Step-and-a-Half’s insomnia

Step-and-a-Half’s insomnia makes rest a passage back into the past. In old age, the wandering that once kept her moving gives way to afternoons under a quilt made from her collected fabrics, where memory assembles itself into vivid scenes she had believed finished. Her life shifts from distance traveled to people and histories held in mind.

A Life in Motion

Before settling in Argus, Step-and-a-Half walked the roads of North Dakota, sleeping in ditches, among riverside trees, and sometimes in barns or on porches. She could cover twenty or thirty miles in a day, finding the distances soothing and sometimes arriving without remembering the journey. Movement had long let her evade reflection; the question of how she knew she had reached a destination mattered because she had nowhere in particular to go. Over time, however, Argus became an arrival: she returned more often, stayed, and began to gather knowledge of the town.

That knowledge came not from its tidy front steps or the appearances people presented in public, but from the discarded things she encountered as a junker. She watched the alleys where people burned rubbish and the back porches where they left rags. Their scraps, the things they considered worthless, told her stories. Her attention to refuse thus becomes a way of reading the lives around her, even as insomnia and age increasingly turn her attention inward and backward.

Rest and the Return of Memory

In the small room behind her shop on an Argus side street, Step-and-a-Half can now manage little more than going outside to the ground before the windows. Only occasionally does she walk the roads. The miles still temporarily soothe her old torment, but her strength is failing, and she rests more often. Each afternoon she creeps upstairs to nap beneath a quilt pieced from her best finds: figured velvets, heavy satins, and fragile silk. The fabrics gathered through a life of movement become the covering beneath which that life returns.

Sleep does not reliably quiet her. As she lies beneath the quilt, scenes assemble, and her brain startles her with moments she has already lived and thought she had put away in memory. Insomnia is therefore more than an inability to rest: it exposes the gap between believing an experience finished and having it return with force. The recollections are vivid, but the evidence does not say that they explain or resolve the events they revisit.

What the Memories Hold

Among the recurring scenes is her early sight of Fidelis Waldvogel arriving in town in search of work, passing the butcher with a suitcase she imagined was empty because he tossed it from hand to hand. She later learned that it held his fine knives. In retrospect, the suitcase carries a further change of direction: it would return to Germany, no longer filled with knives or sausages. Her memory revises an initial misreading of an object and places that small scene within a larger movement between Argus and Germany.

Her thoughts also return to Eva Waldvogel and the boys who belonged to her, and to the surprise and sorrow of Eva’s death. She remembers the boy unsealed from the hill of dirt, and another boy who climbed into the clouds and later fell in love with Delphine’s little sister. These images do not form a simple account of her own life; they show how the town’s joys, losses, and uncanny reversals have become part of what she carries. The past arrives as a file of separate, charged scenes rather than as a settled explanation.

Roy, the Baby, and the Wish to Walk

Step-and-a-Half recalls that after leaving Roy Watzka with a baby, she continued walking, unable to imagine staying in one place. She expected eventually to leave him with the child, but did not foresee that she would return repeatedly, give him money to secure the baby’s future, and sometimes try to care for the growing girl in small, clumsy ways. Her absence and return coexist: she cannot surrender the road, yet her repeated visits and material help establish a continuing bond of care.

At the time, she knew little of photography and did not understand that she was beautiful; the narrative frames her as beautiful again in old age, when she can remember. She is glad that Roy took her pictures with him to the grave, leaving no image of her behind to walk the earth. The thought links the photograph to the very movement she spent her life making: what remains of her must not become another version of her, endlessly traveling after death.

She also remembers Roy’s early explanation that he drank to show he could not live without her. Her answer was blunt dismissal—“That’s a load of bull crap”—followed by her stepping out the door. The memory preserves both his declaration and her refusal to accept it as proof. In the novel’s portrait of Step-and-a-Half, insomnia gathers these contradictions without smoothing them away: motion and attachment, departure and return, forgotten journeys and memories that will not stay buried.