Luno

Luno has walked in his sleep since childhood. They would find him on the roof of the family house, arms crossed, peaceful, while the whole household panicked in pajamas. The doctors said to board up the stairs; his grandmother said to give him the night, since the night carried him. Awake, he’s an anxious young man who checks the kettle three times. Asleep, he is the calmest person in the city.

His hiring is a famous accident: one night he crossed an afterhours party in the Industrial Zone in his bathrobe, in through nobody knows where, eyes half closed, step even. The whole room fell silent. The boss hired the apparition before he woke, and the school of the dancefloor did the rest — the school that teaches you to vanish into a strobe finally had a student who had never needed the lesson.

His number isn’t one: between ten at night and six in the morning, Luno drifts through the room, lunar, unreachable, and the register climbs with every pass he makes — nobody in the city earns more per step. Customers lower their voices when he comes near, the way you dim a light. In the daytime, though, book nothing: the sun wakes him, and awake he counts the emergency exits instead of walking through them.

The paradox makes the rounds of the neighborhoods: an anxious guy with the nerves of a statue. The explanation is simple — he checks everything before closing his eyes. The lists, the exits, the tide forecast; his catastrophes are canceled in advance, and all that’s left is to sleep straight through them. The night the curtain came down two doors over, he’s the one who cleared the dressing rooms at a strolling pace, without waking up — at least that’s what the legend says, and nobody feels like correcting it. The new guys learn his lists by heart; people sleep better in the Houses where Luno has done the inventory.

At four in the morning, Luno is in the middle of his dream, which is to say at the top of his form: while the stable folds, he makes his rounds across the rooftops with the same even step, and the whole neighborhood sleeps under his watch without knowing it. At daybreak he goes home, closes the shutters and sleeps for real — deeply, honestly, like someone who has already checked everything. What he wants he said one night, eyes shut, and someone had the presence of mind to write it down: a room of his own, no alarm clocks and no windows, with a dressing room for the moon.