ask if they’d seen me yesterday but realized that it must be a different crew working now. I ordered tea and looked at the spot where I took the photo. Snow fell softly, certain flakes caught the pale midmorning light and gained for a moment a confected quality before evaporating on the ground and the heads and shoulders of people walking by.

That night at work, Etienne and I built pallets while he told me untrue things about the world that he’d read online. An important phrase to learn in a new language is “Yeah man, totally.” When he first broached this kind of subject, I offered what I knew as facts in response. He didn’t argue back, but the basement became so silent I could hear the footsteps of the shoppers above us. Etienne took off his poker hat and ran his fingers through his thick black hair, collecting sweat and debris and whisking them onto the ground. As we went back to work, I told him I’d heard that the birthrate was low because of Wi-Fi, and he shared a few theories of his own. By the end of our shift the basement felt less like a dank prison and more like our hideout. We would emerge at a moment of our choosing, and in the meantime would sort out the situation above.

Back in my room, I had trouble falling asleep. My eyes kept unzipping a little, noting the camera sitting there, quiescent, wondering if we’d get up to our old tricks again. That evening I woke to the following photo.

I couldn’t believe it. My heartbeat became audible in my ears. There was a warm familiarity to her look. But how the hell did I succeed in chatting with this woman in my sleep state? She was a stranger who met me while I was mobile and unconscious but… it’s a trick of my mind, a sense memory problem, to be looked in the eye by a woman like that felt like a reunion to me, that she’s someone who could intuit the contours of the winding path that brought my soul to the present moment. Even if the look we shared was through a photograph, I had to find her.

I deduced she must be from my home country or at least speak my language fluently, there’s no way I could have pulled this off otherwise. The thought of it all being an enormous prank returned, but maybe it was a prank without a prankster. Did she know the state I was in? If I told her, she would have thought I was kidding, that it was a bizarre (yet successful?) pick up line. No, I probably didn’t address it. I wanted to lurch back into sleep and wake to another photo, one taken years hence, a domestic scene, she’s fallen asleep reading a book by a stained glass window, the open page is illuminated by red.

I ate the cereal again, cursing the incredible deal I’d been so excited about, it was now a flavor-burden to keep ingesting the stuff, and left my apartment. Winter still, but once in a while a shaft of warm air poured by as if it’d gotten lost. The photo didn’t yield many clues, it was too intimately framed. I tried to temper my expectations about the likelihood of finding this person and what kind of relationship we had and would have, but failed. I couldn’t shake the feeling that despite being strangers, she and I had been reunited at last under this extraordinary circumstance. More obstacles might remain; she might be married or gravely ill. Even if it’s as brief as a cube of light in my room, we will hold each other and feel a kind of letting down, a defortification of the present. In practical terms, I walked around and noticed how many people were not her. I’d never looked at so many strangers’ faces so intently.

At work, Etienne told me about a new theory. I had a hard time understanding it, and explained that I hadn’t slept. I wasn’t feeling pliant, I couldn’t go along with this one. I just did not get what he was trying to say. He seemed weirdly invested in it, until I realized he really was, that he was describing a Financial Opportunity. An investment of some kind. Money in. Later, more money out. I tried to convey that it sounded like he was being scammed. Quiet emanated out from us and flooded through the loading dock. I could do nothing to dislodge it. I could barely continue to stack bags of potatoes onto the top of the pallet. I wished he’d sing something. When we finished up, he tied and retied his shoelaces, I suspect to avoid changing in the locker room at the same time as me.

The next morning, I found this photo, and fear ran over me.

This is a famous monument. It’s not in our city–it’s in a village north of here. There’s no way I could have slept-walked there and back. For one thing, it’s a complex transit: taking a bus, a train, transferring, plus the sheer travel time… it must be a prank, not from a friend, but a maniac with a car. My stomach, which I imagine as shaped like a football, contorted into a box. The mildew smell of my windowless room suddenly disgusted me.

I went outside, counted five good breaths, and went back in to use the bathroom. The mirror showed I was sleep deprived, like a spy or an adulterer living a double life. If I had help getting to the monument, perhaps it was Her. She might have chaperoned me on this little trip. I checked the time-tables for buses and trains. It wasn’t impossible, it just left no room for error. I decided to recreate the voyage dead-awake. For realism, I’d do it in the middle of the day as well, when I ought to be sleeping. I called in sick for the shift that night. It was easy to get the time off but it took a while for my boss to understand who I was–the language issue is worse over the phone, is how I explained it to myself.

Sitting on the bus, I thought she might be there waiting at the statue. Maybe the first visit was to establish an iconic location for us to meet today. This thought warmed my feet but I was so tired I almost fell asleep on the way there. I wondered if I had, would I have slept-walked the rest of the way, or just gone home? Delirious, I arrived at the statue. She wasn’t there.

I made it home and slept through the bulk of the next night, but then, naturally, I couldn’t fall asleep that morning and wriggled around in my bed, wondering how Etienne’s shift had been without me. I built a few pallets in my mind and drifted off to sleep. There was no photo that evening.

Later, it was time to work. I entered through the front of the store, squeezing past customers overwhelmed by deals, and found Etienne in the basement. We loaded a case of heavy jars of honey. He didn’t pretend to heave one at me so I knew he was still upset. I tried to defuse the tension and his response was hard to understand but it sounded like he called me an obscure word for Idiot for turning down his Financial Opportunity. That he was angry confirmed he’d fallen into a pyramid scheme and I was supposed to play the role of the greater fool to bail him out. Why else would he care so much? I insulted his intelligence right back, using words I was pretty sure he wouldn’t know. The rancid emotional atmosphere made the basement smell worse, and it already smelled pretty bad.

Towards the end of the shift, to try to change the dynamic, I took out my camera. I showed Etienne the photo of the smiling woman. I told him I met her while sleepwalking, that this photo was all I had and I needed to find her. He had the same seriousness as when I told him about it before. I asked for his help looking for her, not expecting him to hit the bricks or anything. He shook his head and went back to work, as if I was flaunting the same stupidity that made me reject his Financial Opportunity, but now purely to piss him off. I put the camera back in my locker and found I was shaking a little. I drank water from the cooler and we closed out the rest of the shift in silence.

That night I was excited to see what the next photo would be, buzzing in my bed but knowing the sooner I calmed down the sooner I would see it. I needed a new one to cope with a wave of dread that was beginning to lap at my ankles.

That’s me. I couldn’t hold the air in my lungs. This must be a photo of a photo, but no, I didn’t recognize it, and no, it is the me of today. Later I realized this was the only photo anyone ever took of me on purpose in that country. And who else could have taken the photo but Her? We must have moved through all those absent days together, a spiral that could lead us into each other's waking arms.

Everything felt light; a spoonful of the high-fiber cereal, my ragged face in the mirror, the laces of my shoes logged with grey water. While reaching for my bus pass, I found something in my pocket: a wood squill, a little blue flower. For whatever reason, even while asleep, it would never occur to me to pick a flower, so she must have given it to me. I returned to work feeling weightless.

Etienne wasn’t there. He didn’t show up at all. I’d never worked a shift without him. I was afraid he’d been moved to the dayshift, by request, fed up with me, but I didn’t want to ask my boss. Building a pallet alone felt wrong. Once I’d stacked enough product that it was taller than me, I orbited around with the packing tape and kept projecting Etienne into my blind spot. The lack of sleep was getting to me. I knew where I was and what I was doing but still felt lost. I left a note apologizing to the daycrew for the bad job I did and went home. I needed to sleep so some version of myself could be with her. But when I got home it was impossible to rest because the phone was ringing. I picked up the receiver and said the formal word for Hello. It was Etienne. He said something about a girl and repeated an address a few times. It was clear he wanted to meet me there, so I hung up and left.

I’d never been to that neighborhood before so it took a while to find. On the way, I passed by a square of grass where the ice had melted. Blueflowers washed blue like flood-waters over the concrete, lit with a warm blueness. It’d be easy to pick one and continue on your way. I felt hope and concern rise and fall across the breadth of my heart.

I was worried Etienne might have given up waiting, but he caught me on a corner and led me down a street. A block later he came to a stop. I looked to my right and saw her.

It was as if I’d been teleported into the center of an antique shop overflowing with fragile treasures–I could not even take a breath without breaking something. This must have been visible on my face, a sudden recession, a dampening. I remembered the man doing the splits and was hit by the obvious truth: nobody took those photos. He’d been alone.

Etienne encircled me with his arms. He held my head steady for a moment and patted my back. I took a few deep breaths in there. He smelled like kindling. Released from his embrace, I felt again the alternating warm and cool air of early spring. He made it understood that he would buy me a beer.

We sat on two stools by the window at the back of the tavern. I held my pint in both hands while Etienne’s sat untouched in a drink holder to the side of the video poker machine. The glare of the sunlight superimposed images on the screen–people walking, cars ambling, birds in flight, on top of pixelated kings and queens and green velvet. I watched him play for an hour.

A week later, Etienne made a killing on the Financial Opportunity. His disdain turned to pity. As many times as I refused it, an envelope of cash kept appearing in my locker. I finally accepted, and used the money to book passage to my home country, a place I had tried to leave many times while asleep and finally escaped while awake. I go back to renew the original perturbation which allows me to move at all. I cross the threshold into the house I grew up in and let down everything I carry. A voice calls my name. I walk towards it, moving through rooms where I appear in more photos than I’ve ever taken.

©Kevin Griffith Sullivan, 2026
Story photos by Claudia Picard-Deland
Cover and design by Jordan Black

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